Chris Kyle, Clint Eastwood, and a Film Trailer Heinrich Himmler Would Admire

William Norman Grigg
Oct. 04, 2014

Clint Eastwood is one of the most gifted filmmakers in the history of the medium. Bradley Cooper is an extraordinarily capable actor. On the evidence of the teaser trailer for “American Sniper,” Eastwood and Cooper — who stars in the title role, and served as a producer — have produced a masterpiece of War Party propaganda.

Cooper stars as the late Chris Kyle, generally (and, perhaps, unreliably) considered to be the most lethal sniper in US military history.

The teaser clip shows Kyle and his spotter doing overwatch as a Marine patrol occupies a devastated Iraqi neighborhood, kicking in doors in pursuit of local residents who might pose problems for the foreign military force that had invaded their country in an act of criminal aggression.

Kyle notices a woman and a young child emerging from a building. The woman hands the child an object that appears to be a grenade. As Kyle draws bead on the youngster, the viewer is shown a brief montage of scenes of the sniper at home with his lovely wife and beautiful children, briefly interrupted by a shot of Kyle surrounded by flag-draped coffins.

“They’ll fry you if you’re wrong,” the spotter says as Kyle’s haunted eyes focus on his target, and his finger prepares to pull the trigger.

The audience is prompted to empathize with the anguished and reluctant sniper, who is caught in a horrible dilemma.

For that dilemma to exist, the sniper would have to face irreconcilable moral absolutes. That is not the case here: Neither he nor the troops he is protecting had any right to be where they were, and the Iraqis in that neighborhood — including the child — had every right to use any means at their disposal to force the invaders to leave.

An authentic patriot would instinctively sympathize with the child who was defending his neighborhood, rather than the sniper who was poised to murder him. However, the scene is engineered to elicit a nationalist response from the viewer — that is, one informed by the conceit that American lives are innately more valuable than those of Iraqis, and that it is an act of irredeemable evil for an Iraqi to kill an American invader.

That was certainly Kyle’s view, at least as it was expressed in the version of this incident (which occurred in Nasiriyah in March, 2003) found in his memoir.

"I looked through the scope," Kyle recalled. "The only people who were moving were [a] woman and maybe a child or two nearby. I watched the troops pull up. Ten young, proud Marines in uniform got out of their vehicles and gathered for a foot patrol. As the Americans organized, the woman took something from beneath her clothes, and yanked at it. She'd set a grenade."

Kyle shot the woman twice, displaying none of the cinematic anguish depicted in the trailer. The woman was the first of the 255 “kills” recorded in Kyle’s career as a government employee who specialized in killing people from a distance.

"It was my duty to shoot, and I don't regret it," Kyle insisted, describing the woman as “blinded by evil” because she “just wanted Americans dead” for reasons he apparently couldn’t understand, or wouldn’t acknowledge. “My shots saved several Americans, whose lives were clearly worth more than that woman's twisted soul."

Unfiltered nationalistic bigotry of that variety plays well with the Fox News demographic, but it makes for problematic cinema. Even audiences who share those prejudices would find it difficult to sympathize with a “hero” who expressed such sentiments candidly. Accordingly, Cooper was transformed into an uncanny physical Doppelganger of the late sniper, while the character was re-purposed as a tragic figure who heroically overcame his instinctive reluctance to kill on behalf of a grand and glorious historic purpose (which in practical terms meant clearing away any obstacles to the rise of the most recent CIA-abetted “threat,” ISIS).

As Hannah Ahrendt might say, we’ve seen this movie before.

“What stuck in the minds of these men who had become murderers was simply the notion of being involved in something historic, grandiose, unique (`a great task that occurs once in two thousand years’), which must therefore be difficult to bear,” wrote Ahrendt in her study Eichmann in Jerusalem, referring to the SS. “This was important, because the murderers were not sadists or killers by nature; on the contrary, a systematic effort was made to weed out all those who derived physical pleasure from what they did….”

The problem confronted by the National Socialist State’s hired killers, Ahrendt continued, “was how to overcome not so much their conscience as the animal pity by which all normal men are affected in the presence of physical suffering. The trick used by Himmler -- who apparently was rather strongly afflicted by these instinctive reactions himself -- was very simple and probably very effective; it consisted in turning these instincts around, as it were, in directing them toward the self. So that instead of saying: What horrible things I did to people!, the murderers would be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!”

Cooper’s performance is meant to give cinematic expression to this inversion of pity — and to impart that attitude to the audience.