Reducing the war to a DVD

All wars are not created equal. Even a pacifist would have to acknowledge that there is a moral spectrum on which wars can—at least in theory—be placed. Hitler’s war against Poland is impossible to defend. The UN—mostly U.S.—intervention in Bosnia is difficult not to defend. On this moral spectrum, I would put the Iraq War much closer to Hitler’s invasion of Poland. It is in that moral context that I view director Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper.

If a great German filmmaker created a masterpiece about a German sniper who picked off Polish resistance fighters, we would have a very difficult time embracing the character—no matter how much “backstory” developed this sniper as a highly credentialed “good guy.” Would it matter if the German sniper was raised on church services and Bible verses? Would it matter if he was taught to stand firm against the injustices perpetrated by schoolyard bullies?

Eastwood’s Chris Kyle is a super-warrior—he’s a soldier’s soldier in Iraq. But before we ever get to Iraq, Eastwood has made Kyle morally unassailable; his childhood story makes him so in the first 10 minutes of the film. We are supposed to buy this magical premise and never ask another question about the war—the war is OK, because Kyle is A-OK.

What makes American Sniper such a great propaganda film is that it sanctions a highly unjust war only by inference. The film never touches morality other than to anoint the sniper as a moral agent. We need not wrestle with the question of the moral validity of the entire enterprise—or our own culpability as American citizens—because we have American goodness staring down a rifle scope at “savages”—the Chris Kyle term for Iraqis. It’s all personal. Up close. So close that the moral context is outside the frame. Within the frame everything is in the clear focus of high-grade military optics and Eastwood’s myopic lens.

Popular culture is not about truth. Popular culture is popular because it bends truth into something we can live with. How do we live with hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis and the chaos that is now Iraq? How do we wash our hands of this invasion? Film can help. It can reduce the war to a DVD. It can make it manageable. It can tell us the story we want to hear. It can make history into “Legend”—Chris Kyle’s moniker in occupied Iraq.