Since the release of American Sniper, people I haven’t heard from in years have taken the time to text me and tell me I really needed to see this movie. They said: “you owe it to yourself to see this movie.” “I don’t really want to,” I responded. “Why don’t you want to?” they asked me archly, as if my refusal to see the movie hinted at some deeply-seated and conveniently unexamined perversion. “Well,” I said, “I guess I didn’t much like Chris Kyle’s book and his general attitudes about the Iraqi people.” “Watch the movie,” they said with all wisdom that comes with seeing a movie that someone else hasn’t, especially one of political and patriotic import: “It really makes you think.”
Maybe I was being unfair, I thought. Maybe I did it owe to someone – whom, I’m still not quite sure – to pay ten dollars and watch this story that had roused a nation from its intellectual lethargy and inspired old friends to start thinking about my movie-going patterns.
To my surprise, I did not hate the movie. I nodded off two or three times, wondering how old Clint Eastwood was exactly and whether or not he and Scorsese had reached some kind of artistic dementia unique to directors, but I did not hate the film, or even actively dislike it. If I saw it on Lifetime one afternoon, I would change the channel, but not out of spite, simply because it does not seem different than any other Lifetime special. Far from being authentic and gritty, the sentimentality in the film is perhaps only exceeded by that of Linklater’s Boyhood, its competition at this year’s Academy Awards. Both are drearily episodic American bildungsromans that manipulate the idea of authenticity to play on the audience’s mawkish assumptions and aspirations about history and art. Further, and not coincidentally, both are predictable and safe, working hard to ask uninteresting questions about once interesting subjects.
This boredom genuinely surprised me. I read countless reviews of American Sniper before seeing the movie. Almost unanimously, they took time to point out its essential authenticity, its suspense, the immersive immediacy of the action and the audience’s consequent titillation. Even those who hated it passionately did so with a fervor that suggested the movie annoyed them due to its undeniable cinematic excellence, whatever its ideological failings. For this reason, I had ceded its basic entertainment value going in. But I shouldn’t have. Despite all the violence – or, rather, precisely because of all the formulaic and orchestrated violence – the movie is boring and the movie is boring because everything in it from the love story, to the jokes, to the war story is pure unadulterated kitsch.
How best to describe kitsch? Milan Kundera, a man who endured a regime that used this aesthetic to propagate its peculiar sentimental balderdash, puts it this way in The Unbearable Lightness of Being:
“Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!”
At its most fundamental level, kitsch is a poorly constructed or mass produced object or work of art that elicits a predictable and abstracted emotional response, something like a Pavlovian bell that releases saccharine into the viewer’s gut while shutting down the brain. Yet, contrary to popular belief, kitsch does not only apply to the warm and fuzzy feeling we get when children run in the grass and play with dogs; it also applies to the warm fuzzy feeling when we watch children being gunned down by morally conflicted patriots. The first tear says: how nice it is to see this perfectly decent man wrestle with what it takes to protect his friends and countrymen. The second tear says: how nice it is to be moved, together with all mankind, by watching a perfectly decent man do whatever it takes to protect his friends and countrymen.
Never one for subtlety, Eastwood wants tears, lots of them. I feel Eastwood took bits and pieces of every American war movie since Audie Murphy’s To Hell and Back, chose the most hackneyed moments and then tried to make them even more generic, sappy and palatable. Starting with, of course, a lovable loser looking for purpose in life, the movie proceeds to a training scene where people of different race and class backgrounds come together in harmony, the courting of a supposedly cynical girl just out of a break up (which of course turns out to be a girl in need of a real man), the initial battle enthusiasm (Yay! War! We’re going to win!), an evil super-enemy to provide some complexity to the countless legions of brown bullet fodder and a triumph somewhat (but not truly) diminished because of dead friends (whose names we forgot the moment we heard them).
