An Open Access Review Journal Encouraging Critical Engagement with the Continuing Process of Inventing the Middle Ages

February 4, 2017

Woods: The Medieval Filmscape

William F. Woods.  The Medieval Filmscape: Reflections of Fear and Desire in a Cinematic Mirror. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014. 

Reviewer: Erin Lee Mock (emock@westga.edu)

Writing about “period” film as “period film” is rife with difficulty as William F. Woods admits in The Medieval Filmscape: Reflections of Fear and Desire in a Cinematic Mirror.  Beyond the question of period itself, all studies of genre or subgenre present the problem of “quality,” and the “medieval filmscape” does so more than most.  A responsible scholar must attend to a variety of texts which include, to use Rick Altman’s term, the “semantic” elements of that genre, including many films which are frankly terrible.  Simultaneously, most scholars who undertake subgenre study do so to argue for its critical function.  Woods manages this problem structurally and through one major metaphor (the mirror), which is his greatest strength. 

Woods opens his introduction, “Our Lady of Pain: The Subgenre of Medieval Film,” by marking the breadth of the subgenre in terms which are both neutral and indicative of its variable quality.  “Blood-soaked epic, mystical sword and sorcery, legalistic monkish psychodrama—these are the medieval movies” (3).  Such a list brings to mind the subgenre’s possibilities: a committed film scholar can think of examples that run the gamut of grade and importance.  The remainder of the (quite comprehensive) introduction breezes through films like Christian Duguay’s Joan of Arc (1999), which was devastated by critics and a box-office bomb, but nonetheless typifies the subgenre.  Wood also acknowledges his own “guilty pleasures” and his enjoyment of a “gloriously bad movie,” which squares with his genial and reader-friendly style and lends credibility to his inclusive approach (26, 30). 

Wood then uses Part I to address three significant issues in the study of the medieval filmscape before transitioning to case studies in Part II.  This has become a familiar sequence for genre study, but Wood’s list of “issues” (Authenticity, Simplicity, and Spectacle) is not precisely about what is contained or addressed in the filmic texts themselves.  This choice is to his credit.  Rather than adopting what Rick Altman famously called a “semantic” approach to the subgenre, Wood’s three categories address important questions about the very existence of the subgenre: why it continues to exist, why filmmakers and viewers return to it again and again, what is at stake in its recurrence [1]?  His simple argument is that the viewer is better able to understand her own life and struggles through seeing their representations in a medieval context.

The chapter on “Authenticity” is the most difficult undertaking.  Woods announces in the chapter’s first page that “despite their mythic overtones and romance coloring, medieval movies, like medieval histories, have to deliver a convincing picture of life” and he connects this to “cinematic realism” (23).  Theories of “cinematic realism” abound and scholars and viewers have been discussing the topic since the origin of cinema itself.  Historical adaptation study is a field almost entirely concerned with fidelity and authenticity.  Sarah Salih’s essay, “Cinematic authenticity-effects and medieval art: a paradox,” alone would have done some heavy lifting [2]. Major monographs and collections on these issues appear to this day, but Woods consults only two of them.  A deeper sense of the field would have been to his benefit.

Chapter 2 on “Simplicity” is short, solid, and convincing.  The “mirror” argument—that we see ourselves in the medieval context—falls easily in line.

“Spectacle,” Chapter 3, is the strongest because it is the most original.  Woods expands the category of spectacle such that it is not the joust or the battle which suffices.  He reads royalty and religious figures as spectacles in themselves.  Because Woods presents a unique idea, he might have taken it further, perhaps exploring how such a reading might offer deeper critiques of institutions and hierarchies in both medieval and modern societies.  If these films are indeed mirrors, they supply abundant opportunities to reflect on the superficial, corrupt, and unsavory elements of modern power structures. 

Woods does, however, grapple a bit more with the potential for critique as he moves into Part II, his case studies.  Two of these chapters (three case studies) rise above the others for their ambition.  These first two chapters not only add nuance to Woods’s earlier themes, but regard films which are strange and aesthetically overwhelming.  

