American Sniper Research Articles

Reading the Prioress’s Tale as Recovery Romance, or The Tale of a Prioress, a Sniper, and the Cross-Temporal Weaponization of Empathy

ABSTRACT This article argues that the Prioress’s Tale harnesses several narrative elements endemic to a genre of late medieval crusades fantasy—“recovery romance”—in order to weaponize the empathy of its intra- and extratextual audiences. Complementing arguments that have linked the Prioress’s Tale to blood libels abundant in late medieval England, the author contends that the tale borrows from these stories, and specifically from recovery romances, because of their commitment to fantasies of global Christian supremacy achieved through war and genocide. Discerning the link between recovery romance and Chaucer’s tale allows us to reckon fully with the implications of the tale’s Asiatic location and antisemitism. The film American Sniper (2014) provides a contemporary point of comparison.

From Inculcation to Liberation: Pop Culture-Addled Snipers in Clint Eastwood's American Sniper and Alba Sotorra's Game Over

Clint Eastwood's American Sniper (2014) and Alba Sotorra's Game Over (2015) explore the inculcating pull of pop myths on soldiers. Eastwood's biopic focuses on Chris Kyle, American military history’s most lethal sniper. Sotorra's documentary Game Over considers Djalal, an Iranian Catalan youth who moves from being an America-idolizing gamer to a sniper in Afghanistan. Initially, they see themselves as Western cowboys and perfect soldiers. War, however, leaves them disillusioned and traumatized. Via distinct generic formats (documentary v. feature film) and nationally determined political frameworks (US v. Spain), they ask: can mythologies fueling the post-9/11 war machine empty it of its force? Mobilizing postcolonial, disability, and trauma studies, this comparative analysis theorizes how objects of soft power can both harden a soldier’s mind and liberate it from the battlefield’s thrall. Ultimately, the article reveals contrasting, potentially limited strategies subjects across cultures deploy to break the hold of American visions of power.

Popnacjonalizm, czyli elementy dyskursu (re)konstrukcji amerykańskiego poczucia tożsamości narodowej w wybranych filmach hollywoodzkich

This article is dedicated to the idea of pop-nationalism and the connection between popular culture and how its productions (re)construct the American sense of national identity. The study is divided into subsections that delve into topics such as national identity in the current, fragmented social reality, the role of films in propagating American values during times of major socio-political crises, and the concept of banal nationalism according to Michael Billig. To analyze the elements of discourse, three films were chosen – Rocky IV (dir. Sylvester Stallone, 1985), Top Gun (dir. Tony Scott, 1986), and American Sniper (dir. Clint Eastwood, 2014). The research findings indicate that Hollywood films have a significant impact on building and reinforcing a sense of national pride and belonging in American society. Pop-nationalism is often used for entertainment purposes but also as a propaganda tool, especially during periods of international conflicts and political tensions.

REPRESENTATIONS OF IRAQ IN AMERICAN SNIPER

This study investigates representations of Iraq in the film American Sniper(2014). The film encapsulates Hollywoods anti-Muslim discourse post 9/11, which wasparticularly designed to shape public opinion and lay the groundwork for policies that encroach upon civil liberties.To legitimize the draconian, unprecedented measures the Bush Administration introduced in the tumultuous aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the filmdoes not only reinforce the perception of Muslims as primitive savages deserving of every cruelty inflicted on them, but also creates a narrative that conflates patriotism with unequivocalsupport for the governments heavy-handed response. As a point of departure, this thesis draws on a litany of assertions Edward Said made regarding Orientalism, especially his contention that when the United States emerged as a dominant superpower in the aftermath of World War II, supplanting the once mighty and far-flung French and British empires, it inherited a vast repertory of derogatory stereotypes and essentialist tropes about the Islamic Orient. The film, American Sniper,abounds with familiar Orientalist imagery about Muslims, which aim to lock the public in a perpetual state of patriotic hysteria and lend credence to an imperialist discursive tradition that has for long presented the Orient as an inferior, benighted savage that needs to be kept at bay at all costs.

