American Sniper & The Scourge of Tunnel Vision

There’s a sequence in Clint Eastwood’s already legendarily incendiary “American Sniper” when Bradley Cooper’s version of the real-life marine Chris Kyle (who may or may not have been, in official Internet language, a “hero”, though that is not what we are discussing here), in advance of his latest Middle East tour of duty, encounters his brother Jeff (Keir O’Donnell) on the tarmac. It finds Cooper’s Kyle gung-ho to see his little bro but his little bro looking more like one of the eerie dudes Charlie Sheen first encounters on the tarmac in Vietnam in “Platoon.” Jeff can’t seem to make heads or tails of Chris’s jovial disposition and Chris seems taken aback by Jeff’s vacant-eyed detachment. In that moment, two dudes on opposite sides of the viewpoint fence meet in the middle without actually meeting in the middle, if you catch my meaning.

No one in modern America likes meeting in the middle. The middle’s a scary, scary place to the holier-than-thou moralists, those who know what you don’t know because they know EVERYTHING, and so rather than wade into the matter-of-fact murkiness that “American Sniper” chronicles – not flawlessly, not at all (I see you fake baby LOLer’s!) – dingbats on the right and wackadoos on the left would rather stand on opposite sides of the barbed wire and scream and curse at one another on Twitter. The right probably see that scene on the tarmac and call Jeff an “idiot” and the left probably see that scene on the tarmac and call Kyle a “moron” without noticing how beautifully Bradley Cooper plays a moment of sudden internal angst. Because who wants to deal with internal angst when they can metaphorically torch a village instead?

Of the many criticisms lobbed at Eastwood’s account of a story that probably was embellished by the real life person is how it adopts a narrow viewpoint. “The movie,” writes David Edelstein for Vulture, “is scandalously blinkered.” Scandalously! As in, it assumes a Chris Kyle perspective and a Chris Kyle perspective only, as if he only sees life through the scope of a sniper rifle. We hear nothing from the military that prepares him for war or from the government that sends him to war or from the society he engages in war or from the spouse, Teya (Sienna Miller), he leaves on the homefront while he goes off to war. Why did we go to war? How do those Kyle is tasked to kill feel about their country being invaded? What is Teya thinking in moments all to herself? To not present these alternate points-of-view, the film’s opponents will tell you, is irresponsible.

And it is! It is irresponsible! To adopt a single stance and then cling to it is mightily irresponsible! It’s akin to dividing the world into “wolves, sheep and sheepdogs” which is precisely what Chris Kyle’s father does in an early sequence in front of his boys. This, that, or the other, and nothing else. “(T)he analogy is simplistic,” write Michael and Eric Cummings for Slate, “and in its simplicity, dangerous. It divides the world into black and white, into a good-versus-evil struggle that the real world doesn’t match. We aren’t divided into sheep, sheepdogs, and wolves. We are all humans.” Yes, Michael and Eric Cummings. We ARE all humans. We are full of scattershot emotions and complicated belief systems and wheelbarrows of complexities, even if we so often choose not to admit it. And usually we don’t choose to admit it. Why do you think politicians are always getting caught in lies? Because it's fucking hard to just be one thing.

Film critic James Helmsworth, in reviewing the film, cites the scene when Chris Kyle guns down a man carrying a Quran. “I don’t know what a Quran looks like,” Kyle says. To Helmsworth, “A scene like this offers the perfect chance to explore war’s moral ambiguities”, and he is disappointed that Eastwood “doesn’t bother.” But it’s not that Eastwood “doesn’t bother”, it’s that he’s pointedly choosing not to in an effort to underline his main character’s “blinkered” ideology. The Chris Kyle of “American Sniper” is at war because these guys (us) are good and those guys (them) are bad. He's a gun-toting “legend” who views the enemies as “savages”, end of story. It’s an intentionally limited viewpoint, and when it gets challenged – such as the sequence with his brother on the tarmac – he doesn’t really know how to respond. He just retreats further and further into himself, closing off from the thoughts and feelings of others until he is ready to burst. If you don’t want to listen, you can’t hear.

