‘American Sniper’: We Can Kill It for You Wholesale

This cowboy motif is no accident, as it connects this film to the old John Ford Westerns and the nostalgia some folks feel about John Wayne flicks and the mythology of good white cowboys fighting off savage Indians who were keeping good white settlers from utilizing this “wilderness” that would become the U.S.A. Dehumanizing non-whites is the foundation for creating this nation. It’s the glue that holds apple pies and hot dogs together.

American Sniper poster. Starring Bradley Cooper. — *American Sniper* poster. Starring Bradley Cooper.

On Sept. 11, 2001, I was on the West Coast, living in the mountains of Southern Cali and preparing to go to work. A co-worker came running into our office screaming that the Twin Towers had fallen. Mind you, we were on West Coast time, and by the time I saw the attacks on television, the networks were on replay mode and editing footage deemed too gruesome for viewers.

Gathered around the one tiny TV in another office, my co-workers and I stared in disbelief, and the one thing I said out loud was something I remembered Malcolm X saying about chickens coming home to roost. “This is payback for something folks,” I said to them. While my co-workers were the flag-waving Patriotic types, I was already shaping this assault on American soil as retaliation for the untold dirt our military and government had done for years to countries who didn’t uphold our global agenda. This caused some ruffled feathers between me and some of my colleagues. It was a surreal moment. Our Pearl Harbor for the new millennia.

Looking back at the Sept. 11 attacks, it shouldn’t surprise me why American Sniper was such a big hit with the patriotic ‘muricah crowd. It is the military chicken soup of the soul cinema experience. It is propaganda of the highest order for viewers who need the Matrix blue pill to live with the lie of America’s War on Terror.

What makes American Sniper a disappointing viewing experience is not the ahistorical nature of the film, but quite frankly its generic storytelling. It’s downright boring. I may not agree with the politics of a film in order to enjoy it, but dammit, I have to be engaged with the content and its characters. The only time American Sniper really held my total interest was the appearance of a villainous character named Mustafa (played by Sammy Sheik), another sniper from Syria who we learn was a medal winning sharpshooter in the Olympics. He is for all intents and purposes Chris Kyle’s Arab counterpart. Sammy Sheik is riveting to watch in the brief moments we see him, although he never speaks. (Sidenote: every Arab character is a bad guy in this movie. There are no grays or complexity at all. Men, women, and children are all portrayed as evil, conniving, and dangerous. The idea that they could be defending their country from the cowboy antics of American soldiers is never even hinted at.)

Sammy Sheik as "Mustafa" and the only compelling character to hold my interest. — Sammy Sheik as “Mustafa” and the only compelling character to hold my interest.

Bradley Cooper’s portrayal of Chris Kyle as a good ole boy going off to defend American citizens from the new Boogie-Men-of-the-Moment is pretty cut and dry. Usually Cooper is quite engaging to watch with his big baby blues and mega-watt smile. But here he’s not captivating at all, despite his eagerness to be serious and Oscar-worthy. His Kyle comes off as a big dumb reactionary bloke trying to find his manhood through “masculine” pursuits like bronco busting in rodeos and later a trumped up war (lest we forget, the excuse for bludgeoning Iraq was because U.S. intel claimed there was proof of W.M.D.’s—Weapons of Mass Destruction. There were no W.M.D.’s, and the 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, but I digress). This cowboy motif is no accident, as it connects this film to the old John Ford Westerns and the nostalgia some folks feel about John Wayne flicks and the mythology of good white cowboys fighting off savage Indians who were keeping good white settlers from utilizing this “wilderness” that would become the U.S.A. Dehumanizing non-whites is the foundation for creating this nation. It’s the glue that holds apple pies and hot dogs together.

The original "Savages" that Cowboys fought. Actually Native people defending their land and liberty. — The original “Savages” that Cowboys fought. Actually Native people defending their land and liberty.

The new Wild West of the east. Actually American weapons of mass destruction.

Clint Eastwood, a veteran of old school cowboy flicks and the poster boy for conservative old boy politics, paints American Sniper as another addition to that long line of wild west nostalgia in contemporary war cinema. Unfortunately the script tells us nothing new or insightful about the American psyche in relation to war today. As it stands, the simplistic plot of American Sniper tells us what we already know. Men are war, and American men thrive on it under the guise of Democracy and helping other countries liberate themselves from tyranny–by ironically (maybe intentionally) becoming the new tyranny in places we are supposed to be helping. Every generation, America creates new evil henchmen: Native Americans on the frontier, The Yellow Peril, Red Scare Russians, Black people and Civil Rights, Communist Cuba, and renegade North Korea. Since the 90s and our first trumped-up invasion of Iraq, the Arab world is the new thing that goes bump in the night. Our penchant for war only teaches us that xenophobia and colonialism never went away. We just dress them up with new language like insurgents and failing diplomacy.

