From Inculcation to Liberation: Pop Culture-Addled Snipers in Clint Eastwood's American Sniper and Alba Sotorra's Game Over

Abstract

Clint Eastwood's American Sniper (2014) and Alba Sotorra's Game Over (2015) explore the inculcating pull of pop myths on soldiers. Eastwood's biopic focuses on Chris Kyle, American military history’s most lethal sniper. Sotorra's documentary Game Over considers Djalal, an Iranian Catalan youth who moves from being an America-idolizing gamer to a sniper in Afghanistan. Initially, they see themselves as Western cowboys and perfect soldiers. War, however, leaves them disillusioned and traumatized. Via distinct generic formats (documentary v. feature film) and nationally determined political frameworks (US v. Spain), they ask: can mythologies fueling the post-9/11 war machine empty it of its force? Mobilizing postcolonial, disability, and trauma studies, this comparative analysis theorizes how objects of soft power can both harden a soldier’s mind and liberate it from the battlefield’s thrall. Ultimately, the article reveals contrasting, potentially limited strategies subjects across cultures deploy to break the hold of American visions of power.

KEYWORDS:

• clint Eastwood
• Spain
• documentary
• war on terror
• soft power
• postcolonial theory
• neo-imperialism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 As an expansion of earlier writing, this article represents a curious journey – a rediscovery of a film (Game Over) that I thought I once knew. Along the way, I had the joy of working with the most giving interlocutors and readers who deserve to be acknowledged. Miryam Sas helped nuance my first inklings on Game Over when I developed a conference paper for the 2016 Literature/Film Association Conference. After my presentation, John Alberti planted a most inspiring seed when musing how Game Over resembled a kind of documentary response to Eastwood’s American Sniper. Years later, after the publication of my book that dived into Sotorra's work and thus seemed to be an end of my journey with the documentary, the editors of this special issue, Marek Paryż and Marzena Sokołowska-Paryż, offered me a chance to return to the film and to interrogate its blockbuster doppelgänger which had lingered in the back of my mind since 2016. Generously, they worked through abstracts and drafts of the article, a generosity that was shared by the keen-eyed reviewers and the editor Rachel Woodward at the Journal of War & Culture Studies. These individuals all made my journey a delight, and they made me realize that one is never truly finished with a great film. They all have my most sincere thanks.

2 William Beard describes American Sniper as ‘simultaneously a pro-war movie and an anti-war movie … Not always, but so often in Eastwood’s films, it is as if two viewpoints were proceeding simultaneously, mostly with no acknowledgement of each other. This approach leads to a kind of fractured three-dimensionality where the two images refuse to cohere but exist as a species of double vision’ (2023: 108–109). This article takes as its analytical starting point that Eastwood's filmmaking has a ‘double vision,’ one that both stages and incisively critiques the genre myths long associated with the artist.

3 Portions of the reading of Game Over appeared in the concluding chapter of my book, No Jurisdiction: Legal, Political, and Aesthetic Disorder in Post-9/11 Genre Cinema (Ben-Youssef 2022). Some of the featured analysis of Game Over also expands on a post-colonial reading offered in my article, ‘Disrupted Genre, Disrupted Lives: Adieu Gary and the Post-9/11 Banlieue as Ghost Town’ (Ben-Youssef 2017). See Note IX for more details.

4 For a detailed discussion of representations of the Spanish Civil War, see Jo Labanyi’s Memory and Modernity in Democratic Spain: The Difficulty of Coming to Terms with the Spanish Civil War. Labanyi’s reads the post-Franco ‘‘pacto del olvido’ (pact of oblivion) whereby all political parties agreed to forget the civil war in order to reach consensus’ (2007: 93), as a way to mask the continued Francoist presence within the state (94). How, the Hollywood-focused Game Over invites us to wonder, might we understand the elision of post-9/11 wars in Spanish cinema as a post-9/11 pact of oblivion reached with the Spanish citizen, asking them to forget not their wartime past but their wartime present? For the Spanish citizen, does American popular culture which often venerates war and, in which a young man like Djalal is immersed, unmask Spain’s complicitous presence in the United States’ conflicts abroad?

