American Sniper Is the First Great Movie About the Iraq War

Clint Eastwood's blockbuster war movie shows us the suffering of a heroic solider in a disorienting war.

American Sniper, Clint Eastwood's Iraq War film starring Bradley Cooper, opened last weekend to a small measure of controversy and an epic public response. The movie made an estimated $105.3 million over the long holiday weekend, an absurd sum for an R-rated war drama devoid of superheroes. It broke two January box-office records previously held byAvatarby Avatar, for the love of God—and it has already surpassed almost every Clint Eastwood movie's lifetime gross in a few days. (Unforgiven made $101 million over its entire run.) Most remarkable of all is that American Sniper deserves all its success. It is the first great film made about the war in Iraq. (It follows sniper Chris Kyle's tours in Iraq, which included the Second Battle of Fallujah.)

The controversies surrounding American Sniper are predictable, although still quite silly. Michael Moore made the claim that snipers are cowards, and then seemed struck that anyone was offended by the remark. A bizarre statement, truly. You can accuse Navy SEALs of a great deal, but cowardice is not on the slate. Others have more seriously taken issue with the way the film represents history. To which I can only say that going to a Hollywood movie for a history lesson is like going to a brothel for a lecture in philosophy. You're in the wrong place.

No one is denying the quality of the film, well, with the exception of those fake babies. That would be nearly impossible. What makes some critics uncomfortable is their perception of the film's celebration of violence. Chris Kyle, whose autobiography provided the basis of the film, was the deadliest sniper in U.S. military history. He was a naturally gifted shooter from boyhood, and his gift was nurtured by dedicated training until his deployment to Iraq, where urban warfare provided the perfect venue for its expression.

Eastwood does not shy away from displaying Kyle's incredible skills with a rifle, it is true. But to say that American Sniper is pro-war or even a simply heroic portrait of Chris Kyle is deliberately to misinterpret it. At the beginning of the story, we see Kyle as a child in Texas. His father instructs him in a simple code: There are wolves and there are sheep and there are sheepdogs in this world. And he is to use his violence to be a sheepdog rather than a wolf. In the broadest terms, the story of American Sniper is that of a man given this incredibly crude ethical system, thrust into the morass of the Iraq War, and watching it crumble.

During his first tour, Kyle is forced to decide whether to shoot a young boy as he runs toward a convoy of soldiers with what appears to be a grenade. As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan progress, as the tours add up, the decisions become even more complex and the purpose of the violence less clear. Kyle's sign is a crusader's cross. He displays a skull very similar to that of the Punisher comic-book character on the side of his Humvee. He wants to make war on "the evil" of "the savages." He takes missions out of a spirit of personal revenge. His counterpart, his foremost enemy, is a sniper named Mustafa who takes videos of his kills and sells them on the street. But at least when Mustafa goes to kill, he's in the same country as his babies. "God, country, family" is Kyle's motto. It's also the motto of "the savages."

Very quickly it becomes unclear what the purpose of the wars is. Kyle's incredible ability at killing never solves anything. Kyle is fighting for his fellow soldiers and for America. But he has to be very careful not to ask himself any questions beyond that. The final firefight takes place in a sandstorm. It is the best battle scene put onscreen since the storming of the Normandy beaches in Saving Private Ryan. As the storm gathers, the scene becomes something like an abstract painting. The fury of the dust obscures all human faces and actions. This is Eastwood's metaphor for the Iraq War: a mess that ends in blindness. Victory, in the end, is identical to mere escape. In many of the classic movies about World War II,the men who fought did not want to be soldiers; they had to be forced into battle by history, but sucked it up and saved the world. Chris Kyle is the exact opposite, a natural killer who uses his abilities in service of... of what?

The previous movies about the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan—The Hurt Locker, Stop-Loss, Green Zone, Brothers—had to tread a difficult line: supporting the troops while condemning the war. They did so in one of two ways: taking soldiers who opposed the war as their heroes, or painting the soldiers themselves as victims. The courage of American Sniper is that its main character is a perpetrator, not a victim, and his suffering come from that reality. That doesn't mean he's not a good soldier or a good man. He loves his children and his wife. His good intentions and his patriotism are undeniable. The trauma of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was the waste of all that patriotism and all those good intentions. And the waste was not the failure of soldiers like Kyle but of the men who sent them. Nonetheless it was the soldiers who lived the chaos. They had to endure the emptiness and moral confusion created by others.

Two-and-a-half million Americans served in Iraq and Afghanistan. How often do we reckon with how much they have endured? Almost never. In a way, what the release of American Sniper signifies is the transition of the most recent wars into the realm of history and out of the realm of news. One-hundred million dollars in a weekend shows just how vast the appetite for that shift is.

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