*I have a great deal of respect for Matt Taibbi & find his review of the propaganda piece that is 'American Sniper' to be a powerful reminder of the shadows that still plague humanities Awakening... & the methods that are continuously used to reinforce them. ~TemetNosce247
1 21 2015 ~I saw American Sniper last night, and hated it slightly less than I expected to. Like most Clint Eastwood movies – and I like Clint Eastwood movies for the most part – it's a simple, well-lit little fairy tale with the nutritional value of a fortune cookie that serves up a neatly-arranged helping of cheers and tears for target audiences, and panics at the thought of embracing more than one or two ideas at any time.
It's usually silly to get upset about the self-righteous way Hollywood moviemakers routinely turn serious subjects into baby food. Film-industry people angrily reject the notion that their movies have to be about anything (except things like "character" and "narrative" and "arc," subjects they can talk about endlessly).
This is the same Hollywood culture that turned the horror and divisiveness of the Vietnam War era into a movie about a platitude-spewing doofus with leg braces who in the face of terrible moral choices eats chocolates and plays Ping-Pong. The message of Forrest Gump was that if you think about the hard stuff too much, you'll either get AIDS or lose your legs. Meanwhile, the hero is the idiot who just shrugs and says "Whatever!" whenever his country asks him to do something crazy.
Forrest Gump pulled in over half a billion and won Best Picture. So what exactly should we have expected from American Sniper?
Not much. But even by the low low standards of this business, it still manages to sink to a new depth or two.
The thing is, the mere act of trying to make a typically Hollywoodian one-note fairy tale set in the middle of the insane moral morass that is/was the Iraq occupation is both dumber and more arrogant than anything George Bush or even Dick Cheney ever tried.
No one expected 20 minutes of backstory about the failed WMD search, Abu Ghraib, or the myriad other American atrocities and quick-trigger bombings that helped fuel the rise of ISIL and other groups.
But to turn the Iraq war into a saccharine, almost PG-rated two-hour cinematic diversion about a killing machine with a heart of gold (is there any film theme more perfectly 2015-America than that?) who slowly, very slowly, starts to feel bad after shooting enough women and children – Gump notwithstanding, that was a hard one to see coming.
Sniper is a movie whose politics are so ludicrous and idiotic that under normal circumstances it would be beneath criticism. The only thing that forces us to take it seriously is the extraordinary fact that an almost exactly similar worldview consumed the walnut-sized mind of the president who got us into the war in question.
It's the fact that the movie is popular, and actually makes sense to so many people, that's the problem. "American Sniper has the look of a bona fide cultural phenomenon!" gushed Brandon Griggs of CNN, noting the film's record $105 million opening-week box office.
Griggs added, in a review that must make Eastwood swell with pride, that the root of the film's success is that "it's about a real person," and "it's a human story, not a political one."
Well done, Clint! You made a movie about mass-bloodshed in Iraq that critics pronounced not political! That's as Hollywood as Hollywood gets.
The characters in Eastwood's movies almost always wear white and black hats or their equivalents, so you know at all times who's the good guy on the one hand, and whose exploding head we're to applaud on the other.
In this case that effect is often literal, with "hero" sniper Chris Kyle's "sinister" opposite Mustafa permanently dressed in black (with accompanying evil black pirate-stubble) throughout.
Eastwood, who surely knows better, indulges in countless crass stupidities in the movie. There's the obligatory somber scene of shirtless buffed-up SEAL Kyle and his heartthrob wife Sienna Miller gasping at the televised horror of the 9/11 attacks. Next thing you know, Kyle is in Iraq actually fighting al-Qaeda – as if there was some logical connection between 9/11 and Iraq.
Which of course there had not been, until we invaded and bombed the wrong country and turned its moonscaped cities into a recruitment breeding ground for… you guessed it, al-Qaeda. They skipped that chicken-egg dilemma in the film, though, because it would detract from the "human story."
Eastwood plays for cheap applause and goes super-dumb even by Hollywood standards when one of Kyle's officers suggests that they could "win the war" by taking out the evil sniper who is upsetting America's peaceful occupation of Sadr City.
When hunky Bradley Cooper's Kyle character subsequently takes out Mustafa with Skywalkerian long-distance panache – "Aim small, hit small," he whispers, prior to executing an impossible mile-plus shot – even the audiences in the liberal-ass Jersey City theater where I watched the movie stood up and cheered. I can only imagine the response this scene scored in Soldier of Fortune country.
To Eastwood, this was probably just good moviemaking, a scene designed to evoke the same response he got in Trouble With the Curve when his undiscovered Latin Koufax character, Rigoberto Sanchez, strikes out the evil Bonus Baby Bo Gentry (even I cheered at that scene).
