New Clint Eastwood movie has people talking
On Jan. 16, Clint Eastwood’s much-hyped war movie American Sniper would be released in movie theatres worldwide. As the real-life story of gunman Chris Kyle and his postwar experiences with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the film’s ambiguous message has made it a center-piece for controversy in the past two weeks. With liberal and conservative commentators openly debating the picture’s merits, the hoopla surrounding American Sniper is sure to only accelerate the film’s box office sales in the lead-up to this year’s Academy Awards.
Those on the left who have criticized American Sniper include comic actor Seth Rogen and Bowling for Columbine-filmmaker Michael Moore, who both took to Twitter to decry the film. On Jan. 18th, the former wrote, “American Sniper kind of reminds me of the movie that’s showing in the third act of Inglorious Bastards,” likening the film to Nazi propaganda. The latter made a post denouncing snipers as cowards. Conversely, those who have sung the film’s praises include right-wing talk radio host Rush Limbaugh, who praised what he saw as the film’s pro-US military message while denouncing Moore as a “freak” and “oddball” in relation to American values.
Though it’s easy to praise or denounce the film as being pro-war, considering director Clint Eastwood’s reputation as a Hollywood conservative, I think both sides are wrong in making such an estimation. Having seen the film, the character of Chris Kyle is portrayed less as war hero and more as a man whose experiences in war have shaken his mental foundaiton. Having to murder Middle-Eastern women and children as a part of his job as sniper, Kyle’s return to domestic life post-war is the occasion for serious moral atonement and reckoning. Regardless of what you think of Kyle’s character, the plot arc where Kyle suffers post-war inner turmoil makes the film –if anything – arguably anti-war.
In defence of Rogen and Moore, however, their comments were somewhat taken out of context. In the subsequent Twitter wars initiated by their first comments, both Rogen and Moore would acknowledge that they thought Sniper was a well-made film and would also say that they merely meant to point out, respectively, the picture’s likeness to the earlier Tarantino scene and that snipers, outside of the context of American Sniper, weren’t worthy of hero worship. At the end of the day, the events of the past two weeks in relation to the film are simply yet another example of a polar right-wing American media misinterpreting issues and pointing fingers in every direction.