The growing number of Hollywood films and TV outings singing the praises of our military at a moment when the utterly deranged (or corrupt, take your pick) US ruling class and its vassals seem on a collision course with two nuclear powers in their own right, prompts us to revisit this discussion, essentially about the deliberate normalisation of sociopathic behaviour and attitudes in our armed forces and the public at large.
In this context, no examination of Hollywood's shameless and nonstop pro-imperial propaganda can fail to note Clint Eastwood's contributions to this insalubrious canon, starting with his 2016 blockbuster, American Sniper, based on the late Chris Kyle's story, a Texan who gained notoriety and fame as a result of his record kills in Iraq as a Navy SEAL sniper, his chauvinist flamboyancy, and his death—some said, karmic, by gunfire— at the hands of a fellow vet on a shooting range. American Sniper certainly made Eastwood much wealthier than he already was, the man has carved up a fortune by mining the macho/chauvinist streak so prevalent in the juvenile American male psyche, a niche that other celebrities like John Wayne also exploited to great profit and acclaim. (Sniper has now surpassed the half billion dollar mark in world receipts). Upon Sniper's release we published several pieces on the film, pelting it from various angles. (See here, here, and here, for example), not to mention what we might call a "prequel" critique of the movie (more on that later). In his own review, The controversy surrounding American Sniper, wsws.org's cinema critic David Walsh noted with typical astuteness,
The promotion and defense of Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper is the latest means by which the political and media establishment in the US is pursuing its militaristic agenda. Such is the ferocity of this campaign that the relatively toothless critical comments of filmmaker Michael Moore and actor-director Seth Rogen have provoked controversy and brought down upon them a torrent of abuse. The two have been denounced as “traitors,” and Moore has received death threats.
American Sniper is part of the effort to create a mythology around the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq by the US military, an undertaking that has destroyed that Middle Eastern country’s infrastructure, provoked a murderous sectarian civil war and led to the deaths of one million or more Iraqis.
For my part, as a longtime card-carrying despiser of Eastwood and all he represents, I added my own little comment. I thought this was in perfect order, After all, in 1986 Eastwood had also had the audacity to present in Heartbreak Ridge, a typically mawkish concoction, the overwhelming imperial forces of the US as heroes while defeating the nonexistent army of Grenada, a Caribbean nation so small and insignificant that even Brooklyn could have presented a much larger military challenge.
Eastwood's protestations about his movie beg the question whether the man is a complete hypocrite or a clueless moron unable to see the obvious sociopolitical effects of the films he so carefully crafts.
More to the point, in the spring of 2013, almost two and a half years before Sniper hit the theaters, I wrote a piece upon Kyle's death dissenting from the wave of preposterous eulogies sweeping the country (SEAL sniper killed--not exactly an eulogy). This is an excerpt from that piece:
Like most of today's Death Star troopers serving the American juggernaut, Chris Kyle, "America's deadliest sniper," never understood what he was doing overseas. Soaked from the cradle in the chauvinist Texas cultural DNA, he was thoroughly indoctrinated to believe in all the dense mythologies comprising the self-righteous national propaganda canon, especially as it relates to foreign adventures (er, I mean crusades) to save the world or protect the homeland, no questions asked.
Obviously a gun enthusiast, war lover, upright Christian, G.W. Bush supporter, and a committed hunter, he was proud of his skill as a precision killer, and morally undisturbed by his mission in Iraq and elsewhere. Macho to caricature dimensions, by his own reckoning he killed upwards of 160 people, perhaps more. His first kill was a woman cradling a toddler, supposedly about to toss a grenade into a nest of Marines. Apparently the incident never haunted Kyle too much. Suffering from serious empathy deficiency and zero political knowledge, it never occurred to him that a mother with a toddler and a grenade only occur under very desperate circumstances, when a citizens' irregular and vastly outgunned army is forced to repel a superpower's mighty invading force.
In sum this publication ran more than a dozen essays debunking Chris Kyle, Eastwood's American Sniper, and the whole chauvinist miasma that so obligingly launders the rivers of blood caused by the insatiable American empire. To this estimable body of contrarian opinion, we now add, with pleasure, the powerful critique written by Paul Edwards, a man who not only has his moral antennas pointed the right way, but who knows the movie industry like few others.—PG