Woods begins Chapter 4 by considering The Advocate (Megahey, 1993), a rich and sophisticated text.  As Woods puts it, “[i]n perhaps no medieval film are audiences so insistently invited to scrutinize, evaluate, and go beyond the information given” (62).  Without a thorough knowledge of the subgenre, I’m inclined to agree.  The film portrays Richard Courtois (Colin Firth), a wealthy French lawyer based on Bartholomew Chassenee and is cynical nearly to the point of nihilism.  Courtois is an animal advocate and the film is rife with images of animals which are beautiful, but just as often disturbing.  Woods addresses this visual landscape as a backdrop for a what he calls “protocols,” rituals which make the experience more “real” for the viewer as they seem so particular to the world of the film (68-9).  While some of the connections he makes (Thoreau, for example) seem like non sequiturs, I admire his willingness to confront such a complex film.

Chapter 5 in Part II may be even bolder, taking on canonical films by canonical filmmakers, The Seventh Seal (1957) by Ingmar Bergman and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928). Woods immediately dispatches with this, moving immediately from their reputations to their purpose in The Medieval Filmscape, writing that “they are less interesting as icons of high modernism than for the powerful ways that they exploit the conventions of medievalism. . . . in each case an unrelenting focus on a spiritual quest that has never seemed so nakedly and humanly genuine as it does in these two films” (76).  He offers a consistent summary and description of The Seventh Seal, especially contemplating the opening scene, arguing as he has that the medieval context allows the viewer to ponder the merging of the “mundane and the transcendent” in our own lives, as our character Jof has one.  Regarding La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, Woods makes the point, familiar to film scholars, that Dreyer’s close-ups create an intense intimacy with Jeanne d’Arc (Maria Falconetti). Woods’s mirror metaphor is most apt and powerful in this example (86).

Chapters 6-8 consider texts which seem less interesting to this cinema-minded reader, though a medievalist is likely to see their importance more clearly (i.e. lesser works by important filmmakers like Eric Rohmer’s Perceval le gallois and Robert Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac, as well as films by less well-known directors, including Jean-Jacques Annaud’s adaptation of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose [1986] and Daniel Vigue’s The Return of Martin Guerre [1982]).  For example, aesthetic quality aside, French Arthuriana more than merits a chapter.  I was interested again though by Chapter 9, in which Woods begins to apply his notion of the “mirror” to a more specific modern context, writing on Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven (2005).  Here, Woods even mentions the filmmaking context: “Scott issued copies of the early script to historians and others whose opinions might carry weight with the public, it became apparent that the crusades themselves, let alone the Iraq war, had not ended” (155). Woods argues then that Scott’s script requires a “privileging of eastern culture,” even as it indulges in what is “unashamedly a celebration of Orientalism” (166).  Though Woods himself does not make this argument particularly, this Orientalism—the film sets up Jerusalem as a place for Balian (Orlando Bloom) to “find himself”—may in fact “mirror” American notions of the Middle East at the time (166).  Woods argues later that “the measure of ethical authority in this film is ultimately the culture of the East,” but that the East allows a sort of wealth that Balian ultimately rejects, and it’s hard not to see Scott imploring Western divestment from the conflicts—and the oil—of the Middle East (174).  This more explicit politics of the “mirror” elevates the metaphor as Woods nears the end of his argument.

Oddly, in the Epilogue Woods seems reluctant to put his finger on that which is reflected in the mirror, even as he gestures toward “the self-made man,” “the striver,” “the Pony Express,” “freedom and equality,” and “two political parties,” among other things.  Is it a version of modern American-ness that he is arguing is reflected or reflecting?  I suppose I wish he’d told us.  The end of the book however justifies its premise: the “mirror” is not the tautological or trite metaphor it may seem, but a way of thinking through “period” and genre which has the potential for multifaceted uses.

Erin Lee Mock
University of West Georgia

[1] “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre,” Cinema Journal 23.3 (Spring 1984): 6-18.

[2] In Medieval Film, eds Anke Bernau and Bettina Bildhauer (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2009).


January 25, 2017

Metzler, Fools and Idiots?

Irina Metzler. Fools and Idiots? Intellectual Disability in the Middle Ages. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016.

Reviewed by Lauryn S. Mayer (lmayer@washjeff.edu)

While both the figure of the court fool and that of the medieval madman have been the subject of numerous publications, research on medieval perceptions of intellectual disability has been relatively neglected. As Metzler notes in her introduction, “the overarching interest of historians has been in the more glamourous acquired madness rather than folly or idiocy” (2). Interest in the topic has also been hampered by the all-too-prevalent construction of the Middle Ages as simple, primitive, or childish, a place where intellectual disability would be inherently less visible among the populace, or by excessive caution in applying modern diagnostic criteria to a pre-modern phenomenon. Moreover, there are serious obstacles in doing hard analysis of instances of intellectual disability in the Middle Ages: since intellectual disability was seen as incurable, and the figure of the idiot was rarely deemed a danger to herself or others, there is a severe lack of medical evidence or institutional documentation of cases of intellectual disability. Given all these challenges, it is impressive indeed that Metzler has managed to craft such a careful, comprehensive, and nuanced study of intellectual disability in the Middle Ages. 

