Watching ‘American Sniper’ by Clint Eastwood, to me, is a testament of how movies and other forms of media can obscure as much as it reveals. As we have talked in class, when we focus overtly on the effects of war on a single victim – in this case, Chris Kyle and his experience in the war – we efface the effects on the other victims of war like the Iraqi veterans and civilians. Yet, ‘American Sniper’ not only ignores the effects on war on other victims, but it also does not enable audiences to ask themselves more pressing questions about why the Iraq war and the “War on Terror” occurred. Thus, though the film efforts to raise awareness about war’s effects on veterans is admirable and sincere, it obscures the truth of why the war occurred – why those veterans had to go to war in the first place.
Equally important as thinking about a single man’s personal struggles with the war is considering the broader historical forces that have created, and are perpetuating, conditions for war. The framework for thinking about the underlying forces that have created the environment and structures people live in is conceptualised in a reading that we read in our Sociology 100 class with Professor Kerry Greer – a reading titled “The Sociological Imagination” by sociologist C. Wright Mills. In it, Mills puts forth the concept of “the sociological imagination” – that is, the ability to separate the struggles an individual faces in his day-to-day life (called “personal troubles”) from the structures beyond his control that create these very struggles (called “public issues”), thus enabling an individual to understand the historical and societal backdrop of daily life in terms of its consequences on his or her internal thoughts and external behaviour.
To me, the lack of the “sociological imagination” is extremely obvious in the film. The very film itself revolves around Chris Kyle’s “personal troubles”; it dramatises the story of a single character in what is supposed to be a transnational war, but is actually an inner conflict that is taking place in the form of internal disruptions in his mind and daily life. In ‘The Sociological Imagination’, Mills states that:
The personal problem of war, when it occurs, may be how to survive it or how to die in it with honour… to find a set of milieux and within it to survive the war or make one’s death in it meaningful. But the structural issues of war have to do with its causes; with what types of men it throws up into command; with its effects upon economic and political, family and religious institutions, with the unorganised irresponsibility of a world of nation-states.
In other words, viewing war with the sociological imagination involves looking at not only the struggles of a civilian or combatant, but at the overarching network of cause and effect that generate conditions for war. On the other hand, because ‘American Sniper’ centres so strongly on Chris Kyle’s experience, it completely ignores why the war occurred in the first place – the social, economic and political forces driving the American and Iraqi sides respectively, the type of political climate and leadership that is prevalent in the war, and so on. Presenting the actual conditions that created the war is not one of the purposes of ‘American Sniper’, and this is extremely obvious in how the rationale for the war is a broad, oversimplified generalisation of ‘evil’.
The reasons for the war that ‘American Sniper’ puts forth is that Iraqi combatants are unreasonably ‘evil’, while the American combatants are the bearers of justice to mete this evil. This could be seen in the presentation of specific individuals like the fictional ‘butcher’ and Kyle’s arch-nemesis ‘Mustafa’, which are the few faces that audiences see of the Iraqi’s side of the war, from which audiences form an understanding of Iraqi combatants in general. The ‘butcher’ and ‘Mustafa’ are the 2 most prominent Iraqi characters who are combatants, and while the film does make an effort to present several Iraqi characters in a sympathetic light (the children in the film, for instance, or the family that shared information to the soldiers), the ‘butcher’ and ‘Mustafa’ are indisputably bloodthirsty and unjustifiably violent. Since these 2 characters form the basis from which audiences view Iraqi combatants, audiences are likely to believe their motives to be a generalised ‘evil’ – that is, a cruel ignorance of others’ suffering in the pursuit of their (unexplained) goals. This rationalises the entire ‘War on Terror’, and Chris Kyle’s actions in the film. Thus, the film creates what I feel is an incomplete understanding of the Iraq war, for it ignores the effect of war on other victims and the structures that created the war in the first place.