5 For an in-depth analysis of Sotorra’s Game Over and Comandante Arian as well as her approach to documentary, see Fonoll-Tassier et al’s ‘Postcolonial Feminism and Non-Fiction Cinema: Gendered Subjects in Alba Sotorra’s War Documentaries.’ The scholars identify how Sotorra’s films ‘surpass the media exploitation of the missionary discourse of women’s rights – and of other minorities –, as employed to legitimize the politics of colonialism and the war on terror in distant places’ (Fonoll-Tassier et al 2023: 2647). In Game Over, resonant with my own understanding of the film, they find a documentary whose camerawork reveals the artifice of Djalal’s war reenactments (Fonoll-Tassier et al 2023: 2651) and which presents a psychically cleaved brown subject – at once ‘the ideal pattern of Western hegemonic masculinity’ and a man ‘traversed by diverse transnational relationships’ (Fonoll-Tassier et al 2023: 2652). In the article’s conclusion, I probe the implications of their passing yet key assessment that the ‘film does not totally break away from the narrative conventions of war films’ (Fonoll-Tassier et al 2023: 2653), sensing an implicating documentary that may ultimately indict the viewer’s hungers for wartime spectacle.

6 Sottora’s emphasis on an imagined triumph at home highlights Game Over’s domestic focus on Djalal’s relationship with his family. This contrasts American Sniper that spends much of the time on the battlefield and where Kyle’s newborn baby is clearly shown to be a lifeless doll – a potential oversight in staging that implies how much Kyle’s (and Eastwood’s) attentions lie away from the family.

7 It is worth further emphasizing where my reading of Eastwood’s ‘double vision’ – teasing out the film’s ambivalences and critiques of genre forms like the western that would appear to affirm violent power and hegemonic masculinity – fits within scholarship on American Sniper which often meditates on its troubled and troubling politics. This article mulls the presence of the western genre in the film that Lennart Soberon also explores in ‘‘The Old Wild West in the New Middle East’: American Sniper (2014) and the Global Frontiers of the Western Genre’ (2017). Notably, however, I diverge from Soberon who sees the film as ‘one in a long line of conflict-focused narratives that employ frontier mythology as an interpretative framework through which America’s aggressive foreign policy can be legitimized’ (2017, para. 11). Rather, I find that the western-tinged film is an ideologically self-contested one that suggests that such intoxicating, myth-driven foreign policy and those drawn to its underlying ideals are potentially destructive, impotent, and infantile. This point is foregrounded by the fact that I draw out the despairing or infantizing valences in sequences that Soberon also examines (see my discussion of The Searchers homage above, the appearance of the teddy bear in the film’s 9/11 sequence, and the ‘Mission accomplished’ reference in its culminating set piece).

8 While scholars like Soberon have focused on the way that the film deploys the tropes of the Western form, in ‘The Mythic Shape of American Sniper (2015)’ (2016), John Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett show a keen interest in the superheroic dimensions of the Chris Kyle story. In their analysis, they stage a vital mea culpa when responding to Richard Stevens’ critique of their previous scholarship where they argued early in the post-9/11 era that the seemingly jingoistic character of Captain America should go on a ‘‘dignified retirement’’ (2002 cited Lawrence and Jewett 2016: 42). Via Stevens’ scholarship on the comics produced between 2002-2006, they had come to realize that Captain America tales offered a vital and rare space to critique the polices of the Bush administration in times of overwhelming nationalist fervor. With its deployment of pop figures like the Punisher and the cowboy, as I show throughout the article, American Sniper similarly teaches us to be similarly attuned to how such (super)powerful heroes can be a means for nuanced critique of the practices and the ideals of the state institutions that would like to co-opt them for their own legitimizing ends.

9 My present discussion of Game Over’s portrayal of a brown gamer targeting himself using Fanon expands on passages found in both the final chapter of my book, No Jurisdiction (Ben-Youssef 2022), and in my article ‘Disrupted Genre, Disrupted Lives: Adieu Gary and the Post-9/11 Banlieue as Ghost Town’ (Ben-Youssef 2017). As suggested in my book’s conclusion where both Adieu Gary (2009) and Game Over are discussed together, Nassim Amaouche’s portrayal of a French Arab gamer is highly resonant with Sotorra’s documentary. Adieu Gary is similarly invested in how video games produced by the metropole offer brown subjects the means to metaphorically destroy themselves as well as the chance to discover rare avenues for autonomy and control.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Fareed Ismail Ben-Youssef

Dr. Fareed Ben-Youssef is an Assistant Professor in Film & Media Studies at Texas Tech University. He earned his PhD in Film and Media from the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of No Jurisdiction: Legal, Political, and Aesthetic Disorder in Post-9/11 Genre Cinema (SUNY Press 2022) which reveals genre cinema's multivalent purpose: to normalize state violence and also to critique it. His work on global cinema has appeared in journals like The Journal of Popular Culture, Japanese Language and Literature, and Southwestern American Literature. As part of his efforts to teach outside the classroom, Ben-Youssef has also organized myriad university film series and hosted master classes with award-winning directors such as Ari Folman and Ryûsuke Hamaguchi.