Metzler’s introductory chapter (“Pre-Conceptions: Problems of Definition and Historiography”) sets itself the task of defining what intellectual disability would have meant in the Middle Ages, and uses modern medical definitions as an entry point to examining their medieval counterparts, while acknowledging the care needed to avoid imposition of categories where they are not appropriate or justified. Her task is to try to distinguish types of intellectual disability that can be seen as primarily biological in origin, and thus less prone to charges of cultural relativism (the recent conflict surrounding the diagnosis in children of ADD or ADHD, sometimes simply from their inability to sit still for extended periods of time, is a timely reminder of the way a society may pathologize behavior that may, in another culture or period, be seen simply as natural or age-related). She therefore selects for her field of inquiry neurodevelopmental disorders as the kind of disorders that will provide the greatest stability for analysis; as she argues, “they are all developmental, in other words either congenital or connected to specific developmental stages of infancy, childhood, or adolescence – they all manifest before adulthood and then remain with the person for life” (4). Their application to the Middle Ages comes from the kinds of circumstances that produce these disorders: “genetic syndromes, congenital metabolic disorders, brain malformations, maternal disease, and environmental influences such as alcohol, toxins, and teratogens” (5), circumstances which, as she argues, “would have been likely risks during the medieval and any other period” (5). 

While she founds her study on these more stable disorders, it is important to note that she is not, thereby, refusing to examine the way discourses about these disorders were created and disseminated in the medieval period, and thus deftly charts a middle course between over-simplistic arguments for biological determinism or complete social construction of intellectual disability, using the medieval idea of multivalent truths as a guide: in quoting Ian Hacking’s portrayal of critical anxiety that “something can be both socially constructed and yet ‘real’”, Metzler comments that medieval intellectuals “had an easier job, by splitting a single monolithic ‘truth’ into a number of ‘truths’ according to divine or human, natural or otherworldly modes of understanding”(7). In sum, her project is to examine how neurodevelopmental disorders are discussed across an array of medieval texts, and to try to glean from often scattered and opaque references a picture of medieval attitudes toward intellectual disability. 

Chapter Two explores pre-modern terms used to describe intellectual disability in a wealth of languages: Semitic, Ancient Greek, Latin, Old English, Middle English, Anglo-Norman French, and Middle High German demonstrating, in the process, the rich and subtle array of terms that argue for a high pre-modern sensitivity to the kinds and degress of intellectual disability an individual might manifest. For example, Metzler looks at the contexts of the terms stultus and fatuus, arguing that the former referred to “philosophical stupidity, that is, doing something stupid despite having the capacity not to do so” (39) as opposed to the fatuus, “who is foolish because he can’t help himself” (39). 

Chapters three through six build on this semantic foundation, and look at the discourses of intellectual disability as they appear in the realms of natural science, philosophy and law. While these chapters, with their rigorous and exhaustive winnowing of texts for mentions of intellectual disability, are invaluable as a resource for future scholars, of particular interest for the medievalist are the ways in which they help to create a more complex view of medieval medicine, philosophy, and law to counter tropes about the “primitive” Middle Ages: how premodern explorations of intellectual disability reveal an early interest in materialist explanations for the phenomenon, a precursor of current interest in genetics and molecular biology, how medieval legal terminology was fluid not because of imprecision because of a wide array of terms for both idiocy and insanity, allowing a particular official to choose the term that best fit the situation, and how rather than there being a cultural conflation between the natural (inherent) fool and the artificial (professional) fool, medieval society had a long tradition of distinguishing between the two.

The final chapter (“Reconsiderations: Rationality, Intelligence, and Human Status”) traces the influence of the rise of clerical culture in the thirteenth century and its interest in categorization, classification, and labelling on discourses of intellectual disability. The thirteenth century, Metzler notes, “saw the outpouring of ordered, standardized, measured, and … rational scientific texts” (222). This phenomenon led inevitably to the greater pathologizing of people with intellectual disabilities: “[u]nder the older, more random, fluid descriptions, each case of ‘idiocy’ was individually described and, if in a legal context, judged on its own merits against a fairly diverse and mobile set of criteria. That is frustrating for historians, because it does not give us a neat, consisten definition to get our teeth into, but it was probably good for people with IDs. In the absence of definite criteria and diagnostic standards, fewer people were pathologized and more people were just ‘getting on with it’ in whatever daily life they may have had” (223). 

