American Sniper
- Thread starter Paranoia
- Start date
Void
Experiencer
- 9,425
- 11,093
To cater to people like you that can't watch a goddamn movie and enjoy it (or not) without analyzing the fuck out of it and ruining it for everyone?
Lithose
Buzzfeed Editor
- 25,946
- 113,035
Honestly it sounds more like you need to believe this rather than what empirically you'd see around you. I guarantee you the vast majority of Americans think of movies like Platoon, or FMJ, when they think of Vietnam. And there were plenty of movies that focused on the brutality of OUR soldiers over there, including the two you mentioned. Neither of those movies made soldiers look like heroes at all; and in fact, many made a mockery of ever considering a soldier a hero (Most of them presented soldiers as confused young men of circumstance who were just looking to endure the horrendous war). This is such a ridiculous position that I'm having trouble believing you believe it. I can't even fathom how anyone believes the Vietnam genre to be "propaganda". Even heavily patriotic, Pro-American movies like We were Soldiers, emphasize the loss of life and the stupidity of war.
Also, Rambo is not dangerous. Do you honestly believe anyone takes Rambo 2seriously? That movie was being parodied and mocked the moment it came out. This is part of the problem, Dum--you have this deep yearning to believe the absolute worst in everyone, and it shows in your value judgments (Or you and Taib are disgusted because the Utopia you believe is right around the corner is so clear for you; and the plebs who don't see it are really annoying fuck faces
). I get it, I'm a pretty hardcore pessimist to. But standing next to you and Taib? I feel like I'm Gene Kelly. Now, the thing is Taib has a reason for this; he's specifically trying to counter what he perceives to be an established culture placating everyone to subsist off the path of least resistance. And he does this because the anti-establishment crowd tends to buy his papers. (And this is not saying the Establishment is good, or bad, or whatever--but in some cases, his need to tear that shit down? Makes him forgo nuance and pragmatism, in order to really push rage and singular good vs bad narratives.)I don't view everything as propaganda--really I think is the difference. I don't sit there and wonder how the man is fucking me over with this movie. I liked Gump, not going to lie--but I realized on my first watch it was anincrediblysimplisticmovie meant to let history talk in theleastthreatening way possible. It did that by creating a character that could NOT have moral judgements on very complex topics and then shoving him in front the biggest events of that time period. Him not having the ability to grasp things? Is what allowed them to make a functioning movie and cover so much history in a personal matter. (A normal character would have had to have changed, and commented on history--Gump though just got out of the way and YOU were left to fill in what that meant to you.)
Gump's flaw isn't that it was insidious or displaying a message--it's that it was lazy in it's narrative. The director purposely spit out platitudes that were woefully inaccurate or unfitting because he didn't want to get in the way of the audience just watching history go by. I mean, Dumar--I hate to tell you this bro. But they actuallytell you what you get in a Box of Chocolates. His platitudes were nonsense because they weren't meant to be serious commentary, the Director bent over BACKWARDS so people could not get angry about his "take" on important events. I can't even fathom the pessimism/bias required to take "box of chocolates" and not disregard it as a saccharine way of saying "no comment, don't pay attention to what I think because I'm retarded" and instead apply itseriouslyas a bad metaphor for the fall out of hegemonic stability practices of the U.S. But therealirony of Taibi's take is Vietnam was the ONE event in the movie where he had long term characters used as props around Gump to display how much this eventsucked; either by being killed, or maimed. It was reallyoneof the few places in the movie where there was actually a narrative against that historical event.
The fact that Taibi still managed to twist it into you head that it was a propaganda, and somehow those characters were harmed as a kind of political, propaganda "punishment" is just. Wow; yeah, that's as bad as believing Hitman invites us to be sexually violent toward unsuspecting female victims. Like I said, Matt Taibi's interpretation says more about HIM, than the movie. People walked out of Forest Gump mostly with how they viewed history; if you believe the U.S. is some corrupted evil Empire that sews suffering at the behest of it's corporate overlords, well you're going to walk out with the view of events that stated Murica wants retards, because retards are easier to control. If you view the U.S. as a very complex structure of people and interests, which made mistakes, had small triumphs and is full of both good and bad people/institutions that occasional push good and bad agendas? You'll probably see the movie as just being a trip down history lane, and how most people are way too small to do anything but stand by and watch history unfold.
