Review of American Sniper (2014) by Koquito — 24 Jan 2015

As everyone knows, Clint Eastwood’s AMERICAN SNIPER (2015) is, as of this writing (January 24, 2015), a surprise smash hit in the United States. Various postulates as to its success have been formulated: its belated offering of Iraq War cartharsis or even justification; its tight filtering of historical events through a single, largely sympathetic protagonist (memorably played by Bradley Cooper); or simply a highly effective publicity campaign. My own suspicion is that the film is fundamentally about war-themed video games – or rather, is a successful attempt to capitalize on those games’ colossal popularity.

That the film’s iconography, sensibility and rhythm are at one with such games is too obvious to require comment: even I’ve played enough to know that. But I think that part of what the film does is convince its audience that playing those games is actually a form of civic participation, requiring concentration, commitment and self-sacrifice.

Clint lets the cat out of the bag near the end of the film, when Chris Kyle’s kids are playing some game or other (“Level 4, daddy!”), but I think it’s best to read the atavistic scenes of “hunting” in the film as figures for the perceptual (and political) pedagogy offered by war-video games. In other words, what the film does is construct one of those good ol’ four-level allegories familiar from medieval times, enabling the private wargames-player (the “moral” level) to insert him/herself into the “legend” of Chris Kyle (the “typological” level), and thereby connect to the larger destiny of the imperial nation as such (the “anagogical” level). The “literal” level, the history of the Iraq conflict, serves as nothing more than material for these figurations, to be arranged and rearranged like the body parts in the torture chamber.

The point of doing this, of course, is to siphon off some of the enormous libidinal/capital investment in such games - the film is doing huge business! - by providing a gratifying political emplotment of that investment (as a form of civic commitment). After all, you can even jeopardize your precious family life if you spend too much time trying to defeat the (computerized or “savage”) enemy: yet despite these existential risks, the vindication will come, draped in the flag, somewhere down the road….