Metzler concludes her volume by comparing the necessarily rich, fluid, and contingent labelling practices of the “primitive” pre-modern period as practiced on the category of intellectual disability, with the oversimplistic descriptive and evaluative practices too often applied to the Middle Ages by our more “complex” culture, concluding an impressive work of rigorous research with a timely warning against our own potential folly. 

Lauryn S. Mayer                                                                                                                    
Washington & Jefferson College

January 11, 2017

Eastwood (dir.), American Sniper



American Sniper. Written by Jason Hall, Chris Kyle; directed by Clint Eastwood.  Distributed by Warner Brothers, 2 January 2015.

Reviewed by Leila K. Norako (lknorako@uw.edu)

Set in the early 2000s and inspired by Chris Kyle’s eponymous autobiography, the film American Sniper hardly appears inflected with medievalism at first glance. It seeks – according to screen writer Jason Hall – to focus on a single, historic warrior’s consecutive tours of duty in the Iraq war, and is strictly contemporary in that regard. The film, moreover, polarized audiences upon its release. While many praised Bradley Cooper’s convincing performance and the film’s portrayal of a serviceperson’s struggles to reintegrate into civilian life after combat, others critiqued it for its inaccurate portrayal of the Iraq war and for its two-dimensional portrayal of the Iraqi people encountered by Kyle and his fellow sailors and soldiers.

The film’s controversial narrative harnesses affective power by way of a subtle but powerful medievalism: it evokes contemporary perceptions of the crusades at several junctures, and it reaffirms contemporary Islamophobia by stressing the “medieval” brutality of AQI insurgents. Finally, and perhaps most pressingly, it discourages — by way of a comparison of the war in Iraq to the historical crusades — the audience’s impulse to engage in critical thinking about the war or the complex identities of the enemies Kyle and his fellow servicepersons encounter. These moments work in concert in the film and create, however unintentionally on the part of Eastwood and screenwriter Jason Hall, a film that projects an unequivocally triumphalist Christian narrative even as it tries to focus on the disastrous effects of war on those who see combat.

In order to trace American Sniper’s medievalism, it’s crucial to consider the autobiography on which it is based. Also entitled American Sniper, the book enjoyed 37 weeks on the New York Times’ Best Seller’s list, and it recounts Kyle’s childhood and his ten-year career as a Navy Seal, which involved four consecutive tours of duty in Iraq. While the autobiography repeatedly affirms that the world is split between those who do good and those who do evil, it simultaneously reveals a tension between the author’s lived reality and the narrative about his experiences that he tries to construct and interpret. It’s regularly unclear, for instance, whether Kyle believes the insurgents’ actions or the insurgents themselves to be evil. Kyle also simultaneously describes his crusader cross tattoo as a marker of his Christian identity but stresses that he’s not fighting a religious war. These moments in the book reveal the instabilities of Kyle’s worldview, and part of what is striking about his autobiography is its authenticity in that regard; the reader can see him trying to make sense of himself and his ideals and not always succeeding in that endeavor. Thus while his worldview— especially his insistence on xenophobic binaries—might be disturbing to many, the autobiography’s contradictions reveal Kyle’s struggle to come to terms with a series of brutalizing tours of duty, and the book reveals at least one way in which veterans attempt to come to terms with their actions and experiences in war.  As more than oneserviceperson has expressed, and not without some ruefulness, the belief that your enemy is wholly evil is a tempting one to adopt. As I have written elsewhere, “how else can you pull the trigger if you don’t at some level dehumanize the person in your crosshairs? How else can you live with yourself afterwards?”