If American Sniper wasn’t based on real events, we would likely laugh it off as a poor man’s Full Metal Jacket. Yet our uniquely modern kitsch privileges authenticity to such a degree that it mistakes authenticity for art; worse, it excuses bad art through the lie of authenticity. Our superficially ironic modern audience knows to feel warm and fuzzy about a girl running through a field (or a heroic marine-saving SEAL) is a little old fashioned and silly. But if the event really happened, the audience can feel warm and fuzzy (or angry and titillated) without any guilt for the obviously contrived sappiness. This child really does run through the grass just like my child so my feelings of joy and warmth at watching this child run through the grass are real and true and profound. This man really did kill 160 people and save soldiers and help veterans so my complete emotional investment and sense of solidarity with my fellow movie watchers is not only justified but an act of political courage. Right?
Not quite. Eastwood’s Kyle is nothing like the Kyle of the memoir – a person of infinitely more interest, an American gem, a fantastic and fascinating mass of contradiction, absurdities, and hypocrisy, worthy of much more than this movie gives him. Instead, this movie manipulates substandard genre tropes to produce an innocuous and utterly uninteresting character study, turning a once breathing man into a figment, an avatar of our lazy imaginations. All the characters beside Kyle are interchangeable – hard bodies and strong chins, except for the broken and mutilated men, with soft bodies and soft chins – which is impressive considering Kyle himself is but a shadow. The sentimentality in the film’s opening and final moments reaches near criminal proportions. The shootouts are loud and repetitive, the enemies cowardly, sadistic or – hold it – cowardly and sadistic. They and everyone else in the film are no more true to life than the targets Kyle practices on. It’s as if the fact that they existed gives the director the excuse to make them as uninteresting and stereotypical (or unreal) as possible.
I should say here that the problem of kitsch is not unique to war films, or films beloved by Red America. Boyhood, the Academy’s likely Best Picture winner, is nothing if not an egregious attempt to confuse an audience into accepting bad fiction as profound art through the sophistry of authenticity. It suffers from the same sense of confused profundity, and critics have fallen all over themselves to celebrate a movie that amounts to little more than a glorified reality TV show, replete with incredibly banal dialogue and moralistic tripe. We are supposed to celebrate this and shed tears because we lived it, but I’ll save my tears for a movie that give me more than pop-cultural touchstones, a face aging in real time and platitudinous white angst.
This is not to say there are not inspired moments in both movies. In American Sniper, most occur on Kyle’s return home. When he yells at the nurse to stop his baby from crying, I paid attention. There are times when his very obliviousness makes Kyle into a heroic sad sack, just way in over his head in a world that does not allow for heroes (Cooper is a superb actor). But, still, these were flashes, a few well-timed complexities in a movie of explosive sappiness. By the tenth gunfight and the slow build to the inevitable confrontation between the evil brown sniper and good white sniper, I looked around to see if anyone else was as bored as me. I wanted to ask someone if they realized the way in which every character seemed to be playing a part in a movie, and how nearly every one of them played it badly. But there were no takers. They all wanted to see what happened next.
Of course, these failures in themselves point to a reason to celebrate the movie, and Boyhood as well. Their unique kitsch corresponds perfectly with recent American history, which is essentially a series of moments where we let sentimentality drive our actions, all the while unaware of (or maybe just unconcerned with) how those in power manipulate our intellectual indolence to their perpetual advantage. The Iraq War was an absurd proposition from the start, whose disastrous prosecution and consequences should have been obvious to any country not driven nearly insane by saccharine nonsense fed to them in movies that informed American Sniper (Rambo, Saving Private Ryan and An Officer and a Gentlemen for example).
So while most of us do not live violent lives like Kyle, we do, like Kyle, live lives of violent sentimentalism. We do live in fogs like the characters in these movies – irresponsible, lost, and drunkenly emotional. But just because we live such lives, lives of exceptionally cartoonish renderings of reality, replete with stereotypes, racism and an absurdly simplistic and insidious sense of history, does not make an accurate recording of our human failure art; these movies are, in truth, only glorified documentaries, which serve their purpose and have their uses, but cease to do so as soon as they are considered sublime and magical, exciting and profound. At this point, they then become in many ways a gesture of collective despair, an implicit admission that we can no longer achieve anything but a fickle emotional bond in dark theaters, eyes rolling, tears dripping down our cheeks like Dollar Tree communicants.