Patton Dodd addresses this scene too in writing exclusively about the importance of an occasionally glimpsed Bible that “American Sniper’s” Chris Kyle carries with him, a Bible that he seems sure stands for “God, country, family, right?” without “bothering to” really, truly “find out what it says.” He’s content in his beliefs, set in his ways, impervious to questioning. Even at the end when he's ostensibly made some sort of the peace that peace manifests itself in a sequence where his son quite audibly plays some sort of shoot 'em up video game in the background while Kyle pretends to pull a pistol on his wife. This has insulted some viewers, as well it should, since it's almost as if he didn't learn anything, as if his shockingly narrow viewpoint has, in spite of the preceding two hours, remained intact.

That shockingly narrow viewpoint is precisely what Eastwood’s “American Sniper” is attacking and yet, here’s all of America, keeping its own version of that Bible closed, maintaining its own shockingly narrow viewpoint, content in its belief, set in its way, impervious to questioning, and firing social media broadsides without taking a step back to consider the other side.

It was Bob Dylan who once satirically croaked: “You never ask questions when God's on your side.” No. You don’t. You surely don’t.

Sniper Backlash Bears Down On Twitter

(AP) Los Angeles CA, January 22 – Based on forecast models, social media meteorologists are predicting an unprecedented outbreak of cultural backlash that could create a perfect storm come Oscar night February 22nd.

A significant cluster of backlash first developed post-Oscar nominations when Ava DuVernay’s “Selma” was passed over for nominations in several major categories, purportedly due to its lack of veracity for historical accuracy regarding the presentation of President Lyndon Baines Johnson. After a few days of heated conversation on the Internet, however, the backlash for “Selma” was downgraded from Trending On Twitter to Lameazoid Maureen Dowd Article. While dissipating, however, the moisture of the “Selma” backlash was still prominent, and “that’s the key,” says Myron Plotz, associate director at the National Backlash Research Institute (NBRI) in Oceanside, California.

“You had all the remnants of this backlash still floating above, for lack of a better term, the information super highway,” Plotz explained, “while a system of high pressure backlash for ‘American Sniper’ was, unbeknownst to most, just beginning to form.” That backlash centered around the complaints of so-called “yahoos in Oklahoma”, a term coined by Salon.com film critic Andrew O’Hehir to describe the same type of people who tore down LA Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson last year for failing to honor the heroes of Peter Berg’s “Lone Survivor” even though she referred to them as “heroes” in her review.

That high pressure system then collided with a low pressure system of backlash forming from those dismissing “American Sniper” as jingoist propaganda with stars & stripes crust. “Essentially,” explains Plotz, “it was a social media extratropical cyclone. And when the remaining backlash from ‘Selma’ became caught up in that ‘American Sniper’ extratropical cyclone, it exploded.”

Plotz sees the forthcoming 2015 Oscar season as perhaps the most hectic ever. “I don’t want to say it was a perfect storm,” Plotz notes, “because we’ve seen those sorts of levels of atmospheric Internet disturbance before. What we haven’t seen is a rupturing of the social networking crust.” You mean, like a volcano? “Exactly. Think if ‘American Sniper’ actually wins Best Picture. Twitter might literally erupt.” Here's to hoping.

American Sniper

"American Sniper" opens with a moment of intensely rendered drama when Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper), Navy SEAL extraordinaire, is stricken with an immense heat-of-the-battle decision, to shoot or not to shoot a mother and child potentially on the verge of taking the lives of his comrades-in-fatigues. The film brings us right up to "Yes!" or "No!" and then......flashes back to the beginning of his story. This is a traditional thriller device and one that seems tailor-made to trigger a tidy all-American action-adventure. After all, the real-life Chris Kyle, as the ads ceaselessly bill, was the most lethal sniper in United States military history, one with 160 confirmed kills that directly correlated to an $80,000 bounty put on his head by Iraqi enemies. He was nicknamed "The Legend" on account of his exploits. Yet just as that nickname is employed onscreen not as mere militaristic braggadocio but as a skewering of mythologizing in the midst of events still taking place, the opening sequence plays as a purposeful feint toward a traditional thriller before opting for something more illuminatingly introspective.