But whereas the autobiography retains these authentic interpretive contradictions, the film attempts to scrub them from Kyle’s story, thus amplifying his conservative Christian and American heroism. It is worth considering, in this context, that both Taya Kyle (Chris Kyle’s wife) and Wayne Kyle (Kyle’s father) admonished Eastwood, Cooper, and Hall, to get the film “right.” Kyle’s father told them in no uncertain terms that he would “unleash hell” if his son’s memory was dishonored, and Taya Kyle pleaded with them to leave out her husband’s death. As Jason Hall recounts
“Thankfully Taya embraced us a few days after at the funeral and said, ‘If you guys are going to do this, you’re going to need to get it right,’ ” he says. She told him, “This is going to play a part, for better or worse, in how my kids remember their dad.”
While it’s impossible to say how direct an effect these admonishments had, it is clear that the film creators took special care to sanitize certain aspects of Kyle’s character and worldview in order to make him a more sympathetic figure to a wider audience. Kyle regularly refers to the Iraqi people as “savages” in his autobiography, for instance, yet he never once uses that term in the film. Others around him do, and he does not critique them, but the script carefully prevents him from being overtly complicit in that kind of overt xenophobic and Islamophobic branding. The same goes for the impulse to label AQI insurgents as evil. Whereas the autobiography vacillates between labeling the people or just their actions as evil, the film does not allow Kyle to muse along those lines. While a fellow seal (Goat-Winston) calls an AQI insurgent a “fucking evil bitch” after Kyle kills her (an act that, tellingly, seems to upset Kyle tremendously), Kyle only has the following to say in a subsequent scene: “that’s evil like I’ve never seen before.” As he is depicted in the film, then, Kyle takes absolutely no joy in killing people. This is a significant departure from his autobiography, wherein he insists on a clean conscience and says that he had “fun” doing what he did in Iraq.

In keeping with this trend to sanitize, while American Sniper shows Kyle sporting his “crusader cross” tattoo, and shows it prominently featured on a (fictional) bounty poster, the film simultaneously tries to draw as little attention to it as possible. The tattoo is fully visible for grand total of three seconds in the entire film, and it is otherwise hidden or half-covered by a shirtsleeve (thus making it impossible to see the red cross). And unlike the autobiography, Kyle never explains his reason for getting the tattoo.

The only real description of the “crusader cross” tattoo comes mid-way through the film, Lt. Col. Jones and fellow SEAL Lt. Martin debrief Kyle. Jones explains to Kyle that “this war is won or lost in the minds of our enemies,” hands Kyle a bounty poster, points to the cross, and asks: “that you?” Kyle looks at the poster, nods, and says “that’s a crusader cross, yes sir.” After being told that he’s “the most wanted man in Iraq” and has a bounty of $180,000 on his head (a massive exaggeration of the actual $20,000 bounty placed on all American snipers in Iraq at the time), Jones agrees to let Kyle lead a “direct action squad to hunt the Butcher” (an especially vicious – and fictional—AQI insurgent) and instructs him to “put the fear of God in those savages,” which Kyle agrees to do. This scene is compelling for a number of reasons. It metonymically links the crusader cross and Kyle, but it pointedly avoids framing the impending mission to take out the Butcher as religiously motivated. Instead, Jones stresses the tactical value of Kyle’s status as a perceived “crusader.” If, as Jones he sees it, the war will be won or lost “in the mind” of the “savages” they are fighting, then allowing Kyle — identified as a crusader by AQI — to take point on the mission to kill The Butcher stands to have a tremendous psychological impact, given how terrified AQI already is of Kyle (as evidenced by that exaggerated bounty).  This scene, then, simultaneously acknowledges and distances Kyle from the crusader iconography in question. While Kyle acknowledges the tattoo as his own, Jones does the implied interpretive work here, and the insurgents are the ones who use the crusader cross tattoo as the primary symbol with which to identify Kyle. This scene, then, operates much like the split-second glimpses of the cross-tattoo: simultaneously acknowledging the presence of the crusader cross while retreating from its problematic implications shortly thereafter.

While the film should not be critiqued for its refusal to interpret itself on screen, per se, the implications of this interpretive discomfort are worth probing, since the film’s creators inject forceful moments of internal interpretive work elsewhere. Early in the film, Kyle’s father gives a speech to his two sons after Kyle’s brother comes home with a black eye after being bullied at school:

There are three types of people in this world: sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs. Now some people prefer to believe that evil doesn’t exist in the world, and if it ever darkened their doorstep they wouldn’t know how to protect themselves. Those are the sheep. And then you’ve got predators, who use violence to prey on the weak. They’re the wolves. And then there are those who’ve been blessed with aggression and the overpowering need to protect the flock. These men are a rare breed, who live to confront the wolf. They are the sheepdog. [starts to remove his belt] Now we’re not raising any sheep in this family, and I will whoop your ass if you turn into a wolf [slams belt down on table]. But we protect our own. And if someone tries to fight you, or tries to bully your little brother, you have my permission to finish it.