But when it comes down to it, no one escapes kitsch. It is part of us – this substitute spirituality, a farcical aesthetic we live and breathe as pre-capitalist societies used to live and breathe God. But we can, as Milan Kundera, the author of the earlier quote, once argued, be at least open to the fact that we are indulging our maudlin fantasies. At least a movie like Nightcrawler has the courage to point out the obvious – to make us aware of what it is we do when it comes to violence and cinema – and to do so in an entertaining way. As for those who argue American Sniper is the only movie out there really tackling trauma: watch Babadook and tell me which of the two has something to say and which one just repeats what we want to believe in predictable and cowardly monotony
Towards the beginning of American Sniper, Kyle’s father tells him that there are three types of people in this world: wolves, sheep and sheepdogs. The sheepdogs, his father says, protect the sheep from the wolves. Kyle is supposed to be a sheepdog, protecting us. Maybe he was. Neither a Navy SEAL nor a think-tank fellow, I can’t really speak to the success of his guardianship. But I can say with some authority that it is the kitsch in movies like American Sniper and Boyhood that turn us into sheep, and no one will be happier to see the bleating masses fattened by this sentimental drivel than the wolves.
_______________
Michael Carson deployed to Iraq in 2006. He now writes criticism at the Wrath Bearing Tree. Follow him @WrathBT on Twitter.
Still haven’t seen this, though I’m disappointed it sounds so awful. Eastwood has made some great films (I still love “Unforgiven.”) It sounds like the moral ambiguity that serves him well in genre narratives doesn’t serve him adequately in a biopic.
Not quite sure how to ask this, but what the hey. In terms of the way authenticity is so important in discussion of these narratives, I wonder whether you’ve found that being a veteran matters a lot to people when you have discussions about these things? I’ve seen a certain number of conversations where people feel that you’re failing to support the troops if you dislike American Sniper, or question it’s morality. I’d imagine saying, “I’m a veteran, and this film is crap,” would carry a certain weight. Though it also seems like that weight is uncomfortable in some ways, if authenticity is the way that films like this are validated in the first place.
I hope that makes sense. Wasn’t sure of the best way to phrase that question….
Great question. I almost added a paragraph about this in the piece, or at least a note in the byline. I realize that the fact that I am a veteran is one of the reasons people want my opinion on a movie like this, which is itself an example of the kitsch I’m trying to describe. I’ve been struggling with this tension for a while, for what’s the alternative: not say anything? On one level, I think the only way out is, like I say toward the end of the piece, to acknowledge the problem whenever possible, and a couple posts on my blog deal with the issue more directly. Ironically, by doing so I undermine my own authority (such as it is) but it needs to be done.
“platitudinous white angst” is a priceless quote. The use of the word “kitsch,” and the viewers-as-sheep image, is such a classic modernist Greenberg/Adorno move, and you pull it off with zero pomposity. Fabulous piece!
I’m pleased to see Boyhood get kicked too. I haven’t seen it, because I find Richard Linklater’s films pompous, glib, and generally awful. The veneration in which he is held by the critical establishment continues to befuddle me.
Him and Jim Jarmusch. Embarrassing to America.
While I was originally sympathetic, the now standard targeting of “authenticity” as just one more genre trick — and perhaps the most egregious trick of all because of its pretense to standing outside of artifice — has lost its considerable power to charm me. It has become a stand-in for a new kind of knowingness, one that replaces knowledge about the artwork with knowledge about oneself.
That’s the trap you seem to get into, Mr Carson, with your attacks on the film — not your attacks on its cliches and contrivances, but your attack on its “authenticity kitch,” its obeisance to a threadbare realism.
You want to attack this allegiance to authenticity, but then attack the film half the time for being not realistic enough. Its realistic hero isn’t as real as the really real author. Cooper’s character is best not when he acts out cartoonish realism and emotion, but has flashes of authentic “complexity.” The characters are bad because they are flat, “playing a part in a movie.” (And while you don’t say it, what would the alternative be: characters, I can only assume, who seem to be real — people and not just parts.)