Clint Eastwood directed the film and while there are several notable battle sequences set in Iraq, these are never the film's strict focus. He, in tandem with writer James Dean Hall (adapting from Kyle's book of the same name), transform "American Sniper" into a patient character study, one that traverses almost nauseatingly familiar ground while nonetheless enlightening specifically because of its resistance to elucidating the war-going experience. The 84 year old auteur's preferred leisurely un-auteurist sorta style allows the theoretically rote introductory moments of Kyle's boyhood with a father demanding ferocious obedience giving way to a pre-military existence as a rodeo rider, a "cowboy" as if he were a latter day John Wayne Green Beret, to effectively encompass a structured life giving way to one of aimlessness.

It is not until he heeds Uncle Sam's request in the wake of the twin bombing of African US embassies in 1998 (a sly dig at the reactionary mentality) that his life gains genuine traction, both within the naval ranks and on the homefront, where he eventually marries Taya (Sienna Miller). Their meet cute at a bar is a fairly moldy concept, yet still rings true in how the actress believably communicates in but a few moments her search for something tangible in a wandering life. Kyle recognizes and embraces it. And then 9/11 happens and he goes to war.

"American Sniper" deftly portrays how the military both builds Kyle up in the very real brotherhood he forms and tears him down in the psychological toils of war. It does not, however, resort to blatant speechifying to make these points, simply letting events accumulate until he is internally hurtling out of control. Nor does it seek to openly politicize. The only examination of the Iraq war from a national perspective is a palpably naive one wherein Kyle wants to serve and protect America because it's America and America is The Greatest Country In The World. Slowly, quietly, that viewpoint is stripped away, and, perhaps without him making the conscious realization, he finds himself accepting extended duty to protect and avenge the friends he has made more than to defend the honor of his country. "They won't understand that it's about the men next to you, and that's it," as Eric Bana said in the exemplary "Black Hawk Down", though, to its immense credit, "American Sniper" doesn't even need to say it.

“Tell me why you do it. I want to understand.” This is what Taya demands of Chris in a late sequence because she wants to know why he keeps sending himself off to harm’s way in spite of his family, and why he is so shut off and closed down from the world around him. And despite her putting the question to him so pointedly, he doesn’t give an answer. Not because he doesn’t have an answer, necessarily, but because he can’t articulate it. What can you possibly say to get someone who hasn’t lived through it to understand it? And this marks "American Sniper" as an outlier. It's not quite a recruiting film but it’s also not quite anti-war. It says everything by saying nothing. War movies, often rendered by those who have never been to war, so often seek to denounce it or exalt it or explain it. Eastwood has no intention of doing any of these things.

Cooper is a revelation in the lead role. Under the shepherding of David O. Russell he tapped into a distinct and marvelously entertaining manic energy for back-to-back powerhouse turns in "Silver Linings Playbook" and "American Hustle." Here, however, he takes that manic energy and purposely represses it so that by the end he is practically bubbling over with a mental strain that he cannot (not will not - cannot) define. In one harrowing scene he has arrived home from war only to avoid his family and take up residence at a barstool. Taya calls him. He admits where he is. She expresses distress. Why wouldn't he just come home. "I guess," he replies, "I just needed a minute." And in that single line reading and in that single bit of actorly affectation, Cooper conveys the toll a serious military life takes. Though we empathize with it, we can't understand it. "What is it about?" I sense people craving to ask in the wake of this film. That's just the thing - we'll never really know what it's about.