COURTESY: IMDB.COM
Yesterday evening and this Sunday at 8 p.m., the Student Activities Association has decided to screen the Oscar-nominated Clint Eastwood film “American Sniper” in the Grove as part of its spring semester outdoor film series.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with screening this film – I believe all art, regardless of its quality, deserves to be displayed and discussed. However, whose idea of a fun spring film is “American Sniper”?
If you followed the news surrounding this film’s theatrical release, you probably saw a story or two concerning social media posts from people who had seen the film. I will not repeat their content, but suffice it to say they contained some of the most hateful, violent and xenophobic rhetoric towards Muslims and Arabs I have ever seen.
Muslims have been horrified during the film’s screenings, as these tweets indicated many red-blooded white Americans left the film not with a sense of sorrow at the mutual tragedy and senseless death involved in war, but rather with a jingoistic desire to bash on “America’s enemies.” Does this refer to members of the Ba’athist army? Perhaps the Islamic State of Iraq? Maybe even al-Qaeda?
According to “American Sniper”’s audience, however, “America’s enemies” are American Muslims, indiscriminately, regardless of ethnicity. Never mind that Iraqi Muslims, the kind Clint Eastwood paints as “America’s enemies,” make up less than 2 percent of the Muslim population. Middle Eastern Muslims at large only make up 20 percent of the global Muslim population – far more Muslims live in South and Southeast Asia.
Why is it that this film inspires such violent ignorance? Clint Eastwood is a talented director. I enjoyed “Gran Torino.” However, with “American Sniper,” he presented a dangerous misrepresentation of both Chris Kyle’s life and the Iraq War. Early on in the film, Eastwood juxtaposes Kyle watching the burning twin towers on 9/11 with his joining the military and deploying to Iraq. This cheap emotional ploy attempts to create visual causality – 9/11 happened, then the invasion of Iraq happened implicitly as a result. This is a lie.
The Iraq War had nothing to do with 9/11 – that was the Afghanistan War. Eastwood uses this visual juxtaposition to create a jingoistic emotional justification for the Iraq War. Throughout the film this tactic is continued. The Iraq War, which was a tragic mistake based on blatant lies from our leadership that left over 120,000 innocent Iraqi civilians killed by American soldiers, is portrayed as a heroic struggle against America’s aforementioned “enemies.” Obviously, the Iraq War happened, and cinematic depictions of it can be interesting, but a film that does not invoke its many failings is sorely remiss.
However, worse than the film’s misrepresentation of a tragic war is its lack of respect for the lives of Muslims. In a time when the nation at large is concerned with violence against minorities, “American Sniper” depicts Chris Kyle, who shot and killed 160 people, as a glorious war hero. The film makes no attempt to humanize the Iraqi combatants resisting the American invasion of their country. In fact, they are explicitly dehumanized, depicted, to quote Chris Kyle himself, as “savage, despicable evil.” In the book upon which the film is based, Chris Kyle, when asked whether he has any regrets, replied by saying “I only wish I had killed more.”
By valorizing this man, the lives of Arab Muslims are seen as irrelevant. Eastwood does not show the families of the men Kyle killed. He does not show any Muslim Americans, many of whom serve in the military. His depiction of Muslims and Arabs uniformly paints them as savages, enemies, “others.” “American Sniper” is less a nuanced portrayal of the Iraq War than a cynical propaganda film, more akin to “300” in tone than Eastwood’s vastly superior “Flags of Our Fathers” and “Letters from Iwo Jima.”
In light of the Chapel Hill hate crime murder of three Muslim students, is this really a film we as a university ought to be causally screening in the same breath as innocuous films like “The Hunger Games”? Many members of the Muslim community on campus have expressed that the screening of this film makes them feel directly targeted.
Muslim and Arab students are already constant targets of discrimination, jokes and casual microaggressions. “American Sniper” has been proven to inspire hateful, violent reactions from white Americans. It is irresponsible and perhaps immoral for this film to be shown on campus in such a nonchalant manner.
Thankfully, while they will not cancel the showing of the film, the Student Activities Association has agreed to co-sponsor a discussion on Tuesday at noon in Union 404, entitled “Cultural Awareness in the Era of ‘American Sniper.’” I applaud this effort and extol students on both sides of the debate to attend. However, the fact still remains that this film is being shown Sunday night at 8 p.m. in the Grove. I ask that all students, staff, and faculty members who stand opposed to jingoism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia join me in protesting before the screening of the film. Stand in solidarity with your Muslim and Arab brothers and sisters, and make it loud and clear that not everyone at UM supports the hateful message of “American Sniper.”
Robert McAuliffe is a junior international studies major from St. Louis.