The problem of course is that there's no such thing as "winning" the War on Terror militarily. In fact the occupation led to mass destruction, hundreds of thousands of deaths, a choleric lack of real sanitation, epidemic unemployment and political radicalization that continues to this day to spread beyond Iraq's borders.
Yet the movie glosses over all of this, and makes us think that killing Mustafa was some kind of decisive accomplishment – the single shot that kept terrorists out of the coffee shops of San Francisco or whatever. It's a scene that ratified every idiot fantasy of every yahoo with a target rifle from Seattle to Savannah.
The really dangerous part of this film is that it turns into a referendum on the character of a single soldier. It's an unwinnable argument in either direction. We end up talking about Chris Kyle and his dilemmas, and not about the Rumsfelds and Cheneys and other officials up the chain who put Kyle and his high-powered rifle on rooftops in Iraq and asked him to shoot women and children.
They're the real villains in this movie, but the controversy has mostly been over just how much of a "hero" Chris Kyle really was. One Academy member wondered to a reporter if Kyle (who in real life was killed by a fellow troubled vet in an eerie commentary on the violence in our society that might have made a more interesting movie) was a "psychopath." Michael Moore absorbed a ton of criticism when he tweeted that "My uncle [was] killed by sniper in WW2. We were taught snipers were cowards …"
And plenty of other commentators, comparing Kyle's book (where he remorselessly brags about killing "savages") to the film (where he is portrayed as a more rounded figure who struggled, if not verbally then at least visually, with the nature of his work), have pointed out that real-life Kyle was kind of a dick compared to movie-Kyle.
(The most disturbing passage in the book to me was the one where Kyle talked about being competitive with other snipers, and how when one in particular began to threaten his "legendary" number, Kyle "all of the sudden" seemed to have "every stinkin' bad guy in the city running across my scope." As in, wink wink, my luck suddenly changed when the sniper-race got close, get it? It's super-ugly stuff).
The thing is, it always looks bad when you criticize a soldier for doing what he's told. It's equally dangerous to be seduced by the pathos and drama of the individual solider's experience, because most wars are about something much larger than that, too.
They did this after Vietnam, when America spent decades watching movies like Deer Hunter and First Blood and Coming Home about vets struggling to reassimilate after the madness of the jungles. So we came to think of the "tragedy" of Vietnam as something primarily experienced by our guys, and not by the millions of Indochinese we killed.
That doesn't mean Vietnam Veterans didn't suffer: they did, often terribly. But making entertainment out of their dilemmas helped Americans turn their eyes from their political choices. The movies used the struggles of soldiers as a kind of human shield protecting us from thinking too much about what we'd done in places like Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos.
This is going to start happening now with the War-on-Terror movies. As CNN's Griggs writes, "We're finally ready for a movie about the Iraq War." Meaning: we're ready to be entertained by stories about how hard it was for our guys. And it might have been. But that's not the whole story and never will be.
We'll make movies about the Chris Kyles of the world and argue about whether they were heroes or not. Some were, some weren't. But in public relations as in war, it'll be the soldiers taking the bullets, not the suits in the Beltway who blithely sent them into lethal missions they were never supposed to understand.
And filmmakers like Eastwood, who could have cleared things up, only muddy the waters more. Sometimes there's no such thing as "just a human story." Sometimes a story is meaningless or worse without real context, and this is one of them.
AsWithin
SoWithout
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*More food for thought...
Don't hate on critics of 'American Sniper'—criticize its flawed hero
by Matt Rozsa
This article is not about American Sniper. It is about Chris Kyle.
That’s an important distinction because, as American Sniper continues to break box office records, many of its fans are having trouble separating the flesh-and-blood human being from his celluloid counterpart. This was perhaps best embodied by Kid Rock’s response to the public criticisms of the film made by Seth Rogen and Michael Moore on Twitter. “F*** you Michael Moore, you’re a piece of s*** and your uncle would be ashamed of you,” he wrote. “Seth Rogen, your uncle probably molested you. I hope both of you catch a fist to the face soon. God bless you, Chris Kyle. Thank you for your service.”
The fact that Moore had focused on Kyle the man and not Clint Eastwood’s movie, while Rogen had limited his criticism entirely to the movie without mentioning a word about the real man, escaped Kid Rock, much as it has eluded others in the pro-American Sniper camp, including Craig Morton, Blake Shelton,and Sarah Palin.
All of this is noteworthy because it’s symptomatic of a larger problem. For far too many Americans, it is impossible to separate criticism of individuals within certain institution—or even systematic injustices perpetrated by those institutions—from the actual institutions themselves.
This was seen last year in the right-wing backlash against those who protested racial profiling among law enforcement. "If you read the liberal mainstream media," argued Ben Stein, you’d think "that the main problem with race in America was poor innocent black people being set upon and mistreated by the police." In his dismissal of the #BlackLivesMatter protests, Rudy Giuliani claimed that "they are tearing down respect for a criminal justice system that goes back to England in the 11th century." After a crazed cop-hater assassinated two police officers in December, New York Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association president Patrick Lynch blamed it on those who "incited violence on the street under the guise of protest."
