Real life is not like the movies. So why does Hollywood keep trying to make us believe that elite commandos can do anything, and save anyone, all the time?
Like most people, I could only imagine what war was like before I got there myself. At one point, I was outside of the less than 1% of Americans who served in Iraq or Afghanistan, where a minuscule fraction of that population would see ground or aerial combat. The average person has likely never met a modern combat veteran. So as my deployment to Iraq got closer and I imagined what this war would look and feel like, I thought about America’s favorite storytelling medium: the movies. I pictured Baghdad as Black Hawk Down’s Mogadishu, all claustrophobic and high-contrast gun battles with desperate men in dark alleys, and mostly I heard Ride of the Valkyries, that grim killing opus in Apocalypse Now, retrofitted for our urban assaults and nighttime raids.
But the stories I came back with don’t really look like anything in the new breed of Hollywood war films, where central truths about war have all but vanished, even though they’re mostly based on real life. Now tales of elite troops are reshaping the public perception of war, even though war is still a tragic grind far more complex than any film of this era has shown.
American Sniper is the latest movie to capitalize on our insatiable hunger for stories about unstoppable commandos. Lone Survivor, the highest grossing war film of this era, portrays Navy Seals so adept at killing the Taliban that it seems their only weakness is mercy on goat-herders. In Zero Dark Thirty and Captain Phillips, Seal teams emerge only at the climax, with the long tail of logistical support from conventional aviation, infantry and intelligence units obscured by the shadow of the elite.
In American Sniper, Bradley Cooper portrays Chris Kyle, famously credited as the most lethal sniper in US history. Marines and Army infantrymen, who took back Fallujah in brutal house-to-house fighting during Kyle’s deployment in 2004, are relegated to whispers and gawks when “The Legend” scores another kill from a concealed position.
In one scene, Kyle sheds his gear to go help clear rooms with Marines he feels are not trained well enough for urban warfare. It’s a moment meant to underscore Kyle’s lifelong commitment to protect others, but the ultimate message is that anyone not in Special Forces is sloppy or uncommitted. “Let’s coach ’em up,” he says.
These films have the potential to distort how the United States views its own history and its troops. The everyday stories of war are background noise. We rarely see intel soldiers piecing together insurgent networks, or low-ranking officers meting out local grievances in rural Afghanistan.
But Hollywood has found its formula, and it is zero-sum. For every film or bestseller or PlayStation blockbuster about that tiny minority of commandos, the public misses another shot at the larger experience of soldiering in Iraq and Afghanistan. People under 40 no longer ask what war is like; they ask if it’s like Call of Duty.
The conservative fervor over Benghazi and its various conspiracies carried a rarely discussed thread: the mistaken belief that special-ops can do anything, at any time, to save or kill anyone. But real life is not like the movies, and sometimes help is too far away, as in the case of the late Ambassador Chris Stevens, or hostages are killed before they can be rescued, as we saw in Yemen this month. To conceive of a force as infallible or mythical, then, is to create a too-perfect solution to every problem, from Isis to hostage-takers the world over.
The best scenes in American Sniper are the moments when Kyle is home with his wife Taya, when Iraq seeps into quiet suburban life. Clint Eastwood does well to show Kyle’s moral injury – not the guilt of taking lives, but the agony of not saving enough. It is a vital part of countless veterans that civilians must understand. But as more and more movies get marketed as nonfiction action flicks, the deeper truths are in danger of being buried underneath CGI explosions.
http://www.alternet.org/american-sniper-feeds-americas-hero-complex?src=newsletter1029351
Δεν υπάρχουν σχόλια:
Δημοσίευση σχολίου