THE MUSLIMS’ REPRESENTATION IN “AMERICAN SNIPER” (2014) FILM: AN ORIENTALIST STUDY

The terms Islamophobia spread after the incident of September 11th of 2001 or known as 9/11, caused Orientalism to produce images/movies satirizing Western perception of Islam. The brutality and cruelty of Al-Qaeda, ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) nowadays made the Orientalism topic became more serious and more important to be discussed. The Muslims representation and the Western superiority over Islam in “American Sniper” Hollywood film are two major things that the researcher going to be observed. The original American Sniper DVD Version was the primary data that chosen by the researcher. Orientalism by the perspective of Edward Said is the most appropriate approach for this research because there was a lot of occurrence that satirizing Islam since the beginning of the film until the end. Costume, language, body language, and other person that appear in this film are several points that the researcher had emerged to collect the data. Narrative and non-narrative analysis was chosen to analyze the data. Two major essences in narrative analysis were story and plot,and the several technical essences in non-narrative were camera works and movements, costumes, setting, color composition, sounds, characters, and environment. American Sniper is implicitly meant to be a satire in exaggerations and generalizations, and Muslims been visualized as the terrorist – wicked, cruel, vile and evil