Shooting in a Moral Vacuum

CLINT EASTWOOD has made films about the sorrow and repeating pointlessness of war, as seen through the eyes of both aggressor and aggressed-against, with empathic performances and unbearably moving impact. His American Sniper, about the most lethal sniper in U.S. military history, bloodied in Iraq and struggling at home, is not one of those films. At best it’s a valuable character study of a confused warrior, revealing the traumatic effect of his service. At worst it’s a jingoistic and xenophobic attempt to put varnish on a terrible national response to the horror of 9/11, a response that became a self-inflicted wound creating untold collateral damage.

A decade ago, Eastwood made Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, which saw World War II soldiers as propaganda fodder and had the moral imagination to show both sides as courageous and broken without denying the difference between attacker and defender. These films are respectful and thoughtful, but American Sniper is arguably a work born in vengeance. Its reception (becoming one of the biggest January box office weekends ever, and a quick right-wing favorite) is part of the failure to deal in an integrated way with the wounds of 9/11, or to even begin to face the reality of the war in Iraq: an imperial conquest using the cover of national trauma as a justification.

The film’s refusal to engage the political context damages it irreparably. If we don’t know that the war was found to be based on misrepresentation and revenge, then how can we possibly make an adequate judgment of the actions of a protagonist who killed at least 160 people because of that misrepresentation and revenge? This is a general principle too, of course—if the purpose of art is to help us live better, then to have integrity, storytellers who feature characters who behave badly have a responsibility to illuminate their motivation and context. Otherwise we learn nothing about the nature of who we are.

American Sniper could have taken a lesson from recent films such as Nightcrawler, which explores the psychological terrain of a news media addicted to gore and ignorant of (or in denial about) the consequences of keeping the population in fear; Locke, which focuses on nothing but the motivation of one man and his attempts to take responsibility for his actions; and The Immigrant, which responds to one person’s selfishness and cruelty by empowering his victim to set him free to take another chance at getting it right. But American Sniper is so dedicated to the thrill of kinetic action that it doesn’t question the impact—either of the life of its protagonist or of the story now being told about him.