“American Sniper” wasn’t likely to win the Oscar for best picture, but it’s made more than $300 million at the box office and has found an appreciative, empathetic audience.
The film tells the story of Chris Kyle, from his boyhood in Texas through his marriage, four tours in Iraq as a highly skilled sniper, his struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder, and his murder by another former soldier.
This is a story worth telling. We haven’t had the will to properly denounce the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld blunder in Iraq, but we have an obligation to acknowledge the patriotism, courage and suffering of soldiers like Kyle, whom we ask to do our nation’s dirtiest and most dangerous work.
But they deserve a more complex chronicle than “American Sniper,” which never gets beyond a simpleminded good-guys-versus-bad-guys theme and is filled with values that should make us uncomfortable.
The oversimplification starts early. Around the dinner table Kyle’s stern father tells his two sons: Boys, there’s three types of people in the world, sheep, wolves and sheepdogs. Y’all better be sheepdogs.
Then he removes his belt and lays it ominously on the table. Kyle’s mother makes a mild protest, but it’s clear that she knows that she’d better keep her mouth shut, too.
As a boy, Kyle steals a Bible and he carries it with him in Iraq. But as far as the audience can tell, the only part of it that he pays attention to is “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” a principle that Kyle admits lured his squad into a disastrous ambush.
Kyle readily and uncritically embraces the bronco-busting and beer-swilling values of his upbringing, which fit aptly into the military, as well. He’s most comfortable in Iraq among his fellow soldiers, whose principal values in the film are loyalty to the unit, super-macho aggression, sexism and a dash of homophobia.
Any doubts raised about the mission are quickly quashed. Kyle is driven by the motive to kill as many “savages” as possible.
Mostly, though, “American Sniper” is about shooting. The uncritical values that the movie attaches to guns ought to disturb us. To indicate Kyle’s recovery from PTSD, the movie has him pointing a handgun at his wife to playfully demand sex. In a striking violation of responsible handgun protocol, he casually leaves the cocked weapon on a shelf.
But we should probably be more disquieted by this poignant scene: Kyle recovers from his own post-Iraq struggles by helping other traumatized veterans. The road to recovery appears to involve more shooting. One former soldier, with one leg missing and the other badly mangled, finally hits the bull’s-eye. He says, “I feel like I got my balls back.”
One wonders if this is what manhood in America has become, the ability to handle a firearm capably.
Nevertheless, these are the values that Kyle is passing on to his son at the end of the movie. He shows him how to hunt, of course. “It’s a hard thing to stop a beating heart,” Kyle counsels his son. But above all, he says, “Never hesitate.”
Too bad Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld didn’t hesitate before we stumbled into Iraq. And we should hesitate before we uncritically accept the values in “American Sniper.”
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