Clint Eastwood's American Sniper: The Question Of Heroism In War

“The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living.”

― Chris Hedges, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning

Picture this, a man who has just returned home after serving a ten-month-long military tour in a country he was told needed his nation’s “democracy” sits in a room staring at a television. Nothing is playing, and even though the only sound to fill the room is that of the son he’s barely dedicated any time to playing with his action figures, all he can hear is the bombarding sound of rapid gunfire, manic screaming, and IED after IED going off like the soundtrack to a war film he probably grew up loving only to realize it barely captured the reality of what he lived when he was constantly being fired upon while hiding under the body of a comrade he was laughing with just five minutes prior to a round being fired into their head. Although American Sniper is essentially a film with an entertainment aspect to its biographical narrative, it still recreates a reality many veterans live day by day, long after they have left the very war zones they grew to consider more home than the actual home they knew prior to plunging into what might as well be called Hell as opposed to a battlefield.

If war is a force that gives us meaning, then the one question a film as raw and direct as American Sniper in its documentation of the life and service of Chris Kyle is what happens to that meaning once the war is over but forever burned into the mind of a man who continues to carry the weight of it on his shoulders like so many of America’s unrecognized if not unappreciated veterans. Around the time of the film’s release, American Sniper was met with a mixed array of reactions given the controversial public image of the film’s central figure United States Navy SEAL sniper Chris Kyle, who in addition to being awarded a silver star (third-highest military decoration for valor in combat), was known for over 160 confirmed kills.

Much of the positive commentary surrounding American Sniper resembled the essence of patriotism that the film paid tribute to in regard to Kyle’s service in the Iraq war, along with the sympathetic portrayal of the PTSD (Post-traumatic stress disorder) many veterans to this day still endure despite being able to make it back to a place they are unable to recognize as a home given how accustomed they became to the same violence they believed they were fighting as a means of preserving peace in said home. A majority of the negative commentary revolving around the film came from the more controversial comments made by Kyle and what had been interpreted as a form of jingoistic psychopathy rather than something far more complex, which is what the film alludes to in not only documenting the events of a man’s life but the silence that comes from delving into the very psychology analyzing their behavior and just how rooted in the chaotic nature of combat it is. It’s poetically ironic that the film incorporates Kyle’s use of the emblem of the marvel Anti-villain, The Punisher, who is known not only for racking up violent kill after violent kill, but his willful desire to engage in a kind of violence that easily paints him as more psychopathic than human is something that adds only greater complexity to Kyle, who gives equal justification to the violence he committed as part of a greater good that seems both near impossible if not bordering on the kind of wishful thinking only misguided idealists can perpetuate in the face of chaotic circumstances.