This division of people into neat categories is a convenient fiction presented as fact in the world-building of this story. The scene serves as a prime example of the film’s attempt at overt interpretive cueing. It provides the film’s central thesis, one that most subsequent scenes seeks to affirm and support. As a result, the fact that the film doesn’t seek to present easy interpretive cueing for Kyle’s crusader cross is conspicuous. It suggests rather markedly that the film, while striving for at least the veneer of accuracy, simultaneously seeks to erase from Kyle’s story aspects that might complicate his heroism. And more pressingly, the film attempts through this silence to solidify the categories that it establishes at the outset. The Iraqi civilians in this film are presented either as nameless collateral damage or as wolves in sheep’s clothing, and the AQI insurgents are always presented as predatory wolves defined by a brutality that audiences are consistently encouraged to code as backwards and “medieval.” The film cannot sustain that category fantasy, then, if it foregrounds Kyle’s adoption of crusader iconography too emphatically. The film thus alludes to the cross as briefly as possible in an attempt to smooth over the interpretive wrinkles the cross tattoo otherwise presents; and when it is forced to acknowledge the presence of Kyle’s tattoo, it does its best to insist that the cross can be used in service of Kyle’s role as a “sheepdog.” In this way, the film tries to avoid destabilizing the interpretive lens it insists upon from its inception. This is one way of explaining, perhaps, why the film foregrounds the image of the Punisher logo instead (a comic book antihero who ascribes to a near identical black and white view of the world), which Kyle and his men, according to the autobiography, adopted as a charged symbol of their role in the Iraq war. A viewer could be forgiven for forgetting that Kyle even has a cross tattoo, in other words, but she is hard pressed not to notice the Punisher logo and its evocation of a comic book “hero” who, like Kyle, insists on a black-and-white view of the world. The film, then, in insisting on its own interpretation at certain junctures and refusing to interpret itself at others ultimately champions Kyle’s inherited worldview rather than complicating it, and it does so at the expense of other, more nuanced perspectives on the Iraq war.

The film insists on the validity of this worldview by coding the AQI insurgents as “medieval,” and this impulse fully realized in the fictional portrayal of The Butcher. As Clare Monagle and Louise D’Arcens have stressed, there is a strong tendency in our post-9/11 world to describe Islamic terrorism in just this way. As they explain:

When commentators and politicians describe Islamic State as “medieval” they are placing the organisation opportunely outside of modernity, in a sphere of irrationality. The point being made is that they are people from a barbaric and superstitious past, and consequently have not matured into modern political actors. Medievalising IS supporters puts them a very long way away from the here and, even more pointedly, from the now.

While the word medieval isn’t used in the film, American Sniper nevertheless “medievalises” the AQI insurgents in this exact way. They are constantly referred by US servicepersons as “savages,” and the civilians are also subjected to a range of slurs as well. The Butcher, in particular, operates as the most vivid embodiment of this impulse to “medievalise.” He revels in torture, going so far as to display the stray limbs and heads of his victims in what appears to be a meat locker. And in what is doubtless the grisliest scene in the entire film, he takes a power-drill to a child’s leg and head. While The Butcher may be loosely based on Ismael Hafidh Al-Lami, a Shia terrorist,  this scene and character are a complete fiction. Kyle never encountered anyone like the Butcher during his four tours of duty, and he never witnessed the torture and death of a child as he does in the film. This scene is profoundly disturbing, then, not only because of its horrific content but because of its affective purpose. Like “The Prioress’s Tale” in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, it attempts, through its completely fictional content and its encouragement to sympathize with tortured child and with Kyle, to stoke (in this case) Islamophobia in its audience. The film does not simply acknowledge Kyle’s insistence on a simplistic binary. Through its representation of the Iraqi people as nameless collateral damage and/or two-dimensional “medievalised” villains, the film actively encourages audiences to insist upon it as well.

This false and deeply problematic insistence on AQI as implicitly medieval accords with the film’s rejection of critical thinking about the Iraq war. Right before leaving on his third tour, Kyle spies his brother on the tarmac. They embrace, and it becomes abundantly clear that the tour has shattered Jeff. Kyle tries to reassure Jeff that their father is proud of him, and Jeff all but brushes off that assurance, stepping back to say “fuck this place” (referring to Iraq) before turning to head for his transport. While his brother’s attitude clearly disturbs Kyle, he says nothing. A space opens, as a result, for audiences to critically examine the war and its tragic effects on those who fight in it. This space is sustained in an ensuing scene where Kyle talks to his friend and fellow SEAL Marc Lee. Lee has consistently been portrayed in the film as a more cerebral man than Kyle up to this point, and he expresses a newly developed and/or mounting concern about the ethics of the war in which he’s fighting:

Marc: You know growing up in Oregon we had this electric fence around our property. Us kids would grab on to it to see who could hold on the longest. War feels kinda like that. It puts lightning in your bones and makes it hard to hold on to anything else. 

