At its core, American Sniper is about white fear

[villager]

<snip>

From Sudden Impact, to American Sniper, to the recent cases of police who have killed unarmed African Americans, we can see this logic of white fear and vulnerability at play. Think of Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, who shot an unarmed Michael Brown twelve times.

“The only way I can describe it,” Wilson testified, “[is] it looks like a demon…it looked like he was almost bulking up to run through the shots, like it was making him mad that I’m shooting at him.”

Ultimately, American Sniper dispenses with conventional political ideology to portray the raw, emotional core of white vulnerability – and its connection to bloodshed in the face of triple insecurities of race, gender and empire in an unstable political era.

But unlike Dirty Harry or Josey Wales, Chris Kyle evinces a woundedness – and, ultimately, a kind of powerlessness – that does not re-establish white male superiority. After all, Kyle dies – and at the hands of another veteran, no less.


The long, final scene of the film presents actual footage from Chris Kyle’s funeral procession along Texas’s Interstate 35. Showing thousands of mourners on overpasses (accompanied by a beautiful, melancholy trumpet piece), it asks us to bear witness to the death of a hero. We are not asked to question or challenge the war that made him a killer, or that made him the victim of another American veteran who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. Rather we mourn the sheepdog, the emotionally wounded martyr.

In his Studies in Classic American Literature, DH Lawrence wrote that “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.” James Baldwin, offering deeper insight on the vulnerable core of this soul, held that that the monstrous violence visited by white Americans on the world is due to their having opted for safety over life.

American Sniper’s Chris Kyle – the sheepdog, the last line of defense – serves as an exclamation point to Baldwin’s keen insight.

<snip>

http://disinfo.com/2015/03/at-its-core-american-sniper-is-about-white-fear/#sthash.HSAcTUrU.dpuf

[DustyJoe]

1. egad

We are not asked to question or challenge the war that made him a killer

He was a servicemember in a combat zone doing what he was trained to do, nothing more nothing less regardless the rabid anti-war 'killer' dig. No political or racial component. Best sniper in one of my companies in Vietnam was a 18 yr old black sharpshooter with an M14. How would that play to the racial 'fear' the snippet alludes to.

[villager]

4. We're talking about the film made from the book, each of which plays fast and loose with the facts..

...surrounding what this servicemember did, how he did it, to whom, etc.

If they'd made a film about your sharpshooter the said we were in Vietnam to stop the Red Menace, and he didn't really question any of the killing he did, your "egad," might have a different context altogether.

[BrotherIvan]

2. Here is the James Baldwin quote refered to in the piece

Because you can never read (or reread) enough Baldwin.

“[T]he thing that most white people imagine they can salvage from the storm of life is really, in sum, their innocence. It was this commodity precisely which I had to get rid of at once, literally, on pain of death. I am afraid that most of the white people I have ever known impressed me as being in the grip of a weird nostalgia, dreaming of a vanished state of security and order against which dream, unfailingly and unconsciously, they tested and very often lost their lives.” --Nobody Knows My Name

[villager]

3. And "the fire next time" is steadily arriving...

...at our doorsteps now, in so many different ways...