The 2014 film American Sniper, directed by Clint Eastwood, has been criticized by ex-soldiers, film directors, actors and critics, academics, investigative journalists, authors, media figures, political figures, and watchdog groups for its alleged inaccuracies and misleading portrayal of US Navy Seal Chris Kyle.

The controversies involve political, historical, social, cultural, philosophical, moral, religious, racial/ethnic and other aspects of society.

Criticism of political, historical, social, cultural, philosophical, moral, ethical, religious, and racial/ethnic aspects of the film

The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee said that the release of the movie coincided with increased threats against Arabs and Muslims.^[1] It has also accused Eastwood of dishonestly linking the September 11 attacks with Iraq.^[2]

Michael Moore tweeted, in response to American Sniper, "My uncle [was] killed by sniper in WW2. We were taught snipers were cowards. Will shoot you in the back. Snipers aren't heroes. And invaders are worse." [sic]^[3]

Noam Chomsky criticized "what the worship of a movie about a cold-blooded killer says about the American people."^[4]

Lindy West of The Guardian wrote: "In his memoir, Kyle reportedly described killing as “fun”, something he “loved”; he was unwavering in his belief that everyone he shot was a “bad guy”. “I hate the damn savages,” he wrote. “I couldn’t give a flying fuck about the Iraqis.”" and: "If he (Eastwood), intentionally or not, makes a hero out of Kyle – who, bare minimum, was a racist who took pleasure in dehumanising and killing brown people – is he responsible for validating racism, murder, and dehumanisation? Is he a propagandist if people use his work as propaganda?"^[5]

Zack Beauchamp of Vox felt that the film's greatest sin was condescending "to Americans and American troops by acting as if we could not possibly handle moral ambiguity about America's mission in Iraq. But it did, and that is a disservice not just to film's viewers, but to the millions of Americans who were affected by the war and deserve to have that story told honestly."^[6]

John Wight, writing for Russia Today, strongly criticized the film and its reception to date. He said, "The moral depravity into which the US is sinking is shown by American Sniper glorifying the exploits of a racist killer receiving six Oscar nominations, whereas 'Selma' depicting Martin Luther King's struggle against racism has been largely ignored."^[7]

Matt Taibbi wrote that "Sniper is a movie whose politics are so ludicrous and idiotic that under normal circumstances it would be beneath criticism" and that "Eastwood plays for cheap applause and goes super-dumb even by Hollywood standards."^[8]

Chris Hedges, in an article titled "Killing Ragheads for Jesus", wrote that "American Sniper lionizes the most despicable aspects of U.S. society—the gun culture, the blind adoration of the military, the belief that we have an innate right as a 'Christian' nation to exterminate the 'lesser breeds' of the earth, a grotesque hypermasculinity that banishes compassion and pity, a denial of inconvenient facts and historical truth, and a belittling of critical thinking and artistic expression. Many Americans, especially white Americans trapped in a stagnant economy and a dysfunctional political system, yearn for the supposed moral renewal and rigid, militarized control the movie venerates."^[9]

Zaid Jilani attacked American Sniper's inaccuracies, arguing both the film and Kyle's reputation "are all built on a set of half-truths, myths and outright lies." He first criticized Eastwood's direction of a sequence in which Kyle is serving in Iraq right after he is shown watching news footage of the September 11 attacks, suggesting the Iraq War was in direct response to the attacks. Jilani also argued the film glossed over certain fabrications in Kyle's autobiography, including the claims most of the book's proceeds would go to veterans' charity and that Kyle had killed 30 people in post-Katrina New Orleans. Jilani focused the most, however, on the film's portrayal of Kyle as a man tormented by and remorseful for his actions, writing such torment is "completely absent from the book the film is based on," quoting passages from Kyle's autobiography in which Kyle wrote he enjoyed his occupation and would have killed more people.^[10]

Max Blumenthal said the film American Sniper is "filled with lies and distortion from start to finish," makes a hero out of "a pathological liar and a mass killer" and promotes falsehoods about Navy SEAL Chris Kyle along with the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. Blumenthal said the film is a "bogus whitewash of the atrocities committed by American troops in Iraq."^[11]

Seth Rogen was accused of criticizing the film when he tweeted that the film reminded him of the Nazi sniper propaganda film showing in the third act of Quentin Tarantino's 2009 film Inglourious Basterds. He later stated that he was not criticizing the film but making a comparison.^[12][13]

