Clint Eastwood’s surprising box office hit “American Sniper” attempts to tell the tale of real-life Iraq War sniper Chris Kyle. The film’s narrative is simple: it’s good versus evil. Basically, there are evil terrorists and Kyle needs to kill them.
The overarching theme of the film is set early on by Kyle’s father when he declares that there are three types of people in this world: sheep, wolves and sheep dogs.
In this metaphor, the American people would be considered the ?innocent sheep, the big bad wolves are al-Qaeda terrorists and the protective sheep dog is Chris Kyle.
As a result, the narrative couples together and hardly distinguishes the difference between Iraq’s millions of citizens and al-Qaeda terrorists. The resulting sentiment against Muslim Americans from “American Sniper” is terrifying.
As much of the film was based on Kyle’s memoir, a considerable amount of the displeasure is based on excerpts that critics have flagged.
Examples such as, “I couldn’t give a flying fuck about the Iraqis” and “if you see anyone from about sixteen to seventy-five and they’re male, shoot ’em. Kill every male you see.”
In the end, the film makes little ?effort to prove his comments wrong.For example, as Vox’s Zach Beauchamp points out, most children the movie chooses to focus on pick-up weapons.
The rhetoric presented in the film is not only wrong but it also quite ?distasteful.
In fact, as Beauchamp explains, “many thousands of Iraqis died fighting al-Qaeda, and the group’s defeat never would have been possible without the 2005 Anbar Awakening, in which many Iraqi communities in al-Qaeda hotspots took up arms to uproot the group.”
In an attempt to retell history, “American Sniper” instead has opened the floodgates for hateful ?rhetoric and negative sentiment against the Muslim community, both in America and abroad.
The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee cites that anti-Arab and anti-Muslim threats have already tripled since the release of the film.
And after the threats? The ADC even wrote Clint Eastwood and ?Bradley Cooper, urging them to speak out against the “hateful rhetoric.”
Still no comment from the director or the film’s star.
With all of this being said, Kyle is still a celebrated war hero, and that’s saying something about the power of cinema to distort history and further racial stereotypes.
It’s clear that “American Sniper” is set to present a dangerous precedent for war films to come.