As Fana said, Chomsky's definition of propaganda comes wildly close to classic post modernist thought (Which, despite Chomsky not liking, he does stray close to every now and then). That things can't exist without a message, everything is political; and objective but narrowly scoped views of events simply don't exist (not that this was one, it had issues, but it's what it attempted to be) . Was there some propaganda in the movie?Yes(Kyle was a one dimensional good guy, when obviously he also had his asshole side like every human. But it takes some stretching to make that into nationalistic propaganda, but sure, you could. Painting seals as unblemished paragons, when they are just human can be construed as propaganda for the armed services.). Does that make the whole film "dangerous propaganda film"? No, that's hyperbole.Especiallyconsidering thecontextof how those "idolized" soldiers went through the meat grinder. I didn't see all those idolized Navy Seals and Marines get vacant stares and disillusioned with life after having to shoot children, and think "my god, that makes me think Murica is awesome, this war was a good idea". Instead I saw that commentary as saying, I believe, even the best parts of the war (The Soldiers) were ultimatelyalsotainted by how shity it was, and no one is really joe-good guy in war. (In fact, one of the ways the film failed for me was not going down that rabbit hole more.)
And come on, Dumar--the irony is saying we "stupidize" things is a way to "stupidize" the reasons why we simplify things (lol). You are living in one of the first eras where fields of information are being delivered to every person alive, in a constant stream. "Dumbifying" things is almost required in order to tell stories of small slices of events. And this can happen, while telling a robust story, because there is aTONof media, with tons of delivery methods for everyone (Far more than any point in history). American Sniper does NOT exist in a vacuum. It exists ALONG with Taibi's Iraq pieces, Generation Kill, 400 Iraq HBO documentaries, and a slew of other media and books that have already been written on it. Hell, Taibi himself works within the same system; he often simplifies complex economic and financial tools into very simplistic metaphors in order to feed it to his audience. IE he has "dumbified" it. (The only difference is you agree with his distilled dumbification in one case, and not in the other.) This is just another way of saying "I'm mad because not everyone is an Economist, or a War Historian or a Weapons inspector!". Yes, Matt Taibi has uncovered the great plot--people need things to be broken down when they are layman and not educated in a specific event/field. (This is why GG is so important for me, because we rely on reporters to do this ACCURATELY). No one piece of media is meant to capture everything--if this was a movie about the Iraq war at large? And it left out what Taibi left out? He might have a point. It's not though, it was about a single person. Expecting it's coverage is as silly as me expecting Taibi's articles to teach everyone how derivatives work when they are benefiting the economy (If he's going to shit on them when they are not.)
As for his his financial stuff; like I said above, read some of his interviews. He talks about how he writes outrage into his pieces, how he purposely simplifies things (I'll try to dig it up, I forget precisely where I read it.) I know,I do it toon this board when I discuss finance stuff. He is not trying to teach someone economics (He doesn't know it himself, he's self taught since 08 but he is well versed and thorough on specific events); he's trying to convey aspecific eventin terms a normal person who understands nothing would understand. While yes, he is more accurate than a movie? That's too be expected, because, you know, Journalists are ethically required to be so. But at their core? Yes, his pieces leave out a lot of nuance, and pragmatic views of WHY things ended up like they are, and potential huge problems if they change (One time he commented on the rationality of plea deal fines--and how he agreed they were rational. But he still rails against them more over fairness, because of how poor people get hauled off for swiping 5$, rather than him having a pragmatic solution to the issues that keep the practice going.). But you know what? That's not a problem, because the presence of those things does not change his own story. Just like the presence of Cheney being a dick head who used the war to secure petrodollars from international conglomerates, there by tying them to stability in the region (Notice how only one American company got exploitation contracts in Iraq? Think that was a mistake? American companies did all the drilling though...har har and made their money before ISIS blew up. Funny.)--does not change how a Sniper in the middle east got survivors guilt and PTSD.