            Chris: Hey man, you need to sit this one out?

            Marc: I just want to believe in what we’re doing here.

            Chris: Well there’s evil here, we’ve seen it.

            Marc: Yeah, there’s evil everywhere. 

Chris: You want these motherfuckers to come to San Diego or New York? We’re protecting more than just this dirt. 

Marc: [with a look that signals something short of agreement] Alright. Let’s go kill this fucker.

Marc is eventually shot and killed in the line of duty, and at his funeral his mother reads a portion of the letter that he wrote a few days before his death:

"Glory is something some men chase and others find themselves stumbling upon, not expecting to find it. Either way it is a noble gesture that one finds itself bestowed upon them. My question is, when does glory fade away and become a wrongful crusade . . .”

The script faithfully replicates the opening lines of the letter that the actual Marc Lee wrote shortly before his death. As these lines suggest, the unread portions of the letter reflect the thoughts of a man who wants to believe in the rightness of what he is doing in Iraq, but who is clearly torn about some of his experiences and about the virtues (or lack thereof) of the country that has sent him to war. While Kyle has nothing but positive things to say about Marc and this letter in his autobiography, the film inserts a (presumably fictional) dialogue between Kyle and Taya that works to inscribe Marc’s rather mild questioning of the war in the moralizing framework of the film:

Taya: Marc wrote that letter two weeks ago. Did he say any of that to you? [pause] Chris, I wanna know what you thought of his letter.

Chris: An AQI informant had called in a tip and, uh, Biggles had just been shot and we were operating out of emotion, and we just walked right into an ambush. But that’s not what killed him [Marc]. That letter did. That letter killed Marc. He let go and he paid the price for it. 

Rather than sustaining a space for criticism of the Iraq war (created by the scene with Kyle’s brother and the earlier scene with Marc), this scene unequivocally rejects the very impulses that lead to such criticism. Instead, it stresses the fact that criticism of the war, especially if you are a serviceperson, either weakens (in the case of Jeff) or kills (in the case of Marc) those who engage in it. The scene, then, reaffirms the governing ideology of the film. Kyle survives the war and Marc and Jeff do not, because Kyle is able to correctly categorize his enemies and those he, as a sheepdog, must protect.[1] In this way, the film sets up its audience to expect a degree of ambivalence about the war that it then patently rejects. And in having Kyle reject Marc’s impulse to think critically about the war in which he is fighting, the film tacitly chides its audience for being inclined to do so as well. Audiences are potentially manipulated as a result: invited into a space of critical inquiry only to find themselves condemned by the hero of the film for entering it.

Aside from the mention of Kyle’s “crusader cross” tattoo, Marc’s letter is the only other instance in the film where the word “crusade” is uttered. But in rejecting Marc’s impulse to critique the war, Kyle stresses the importance of not thinking of history as cyclical, especially if you are in combat. Several veterans have rightly critiqued the film for this particular message, stressing that it is possible to be a committed serviceperson and hold complex feelings about the wars in which they fight. It is nevertheless crucial to consider the implications of this scene for the viewing audience. If we accept Kyle as the narrative and interpretive authority that he is presented to be—then we are being encouraged to believe that critical thinking is inherently harmful to a serviceperson (and potentially to audience members as well), and that any consideration of our cultural past, any willingness to acknowledge the lineage that we have inherited from the Middle Ages, any attempt to resist the impulse to medievalize those we might Other, is inherently wrong-headed.