And believe it or not, I agree with all those types of assessment: they identify markers of bad art, all. But you cannot afford that luxury and must, instead, resort to the fear of art as trickery, with the best viewer being the most undeceived. (Look at all these rubes!) And since it would seem perhaps unsophisticated to say that you alone stand outside the circle, this rhetoric has to retreat into the boundless consolation of self-consciousness. My awareness of my entrapment makes me freer than the next prisoner.
Which is to say that that here are essentially two reviews here. One that makes its case, and is not afraid to make invidious distinctions between art that is original and art that is hackneyed, art that is complex and art that is flat, even art that gives a feeling of “the real” and art that can only approach that through visual cliches.
But the other review wants transcendence, or the simulation of transcendence. This will come, perhaps, from an art that takes us beyond a simple reproduction of our own “irresponsible” lives and towards something more rarified. (Where’s my real “real” emotion?) But more likely, it will come from a criticism of continually deferred self-acknowledgement and self-awareness, seeing such a stance as the only “right thing to do.”
Unfortunately, the latter reviewer tends to kill the former. Or to extend the idea, the latter lines up his shot, aiming straight at his own head. Luckily, the former reviewer gets to keep right on talking.
Bert: “‘platitudinous white angst’ is a priceless quote.” By which I can only assume you mean, in this critical marketplace, “a dime a dozen.”
Jeez, I’m surprised to hear that Noah thinks Clint Eastwood has made some great films. I always think of Eastwood in his later years) as having a genius for making the kinds of movies that dumb people find profound, which is the best way to haul in Oscars. Admittedly, I haven’t seen that many of them.
Peter, I understand your concerns — but I wonder if just dismissing them (as inauthentic?) really grapples with the problems the piece brings up. I’d say that, yes, the attack on authenticity becomes circular (how do you criticize authenticity except through saying it’s not real enough?) But that is, if I can use the word, a real problem. War stories are so thoroughly grounded on authenticity, on the discovery of the real, that the claim “this isn’t real” ends up simply reifying the discourse. In a culture (and not just this culture) in which war and violence are the most real thing, and in which anyone who criticizes those things is seen as insufficiently realistic, how do you criticize violence? Or, to put it another way, when authority and violence are so thoroughly conflated, where can you get the authority to speak against violence?
You condemn Michael’s review for not solving this problem, and I think it’s true that he hasn’t solved it. But you somewhat ironically do that by failing to grapple with the way that this is an authentic problem; it’s not just about how we talk about movies, but about how we justify shooting people. It becomes simply an issue of aesthetics for you; in calling for an embrace of the language of authenticity, it seems like you lose track of the ways in which there might be actual moral issues at stake here. (Which I would say results in your fairly unfortunate final metaphor.)
I mean, I could be misreading, but to me what’s at stake for Michael isn’t transcendence of “reality;” it’s transcendence of violence. The problem is that reality and violence are so conflated that the difference between those two transcendences is essentially impossible for people to imagine.
Your argumentation is flawless. Thanks a lot, we missed a critique so well written, the connection with Boyhood was essential to develop the topic. I hated it as well, those are rapresentations that serve the purpose to make the viewer confortable in his position.
Jack, I think Unforgiven may be the last film he directed that I saw! The more recent ones haven’t looked especially appealing to me, I have to admit.
High Plains Drifter is a great movie; The Outlaw Josie Wales is good too…he’s definitely had better movies as an actor than a director. I still love The Beguiled.
Just so people are aware, the sheep-wolves-sheepdogs analogy did not come from Kyle’s book, and the “sheep” portion was not meant to be derogatory, as Mr. Carson uses it here. It was popularized by psychologist and veteran Dave Grossman, who got it from someone else. From Grossman’s website (http://www.killology.com/sheep_dog.htm):
“One Vietnam veteran, an old retired colonel, once said this to me: ‘Most of the people in our society are sheep. They are kind, gentle, productive creatures who can only hurt one another by accident.” His point was actually about the relative rarity of violent actors in society.
Regarding recent Eastwood films, I enjoyed Gran Torino. The bleakness of the subject matter was effectively leavened by humor, which was not as true in Million Dollar Baby. One theme common to several of his movies is death, and people’s choices or lack thereof regarding the manner, the timing, and the circumstances of their deaths. I wonder how much of his interest stems from death’s potential for drama and how much is because he is getting on in years.
