The Hollywood Jihad Against American Sniper
By Danile Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
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.