Famm
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
- 11,041
- 794
This was in fact the entire thrust of Taibbi's article, though you seem to prefer nitpicking the one paragraph about Forrest Gump (which was in fact a regrettably lame comparison). The problem he states is that this is the sort of cultural more that leads us to tunnel vision of focusing on some bullshit relaetable human interest story rather than the overall cause and effect and justification or lack thereof. People are easily led into making "the war" all about these individualized and disturbingly one-sided tales. If that doesn't seem to function as a form of propaganda to you then there's no explaining it.
Relevant quotes from article:
That just seems like the real meat of his argument to me, the Gump thing was a throwaway and almost a gag. His problem is that now when voting Americans think about our time in Iraq, their first thoughts may be of the impression this movie left them of one man's story, rather than of what was or wasn't accomplished on the larger scale and what we left behind...which is a more unstable region. Its easier to forget the mistakes of the past when the collective unconscious has replaced those memories with something idealized and irrelevant.
Lithose
Buzzfeed Editor
- 25,946
- 113,035
I talked about the Gump thing, and Vietnam mainly because they illustrate how personal bias can warp someone's view; and interpretation can vary wildly from one person to another. Also, this, all of thsi? Isn't propaganda:information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.. The movie didn't push a conclusion or point of view about the war; at all. You can say it pushed a view of the soldiers, but if you admit that then the movie had an anti-war message because it illustrated how these "heroic" men were all messed up by it's end. Something being "distracting" is not propaganda--that's not how the word works.
Like I said, classifying aLACKof narrative as a form of propaganda is a postmodernism "philosophy" that is typically used to try and remove objective statements in order to achieve a "greater truth". IE everything has a political, social and "greater" truth--I can't even begin to describe how much this bullshit has been infecting "social" history in academia (But that's a whole different post). But where postmodernism gets dangerous is when someone, like Taibi is doing, believes there is this "greater" narrative--and thinks all the data should be altered to reflect it, rather than that greater narrative rising organically from the data. A personal Sniper's recounting of the war doesn't need to include the bigger picture; it should just be another small sliver of data that contributes to someone forming that picture.
But to your point about the meat of the post, you left out his point (But you note it's meaning, still, want to include his words so I can explain why I think it's silly.)
We'll make movies about the Chris Kyles of the world and argue about whether they were heroes or not. Some were, some weren't. But in public relations as in war, it'll be the soldiers taking the bullets, not the suits in the Beltway who blithely sent them into lethal missions they were never supposed to understand.
He believes, as you said, that by making movies about how bad it is for our soldiers--that people will develop a shield that somehow will prevent them from connecting the dots that it was a bunch of old, wealthy elite who sent them there. I guess because, as you said, we will develop "tunnel vision" and be debating the soldiers and not the suits that sent them there. But where does this logic even come from? This is why I brought up Vietnam. He believes this happened in Vietnam; that by making movies about what our soldiers suffered, it "distracted" us and was thus a form of propaganda. I guess that lead us to be suckered into Vietnam 2.0 in Iraq, so obviously these movies are bad, because if we make them everyone gets distracted and THAT is why we get sucked into ten year occupations! (heh)
In reality, the MIC, and the various political apparatuses in this country who often require the military to intervene when other economic/intelligence measures fail, had to spend decades andbillionsin dirty money just to try and stave of what they called "Vietnam Syndrome". Contrary to Taibi's assessment, the media swirling around Vietnam wasveryeffective as making Americans question war, and the decision to go to war. If you could drawanythingfrom the Vietnam genre (And larger media), and the "personalized" stories of victimized soldiers and families that were generated by it, is that theyhumanizedthe war's terrible effects enough for Americans to care about the downsides of war far more than the pure heroic propaganda of WW2. (But even that's a correlation, or course, the reason for the back lash in Vietnam could have been any number of reasons. I'm just illustrating this to show that Taibi's assessment doesn't even have correlative value.)
