Tag Archives: “American Sniper”

“American Sniper”: Giving Ticket Buyers a War They Can Enjoy

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Lambert_to_the_SlaughterI finally got around to seeing “American Sniper”. It was last Friday night in Phoenix, which I mention only because if you’re familiar with Arizona’s largest city, you know there’s rarely a day that goes by without some unholy gathering of big-bellied white guys with weird facial hair milling around a “Gun Expo”, a “Gun Swap Meet” or a “Bullet Circus”, or whatever. Arizona loves guns and all the debate about “American Sniper” aside, what it is selling on the most fundamental level is the thrill of righteous gun vengeance. Take away the smoking hardware and the film’s box-office would drop 90%.

That said, the movie, directed by good ol’ Clint Eastwood, is as slick a piece of big time Hollywood filmmaking as you’ll ever see. Terrific editing, great sound work, top notch art direction, a decent script and solid performances from Bradley Cooper and Sienna Miller. Warner Brothers, seeing the near perfect box office fusion of Eastwood, hot young star Cooper and a memoir/”true story” of a goddam bona fide American hero who happened to be the deadliest, baddest mutha of our adventure in Iraq, popped for an enormous budget, which Eastwood got up on the screen. (Warners’ investment has paid off handsomely. The film has done astonishing business for a January general release.)

The theater in Phoenix, an enormous 2000-plus seat “UltraStar” auditorium, was packed to capacity, and while there was no yahoo cheering at the moment when our hero picks off his rival sniper … at a preposterous 2100 meters through a shimmering heat haze … the crowd did sit in rapt attention during the end credits, as real world footage ran of sniper Chris Kyle’s actual funeral in Dallas two years ago. (The whacking of “Mustafa”, a character barely mentioned in the book and never listed among Kyle’s 160-plus “confirmed kills”, is almost entirely a Hollywood invention. For that matter, the US Military has a pretty loose system for “confirming” sniper shootings.)

I confess, I have not read “American Sniper”, despite the attention it got here in Minnesota during Jesse Ventura’s successful defamation case against Kyle last summer. I have as much interest in military memoirs as I do bodice-ripping romance novels, although the latter might actually hew closer to reality. (Kyle clearly had a problem with details. His own sense of his “legend” may well have overwhelmed him.)

Anyway, the point here is to simply to say that while the movie is not some patently ridiculous piece of gun-crazed jingoism, it suffers by copping out on elephant-in-the-room realities that are, unlike so much of Kyle’s story, completely and lamentably verifiable.

No doubt Eastwood, a shrewd judge of mainstream American tastes, loved the thought of packaging an exciting contemporary combat film around, “one man’s story.” No need to muss with broader history and politics. Just tell this guy’s story. (In fact, it appears that it was Bradley Cooper who bought the rights to Kyle’s book and then got it to Eastwood.) By dialing out the rather enormous and fundamental question of, “What in the hell were we and this guy doing in Iraq?”, audiences are allowed to remain comfortably unchallenged, which is to say entertained by the action and splatter and moved by the effect it has on unassuming, easy-going, unfailingly polite Kyle’s mental stability and marriage.

I’m sorry. The far, far braver (and commercially problematic) thing for Warner Brothers and Eastwood to have done would be to work in a deeper assessment of Kyle’s good ‘ol Texas boy blind faith in his country’s war-making decisions and at least some reflection, like say after the Weapons of Mass Destruction canard was fully understood, on why (at the very least) they’re not over in Afghanistan hunting Osama bin Laden.

Personally, I found it very interesting that there is no reference to either Dick Cheney or George W. anywhere in “American Sniper”. In the film, Kyle watches the World Trade Center collapse and the next thing you know, as though it was ordained by national acclamation, he and his pals are kicking ass in … Iraq. I.e. direct linkage.

Constructed as it is, Eastwood cannily evokes an audience response that is more somber than flat-out celebratory. War is hell Who does not agree? But a braver filmmaker and lesser businessman would have felt a responsibility to take Kyle’s story (more or less as he told it to his ghostwriters) and stir in the context of what we now recognize was one of the most misguided foreign policy disasters and most poorly-planned military campaigns in American history.

Those are details you can verify.

Jesse Gets Lucky, Again

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Lambert_to_the_SlaughterJesse Ventura is one lucky bastard. He got elected Governor in 1998, at the peak of the ‘90s boom economy, when thirty-some percent of voters decided, kind of like electing Floyd the Pig Homecoming King, they could afford a laugh. (The competition from two stiffs like Skip Humphrey and Norm Coleman didn’t hurt.)

Now a jury … of his peers … has decided, in a split but conclusive vote, that he was in fact “defamed”, or as I like to think of it “de-famed”, since Jesse believes the dead sniper’s memoir yanked the rudder of his good ship celebrity and crashed it on the hard rocks of horrible, desolate semi-anonymity. Frankly, I’m as shocked by the decision as the legal experts, scholars and pundits. In today’s free-fire publishing world no one is supposed to mount much less win a defamation case against anyone who has previously appeared on TV.

In a previous post I both said I doubted Jesse could prevail, but that I sincerely hoped he would, if only to throw a momentary chill into the fetid sub-culture of charlatans, hustlers and publicists pumping this — recklessly indifferent — memoir/tell-all offal with wearying monotony. That chill, if it is experienced at all, probably won’t last as long as their next tax deductible business lunch. But at least it’s out there.