There is an obvious logical response to these attitudes. "You can truly grieve for every officer who’s been lost in the line of duty in this country, and still be troubled by cases of police overreach," argued Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. "Those two ideas are not mutually exclusive. You can have great regard for law enforcement and still want them to be held to high standards."
The same thing can be said for those who criticize Chris Kyle. After all, regardless of one’s opinion on the American military, there is much that is problematic about Kyle himself. His autobiography is filled with distortions and outright lies, from claiming that he shot carjackers in Texas and New Orleans looters during Hurricane Katrina to libel against Jesse Ventura that ultimately led to a civil settlement in the former governor’s favor. He refers to Iraqis as "savages" about whom he "couldn’t give a flying f***," says he is drawn to killing because it’s "fun," and brags about telling investigators into his sniping of a civilian that "I don’t shoot people with Korans—I’d like to, but I don’t."
"In Kyle’s version of the Iraq War, the parties consisted of Americans, who are good by virtue of being American, and fanatic Muslims whose 'savage, despicable evil' led them to want to kill Americans simply because they are Christians," writes Laura Miller of Salon. Tellingly, Kyle’s book never challenges the Bush administration’s assumption that Iraq was somehow involved in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, even though no such connection has ever been proved; Kyle even claims that he personally discovered some of the weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) that were brandished as the pretext for our invasion, although all of the confirmed materials found in that country were leftovers from the early 1990s that were already known at the time.
None of these observations are meant to detract from Kyle’s physical courage and unwavering support for his fellow soldiers. If anything, the fact that a man capable of such heroism could also be so flawed only underscores the complexity of human nature—something that those who insist on Kyle’s beatification studiously ignore. In the same vein, drawing attention to Kyle’s faults is not tantamount to attacking the character of every soldier who fought and/or died in Iraq. Kyle was one man, not a symbol for the entire American military.
Of course, the reason we are seeing such reflexive rallying behind American Sniper and Kyle’s character is that there are Americans who wish to turn him into such a symbol. "Treating Kyle as a patriot and ignoring any other possibility," observes Dennis Jett of the New Republic, "allows Americans to ignore the consequences of invading a country that had no weapons of mass destruction, had nothing to do with 9/11, and had no meaningful ties to Al Qaeda." Just as important, the canonization of Chris Kyle allows Americans to duck the morally thorny questions involving Kyle’s possible killing of innocent civilians, his dehumanization of both Muslims in general and Iraqis specifically, and his bloodthirsty attitude toward war itself. Because his supporters don’t wish to see these things (or, even worse, secretly condone them), they gloss over the inconvenient details and insist that drawing attention to them is un-American.
This speaks to an issue even larger than questions about the Iraq War, America’s military presence overseas, or even racism among law enforcement (to refer to the earlier analogy in this article). If America is going to have an intelligent public debate on any political issue, it is essential that its citizens be able to participate without fear of having their motives baselessly attacked. More specifically, if we are to hold our government accountable for its actions, we absolutely must be able to criticize its most powerful institutions—particularly those who use violence, be it the military abroad or the police at home—without being intimidated into silence.
It's not un-American to question Chris Kyle and the military operation he worked for. In fact, it might just be the most patriotic thing you can do.
http://www.dailydot.com/opinion/american-sniper-seth-rogen-michael-...
war is wasteful, horrific, breeds contempt for generations ruins everyone who participates in one way or another-the money behind them and the geopolitics always includes how banks, suppliers, corps, etc. make a buck at it at the same time and then drill or mine or trade, among other more nefarious things-all hell-but if we don't have the military ( and police) we don't have a democracy (which is being eroded by the above characters) and then we are under the thumb of someone else-the US military and our allies are being badly misused for gain at the behest of geopoliticians who are controlled , well you know the rest and that is the real problem, focus on the puppet masters-bashing the military or the police constantly may one day send us all into chaos
“Chaos is what we've lost touch with. This is why it is given a bad name. It is feared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is Ego, which clenches because its existence is defined in terms of control.” ~Terence McKenna
( ( ( Truth is Stranger than Fiction ) ) )
So, yes... "war is wasteful, horrific, breeds contempt for generations ruins everyone who participates in one way or another..." & as the veils of duality continue to fade, a new paradigm, a new way, is emerging. The clay feel of the bronze statue are crumbling & there's nothing the Babylonian prison guards can do about it! ~InLight555
They're lying about the attendance numbers, and Clint Eastwood may be either senile or just plain sold out due to fear of his dollar-based bank account.
The movie is an outright lie according to servicemen who knew Chris Kyles, and anyone who takes pleasure in killing others is someone with a mental illness, the president included.
Agreed...