Sophia A. McClennen, a Professor of International Affairs and Comparative Literature at the Pennsylvania State University, said there are "insanities and fantasies at the heart of" American Sniper and that "despite the fact that the film depicts Kyle as a hero and a martyr, the real American sniper was heartless and cruel. Rather than struggle with moral dilemmas as we see in the film, the actual man had no such hesitation and no such conscience. But to focus on American Sniper's depiction of Kyle is to miss the larger problems of the film. In addition to sugarcoating Kyle, the film suffers from major myopia — from a complete inability to see the larger picture. And that is why criticism of the film has to look at its director, Clint Eastwood, and the troubling ways he represents a dark, disturbing feature of the GOP mind-set."^[14]

Ross Caputi, a former U.S. Marine who participated in the US's second siege of Fallujah, criticized American Sniper, writing that "What American Sniper offers us — more than a heart-wrenching tale about Chris Kyle's struggle to be a soldier, a husband, and a father; more than an action packed story about America's most lethal sniper — is an exposure of the often hidden side of American war culture. The criminality that has characterized American military engagements since the American Indian Wars, and most recently in Iraq and Afghanistan, is hardly noticeable in this film."^[15]

Comedian Bill Maher stated "He's a psychopath patriot, and we love him," and "'I hate the damn savages' doesn't seem like a very Christian thing to say," comparing Kyle disfavourably to anti-war general Dwight D. Eisenhower.^[16]

Journalist Eamon Murphy wrote on Mondoweiss that "it's hard to know, when watching Eastwood's Iraq War, where doltish film conventions end and rotten politics begins. (Bushism was an awful lot like an idiotic blockbuster in the first place.) The bits of military exposition are outrageously at odds with the facts, but they also sound so hokey it seems almost stupid to object by citing reality."^[17]

Peter Maass wrote the film "ignores history" and that the film makes no attempt to provide "anything beyond Kyle’s limited comprehension of what was happening." He added that the movie is "utterly false to the experience of millions of Iraqis and to the historical record. Further, it’s no act of patriotism to celebrate, without context or discussion, a grunt’s view that the people killed in Iraq were animals deserving their six-feet-under fate." Maass also wrote public statements made by Bradley Cooper, the film’s star and co-producer, appear to show Cooper may "fail to understand how war movies operate in popular culture. When a film venerates an American sniper but portrays as sub-human the Iraqis whose country we were occupying—the film has one Iraqi who seems sympathetic but turns out to be hiding a cache of insurgent weapons—it conveys a political message that is flat wrong. Among other things, it ignores and dishonors the scores of thousands of Iraqis who fought alongside American forces and the hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians who were killed or injured in the crossfire." Maass added, "While it is about a certain type of bravery, the film itself is not brave."^[18]

Dan Sanchez alleged another historical inaccuracy in the film, writing that "The most harrowing scene in American Sniper involves an Iraqi character nicknamed “The Butcher” torturing and executing an Iraqi child by taking a power drill to his skull. The scene lends credibility to the narrative of Chris Kyle as basically a hero facing villains. In the film, “The Butcher” is a lieutenant of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Sunni insurgent, terrorist, and founder of Al Qaeda in Iraq, which later became ISIS. However, in the Iraq of the real world, power drilling human heads is more of a predilection, not of Sunni insurgents, but of their enemies in the Shiite militias." According to Sanchez, the real-life head-drilling “butchers” of Iraq "rose to power thanks to the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, and are now commanding forces either in the US-backed Iraqi government, or under its protection, fighting alongside the US military against the now ISIS-lead Sunni insurgency. At the end of the day, the American Sniper was not the enemy of the Iraqi Butchers, but their benefactor." ... "the chief role of the American troops in Iraq was to fight a bloody civil war on behalf of the Shiite side and to install Iran-backed Shiite militias in power. These militias used death squads to ethnically cleanse Baghdad and other cities of Sunnis, and ... imposed a Sharia-compliant constitution over a once-secular country. This Shiite jihad was, in effect, Chris Kyle’s true mission."^[19]

Brock McIntosh, an ex-soldier, commended Chris Kyle for telling his story in his book. In his view, Chris Kyle is not the problem. "We don’t care about the lies that Chris Kyle may or may not have told. They don’t matter. We care about the lies that Chris Kyle believed. The lie that Iraq was culpable for September 11. The lie that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The lie that people do evil things because they are evil." McIntosh criticized the film's writer Jason Hall, writing that “American Sniper” is "rife with lies" and that the movie is "as fictional as Buffy Summers." McIntosh also wrote: "... Americans were responsible for thousands of Iraqi deaths and almost none were held accountable." ... "So enough about Chris Kyle. Let’s talk about [Bradley] Cooper and [Jason] Hall, and the culture industry that recycles propagandistic fiction under the guise of a “true story.” And let’s focus our anger and our organizing against the authorities and the institutions that craft the lies that the Chris Kyles of the world believe, that have created a trail of blowback leading from dumb war to dumb war ..."^[20]

