“Oh my god, I know it’s bad to be happy when someone is killed but I just wanted him to shoot those fuckers up. Also Bradley Cooper is sooooooo hot.” Four girls emerge from the Regal Movie Theater in Union Square on a frigid January evening. Three continue to chatter about the amazing film they just saw as they briskly walk home. One follows behind, slowly… silently. Her mind is racing… “Did we just see the same film?” Her thoughts are interrupted by another loud comment. “I don’t understand the controversy, this was an amazing and heroic film”. “More like racist and propagandistic” she thinks to herself. Often, people say that being a sociologist involves a certain level of social detachment or awkwardness. For the first time, I experienced this detachment from my own social location.
This past weekend Hollywood spent one hundred and thirty four minutes brilliantly epitomizing the problematic mindset of the American nationalist. From racism to the military industrial complex, it is all in there. American Sniper is a film which depicts a man overcoming his internal struggle about being the one to stop a beating heart in order to protect his men become a legend: becoming a hero.
The film follows the path of the War on Terror, beginning just before the 1998 Embassy Bombings. Chris Kyle, the American Sniper, wants to be a cowboy but upon seeing the news of the Embassy Bombings he enlists as a Navy Seal. Fortunately, he finishes his training just in time to be deployed right after 9/11. He goes on 4 tours and in between whenever he comes home we see his struggle because he knows that his men are still getting slaughtered over there. The first hugely problematic portion of this film is that there is no explanation of why these “bad guys” want to get us. Ironically, the American public or mass media has never truly posed this same question in reality.
Durkheim defines a social fact as "A social fact is any way of acting, whether fixed or not, capable of exerting over the individual an external constraint; which is general over the whole of a given society whilst having an existence of its own, independent of its individual manifestations." Based on this definition, this American Sniper has pushed me to realize a social fact. This fact is that nationalism undermines critical thinking, which is a powerful way to blind a group of people.
In the movie, Chris Kyle’s father imparts some paternal wisdom upon him. He states that: “There are three types of people in this world: sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs. Some people prefer to believe that evil doesn’t exist in the world, and if it ever darkened their doorstep, they wouldn’t know how to protect themselves. Those are the sheep. Then you’ve got predators, who use violence to prey on the weak. They’re the wolves. And then there are those blessed with the gift of aggression, an overpowering need to protect the flock. These men are the rare breed who live to confront the wolf. They are the sheepdog.” This is arguably a true piece of wisdom. But the irony lies in who the actual sheep, wolves and sheepdogs are. On one hand, we can look at it the way the movie portrays where Kyle is a sheepdog protecting America. Or, we can look at it realistically, in which a bloodthirsty occupier guns down more than 200 faceless Iraqis (Kyle has160 confirmed kills out of 255 probable kills) but then decided that the real victim is his own anguished soul. He even snipes Iraqi children, though this he does feel bad about. Our hero has no qualms with killing, but does have qualms with being congratulated for killing.
This essay could easily interpreted as a scathing review of American Sniper, but that would be missing the point entirely. The point is that we in America have a huge problem. The problem is in the American mentality. We think in terms of acquiring, dominating, being the best and having the most.