When, at an early juncture in American Sniper, Clint Eastwood frames Bradley Cooper in the doorway of a barn silhouetted against the bright light of day, the direct visual reference to John Ford’s The Searchers is less a tipping of the ten-gallon hat than a sad, sombre lament of the consuming culture of violence that has informed both American masculinity and its on-screen iterations for decades past and—if the film’s wearied tone is onto anything—decades more yet to come. But where Ford’s film concluded with that iconic image excluding John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards from the ordered world he had ostensibly established, Eastwood’s all-but opens thereon, explicitly identifying Cooper and his real-life character Chris Kyle as an outsider already in the world he will proceed to spend two hours “protecting”.
…where films such as Unforgiven and Gran Torino could be considered correctives to the violent fantasy likes of Coogan’s Bluff and Dirty Harry, American Sniper astutely establishes itself an elegiac apology for the cinematic culture of bloodshed and barbarity they went so far to help establish.
Ford’s film was a vicious deconstruction of the icon he had erected two decades prior in Stagecoach, and would go on to disavow further the following decade with The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, another movie to which American Sniper refers with rich appreciation of its own evolution therefrom. “When the legend becomes fact,” goes the iconic quote, invoked aplenty as Kyle’s reputation as the American military’s most lethal sniper is built, “print the legend.” Eastwood does here—via Jason Hall’s adaptation of Kyle’s memoir—and the ire and awe it’s respectively earned him is indicative less of the perils of modern mythmaking than that same cyclical trajectory of man and the movies against which the film restlessly rails.
Unlike John Wayne, who tended to unabashedly embrace the increasingly—and ironically—unsettling attributes of his characters in those three Ford films and more, Eastwood has long shown an appreciation for the deeper ramifications of his star status; his early segue into direction revealed an iconoclastic tendency to undermine his own archetype, not coincidentally paired with an eventual aversion to being directed by anyone else. And where films such as Unforgiven and Gran Torino could be considered correctives to the violent fantasy likes of Coogan’s Bluff and Dirty Harry, American Sniper astutely establishes itself an elegiac apology for the cinematic culture of bloodshed and barbarity they went so far to help establish.
…from the uncharacteristically colourful flashback that accords a hunting trip as much adolescent import as religion to the tremendously tense finale that could be a Call of Duty cut scene to the sober presentation of the inevitable endpoint of this tale, Eastwood has crafted neither a liberal nor conservative consideration of conflict, rather a study of its sorry centrality in a culture that prizes protectors above all.
It’s a far shorter series of leaps than it might seem from the urban cowboy evolution of those two early Eastwood roles to the amped-up action men of Die Hard and Rambo—after their own (alas ongoing) cycles of relevance and redundancy—to the literal rather than figurative supermen of cinema today, the insignia of one of whom is accorded inordinate attention in the film. Eastwood’s always excelled at recognising the ramifications of his own image—look to his sly Jersey Boys cameo for an under-discussed example—but here we find him exploring it as emblematic of a wider systemic obsession with violence and valour, every bit as much in the cinema as in the world beyond.
So of course the ire and awe at the audacity of making a film about war that says no more than, simply, war is: from the uncharacteristically colourful flashback that accords a hunting trip as much adolescent import as religion to the tremendously tense finale that could be a Call of Duty cut scene to the sober presentation of the inevitable endpoint of this tale, Eastwood has crafted neither a liberal nor conservative consideration of conflict, rather a study of its sorry centrality in a culture that prizes protectors above all. Eastwood has made films far finer than American Sniper, but rarely has his iconoclastic edge been so sharp, rarely has he utilised his own image—public, as much as cinematic—to such efficient ironic impact. One need do no more than print the legend when its legacies are plain to see.