Feminist geopolitics, cinema, and the sensible encounter in American Sniper

Feminist geopolitics, cinema, and the sensible encounter in American Sniper

Constructing Western Civilisation and Eastern Otherness

Edward Saids Orientalism reveals the functionality of the oriental in Western culture that the idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the non-European peoples and cultures. There is in addition the hegemony of European ideas about the Orient, themselves reiterating European superiority over Oriental backwardness This idea can largely apply to the Hollywood films made in the Middle East. The representations on the orientals are extremely similar and biased. This paper aims to use The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2008) and American Sniper (Clint Eastwood, 2014) to demonstrate that the East is artificially instructed by the West through unfolding the processes of othering.

“War on Terror”: The Limitation of Representation of the Film

History was always written by the winners. Despite the fact that the history of the War on Terror is relatively new, Hollywood is quick to develop a visual history of the conflict. Hollywood’s excellent realism aesthetics were successful in justifying the goal and method of the “war on terror,” interrupting ongoing reality to influence and reconstruct public memory about what happened. This dissertation will use three awarded and influential case studies: The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty and American Sniper to demonstrate the fragmentation of film representation, that the film only speaks for “us.” The dissertation aims to uncover the hidden political unawareness behind film representations, the manner in which those films provide limited versions of what happened, and how the films emphasise the self-subjectivity while objectifying the other.

Islamophobia In Western Media: A Study Of American Movies After 9/11

The present study discussed the feelings and sentiments that unquestionably exist in Western media particularly in U.S films against Islam and Muslims after Sep 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States, and the reaction to them increased the hater against Muslims. Specifically, the assumption that Islam is characteristically fierce or that Muslims have a reopensity for psychological warfare. Since 9/11, explicit people have transformed Islamophobia into an industry. In this study, content analysis of some commercially successful U.S films is being provided that has perpetuated popularized Islamophobia. Specifically, Hollywood films i.e. American Sniper, The Hurt Locker, and The Dictator have been examined. Although the researcher’s analysis fundamentally talks about these movies inside the setting of twenty-first century Islamophobia, Additionally, it will also elaborate how relentless negative stereotypes are being drawn from decades against Muslims by the West with the help of media.

Cinema as an Ideological Device: Reflection of the Dominant Ideology to Image and Discourse in the context of American Sniper Film

Kitle iletişim araçları özellikle siyasal iktidarlar ve üretim araçlarını ellerinde bulunduranlar için her zaman önemli bir yere ve işleve sahip olmuştur. Bu araçların en etkililerinden biri olan sinema sanatı, geniş kitlelere ulaşma, kitleleri manipüle etme ve muktedirin arzu ettiği rızayı üretebilecek potansiyele sahip olması sebebiyle her zaman için bir adım önde yer almıştır. Özellikle her iki dünya savaşı yılları başta olmak üzere geçmiş dönemlerde, sinemanın geniş kitleleri etkileme gücünden pek çok siyasal iktidar başta olmak üzere birçok iktidar çeşidi yararlanmıştır. Etkili bir propaganda aracı olan sinema ile Hitler, Mussolini ve Lenin gibi pek çok siyasal aktör, fikirlerini filmler dolayımıyla geniş kitlelere iletme fırsatı yakalamıştır. Başat ideolojinin bir iletim aracı olarak sinema var olan gerçekliği değiştirip dönüştürmede ve yeniden inşa etme noktasında önemli bir dolayım olarak görülmüş, özellikle siyasal iktidarlar tarafından bu etkili kitle iletişim aracı egemen yapının menfaatine olan birtakım olay ve olguları kitlelerin yararınaymış gibi göstermeye çalışmıştır. Bu bağlamda düşünüldüğünde başat ideolojinin ister kitle sineması olsun ister düşünce temelli sinema olsun, en temelde sinemanın bizatihi kendisi ekseninde anlamak oldukça önem taşımaktadır. Bu çalışma ideoloji ve sinema arasındaki bu çok boyutlu ve kapsamlı ilişkiyi kendisine konu edinmektedir. Bu düşünceden hareketle bu çalışmada başat ideolojinin sinemaya olan tezahürü araştırma nesnesi olarak tercih edilen Keskin Nişancı (American Sniper, 2014) filmi örneğinde incelenerek, ideoloji ve sinema arasındaki diyalektik ilişki anlaşılmaya ve ortaya çıkarılmaya çalışılacaktır. İlgili araştırma nesnesi önemli sinematik bakışlardan biri olan ideolojik film eleştirisi ekseninde ele alınacak, böylece en temelde ideolojik enstrümanların filmde nasıl tercih ve temsil edildiği okunmaya çalışılacaktır.