Kyle’s indoctrination into war comes when he sees the bombing of the U.S. embassy in Kenya on television, and he only feels bad when he learns some Americans were killed. When the Twin Towers drop, he is gung ho to go to war. Not to protect people, but really, just to have something to do. Before the war, Kyle appears aimless, searching for a purpose. War gives him purpose. He gets married because that seems to be what he is supposed to do. He goes through life following a script pre-written for him. There are obligatory flashback scenes to show his stern father and the simplistic philosophy he was raised to believe in. That there is evil in the world at all times. That there are three types of people in the world: Wolves, sheep, and sheepdogs. And of course, a real man uses a gun and beats the crap out of people. Kyle internalizes these ideals, and carries them with him throughout the rest of his life.

New marriage, but already thinking of battle. Chris and Taya get married. (Bradley Cooper and Sienna Miller)

The introduction of his wife, Taya (Sienna Miller), adds no meat to the story. She is regulated to being the good wife, the baby maker, the nagging spouse crying on the phone with an infant swinging off her breasts. (Let me say that the fake animatronic baby was creepy as hell and so distracting.) Although it probably wasn’t intended in the writing, you get the impression that Kyle preferred to be away from home not because he wanted to be a war hero, but because being a husband/father was a real drag for him.

Kill shot. Marc (Luke Grimes) and Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper)

We are taken through Kyle’s four tour of duties, and each tour builds Kyle up as the sniper with the most kills. There are two scenes, one in the very beginning of the movie, and one later on, where Kyle is faced with the task of killing a child or not. These scenes are meant to show a moral dilemma, but they rang false to me because if someone is the deadliest sniper in American military history, they didn’t get that high body count by worrying about shooting children. There are no children in the Arab world according to this story. Just little insurgents ready to make war.

The "bad guys" in the sniper crosshairs. In America they would be considered Patriots for fighting back. — The “bad guys” in the sniper crosshairs. In America they would be considered Patriots for fighting back.

In the theater that I watched the film, a rotund older white gentleman (probably retired military by his crew cut) was actually rooting for Kyle to shoot a child. Because all the Arabs in the movie were considered “savages,” I have no doubt that Kyle never questioned or worried about assassinating children. They weren’t Americans, and therefore not human. (In real life, Chris Kyle bragged about shooting 30 Black people right after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. He bragged about killing fellow American citizens who I’m sure he didn’t view as human. His Katrina shootings were said to be a lie he made up, but his lies spoke volumes about his character. So his fictional quandary regarding Arab children rang false to me because we are never shown a man who questions anything ever. He’s just an unthinking workhorse used by the military.)

The concept of showing a man who just goes along with the war machine could be enhanced dramatically by having side characters who offer a different viewpoint. Unfortunately, we never spend too much time with side characters. The one character who does begin to question the meaning of this war, Marc ( Luke Grimes—who needs to be in more movies), barely registers a blip on Kyle’s radar of understanding. The plot drags on for over two hours until there’s a stand-off between Kyle and Mustafa. By then, when he’s about to get his ass handed to him by death, Kyle calls his wife and says he finally wants to come home. Not because war has changed his consciousness or philosophy, but because he’s losing a skirmish that he created by not following orders. He went rogue, it backfired, and now he wants out. That was the realest moment in the entire film. Not heroic, just honest human self-preservation.

Snipers in Ferguson, Missouri, their crosshairs on American citizens . — Snipers in Ferguson, Missouri, their crosshairs on American citizens.

This is U.S. terrorism. Snipers against Americans.

Watching an audience root for snipers to kill humans defending their right to exist on their own land reminded me of images of American snipers here in the states pointing guns at Black American citizens and their supporters protesting murders by cops in the United States. This same audience that cheered the heroics of Bradley Cooper as Chris Kyle probably cheered the actions of police forces on American streets aiming gun sights on folks with extra melanin. Cognitive dissonance is entrenched in the Patriotic American psyche. It allows Americans to rally around American Sniper, turning it into a blockbuster, while ignoring the home grown terrorism white Americans perpetuated against Black Americans that was depicted in the film Selma. I saw Americans of all colors streaming in to view Selma. American Sniper was vanilla heavy. Not a big surprise to me. Because, history.

Director Clint Eastwood claims he made an anti-war film. He didn't. — Director Clint Eastwood claims he made an anti-war film. He didn’t.