Journalist and author Robert Fisk, who reported on several wars and armed conflicts, tweeted that American Sniper is "rubbish."^[21]

Adam K. Raymond wrote about "5 Things American Sniper’s Chris Kyle Allegedly Lied About."^[22]

Brock McIntosh, an ex-soldier, commended Chris Kyle for telling his story in his book. McIntosh wrote that “American Sniper” is "rife with lies" and that the movie is "as fictional as Buffy Summers." He also wrote: "... Americans were responsible for thousands of Iraqi deaths and almost none were held accountable." ... "Let’s talk about [Bradley] Cooper and [screenwriter Jason] Hall, and the culture industry that recycles propagandistic fiction under the guise of a “true story.” And let’s focus our anger and our organizing against the authorities and the institutions that craft the lies that the Chris Kyles of the world believe, that have created a trail of blowback leading from dumb war to dumb war ... "^[23]

Allegations of objectifying Iraqis, and presenting children as legitimate targets

Janet Weil, a military family member, wrote "And what about the locals? In his brilliant analysis in Reel Bad Arabs, Professor Jack Shaheen gives a sort of taxonomy of Arab male types in popular films — the evil Arab, the silly/horny Arab, the primitive Arab, and the nervous/arrogant Arab. With the exception of the “primitive” type with camels, these stereotypes are on display in “American Sniper,” plus a couple of others I would name “Pitiful Father” and “Kid as Target.” The presentation of children as potential or actual evildoers, and thus “deserving” victims of Kyle’s kill shots, seems to me a sinister new development in American film." ... "The Iraqis that Kyle kills lie flat, literally and metaphorically, like images in a video game, and we hear no one weep for them (with the exception of “The Sheikh,” whose screaming daughter runs to his corpse). One scene briefly shows dogs eating Iraqi corpses. The American dead, by contrast, are pulled at great risk from the battleground, wept over, accompanied in their flag-covered coffins in flights home, and laid to rest in magnificent ceremonies, remembered. The American dead were persons, and they count. The Iraqi dead were objects in a sniper’s scope, and they are counted. That in a nutshell is the message of “American Sniper.”" ... "And the boy in Fallujah with the RPG in his arms? Kyle kills him, and the woman with him. We as audience are asked to ... empathize, not with the boy in the devastated street, but with a “tormented” man becoming a hardened killer, who calls Iraqis “savages” in several scenes." Weil said the movie portrays snipers as protectors, and invaders as "The Good Guys," and that Iraqi children are portrayed as "legitimate targets" ... She further wrote: "I left the movie theater with ... a heavy heart, and the feeling that this is a very dangerous film."^[24]

Allegations of propagating the "trauma hero myth"

Roy Scranton, who served in the US Army in Iraq from 2002-2006,^[25] analyzed the film in the Los Angeles Review of Books, where he wrote: ... "The trauma hero myth also serves a scapegoat function, discharging national bloodguilt by substituting the victim of trauma, the soldier, for the victim of violence, the enemy." ... "Never mind the tired Vietnam-era trope of the bomb-wielding child, a fiction that Eastwood grafted onto Kyle’s less sensational autobiographical account of shooting a woman." ... "the film obviates the questions of why any American soldiers were in Iraq, why they stayed there for eight years, why they had to kill thousands upon thousands of Iraqi civilians, and how we are to understand the long and ongoing bloodbath once called the “war on terror.” It does that precisely by turning a killer into a victim, a war hero into a trauma hero." ... "Yet when the trauma hero myth is taken as representing the ultimate truth of more than a decade of global aggression, as with American Sniper, we allow the psychological suffering endured by those we sent to kill for us displace and erase the innocents killed in our name. ... the real victims of American political violence disappear under a load of shit. ... Off-loading the problem of war onto the figure of the traumatized veteran, however, has long-term costs we have yet to reckon. ... Understanding the problem of American political violence demands recognizing soldiers as agents of national power, and understanding what kind of work the trauma hero is doing when he comes bearing witness in his bloody fatigues."^[26]

Lucy Steigerwald wrote that "The disconnect civilians feel from the military and their wars may be one sign of a broken society. So, too, is the fact that the best we can do with our war films is to show how American soldiers are tormented. With few exceptions, we just haven’t the time to portray the suffering of anyone else."^[27]