A Critical Analysis of the Political Discourse of Exceptionalism in the American Sniper Movie

Political discourse usually tends to diffuse itself in other discursive fields. One of the areas through which the political field can be reproduced is the field of popular culture, especially films. Moreover, language serves as the intermediate variable in which political discourses in the media offer themselves more or less ideologically. In this paper, the language of the film American Sniper and its relation to the exceptionalism discourse in the politics of the United States is reviewed. It addresses the major question of how the discourse of American Sniper is related to the three layers of exceptionalism discourse. The analysis of the three discursive levels of description, interpretation and explanation of the film based on Fairclough’s model reveals that, by following Hollywood’s dominant framework of discourse towards Islam and the Middle East, i.e., the ‘Islamophobia’ discourse, the film depicts Islam as ‘Other’. The discourse of the film ultimately resides in a wider social action that is congruous with the concept of the political language of exceptionalism.

Hegemoni Hollywood Pada Film American Sniper

Most movies shown in Indonesian cinemas are Hollywood movies. From existing genres, war movies tend to be used by Hollywood to spread their hegemonic practices. American Sniper, which was released in 2014, is one of the examples. The heroic scene acted by the main lead persuades the audience that America has a hero involved in Navy SEALs. This study was qualitative research using a critical paradigm. Hollywood’s hegemony in the film American Sniper (2014) could be understood by elaborating the three dimensions of Critical Discourse Analysis by Norman Fairclough, along with the theory of hegemony by Antonio Gramsci. The result of the research shows that in microanalysis, there are universal and idealist elements such as patriotism, nationalism, and loyalty. Meso analysis found that PT. Omega Film is a registered distributor of Film Censorship Institute (LSF) as part of the Political Society, according to Gramsci, which plays a significant role in the distribution of Hollywood films in Indonesia. Based on the macro analysis, the American Sniper (2014) film is one of the hegemonic practices of Hollywood in the era of neo-conservative that contains American centric.

The Cult of the American Sniper in the Age of the Imperial Security State

This essay analyzes the cult of the American sniper, a figure associated with “covert ops”, atomized violence, and the surprise element of targeted shots fired at long range, as key to the militarization of modern life in the imperial security state. I examine some of the countless books, video games, and websites devoted to teaching civilians how to “shoot like a sniper”, with a “warrior attitude”, urging citizen-soldiers to “remember: complacency kills”. Building on the recent work of Inderpal Grewal, Matthew Thomas Payne, and others, this essay explores the sniper as a fetishized “man as machine” imperial technology, the cyborg analog of the drone in many respects. Recent movies like American Sniper and television series such as Homeland humanize the white male American sniper at the expense of racialized others, particularly Arab and African American characters. However, the position and power of the American sniper has not only been taken up by those who seek to enact white imperial hypermasculine patriarchy; the American sniper has a more complex genealogy that has also been imagined and enacted by African Americans and racial, ethnic, and religious others who turn the state's weapons back on itself. The sniper, like all killing technologies and militarized subjectivities, cannot be fully contained, controlled, or deployed. I consider examples of counter-hegemonic sniping (both imagined and made manifest), with particular interest in the politicized “blow back” of those cultural workers and veterans of colour in the late twentieth and early twenty-first-centuries who trained critique and/or their weapons on local police officers. As we demystify and deconstruct the cult of the American sniper, we come to understand the fallibility, the vulnerability, and the volatility – the insecurity – at the heart of the white supremacist empire and the security state.

