Every movie rewrites history. What American Sniper did is much, much worse.
Updated by
Amanda Taub on January 22, 2015, 11:10 a.m. ET
American Sniper has a problem. It's a movie about a black-and-white distinction between good and evil, but it is set almost entirely in the
Iraq War, which can only be honestly portrayed in shades of gray.
Faced with a choice between altering its
narrative to account for that gray versus altering the facts of history, the film chose the latter. It adopted an "honesty shmonesty" approach to the war: in its retelling, Iraq was a fight of Good Americans against Bad Terrorists, led by Chris Kyle, the Good-est American of them all.
The result is a sort of Hezbollah martyr video for the Fox News set; recruitment propaganda for culture-war extremists.In the world of this movie, the Iraq war is an extension of the war on terror; heroes with guns are our only hope of salvation; and anyone who doubts that is part of the problem.And if the film's historic
box office success and many award
nominations are anything to go by, that propaganda is frighteningly effective.
The movie's central moral metaphor is voiced by Kyle's father during a flashback to his childhood. There are, he explains, three types of people in the world: wolves, sheep, and sheepdogs. The evil wolves threaten the sheep. The sheep are good people, but vulnerable to harm because they're too naive to understand that evil exists. That means that it's up to the sheepdogs to protect them from harm.
In that metaphor, Kyle is America's border collie, shepherding the weak and vulnerable away from harm. The movie's Big Bad Wolves are al-Qaeda terrorists, led by a psychopathic child-torturer and his marksman sidekick.
And the sheep? They would be the other Americans who lack Chris Kyle's vision and fortitude, and fail to understand that you're either with us or against us. That includes fellow US troops who lack Kyle's skill, or who dare to question the war. Iraqis, by contrast, are not sheep: in this movie they're either wolves themselves, or nameless collateral damage. Mostly wolves, though.
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Every movie rewrites history. What American Sniper did is much, much worse. - Vox