I don’t remember Mystic River that well, but at the time I thought it was really overrated. The movie seemed to have a worshipful attitude toward these blue-collar Boston Irish guys who occasionally need to take the law into their own hands, as if we’re supposed to admire them even when they fuck up and murder the wrong guy. I just thought they were douches.
Peter: by “is not afraid to make invidious distinctions,” I can only assume you mean, in this pay-per-word marketplace, “differentiates.”
The all-white Oscars list, movies in which white men undergo white male growth experiences, is some kind of anomaly in a general trend of critics overwhelmingly picking on white men’s pain?
I feel like such an accessory to bullying! The nanny state needs to give me a time-out.
This was a fantastic piece. I haven’t seen (nor plan to see American Sniper, after Gran Torino I am done giving Clintwood chances, but while I did like Boyhood (as I like Linklater’s film’s in general – I like the slack in his narratives – the fantasy worlds he creates in the interaction of characters that feel real, but do not actually represent anything but a composite ideal at best), I think it is due your criticisms. I never consider Linklater’s films as authentic, but as explicitly constructed around memories and questions. After watching it I tweeted – _Boyhood_ was good, but I think your time would be better served reading Richard Wright’s _Black Boy_ #boyhood #blackboy #richardwright
The world Linklater creates for (white) boyhood is one that has no experience of race in the American South, except as broad and generic ideas like Obama running for president and a friend of his mom. It denotes the privilege of ignoring race, failing to imagine how race shapes the places we occupy and how that informs who we are. In its peculiar specificity, it creates a dangerous idea of an authentic “generic.”
Normally such films are the advertising for the inevitable video game release.
I am not sure whether the Scottish comedian Frankie Boyle has a point but the audience did find it entertaining – in it he critiques US war films:
http://tinyurl.com/keo2qrl
Nice piece. Haven’t seen the movie, don’t intend to, but do enjoy reading about the “controversy.” Scare quotes intended. Great piece at one of the Gawker meida sites, that I can’t find now.
Regarding authenticity. Seems to me the goal of authenticity in a movie is not to render a scene authentic, but to elicit an authentic feeling. My dad, who spent 4 years walking point from Guadalcanal to Nagasaki as a 1st division Marine battalion scout, loved war movies and knew a little about the authenticity of war. The movie that did it for him was the opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan. We left the theater mid scene, him visibly shaken. A month or so later he remarked to me how he thought he was over that part of his life and SPR reminded him how wrong he was.
It is truly hard to think of a worse Clint Eastwood movie. Mixing the violent certainty of computer games, self-pity, xenophobia, and a kind of obscene patriotism. Michael Carson is right in calling it boring in parts and it is also laughable in others (you have to shake your head at Sienna Miller’s stereotypical harridan wife who just walked out of a TV soap). The part where she collapses to her knees when she hears her husband coming under sniper attack on the phone is C-grade Korean Drama material. The made-up sniper duel will certainly bring to mind the Sniper Elite video game series. No wonder America and its critics love this movie. To think they could have all gone to watch Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and improved their intellects or at least their appreciation of art.
I hardly saw any new releases last year (which is what happens every year), but the best thing I did see was Bethlehem, which i reviewed here. Its also about enforcing order in the Middle East, and sounds better in every way than American Sniper. Too much better, probably, and of course, not directed by Clint Eastwood, so nobody’s heard of it, and it will win no academy awards, alas.
Yeah I watched Bethlehem a few weeks back because of your many recommendations and was…not impressed. But it’s still better than American Sniper which mixes tedium and moral repugnance into this great big pie. There’s an article at Haaretz by Gideon Levy which gets at some of my disagreements with Bethlehem.
I thought about walking out during that phone scene, and not because it resonated on a deep level. I couldn’t help but think of those Mystery Science Theater 3000 movies.