Admittedly, the film does try to assess the costs of war in certain ways. We are forced to witness the death of innocent Iraqi civilians, for instance, with special attention being paid to the horrific and tragic impact of the war on Iraqi children, and we are shown throughout the film (but especially towards the end) the dramatic impact the war has on the bodies and psyches of those who fight in it. However, even these scenes work to amplify the audience’s sympathy for the Americans in question. The scene where the Butcher kills the Iraqi child, for instance, is ultimately made into a means of stressing Kyle’s post-traumatic stress: It explains both his distress over hearing his newborn daughter wailing in the hospital nursery and his agitation as he listens to the innocuous sound of a power tool at a car dealership. The scene where an Iraqi child picks up a rocket launcher, in turn, becomes a way of amplifying sympathy for Kyle; as he stares at the child through his scope, we hear him pleading with the child to drop the weapon so that he doesn’t have to kill him. The child eventually does drop the weapon and run, and Kyle nearly breaks down in response. We are encouraged, then, only to see the child as a threat both to the Americans on the ground and to Kyle. Perhaps the clearest example of this tendency, however, lies in the depiction of the Syrian sniper. In one brief scene, we see the Sniper in his home with his presumed wife and child. This might seem, at first, as an attempt to forge a positive comparison between Kyle and the Sniper, demonstrating that both are family men serving their respective sides), but this reading is ultimately difficult to sustain. Whereas Taya is shown consistently as Kyle’s equal in marriage, the woman with the Syrian sniper is granted only a few seconds of screen time and says nothing, presented only as a wildly problematic Western stereotype of a submissive Muslim wife. Whereas Taya is given a voice and agency, this woman is shown staring nervously and timidly at the floor as she tries to sooth her agitated infant. Whereas Kyle actively engages with both his wife and children, the Syrian sniper does not so much as glance at his wife or child in this scene. Instead, he sits on the couch, spinning a bullet on the table as he waits for his next call to action. And when that call comes, he mechanically gets up, readies his weapon, puts on his signature bandanna, and leaves without so much as a parting look at his family. This lack of engagement directly contrasts with a scene immediately prior, where Kyle and Taya have a tense conversation about his service in his infant daughter’s light-filled nursery – Taya openly expresses her anger about his inability to prioritize his family while Kyle holds his daughter and concedes (through facial expressions if not through words) that she is right. Rather than humanizing the Syrian sniper, then, the scene dehumanizes him by directly inviting comparison. Kyle—imperfect as he may be—is immediately positioned here as the superior warrior, husband, and father. And while Kyle does, in the last several minutes of the film, express a readiness to go home for good (symbolically leaving his sniper rifle and Bible in Iraq), American Sniper takes considerable care to frame Kyle’s service as heroic and worthy of praise, even as it acknowledges the terrible toll that the war took on him.

Jason Hall, Clint Eastwood, and Bradley Cooper have consistently claimed that the film was meant to “promote discussion” about the sacrifices veterans make, and the toll wars take on those who fight in them. And, in truth, the parts of the film focused on the costs of war (both physical and psychological) are consistently and impressively wrought. Hall was also emphatic that this was a film told from one Navy SEAL’s perspective, and that as a result the interpretive lens could not be widened to accommodate other takes on the Iraq war. The film could have accomplished this goal more effectively, however, without fictionalizing and white-washing Kyle’s story, and without insisting on a troubling impulse to “medievalise” the enemy while glossing over Kyle’s appropriation of crusader iconography. Instead, the film becomes a moralizing tall-tale that, in an attempt to present a resolutely positive and heroic portrait of Kyle, promotes an array of profoundly problematic ideas about the wars in which Kyle fought.

History, as so many have argued, is cyclic, and given our current socio-political moment, that truth is especially pressing. This is why a film like American Sniper, well-intentioned as it may well have been in many respects, warrants the very kinds of critical inquiry it seeks to discourage in its viewing audience. It is imperative, as a result, that we acknowledge the problematics of historical elision in a film like American Sniper, because, simply put, the stories we tell matter. The words we use to tell them matter. They have the capacity both to reflect our desires and to shape our aspirations and worldviews. The concerning thing about the story presented in this film is how much it represents cultural binaries not as fictions but as facts, and how much it promotes the notion that thinking carefully and critically will either break you or get you killed.

--Leila K. Norako, University of Washington


[1] The film ends with Kyle’s death (which took place well into the production of the film) at the hands of a veteran, and thus seems to complicate this representation of Kyle as someone who can always correctly categorize those around him. It suggests, then, that while Kyle can correctly read his enemies abroad, he has a harder time identifying those who might do him and his loved ones harm once he’s back home. This is problematic, ultimately, because since the film’s thesis is one that insists on a world comprised of wolves, sheep, and sheepdogs, the veteran who kills him – ostensibly suffering from PTSD -- is a wolf, and therefore evil. This governing ideology of the film then, allows the closing moments of the film to perpetuate, however inadvertently, abelist stereotypes (and the impulse to Other veterans psychologically affected by the war) as opposed to encouraging complex thinking and compassion.