Allegations of attending to the insecurities of race, gender, and empire

Political scientist Joseph Lowndes wrote that "American Sniper need not directly claim a link between 9/11 and Iraq, it need not subscribe to Chris Kyle’s claim that Iraqis are “savage” and “evil.” One could easily read both as meant to convey the narrow, provincial perception of the protagonist. It need not even endorse any American presence in the Middle East at all. American Sniper dispenses with conventional politics to portray the raw, emotional core of white vulnerability. James Baldwin once wrote that the monstrous violence visited by white Americans on the world is due to this people having opted for safety over life. American Sniper, attending to the triple insecurities of race, gender, and empire, serves as an exclamation point to that observation."^[28]

Allegations of overly simplistic portrayal of Iraq

Janet Weil wrote "The violent battle scenes had, for me, a tedious inevitability that kept me from being pulled in emotionally. What hurt me the most ... was my sense of Iraq being used as backdrop. It’s reduced to a hot, dirty place that “smells like dog shit,” as one Marine says in the opening scene. “This place is evil,” Kyle’s psychologically shattered younger brother, a fellow veteran, tells him as he departs the country. One war-blasted city looks much like another, almost as if a painted stage backdrop representing “Urban War Scene” were just hauled from one scene to the next." ... "Iraq is [portrayed as] battleground and backdrop for American deeds and emotions — nothing more." ^[29]

Allegations of misuse of Christian values

Gary Legum wrote that right-wing Christians who think American Sniper embodies Christian values use patriarchal language to defend Chris Kyle in the “clash of civilizations.” Legum further wrote that "... Chris Kyle ... embodied the fanatical, driven purpose of those 10th-century Christians who invaded the Holy Lands and saw slaughtering Muslims by the thousands as their God-given duty. In his autobiography upon which Clint Eastwood’s hit film is based, the self-professed Christian, who had tattooed the Crusader’s red cross on his arm, referred to the Iraqis he was paid to shoot as “savages” and a “savage, despicable evil” who all “deserved to die.” ... Kyle ... or any other militant Christian, can pick and choose whichever passage from the New Testament justifies his own desire to kill for Jesus. Unfortunately it’s us non-believers who still have to live in the world they make."^[30]

Allegations of the film serving as war propaganda

Janet Weil wrote that ""American Sniper" is well acted, slickly produced, and occasionally gripping. It's also war propaganda." She wrote that "Al-Qaeda in Iraq ... is mentioned frequently throughout the film, without one line of dialogue as to how al-Qaeda had penetrated Iraq following the U.S. invasion." ... "How Chris Kyle and hundreds of thousands of other, mostly young Americans came to invade and occupy, wound and be wounded, kill and be killed in Iraq — for what politics, for whose profits — cannot be touched upon in American Sniper. Because to do so would be to move the narrative away from the isolated, tragic white male — that hoary old trope of Western Civ[ilization] — toward something more politically and historically informed, and much less of a money maker." ... "In war propaganda — a huge genre in which American Sniper stands as a well-acted, high-production example — fictional narratives borrow just enough from true-life stories to reinforce already established memes. Cowboy, family man, Navy SEAL, sniper, trainer, author, veteran, celebrity, murderer, and eventually a murder victim of another tormented combat veteran — Chris Kyle was a mystery. American Sniper portrays the life of a flawed “hero” who is also a blank slate on which other Americans can project rage, hatred, and ignorant misconceptions about Iraqis and other Arabs, as well as their — our — many conflicted feelings about war, “the troops,” and veterans." ^[31]

Alleged bias in the mainstream media coverage of the film

Noam Chomsky criticized American Sniper and the media that he believes glorifies it. He also drew a parallel between Sniper and the US "global assassination campaign, the drone campaign, which officially is aimed at murdering people who are suspected of maybe someday planning to harm us."^[32]

Popular/cultural evaluation

Sheldon Richman commented on the popular/cultural evaluation of Kyle: "Despite what some people think, hero is not a synonym for competent government-hired killer." Richman said if American Sniper launches a frank public conversation about war and heroism, Eastwood will have performed a "badly needed" service. Richman added:

"Jeanine Pirro, a Fox News commentator, said, “Chris Kyle was clear as to who the enemy was. They were the ones his government sent him to kill.” Appalling! Kyle was a hero because he eagerly and expertly killed whomever the government told him to kill? Conservatives, supposed advocates of limited government, sure have an odd notion of heroism. Excuse me, but I have trouble seeing an essential difference between what Kyle did in Iraq and what Adam Lanza did at Sandy Hook Elementary School. It certainly was not heroism."

