So as a film and history major, the issue of “historically accurate” films has been on my mind lately, what with “American Sniper,” “Selma,” “Foxcatcher” and “The Imitation Game” all being largely talked about movies. But it winds up being just part of a larger conversation I’ve had a few times recently, so to talk about this issue I’m going to talk about something else.
Full disclosure, I haven’t actually seen “American Sniper,” but I’m not interested in the film itself as much as everything that’s been going on around it. By all accounts it’s a brilliantly made and acted, affecting film. But from there, opinions diverge, with both pro- and anti-war readings placing it somewhere on the spectrum from armed forces recruiting film to elegy for the high costs of war and those who pay them.
And while the artists involved have mostly tried to deflect or downplay any political stances it may have (directorClint Eastwood stated that any anti-war message would be present in the impact war has on families at home, and star Bradley Cooper has said it’s about creating a portrait of a complicated man), the way the film has been presented strikes me as being…less like that.
Take for example the fact that most every piece of advertising I’ve seen for the film has Cooper posed in some way near or wrapped in an American flag. Take the hyper-emphasis on his story as that of “the deadliest sniper in US history.” Divorced from the content of the movie, however you choose to interpret it, it’s being delivered in alignment with a certain view of the war, the man and the issues surrounding them, a view distinctly nationalistic and excited by the idea of the military and combat. Take the title of the movie; if what they were looking to promise to the audience was an examination of the effect that war and sacrifice have on the lives of the people closest to them, they could have easily called it “Sniper” and let the fact that he was American speak for itself. “American Sniper” implies there is something profoundly different about the way American soldiers serve from the way that say, Canadians or Britons do.
I’m not saying anything here about the merits of the film itself; again, I haven’t yet seen it. What I’m saying is that this holistic branding with the emphasis placed on it being a true story and with everything about the way they’ve chosen to get people interested affects the way people approach the movie, and weigh on the preconceptions that we all, always, carry into every movie we see, and that invariably color the way we wind up thinking about the film.
This becomes important when we start looking at the ways people have been reacting to “American Sniper.” On the more positive end, there are the reactions from veterans who have gone to see the film together and cried, feeling represented by what they saw on the screen, like a film had finally gotten right what they went through and how it has affected them. That’s true, emotional catharsis, and is beyond politics.
On the other hand, there have been some very ugly, violent responses, including hate speech directed toward Muslims and open, unrepentant justification of war and the destruction it causes. In both cases, the responses are based in whatever the viewers were carrying with them, whether it’s personal experience or a militaristic view of a group designated as an enemy and an other. And in the second case, the film’s presentation as a purely patriotic true story may be washing away some of the nuance of reality that is actually present in favor of a simple, jingoistic interpretation (and the two never ever go together).
Whether or not the trappings of the film sanction or encourage these reactions, they’re a part of the way we experience films because they directly influence what our expectations are going in. And that baggage we carry in is sort of a fundamental part of how we watch movies. It’s why we expect “quirk” and dryness and primary color palettes from Wes Anderson films, and it’s why we expect “based on a true story” films to adhere to our own understanding of history.
But obviously no film, not even a documentary, is ever going to be “objective” or purely factual. They present inherently subjective realities, and can only ever speak to individual, specific points of view—not saying facts aren’t important, just that fictionalizations are inherently not fact, and so unless they’re radically revising, like, the actual events, they’re good.
So for a film like “American Sniper” to be targeted so directly at a certain attitude toward the military, certain concrete notions of nationalism and a simple, pure truth when the man and the issues it portrays were so much more complicated than that, is a disservice to the film being presented and to the people watching it. There’s just too much at stake, and reality is far too messy. It deserves to be understood as a film about what it’s like to be a soldier, in all its personal and individual complexity.
Similarly, there’s been a lot of (irrelevant and bogus) backlash against “Selma” for its portrayal of LBJ, because its representation of history didn’t line up with that of some viewers. Which is one hundred percent, utterly and unequivocally, beside the point. The point is to tell the story of the Civil Rights movement from the perspective of the people making the film; it’s the entire reason why we make and watch movies, to experience things we haven’t and understand a little more about people in general.
This collision between our preconceptions and what we see is nothing more than how we react to the movie. It’s every emotion, yawn, flinch, smile and tear we go through in those two hours or so. And oftentimes, when a film makes us uncomfortable or upset or unsure, it’s because it’s challenging us; sometimes challenging our most closely held convictions or ideals. This is uncomfortable. The only way to really deal with it is to check our reactions against our expectations; to not just think about how the movie made us feel a certain way, but why. This is how we get understanding of new ideas and learn more about each other, the world and our place in it, etc. etc. Which is sort of why we bother with all this stuff in the first place.
