Filmmakers have stripped the story of Chris Kyle from the factual details harrowingly present in his autobiography
Dubbed as one of the whitest Oscars in years, it comes as no amazement that American Sniper is nominated for six Academy Awards, including best actor, director and picture. The film is based on the autobiography of SEAL Chris Kyle, who has a killing rate of 225, of which 160 are confirmed. The biopic depicts his life from his so-called motivations to enter the Iraq war to his very last day, ending with real footage of support and grief from the public upon his death.
The film, in one word, is a little something that begins with the letter F: Fiction.
It is understandable that the movie polishes a lot of its subject’s flaws, considering that Taya Kyle (played by Sienna Miller) and Chris Kyle (played by Bradley Cooper) himself, before his death, were heavily involved in the filmmaking process. It is unlikely that either of these two would want the masses to witness the brutality that habituated the mind of the “American Sniper”.
In the film, Kyle is presented as the perfect gentleman, who just wants to do right by his country and protect the nation after having seen multiple terrorist attacks against his country on the news. He saves a girl from a sleazy man in a bar, and ends up marrying this girl and having children with her. He always makes sure to say “please”, “thank you”, “ma’am” and “sir”, and above all, he is a man with a conscience. The last characterisation is perhaps the most laughable of them all.
Cooper, who is credited as a producer of the film, and Clint Eastwood who directed it, either skipped past the process of actually reading the autobiography, or just had a selective blindness to the parts that didn’t paint Kyle as the ultimate hero – one whom all men should aspire to be like. This is a man who has admitted to his sadistic nature, narrating how he would drive his car towards Iraqi civilians, their screams making him laugh till he doubled over, and how “cheap thrills in Iraq were priceless.”
Kyle is constantly referred to as a “hero”, a “legend”, a “myth” in the film. However, the label of “Shaitan Al-Ramadi” (The Devil of Ramadi) afforded to him by the Iraqis that he slaughtered, was one that was appointed, in the movie, to an Iraqi bad guy instead, a man who worked for an opposing sniper shooting down American soldiers.
This is where the fictitious nature of the film is a little more evident. Mustafa, the sniper taking down soldiers, is presented as the villain throughout the movie – the one guy that Kyle must get whether it kills him and destroys his marriage, because this man is killing his friends. In Kyle’s book, he refers to the sniper in a mere one paragraph in the entire autobiography, writing, “I never saw him, but other snipers later killed an Iraqi sniper we think was him.” Kyle had never even met this man, wasn’t even sure of his demise, but in the film he is the superhero to Mustafa’s supervillain.
Furthermore, Kyle is seen to be wrecked with guilt after his first kill, one that was a child, and then throughout the film he is portrayed as killing because of noble necessity. Kyle, in his book, divulged how he was not bothered by his killings and said, “I loved what I did… I’m not lying or exaggerating to say it was fun”, and then later “the number is not important to me. I only wish I had killed more.” It is a wonder how Eastwood and Cooper omitted these significant parts of the book.
Reactions to the film have been horrifyingly revealing of the current society in which we live in, with anti-Muslim threats heightening upon the film’s release. Many took to Twitter to express the buzz they felt in watching the film and how they wish to “kill some ******* ragheads.” It is no surprise that the film caused this feedback as it failed to portray a single Muslim as anything but the enemy, be they an elderly person or a young child.
Seth Rogen tweeted that American Sniper reminded him of a scene from Inglorious Basterds, where the Nazis are watching and cheering on a film about a German sniper killing allied soldiers. Though Rogen apologised for the tweet and backtracked on his observation, he inadvertently stumbled onto the flaws of our voyeur culture, highlighting our tendency to glorify individuals without considering the darker consequences of their actions.
There has never been a time when I felt that I could not sit through an entire movie – and, mind you, I’ve sat through The Lord of The Rings back-to-back – but this film had my leg muscles twitching in preparation to storm out. It opens with the Islamic call to prayer (adhan), then goes on to display a film where Islam has become a source of evil, and all who follow it deserve to die. Perhaps it was curiosity that made me stay, and we all know what that did to the proverbial cat. My curiosity surrounding this movie and its subsequent Islamaphobic reaction has killed my faith in humanity just a little bit.
The only redeemable aspect of the whole experience of going to the cinema to see this was perhaps the trailer of Selma that came on before American Sniper started. Selma portrays Martin Luther King’s endeavour in the civil rights movement, the story of a real hero, who believe it or not, was killed by an American sniper.
With thanks to Stratford East Picturehouse.
Image from: Warner Bros.