Not being a licensed legal expert — although I am three for four in conciliation court (don’t bleep with me) — I am most confused over whether or how the issue of “harm” was considered. The “American Sniper” book, as we learned from depositions of the dead sniper, essentially took a “close enough” approach to the veracity of its claims about the Ventura incident. But as to the book being what cratered Jesse’s big money days? Mmmmmm … I’m not so convinced. And I fail to see how anyone could.

Immediate speculation is that the eight jurors voting for Ventura decided they were cool with their decision on the grounds that, yes he was defamed — the sniper’s tale, as written by a ghost writer, had a lot of funky holes that no one cared enough to correct and they all went ahead and publicized the victim of the incident as our guy The Body. All that equals defamation. But, the guessing is … the fact that damages will be paid by the giant publisher’s giant insurance company nailed the choice shut. (In modern America few entities are fairer game for a punitive scalding than insurance companies.)

The second, larger tier of damages, the $1.3 million and change part, may or may not also be covered by insurance. There seems to be some debate on that matter. But were I a juror in doubt about who was going to pay … not the poor, suffering widow! … I would still go ahead with a fat reward for Jesse’s loss of income, fully expecting that the judge and appeals will shave that number down … a lot.

That way the reckless publisher (and their ilk) would get a loud message, but the inncocent family of a “bonafide American hero” will never miss a meal. (Hell, Clint Eastwood, who’s directing a move of “American Sniper”, could write a personal check for the widow’s losses.)

Until a juror speaks up, we won’t know their thinking for certain. But I want to believe that Team Ventura struck a righteous, populist nerve. A nerve that says writers and publishers, especially big corporate publishing houses have to make at least a good faith attempt at accuracy, and … if you’re big enough to have insurance to cover screw ups, the bastards at Pan Global Monolith Insurance, Inc. can afford to cover the tab.

Here’s Hoping Jesse Wins

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Lambert_to_the_SlaughterIt hard to take Jesse Ventura’s defamation suit seriously. Too much irony keeps getting in the way. I mean Jesse Ventura outraged that someone put too much show biz in their shtick? Gotta love it.

But whether he wins — which is doubtful, despite, I believe being warranted — I’d like to think his willingness to mount an attack will have, if only a momentary, impact on our vast, fetid “non-fiction” industry.

Our guy Jesse is many things. Among them: A grasping, self-serving, self-aggrandizing, thin-skinned galoot. But he is also positively reverential about the Navy SEALs and the bond of macho brotherhood with those who have served. Similarly, he has been unabashedly vocal about the War in Iraq since it was launched, saying rational, reality-based things about that misbegotten adventure I’ve still never heard from the likes of John McCain or Lindsey Graham.

For those reasons alone it is nearly impossible for me to believe that he ever said the SEALs “deserve to lose a few” to anyone, much less a group of actual (half drunk) SEALs practically in their own backyard. Even if he too was drunk or hell, on mescaline, like some sage native mystic, asking me to believe Jesse Ventura urged death on any of his brothers-in-shark-infested-waters is a bridge … way too far.

And based on the deposition of Chris Kyle, the now-deceased “American Sniper” himself, the whole incident at the bar in San Diego, with all the chest bumping, swaggering, taunting and brawling sounds deeply flaky, as in it made for a much better story when you’re trying to sell a tough guy/uber-patriot memoir. Certainly a lot better than letting Ventura get away with an anti-war crack. When your target audience is gun-worshipping, flag-waving, hoo rah wannabes, you slap that shit down … even if you actually didn’t.

Jesse’s fight coincides with right-wing fantasist Edward Klein’s latest best-seller, “Blood Feud”, in which we’re too believe the Obamas and the Clintons are, behind the scenes, in private, barely different in their connivery and blood lust than the Lannisters and the Starks on “Game of Thrones”. If Jesse thinks he got unfair treatment in Kyle’s book (ghost-written, of course) imagine how Hillary feels with Michele Obama calling her the “Hilldebeest”, and how about Barack pounding down the vino and bad-mouthing Bubba to his face? I always knew that guy a drunk and a boor. I mean, hell, did you see him boozing it up in Texas? W* never behaved like that.

Point being of course we rarely have any good reason to believe anything in a memoir — really, any memoir, including Hillary Clinton, Tim Pawlenty, Michelle Bachman, every tired old statesman, jock, pop star, etc. — although, personally I’d actually read Vladimir Nabokov or William Styron in their own words than the ghost-written, demo-targeted tale of an expert rifleman, who despite the hagiographic lurches would never have been mistaken for Vasily Zaytsev defending Stalingrad from the Nazis.

And why stop with memoirs? The publishing industry has only the most loosely defined and even more loosely policed definition of “non-fiction”. It hardly matters to the average publisher, and not at all to the partisan houses pushing precisely what their demographic wants to hear, if no one can corroborate the author’s astonishing verbatim dialogue from private episodes between characters who’d rather flatten him under their limo wheels than grant him an interview.

House attorneys may scour books for the most egregious slander, to avoid time-sucking litigation. But once into the realm of “celebrity” or “public person”, why waste time checking and deleting the juicy stuff that might accelerate on the Interwebs and move product? If the aggrieved celebrity yob wants to declare the whole thing an insult to nature and a hideous, despicable lie, well hell, thank them for being stupid and vain enough to goose the publicity effort.

According to reports from the Ventura trial, Jesse’s original complaints about the Kyle book spiked sales and delighted the publisher, proving again that the best offense in the face of obscene offense is … nothing. Ignore it. The shelf life of the average, under-publicized unlitigated memoir is about as short as a mayfly, or a jihadi in a sniper’s crosshairs.