It’s funny because even after this review people still ask me only one thing: so, give it to me straight, is it real? Nothing I said about the artistic merits of the film, the characters or aesthetics, or kitsch, or boredom, mattered in the least. They still want to know if the one thing that matters is it in fact real: the violence. I don’t like the question. People who hate Kyle are working very hard to prove it is not real but by doing so (as Noah pointed out) they automatically concede that a real war movie with such a person as this imagined Kyle would be art. That’s what is truly horrifying to me – the idea that perfectly represented violence is somehow profound or would make going to see this justified or obligatory. It makes you ask what exactly makes us different than the groups out there who just tape violence as it happens for propaganda.
And to carry your analogy forward Peter, yes there is an element of despair in the second reviewer in me, for he is thinking how irrelevant the first has become in a world that privileges this kind of authenticity and refuses to see a boring and trite film or work of art for what it is and then uses this boring and trite object as evidence in real life decisions involving death and destruction.
Haven’t seen Bethlehem, Noah. Looks worthwhile from your review.
Osvaldo, I agree. Richard Wright’s Black Boy would have been a better film than Boyhood (or The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao) for the reasons you describe. I have to admit I haven’t seen that many Linklater films. Boyhood though was so clearly an attempt of the director to relive his life and have it mean something profound and universal, and while a lot of art does this, the authenticity shtick, the aging actor in real time, seemed a substitute for an actual story or even an actual question. I think I get his overall point, about everyone ends up giving up on the dreams of their youth and being disappointed in one way or another but this struck me as something every person that is not a (privileged) boy or child knows. The “don’t seize the day but let the day seize you” epiphany ending didn’t help my opinion of the film either. It was like a bad commercial for vacationing in the Mojave. Maybe he was being ironic. I hope so.
WGAS about Sniper, but I found Boyhood surprisingly unsentimental and unmawkish, for the most part. (As you’d expect, it does falter more towards the end). Not that it’s a perfect film, by any means…but I went in expecting to have a lot more tears jerked.
(For me, the worst scene, by a long way, was where SPOILER the dude approaches the mother at the restaurant and tells her she changed his life. Ugh. Which, incidentally, is one of the few scenes that directly speaks to race, and not in a way that reflects well on the film, to say the least)
Then again, I thought the culture-of-violence stuff was the least interesting part of Nightcrawler, so maybe we just have different strokes.
Maybe the ending and the restaurant scene (ugh is right) distracted me. They definitely lingered in my memory after leaving the theater. Overall there were just too many moments for me that felt like cheap gratification: the little girl singing Brittany Spears, the dad feeding the kids French fries for dinner, the election’s signs. To me, Linklater seemed to throw in these little moments that white middle-class America experienced together much like those VH1 specials that used to categorize and countdown pop-culture nostalgia a year after it happened.
As for Nightcrawler, I think we agree somewhat actually. To me, it would have been a rather uninteresting critique of violence if not for the satire of the hard working boy coming up in the world. I thought that joke, all the violence that happened for such paltry gains (two trucks and three employees!), made the culture-of-violence critique work more than it would have otherwise. I think any other approach would have romanticized the violence even if it were a critique.
Chris Hedges, who really did hate this movie (http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/killing_ragheads_for_jesus_20150125) made some comments about it that reminded me of your and Milan Kundera’s thoughts on sentimentality and kitsch. He quoted James Baldwin as saying, “Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel. The wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.” That reminded me of Vladamir Nabokov’s views on sentimentality: “A sentimentalist may be a perfect brute in his free time. A sensitive person is never a cruel person. Sentimental Rousseau, who could weep over a progressive idea, distributed his many natural children through various poorhouses and workhouses and never gave a hoot for them… Stalin loved babies. Lenin sobbed at the opera…”
Baldwin always says what I’m trying to say better than I can it seems. I had not heard that Nabokov quote. Thanks for that.
I love Baldwin, I love Nabokov, and I used to love Kundera. But this sentimentalism vs sensitivity (or whatever) distinction is feeling, to me, a bit slippery — and worse than slippery when we try to tie it to bad politics.
I’m all for valuing unexpected portrayals of human experience as opposed to clichéd ones, and complex tugs on one’s emotions over and against their easy or hackneyed counterparts. (And, yes, I cry at almost everything!) But I’m not sure what makes a girl energetically singing Britney any more sentimental, per se, than boys contemplating bugs in Malick or watching trains in Ozu. And even if they girl boisterously bugging her brother in Linklater is somehow the “easy” approach to emotion — and given how rarely we see girls in joyous play, I don’t think that it is — I’m not sure that should lead us to a self-serving conclusion about the morality of easy and difficult art. I mean easy emotions might correlate with bad art, but not bad people or even bad purposes.