The only tangible thing he posits his position on is that Vietnam happened, a bunch of movies about Vietnam came out--and subsequently the military apparatus in this country has continued to survive. But like I said above, that's correlation without causation; hell that's correlation without even correlation, because as said the government literally had a crisis of confidence post Vietnam. The reality is Vietnam genre of films, combined with that era's media, did actually precede aretardationof the various political and financial machinations for using Murica's army as a fourth lever in the world stability game (Diplomacy, Intelligence operations, Economic operations, War), at least for alittlewhile. The continued existence of these "beltway forces" that Taibi cites, probably speaks more to their size and how embedded in our economy, and their sheer political power, than anything to do with some cultural shield obfuscating them. Thinking if movies "only told the whole story"--that somehow these forces would change and America would rise up against the hidden plutocrats is some pie in the sky BS that's not really different than believing if only games had female protagonists then rape culture would end.
In my opinion, and yeah, it is my opinion. Movies that illustrate how war fucks up soldiers are probably the most sophisticated anti-war films you can make. Because they work on personalizing how bad war is to the broadest range of people possible. Even jingoistic readnecks who would scoff at a movie about brown people being hurt, will watch it if an Murican hero is in it. And if you can show that Murican hero get fucked over, mentally and physically, by war? You are still conveying an anti-war message, even to the crowd that would normally support it the most. You could argue that American Sniper didn't do that enough, it didn't show enough how much war took out of him; but to try and say this genre of movie, that focuses on the troubles of soldiers, is somehow using "pathos and drama" to prevent people from talking about the consequences of their decisions which allowed the war--is just a stretch that's not supported by anything. (Or it's about as supported as my opinion above--at least my opinion has some weak correlation to a sharp increase in reticence to engage in aggressive foreign affairs after Vietnam.)
stupidmonkey
Not Smrt
- 1,705
- 3,688
Sterling
El Presidente
- 12,965
- 7,858
stupidmonkey
Not Smrt
- 1,705
- 3,688
Sterling
El Presidente
- 12,965
- 7,858
BrutulTM
Good, bad, I'm the guy with the gun.
- 14,445
- 2,224
To my surprise my local theater actually got this movie this week so I went and watched it tonight. I enjoyed it very much although I thought that the wife character was very underdeveloped and therefore fairly unpleasant to watch. That said, Bradley Cooper was great in it and I really enjoyed the parts that were in Iraq.
I really think that the criticisms of the movie are misplaced. This was not a movie about the war in Iraq at all. It was a movie about Chris Kyle, told from his perspective, and based on his book. It was his story and all the "look at the terrible things we have done" would have been out of place and tacked on for no reason other than to make self-righteous liberals feel good about watching the movie since Kyle obviously didn't feel that way about it. The movie didn't set out to be "Platoon" at all and that would have been totally inappropriate. If someone wants to make a movie like "Platoon" about the Iraq war I would definitely go see it, but this was not that movie.
I doubt that it will win any Oscars, but it was a very good movie in my book.
I really think that the criticisms of the movie are misplaced. This was not a movie about the war in Iraq at all. It was a movie about Chris Kyle, told from his perspective, and based on his book. It was his story and all the "look at the terrible things we have done" would have been out of place and tacked on for no reason other than to make self-righteous liberals feel good about watching the movie since Kyle obviously didn't feel that way about it. The movie didn't set out to be "Platoon" at all and that would have been totally inappropriate. If someone wants to make a movie like "Platoon" about the Iraq war I would definitely go see it, but this was not that movie.
I doubt that it will win any Oscars, but it was a very good movie in my book.
Fuck me. All these people carrying on like this movie was some purposeful propaganda created to get people to go kill people in Iraq. It's a fucken movie. Anyone that thinks it will have any real significant impact on society as a whole is an arrogant wanker that thinks everyone else is a brain dead zombie that can be hypnotized to go kill people at the drop of a hat. The self hate in the west is almost unbearable these days.
The Imitation Game glorified war much more than this movie ever dead. More innocent people died from the guy in Imitation game than Chris Kyle ever killed. But it doesn't suit the agenda of the entitled 'privileged' kids that will do anything to say how terrible the west is and how innocent everyone else is.
The Imitation Game glorified war much more than this movie ever dead. More innocent people died from the guy in Imitation game than Chris Kyle ever killed. But it doesn't suit the agenda of the entitled 'privileged' kids that will do anything to say how terrible the west is and how innocent everyone else is.