— Sheldon Richman, ^[33]

Film historian Max Alvarez, in an article titled From Psychopaths to American Hero? A Short History of Sniper Cinema, expressed the view that "It can only be hoped that American Sniper will not set the tone for future Hollywood movies in which “sharpshooters” are portrayed heroically."^[34]

Paul Edwards wrote that American Sniper displays "baldly ridiculous ideas long universally discredited, and a politics rooted in deep, indomitable ignorance and a form of stupidity that prides itself on denial of irrefutable reality." He also wrote the film displays "the sleazy depravity of a mind that can craft a mawkish, fawning tribute to a diseased serial killer from a biography in which the killer himself spells out in appalling detail his own disgusting sickness.   So much has been written about this paean to a subhuman monster -– much of it on whether or not it is moral and heroic to murder people wholesale for flag and country -– that the only truly important thing about its success has not been articulated. That is the grossly ugly fact that such a huge number of Americans jubilantly support this morally dirty film and its message.   Of course, an audience that embraces films featuring all kinds of vicious, repulsive, sadistic murderers -– cannibals, necrophiles, zombies, vampires -- can be expected to flock to any flick that promises to satisfy its craving, and promotion for American Sniper puts it right in their wheelhouse.   What is profoundly disturbing culturally but should not be surprising is that, unlike goofy trash about chainsaw maniacs, anthropophagous esthetes, and midnight bloodsuckers, American Sniper glorifies a real self-confessed serial murderer, and its supporters don’t care. It makes no distinction, that is, between imbecile fantasy and appalling truth. The fact that the “hero” and much of his story was real only enhances his glamour in their eyes.   What gives the film its fierce attractive power for them is that the relentless propaganda of “the Global War on Terror” has imbued them with the same hateful, furious, kneejerk, Nazi-style “patriotism” that Kyle embodied.   As long as the tag-team of our “news” media and the Hollywood War Porn industry continues, the fan base for U.S. military ubermensch horror films will grow. As Germany learned in the deadly 1930s, there is nothing quite so dangerous to a nation’s liberty as a furious, stupid, violence-addicted, enemy-fixated underclass."^[35]

Response to the allegations

Responding to critics that called the film Pro-War on Terror, Pro-Republican and jingoistic, American Sniper director Clint Eastwood said it is a "stupid analysis" and that the film has nothing to do with political parties. He stated: "I was a child growing up during World War II. That was supposed to be the one to end all wars. And four years later, I was standing at the draft board being drafted during the Korean conflict, and then after that there was Vietnam, and it goes on and on forever ... I just wonder ... does this ever stop? And no, it doesn’t. So each time we get in these conflicts, it deserves a lot of thought before we go wading in or wading out. Going in or coming out. It needs a better thought process, I think."^[36] Eastwood called American Sniper "the biggest anti-war statement any film can make," and said that "the fact of what [war] does to the family and the people who have to go back into civilian life like Chris Kyle did" and “what it (war) does to the people left behind." Eastwood further stated: "One of my favorite war movies that I’ve been involved with is Letters from Iwo Jima and that was about family, about being taken away from life, being sent someplace. In World War II, everybody just sort of went home and got over it. Now there is some effort to help people through it."^[37]

Bradley Cooper stated that much of the criticism ignores that the film was about widespread neglect of returning veterans, and that people who take issue with Kyle should redirect their attention to the leaders who put troops there in the first place. He said: “We looked at hopefully igniting attention about the lack of care that goes to vets.” “Discussion that has nothing to do with vets or what we did or did not do, every conversation in those terms is moving farther and farther from what our soldiers go through, and the fact that 22 veterans commit suicide each day.” Mr. Cooper noted that an increasing number of soldiers are returning from conflict psychologically damaged, only to be more or less discarded.^[38]

First Lady Michelle Obama was quoted on American Sniper: "The number-one movie in America right now is a complex, emotional depiction of a veteran and his family. And while I know there have been critics, I felt that, more often than not, this film touches on many of the emotions and experiences that I've heard firsthand from military families over these past few years. This movie reflects those wrenching stories that I've heard — the complex journeys that our men and women in uniform endure. The complicated moral decisions they are tasked with every day. The stresses of balancing love of family with a love of country. And the challenges of transitioning back home to their next mission in life. And here’s why a movie like this is important: see, the vast majority of Americans will never see these stories. They will never grasp these issues on an emotional level without portrayals like this."^[39][40]

Former GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin addressed "Hollywood leftists" with their "shiny plastic trophies" in responding to criticism about the movie. Palin criticized these "leftists" for "spitting on the graves of freedom fighters" and decried that the opponents of the movie were "not fit to shine Chris Kyle's combat boots." Palin further wrote "May the epic "American Sniper" bring nothing but blessings to Taya and the children of this true American hero."^[41]

References