Clint Eastwood made spurious claims that American Sniper is an anti-war film. This disingenuous claim falls flat given the simplistic story-line, and the film’s ending dripping with flag waving from real-life footage of Kyle’s funeral. Had Eastwood really wanted to impress upon an audience the agonies of war, then he would be better off showing actual wounded veterans recovering from the various body traumas they come home with. A lot of flag-waving might become less vigorous when we see war up close and personal. Americans don’t know war. Not really. We watch it on TV like video games. We don’t sleep, eat, go to work, or go to school worrying about unmanned drones and bombs falling out of the sky from some hopped up dudebro with a military computer joystick thousands of miles away.

Unlike the rest of the world, Americans are spared from these continuous horrors and daily PTSD. We are coddled like babies, and this coddling has made us immature children in regards to war. So we deserve a movie like American Sniper. The only message it gives us (like it did Chris Kyle in real life), is that the war you perpetuate abroad will come back to haunt you in another form. Chickens coming home to roost indeed.

No one likes seeing the bodies coming home in movies or in real life.

‘Concerning Violence,’ Concerning Ferguson

Chinua Achebe said, “There is that great proverb — that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”
Reading Fanon, listening to Malcolm X, watching ‘Concerning Violence’–these are just a few ways to hear the lions. When the hunter listens, though, he sees a lion roaring, jaws open wide to bite and kill. The fear sets in. Oppressive control digs its heels back in.

“We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.” – Frantz Fanon

Written by Leigh Kolb.

I saw Concerning Violence six months before Darren Wilson shot Michael Brown. It was six months before white people started wringing their hands to a chorus of “The answer to violence isn’t more violence!” “Look at them destroying property and looting!” “What would Martin Luther King, Jr. say?”

Nine months before the announcement that Darren Wilson was not indicted, white audience members–in Missouri–squirmed in their seat after screening Concerning Violence: “But violence should never be the answer.”

[youtube_sc url=”http://youtu.be/ohoiW9HrXkc”]

Concerning Violence is a remarkable documentary. Directed by Göran Hugo Olsson (The Black Power Mixtape 1967 – 1975), it weaves together archival footage of African colonization and anti-colonial liberation revolts from the 1960s – 1980s with the words of Frantz Fanon‘s The Wretched of the Earth (1961). The text–read by Lauryn Hill–often appears on screen as she narrates. Technically, the documentary is brilliant. It’s almost as if we cannot feel the director’s presence, because the power of the archival footage and Fanon’s language is woven together so powerfully and without any added commentary (nor does there need to be). Instead, we are assaulted with a perspective we never feel: that of the colonized-as-heroes, by any means necessary.

The stunning, disturbing footage is presented in such a way that we must realize how pertinent it is to America in 2014. The film opens with images of armed men in helicopters shooting and killing a field full of cattle. As Keith Uhlich describes at A.V. Club:

“One animal takes a particularly long time to die, and, with each bullet that doesn’t kill it, convulses in what can only be described, anthropomorphically, as pure fear. The more horrifying implication is that there’s no true word for what the beast is going through, and it’s impossible, by the end of the scene, to not imagine a human being in the same terrible situation.”

From far away, a literal and figurative position hundreds of feet higher than those on the ground, these powerful colonizing forces shoot with savage impunity. The privilege and power are palpable, and this sets the stage for the rest of the film (or, more accurately, for our history). Colonize, control, instill fear, kill, in perpetuity.

Missionaries in Tanzania, watching Tanzanians dig a site to build a church. They say that maybe after the church, they’ll build schools and hospitals.

I can’t stress this enough: watch this film, and research the various “anti-imperialistic self-defense” histories that you likely never learned about in school.

What is overwhelming to me is the complete cognitive dissonance in white Americans decrying violent revolution. The same utterance of “violence is never the answer!” about protests contrasts with celebrating American history. This isn’t a new dichotomy, of course. In “The Ballot or the Bullet,” Malcolm X said,

“When this country here was first being founded, there were thirteen colonies. The whites were colonized. They were fed up with this taxation without representation. So some of them stood up and said, ‘Liberty or death!’ I went to a white school over here in Mason, Michigan. The white man made the mistake of letting me read his history books. He made the mistake of teaching me that Patrick Henry was a patriot, and George Washington – wasn’t nothing non-violent about ol’ Pat, or George Washington. ‘Liberty or death’ is was what brought about the freedom of whites in this country from the English.”

The word “or” is important here. Just as the American Revolution we celebrate with fireworks (even though there was plenty of looting and a high death toll) was built upon this notion of “liberty or death,” so also are calls to anti-colonial violence in self-defense.

