My Panera Time isn’t always used for doing puzzles, people watching, or talking to friends. Linda and I spent some Panera Time last week talking and reading about the film the AMERICAN SNIPER, which we had just seen. Then yesterday morning, I gave some more P-time thought to this truly thought-provoking film. There is so much noise about it both in print and on the air, claptrap from both ends of the political spectrum. Michael Moore and his self-serving tweets. Sarah Palin and her self-serving, politically motivated rants. I think it needs contemplation in silence not noisy discussion.
AMERICAN SNIPER isn’t a movie you can say you enjoy. We were very moved by it and are glad we saw it. I don’t think it’s a movie about war as some have suggested. Rather it’s a character study of a man who after 911 decided to enlist in the military as did many others. He had a legitimate desire to help protect his country and countrymen. It makes no difference if you think we were wrong in being in Iraq. We were there. Chris Kyle was there and was given the job of protecting his fellow soldiers on the ground by being a sniper. He was good at it and saved a lot of American lives. Let me reiterate: maybe you don’t think we had any right to be there. But we were, and Kyle believed in what we were doing. It’s ludicrous to suggest that because he shot from concealment that he was acting as a coward. It’s like saying that the bombardier in an aircraft is cowardly because he is thousands of feet above his target. Chris Kyle was often in harm’s way and the weight of the deaths for which he was responsible and the specter of those comrades he felt he failed to save were burdens for him. I think his motivation changed over the course of the movie. At the beginning, he felt he was sniping to protect the American way of life. As time went on, he became a sniper less concerned about the purpose behind the conflict and more concerned about protecting his friends. By the end, he was caught in a personal/professional vendetta. When that was settled, he could finally go home. The scene near the end of the movie when he has just arrived in country and is sitting at a bar having a beer is particularly touching. When his wife calls, he breaks down and tells her he is ready to come home, his need to keep returning to Iraq was gone.
A talking head on FOX News suggested, as have many others, that the popularity of AMERICAN SNIPER is the result of a mid-American, patriotic need to witness a hero. Label him a hero if you want but it makes more sense to label him a soldier doing a terrible job, and, of course, there is something very heroic about that. Others have suggested that the film glorifies war. They didn’t see the movie that I saw, then. Maybe the scenes of the Seal training would look exciting to young people because of its rigorous nature. I can’t think of any other scenes that would make a young person want to go to war.
I guess the point I most wish to make in this post is that AMERICAN SNIPER is a film that shouldn’t be used, used by people of different political persuasions or people with agendas. Director Clint Eastwood called his film an “apolitical character study.” (POST STANDARD, 1/25/2015) For me, that was the only logical way to view it. If you haven’t seen it, I urge you to go in with the mindset that you will be following the life of a brave man with a terrible job at which he excels. Watch and learn how that job affects him and his loved ones and eschew any political statement you may see or think you see. Then maybe you’ll go into Panera or some other place and think about whether or not you agree with me.
Finally, I am not writing this post to serve as the opening of a debate. This is my opinion which I have come to quietly. When the film ended in the big Shoppingtown theater where we saw, it ended with the audience in absolute silence as its members thought about what they had just seen. That’s what I tried to do in writing this.--Greg Ellstrom
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