Is American Sniper an Anti-war Movie? – Mark Rich

In addition to being one of the highest-grossing movies in American history, American Sniper is also, without doubt, one of the most-commented about – one might even say one of the most-bickered about. The internet, and especially its parasite Twitter, privilege short-answer, quick-on-the-draw opinionoids, and they discourage thoughtfulness. That is, they encourage bickering, and we all know bickering never gets its antagonists anywhere. In the left-right binary that most of our public thinking tends to get sucked into, American Sniper hits the nerve right in the middle. Everyone gets to feel the zing, and the thinking rarely gets beyond that feeling.

Chris Kyle’s story (in its incarnation by Bradley Cooper and its delivery by Clint Eastwood) offers up just the beefy unthinking hero that many want in order to make them cheer, along with this cockeyed moral framework delivered by Chris’ dad Wayne while Chris is a boy:

There are three types of people in this world. Sheep, wolves and sheepdogs… Some people prefer to believe that evil doesn’t exist in the world– And if hatred ever darkened their doorstep they wouldn’t know how to protect themselves. These are the sheep.

Then you got the predators. These people use violence to prey on the weak. They are the wolves.

Then there are those who are blessed with the gift of aggression and an overpowering need to protect the flock… These men are the rare breed that live to confront the wolf– They’re the sheepdog.

This speech is delivered mostly in voiceover during a slow-mo of Chris’ younger brother getting beaten up by a bully, and then delivered by Chris’ righteous fists. So we get it that this is not only literal depiction but moral framing of the whole story.

Moral thinking has never been a strong suit with most white Americans, and that fable abets that weakness. To point out the obvious, a fable that casts humans as somewhat lower mammals is not designed to help humans reason morally, that is, humanely about themselves. Kyle obliges by not thinking much but serving very well, all too well. And if the movie simply abets that impulse, then it is indeed the jingoistic, pro-war film that many see it for, whether they are for or against that.

Eastwood himself has said publicly that the film is anti-war, and such a public statement bears consideration. If it is anti-war, then good, for there is so very little of that coursing through American culture. But Eastwood’s anti-war position is mostly sentimental, extending as far as showing (fairly well) that extended war postings are fiendishly hard on marriages and families. He has nothing of thought about the inherent good or evil, right or wrong, of war in general nor of the Iraq War in particular. A couple of characters around movie Kyle do briefly raise those questions, but Kyle quickly waves them away each time.

Nonetheless, Eastwood’s declared position is very worth hearing and thinking about seriously. By passively accepting the lies pushed by both the government and the media that got us into Iraq (and that then helped set the stage for the Islamic State), the American people have surrendered their moral duty to oppose war unless proven otherwise. In the current fog of terror we are already primed for war, with no need to think about it. Questions over the rightness or wrongness of a particular war will be seen as longheaded and even wrongheaded.

That moral lassitude then turns the ‘guard dogs’ into sacrificial animals, ready to be shipped off every time a chickenhawk vice-president sees an opportunity to remake some part of the world into his twisted image. And of course, because those same soldiers are so very good at what they do, the countries they are sent to (and which are invariably smaller and poorer than ours) also end up being sacrificed.

So Eastwood’s depiction of these soldiers may be not so much anti-war as anti-sacrifice, and that is surely a better thing than the gung-ho militarism that the film has aroused in some places.

But Eastwood’s film and Jason Dean Hall’s script also offer a couple more dimensions of observation and critique. The first was noticed by Patton Dodd and commented on here – and I urge all of the millions of readers of this essay to click to it and read it.

Dodd points out the very clear symbolism of Kyle’s pocket Bible. It appears early, in Kyle’s mythically-presented childhood, during a sermon in which the unseen preacher says in worship,

–we don’t know his plan. We cannot see with his eyes. Our lives unfold like puzzling reflections in a mirror. But on the day we rise, we will see with clarity and understand the mystery of his ways—

While those words are going on, Kyle takes a blue pocket Bible from a pew and promptly pockets it. It’s clear in the scene that he is stealing it.

