American Sniper Finally Breaks Hollywood’s Anti-Military Omertà

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Ed Driscoll:

So I finally saw American Sniper yesterday.

Short review: You should too. Right now.

Slightly longer review: Based on Chris Kyle’s autobiography and a well-crafted script by actor/writer Jason Hall, this is a surprisingly multifaceted movie that asks the questions that Hollywood rarely explores, and certainly not with this depth: in the 21st century, in an era of an all-volunteer military, what is it that makes a man volunteer? And once he’s done his time “in country,” what is it that makes him return back there again and again? For Kyle, it becomes not letting his fellow soldiers down and, in the story that provides the arc that structures the film’s scenes set in Iraq, killing his Syrian counterpart “Mustafa,” which gives the film the resonance of Ahab versus the whale, or Clint Eastwood’s earlier film about an obsessed man with a rifle, White Hunter, Black Heart.

With the rare exception of Eastwood himself, few who reach the upper echelons of Hollywood have ever served in the military, and, as Bill Clinton would say, most loathe the military and those who serve. Which is why so few films of this nature have been made since the late 1960s, when the young, largely left-wing turks began to succeed the men who originally built Hollywood. Or in the few cases they have, such as Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July, invariably, after returning home, soldiers are depicted as wild-eyed near-psychopaths, unable to return to their families and civilian life in general. That’s not the story depicted here, which is yet another reason why reactionary Hollywood lefties such as Michael Moore and Seth Rogen are having aneurisms over this film, and reliving the late ’60s and 1970s, when left-wing Hollywood frequently smeared the US military in the worst possible light.

Similarly, given the era in which it was released, American Sniper is serving as much of a litmus test to see where the rest of Hollywood and film critics stand on Iraq and the American military as did Eastwood’s Dirty Harry and the left’s efforts to promote violence for its own sake and weaken law enforcement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. At the Weekly Standard, in a piece titled, “The ‘American Sniper’ Freakout,” Mark Hemingway writes, “Leftists simply can’t digest the fact that their own safety is predicated on the willingness to fight of courageous men they openly disdain.”

Which is yet another reason to go see it.

So beyond all that, as Max Boot asked this past Thursday at Commentary, why all the criticism?

Perhaps because almost all of the Iraqis are depicted as bad guys–or to use the word that Kyle used “savages”–while Kyle and his SEAL teammates are depicted as dedicated professionals who try as hard as possible to avoid killing civilians. Although the movie shows a scene at the beginning of Kyle killing a woman and her child who are carrying a grenade to blow up a Marine column (in reality he only killed the woman–there was no child present), it later shows how relieved he is that a child who picked up a rocket-propelled grenade and aimed it an American Humvee put down the weapon and ran away before Kyle could shoot him. This is, in short, not a movie like  Platoon or Born on the Fourth of July or In the Valley of Elah or MASH that depicts American soldiers in the worst possible light.

But guess what? In my experience having visited Iraq a number of times during the war, Clint Eastwood, the movie’s director, is telling it like it is. Oh sure, large elements of the film are fictionalized (no, Kyle did not have a personal duel with a Syrian sniper called Mustafa), as is the case with pretty much every Hollywood movie. But the movie gets the larger truth right–that, with some lamentable and inevitable exceptions, American soldiers did behave themselves in exemplary fashion in Iraq, certainly compared to their enemies who drove car bombs into crowds of civilians and ruthless tortured to death anyone they suspected of opposing them.

Which reminded me of Tom Wolfe’s response to his critics when asked if his breakthrough first novel Bonfire of the Vanities was racist.  

In February of 1989, Wolfe was interviewed by Time magazine about Bonfire. (Coincidentally or not, the interview occurred right around the time that producer Peter Guber was asking Tom Hanks if he’d like to star in the movie version of the book for Warner Brothers, owned by the same conglomerate that owned Time.)  One of the interviewer’s questions was, “Bonfire has received great critical acclaim, but critics have also called it cynical, racist, elitist,” to which Wolfe replied:

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