“If you do not liberate us, we must liberate ourselves.” How is this not logical? And if the historical precedence of “liberation” is through violent means, how can we, with a straight face, say that the answer to violence is not more violence? It’s always been white America’s answer.

In the Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO), founded in 1962, men and women fight as equals.

When we learn about Nat Turner and Malcolm X in school (if we do), it’s in hushed tones. That‘s not the way to get freedom (if you are African American, at least). We know that we receive our history, literature, and film primary from one voice: the white male. Chinua Achebe said, “There is that great proverb — that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”

Reading Fanon, listening to Malcolm X, watching Concerning Violence–these are just a few ways to hear the lions. When the hunter listens, though, he sees a lion roaring, jaws open wide to bite and kill. The fear sets in. Oppressive control digs its heels back in.

One of the aspects of Concerning Violence‘s archival footage that makes it powerful is that so much of it is in color. We tend to think that the fiercest acts of colonialism and imperialism happened long ago and far away. It’s so important to see a world that looks like our world now, with the weapons and machinery of modernity that colonize now, not 100 years ago. Concerning Violence is historical, but it’s not history. It forces us to be uncomfortable with the world we’re living in, which is the first step to changing it.

Violence is presented as the or. Instead of desiring or justifying violence from the oppressor or the oppressed, we need to consider changing the structure. If people riot and respond to oppression with violence, how can we think that’s unheard of, uncalled for, or without historical precedent? If we do react that way, then we need to drastically change how we teach and understand our own history. If violent revolution is abhorrent, make that clear–even when white men do it.

From the Al Jazeera review of Concerning Violence:

“In her spoken preface to Concerning Violence, renowned Columbia University professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak explains that in ‘reading between the lines’ of The Wretched of the Earth, one sees that Fanon does not in fact endorse violence but rather ‘insists that the tragedy is that the very poor is reduced to violence, because there is no other response possible to an absolute absence of response and an absolute exercise of legitimised violence from the colonisers’. Spivak goes on to make a telling comparison regarding the earth’s ‘wretched’: ‘Their lives count as nothing against the death of the colonisers: unacknowledged Hiroshimas against sentimentalised 9/11s.'”

Violence is the or. If the oppressed, the colonized, are not treated as human beings, and are subjected to institutional racism and injustice, thinkers such as Fanon and Malcolm X see the or as revolutionary self-defense. This kind of violence is part of a long history of the oppressed overcoming oppression. That’s why it’s so terrifying to colonial powers and their rhetoric is censored, shut down, and shrouded in fear.

Perhaps that is what is most frightening to those who focus on how abhorrent rioting in the face of injustice and brutality is: they know, deep down, that rioting makes sense. White Americans know–consciously or subconsciously–that Black Americans have reason to respond to violence from the “colonizers.” And that is a terrifying reality.

In Ferguson and the protests that have swept the nation, small pockets of violent and destructive reactions have occurred–almost never by the organized protesters themselves. Even so, one image on the news media of a burned business or vehicle makes many white Americans shut down and refuse to see any legitimacy in wider protests.

White Americans, at the very least, can strive to understand why–in a world bought and won by violence–an oppressed group might see violence as self-defense and justifiable. This is not to encourage violence, to desire violence, or to act violently. This is to pause, take a step back, and just for a moment, listen to the lions. Listen to them roar.

Two of the most prominent messages during the protests against police brutality and inequality in Ferguson and elsewhere have been “Black Lives Matter” and “I/We Can’t Breathe” (after Eric Garner’s final words). These sentiments, and the response from both the judicial system and many white Americans, bear a chilling resemblance to the words Fanon wrote about colonialism.

See also:

“Ferguson: In Defense of Rioting,” by Darlena Cunha at TIME; “If Assata is a terrorist, then Timothy Loehman, Daniel Pantaleo, & Sean Williams are terrorists,” by Shaun King at Daily Kos; “When Are Violent Protests Justified?” by Taylor Adams at The New York Times

Review: ‘Concerning Violence’ Visualizes Frantz Fanon’s ‘Wretched of the Earth’, by Zeba Blay at Shadow and Act; ‘Concerning Violence’: Fanon lives on, by Belen Fernandez at Al Jazeera; “Film of the week: Concerning Violence,” by Ashley Clark at BFI; “Living at the Movies: Concerning Violence,” by Jeremy Martin at Good; What’s Happening Now in Ferguson and ‘The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975,’ by Ren Jender at Bitch Flicks

Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature, and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.