That Bible reappears several more times through the film, always unopened and unread, but visually noted every time he sets up his sniper nest. As Dodd observes, it represents Kyle’s own unopened and unexamined “sense of self, his sense of the world and what’s required of him.” Its last appearance is its disappearance, along with Kyle’s pocket flag and (surprise!) his gun during his very last fight in Iraq, as he escapes with nothing but his life and his uniform.

Only one person, a fellow soldier, questions Kyle about his Bible, observing that he never reads it. The soldier then goes on to observe that Kyle doesn’t know who his God is, while Kyle himself never moves beyond the slogan of “It’s God, country, family – right?”

MARC LEE

You never open it so I just assumed…

CHRIS KYLE (crosses chest)

It’s God, country, family– right?

MARC LEE

That’s what they say. You got a God?

CHRIS KYLE

Depends who’s shooting at me.

MARC LEE

If you find anything here [pointing to the Bible], make it that.

CHRIS

You getting weird on me?

We are told earlier in the film that this Marc Lee character had gone to seminary for a while. It is his funeral much later on which provides the most open, pointed questioning of the war in the whole movie as a letter from Lee is read out loud by his mother. Kyle is shocked by the questioning, but only briefly. Kyle later on blames that letter for magically having gotten Lee killed, “He let go and he paid the price for it.”

I am a theologian, so of course the pocket Bible stood out for me. Tocqueville once observed that (white) Americans are natural Cartesians. So symbolism usually goes right over their heads, and in commentary no one besides Dodd has noted this Bible motif, to my knowledge. And I also don’t want to make too much of it either. It’s not as though the whole movie turns on it.

But as Dodd says, it does quite effectively symbolize the unexamined character of Kyle – and, we should add, the unexamined character of that whole war. Hall and Eastwood could easily have chosen any number of other objects or ways to symbolize Kyle’s identity, but what the Bible specifically brings as a symbol is the awareness that there is more to be aware of; that the God of the Bible is not the same as whatever gods were being served by that war.

And what goes for Iraq goes as well for the US government’s whole military posture (see David Vine’s excellent piece here). The best thing Obama could do for foreign policy in his remaining time in office is to publicly repudiate the Carter Doctrine, which has resulted in putting the US on a permanent war footing throughout the Middle East. That open-ended commitment to militarily ensuring the flow of oil through the Persian Gulf (one which surely has absolutely no energy necessity to it any longer!) has made the US into the default military super-patron in the whole region, including North Africa and Central Asia.

What gods are we serving there, in whose names we are sacrificing hundreds of thousands of people and prosecuting a war without end? And if the Chris Kyles of America will not think about this, then shouldn’t the rest of us?

My second point about the movie is a larger one. The scene where Kyle finally leaves Iraq comes at the very end of his last battle in his fourth tour(!) in Iraq. He first kills the Iraqi sniper who functioned dramatically as his nemesis. Once that killing is accomplished, the US position is itself quickly attacked by a steadily-increasing storm of Sunni irregulars, while a blinding sandstorm comes on. A helicopter rescue of the besieged Americans becomes impossible. An unlikely surface rescue is all that remains, and as the storm and battle strike together in full fury, Kyle himself is the very last American to make it into the vehicle. In the rush and chaos of dust and death Kyle leaves behind both his gun and his Bible in the dirt. They are quickly buried in the accumulating sand, as is the body of his nemesis.

When Kyle finally makes it back to the US, he no longer knows who he is. He fails at first even to communicate with his wife, and his life no longer makes any sense to him at all.

In sum: the chaos of war is not the creation of identity; it is identity’s destruction. War is not the force that gives us meaning. Resurrection is that force.

It is indeed true that “…on the day we rise, we will see with clarity and understand the mystery of [God’s] ways.” But we must know and say that resurrection has already begun, and we can begin to see now; to know who we are and whose we are now in the light of Christ.

 

Mark Rich is a sometime contributor to ecclesio.com and a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.