Posted: 24 Jan 2015 08:32 PM PST
American Sniper is the movie that should not have existed. Even
though the book was a bestseller, nobody in Hollywood wanted the rights.
And why would they?
The
Iraq War already had an official narrative in Hollywood. It was bad and
wrong. Its veterans were crippled, dysfunctional and dangerous. Before
American Sniper, Warner Brothers had gone with anti-war flicks like Body of
Lies and In the Valley of Elah. It had lost a fortune on Body of Lies; but
losing money had never stopped Hollywood from making anti-war movies that no
one wanted to watch.
Even the Hurt Locker had opened with a quote from leftist terrorist supporter
Chris Hedges.
An Iraq War movie was supposed to be an anti-war movie. There was no other
way to tell the story. Spielberg’s own interest in American Sniper was
focused on “humanizing” the other side. When he left and Clint Eastwood,
coming off a series of failed films, took the helm, it was assumed that
American Sniper would briefly show up in theaters and then go off to die
quietly in what was left of the DVD aisle.
And then American Sniper broke box office records that had been set by
blockbusters like Avatar, Passion and Hangover Part II by refusing to
demonize American soldiers or to spin conspiracy tales about the war. Instead
of pandering to coastal progressives, it aimed at the patriotic heartland.
In a sentence you no longer expected to hear from a Hollywood exec, the
Warner Brothers distribution chief said, “This is about patriotism and all
the things people say the country is lacking these days.”
The backlash to that patriotism and the things the country is lacking these
days didn’t take very long to form and it goes a lot deeper than snide tweets
from Michael Moore and Seth Rogen. Academy members were reportedly passing
around an article from the New Republic, whose author had not actually seen
the movie, but still denounced it for not showing Chris Kyle as a bigoted
murderer.
Hollywood progressives are both threatened and angered by American Sniper.
And with good reason.
The most basic reason is the bottom line. Between Lone Survivor, Unbroken and
American Sniper, the patriotic war movie is back. Hollywood could only keep
making anti-war movies no one would watch as long as that seemed to be the
only way to tackle the subject. Now there’s a clear model for making successful
and respectful war movies based around the biographies and accounts of actual
veterans.
Hollywood studios had been pressured by left-wing stars into wasting fortunes
on failed anti-war conspiracy movies. Matt Damon had managed to get $150
million sunk into his Green Zone failed anti-war movie before stomping away
from Universal in a huff. Body of Lies with Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell
Crowe had a real budget estimated at around $120 million, but had opened
third after Beverly Hills Chihuahua whose titular tiny dog audiences
preferred to either star and their political critiques.
But
why spend over a hundred million on anti-war movies no one wants when
American Sniper has already made over $120 million on a budget only half that
much?
Hollywood progressives don’t look forward to having to write, direct and star
in patriotic pictures and if they can’t destroy American Sniper at the box
office, they can taint it enough that no major star or director will want to
be associated with anything like it.
Adding to their undercurrent of anger is the way that American Sniper
upstaged Selma at the box office and at the Academy Award nominations. Selma
is a mediocre movie, but it was meant to be a platform for the usual
conversation that progressives want to have about how terrible Americans are.
Instead audiences chose to see a movie about how great Americans can be even
in difficult times.
There’s nothing that threatens the left as much as that.
In a Best Picture lineup that includes the obligatory paeans to gay rights
and the evils of racism, American Sniper distinctly stands out as something
different. It displaces Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, the previous sure winner
which had its obligatory drunken Iraq War veteran claiming that the war was
fought for oil, with an authentic veteran instead of Hollywood’s twisted
caricature of one.
American Sniper and Lone Survivor signal a shifting wind in which the focus
of movies about the War on Terror moves from the organizational conspiracy
theories that Hollywood liked to make to the personal narratives of the men
who fought in them. Many of the smarter progressive reviews of American
Sniper grapple with the fact that the time when they could even have their
favorite argument is going away.
Progressives would like Dick Cheney to be the face of the war, but are forced
to deal with a world in which Chris Kyle and Marcus Luttrell will be how
America sees the conflict. The lens through which the left liked to view the
war, its obsessions with WMD, Bush and the path to war, have been eclipsed by
the rise of ISIS and the return of American veterans. Their worldview has
become outdated and irrelevant.
It’s easier for the left to vent its anger on American Sniper than to deal
with its own irrelevance. The most shocking thing about the movie is not any
political statement, but its presumption in dealing with the Iraq War and the
men in it as if it were WW2. It doesn’t confront the left; instead it acts as
if the left isn’t there. It fails to acknowledge the entire worldview through
which Hollywood dealt with the war.
The
left spends most of its time living in its own bubble and is shocked when
events remind it that the rest of the country does not really share its
opinions and tastes. American Sniper’s success is one of those explosive
wake-up calls and the left has responded to it with all the expected vicious
pettiness.
A billboard for the movie was vandalized and attacks from lefty outlets like
New Republic and Vox not only target the movie, but the dead man at the
center of it. The smear campaign against Kyle has reached new lows, because
in death he has become an even more powerful symbol of everything that the
left hates.
Hollywood tried to “Vietnamize” Iraq in the popular imagination. American
Sniper shows they failed.
Whether or not American Sniper wins the requisite number of Oscars, its
impact on Hollywood and on ordinary Americans will not go away. The anti-war
movie is in eclipse. The movies that tell the stories of the sacrifices that
American veterans have made in the war against Islamic terrorists are rising.
Daniel Greenfield is a New York City based writer and blogger
and a Shillman Journalism Fellow of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
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