(This is a separate issue from Mike’s different claim that good art needs to transcend and transform everyday experience — as opposed to simply having the ingenuity [in my opinion] to recognize and capture it, in a variety of forms.)
As he did with “Letters from Iwo Jima” I would love to see Eastwood make a counterpoint movie to “Sniper” told from the Iraqi point of view.
Ng Suat Tong says: “The part where she collapses to her knees when she hears her husband coming under sniper attack on the phone is C-grade Korean Drama material.”
Seriously? Even if it actually happened? Geez! How jaded can one be?
Back in 1992 I was in an extended military training class in Indiana when I got a brief message from the training unit’s orderly room telling me my wife had been admitted to a local hospital back in Delaware for emergency surgery. In those days before cell phones, it often wasn’t easy reaching people on a moment’s notice, but I was able to piece together from several phone calls back to Delaware that a friend of my wife had driven her to the hospital after a disc had apparently ruptured, and that my wife had lost all feeling in her lower extremities – hence the emergency part of emergency surgery.
Once I had a rough picture of the situation, a lot of things had to happen real fast. The training unit I was temporarily assigned to had to quickly verify the situation through the Red Cross, disenroll me from my training class, cut emergency leave orders, and once all that was done, I had to go back to my dorm room, pack up all of my stuff, throw it in the car and drive the 10 hours or so back to Delaware. The entire time I had no idea if my wife would be permanently paralyzed or die on the operating table.
I guess if the vignette above were in a film, you’d think it was maudlin and kitschy as well — especially the part later where the state trooper in Ohio pulled me over and ticketed me for speeding.
The fact is, unless you’ve walked in another person’s shoes, you cannot possibly understand the real frustration and fear – which can occur on either end of the phone – when a family is separated by long distances and the serious shit hits the fan. It happens to many families separated by great distances, but probably even more so with military families where deployments or temporary duty are routine.
The big difference between real life and the phone scene in American Sniper is that one of them was very badly filmed and edited.
Badly filmed and edited? Funny how so many people disagree.
@ Peter Sattler
“But I’m not sure what makes a girl energetically singing Britney any more sentimental, per se”
You seem to be misunderstanding Mike Carson. It’s not the girl singing Britney who is sentimental, any more than Kundera’s children running through the grass. The girl is of course naïve – the potential sentimentalists are the filmmakers, depending on what they imply the audience is supposed to feel about the girl, and the audience, depending on how they respond.
@ Mike Carson
This piece is magnificent.
Oops. Never mind, it’s me who somehow didn’t understand Peter’s last comment the first time around. Sorry!
Okay, let’s see if I can do it right the second time.
“I’m not sure what makes a girl energetically singing Britney [in Linklater’s film] any more sentimental, per se, than boys contemplating bugs in Malick or watching trains in Ozu”
Well, maybe Malick and Ozu are sentimental! – at least sometimes. There’s been a lot of it going around since the late 18th century. Though it seems to me the above conversation is missing a distinction between mere sentimentality and kitsch, which can maybe be defined as sentimentality plus vulgarity (Ozu, at least, seems to me often sentimental but never kitschy, while everything I’ve heard about American Sniper and Boyhood, plus the trailers, which is as much of them as I’m ever likely to see, screams of kitsch.)
Oh, and everything Eastwood-directed that I have seen. Linklater is a more complicated case: Slacker doesn’t convey enough of an opinion about what’s happening to risk sentimentality; Before Sunrise is certainly sentimental but never really kitschy; Waking Life would be kitsch, except it’s so dumb and at the same time so sincerely enthusiastic that it may have circled all the way back to naïveté; Dazed and Confused is kitsch. Maybe somebody should tell him to stay away from coming-of-age stories.
Not that kitsch is necessarily bad – e.g. Casablanca – though when it’s mistaken for meaningful social commentary, that is certainly a problem.