Calling the shots : American Sniper, cinema populista e guerre impopolari

Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper is sui generis: the sole commercially successful Hollywood film about the war in Iraq. This essay considers the politics of populist moviemaking in an era of unpopular war. Reading the film against the grain of Eastwood’s purported “antiwar” impetus for dramatizing the story of Chris Kyle, the author proposes that American Sniper valorizes both the killing of Arabs and gun culture more broadly. War, Eastwood implies, invariably damages warriors who deserve a better fate; yet guns are nevertheless endowed with quasi-sacred powers of regeneration in his paean to America’s most prolific sniper. To make this moral point, however, Eastwood has to occlude the final chapter of his protagonist’s life - killed by a fellow traumatized veteran whose therapy, devised and administered by Kyle, consisted of target shooting. Shorn of this bitterly ironic conclusion, Eastwood’s story encourages audiences to mourn the loss of an “American hero,” without considering either why he died or whether mass killing merits such reverent celebration