Lone wolf family man: Individualism, collectivism and masculinities in American Sniper(s) and Lone Survivor(s)

Lone wolf family man: Individualism, collectivism and masculinities in American Sniper(s) and Lone Survivor(s)

CHRIS KYLE AS A HERO IN AMERICAN SNIPER: A STUDY OF POPULAR LITERATURE

<p>The purpose of this research is to describe the portrayal of hero and heroic mode in the <em>American Sniper </em>movie and explain the reason of hero and heroic mode are represented in the <em>American Sniper</em> movie. The researcher uses popular literature in this study. The research method is descriptive qualitative research. There are two sources of the data; they are primary data and secondary data. The primary data of this research is taken from <em>American Sniper</em> movie. Meanwhile, the secondary of this research are from references from other source which are related to the popular literature. The technique of collecting data is by using documentation. The content analysis is chosen to analyze the data. The result of the research is described as follows: 1) The portrayal of hero has already happened in the previous time, but the heroic mode of hero’s mentality as a husband and father who love his wife and his family as it is shown in <em>American Sniper movie </em>is one of new version which does not happen in the previous time. 2) It <em>shows <em>that the movement of action war movie from time to time reflects the audiences’ interest or the movie lovers to the action war movie. So, it is the motivation for the Hollywood production to continuously create the newest hero movie to fulfill the market request.</em></em><em></em></p>

War, Snipers, and Rage from <em>Enemy at the Gates</em> to <em>American Sniper</em>

Shooting people, murder and war are inherently violent activities to which the concept of rage might seem inextricably linked, but deeper examination reveals levels of complexity. Despite what we often perceive, soldiers are actually trained to operate in a calm and dispassionate manner. This is especially the case for military snipers, who perform the role of hiding in the battlefield, waiting for the chance to take single aimed shots to kill an unsuspecting enemy. My study examines the concept of rage and compares the level of rage in the film American Sniper (2014), set in the Iraq war with that of Enemy at the Gates (2001), set during the siege of Stalingrad in the Second World War. I argue that a form of controlled rage can be seen in the world of the sniper, and I set this against the acceptance of violence in an America where mass shootings appear to be an ever-growing expression of individual rage.

Rage – beyond the Point of Boiling Over

Rage – beyond the Point of Boiling Over

American War Adventure and the Generic Pleasures of Military Violence: Clint Eastwood's American Sniper

The Journal of Popular CultureVolume 51, Issue 6 p. 1376-1397 Special Issue Article American War Adventure and the Generic Pleasures of Military Violence: Clint Eastwood's American Sniper Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet, Agnieszka Soltysik MonnetSearch for more papers by this author Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet, Agnieszka Soltysik MonnetSearch for more papers by this author First published: 12 November 2018 https://doi.org/10.1111/jpcu.12735Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume51, Issue6Special Issue: Revisiting AdventureDecember 2018Pages 1376-1397 RelatedInformation

Declarative and Interrogative Sentences in The Film “American Sniper”

This paper entitled “Declarative and Interrogative Sentences in the Film “American Sniper” is mainly aimed to identify the kinds and functions of declarative and interrogative sentences used in this film directed by Clint Eastwood. The data of this study is declarative and interrogative sentences taken from film entitled American Sniper. This study was using qualitative and documentary methods. The data were analyzed qualitatively in accordance with some related theories to define the kinds and functions of declarative and interrogative sentences. The theories used in this study are declarative sentence theory “Declarative sentence is a sentence that used to expressing of the statement, it completely formed sentence elements such a subject, verb, object, and another element.” by Quirk (1985) and interrogative sentence theory “Interrogative is a term used in grammar to refer to features that form questions.” by John Eastwood (1994). Then the data were presented descriptively by explaining the process and the result of discussion. The finding in the analysis shows that declarative and interrogative sentences was used in the film American Sniper. The result is: two kinds of declarative sentences, positive and negative declarative sentence, and eight kinds of interrogative sentences: (a) yes-no question; (b) w-h question; (c) suggestion; (d) command; (e) request; (f) greeting; (g) confirmation; (h) offering.

Positionality in Embodied War Imaginaries: American Snipers

This paper maps the positionality of two soldiers embodied experiences as snipers for the US military. One, Chris Kyle who is labeled as “the most lethal sniper in US military history,” wrote a book uncritically glorifying his experiences, which was later turned into the Oscar nominated film American Sniper. His attempt to help veterans heal from PTSD by taking them shooting was a possible trigger that reignited the traumas of war, which can be traced to his eventual death. The other, Garett Reppenhagen, who was the first active duty member of the antiwar group Iraq Veterans Against the War, and currently works to help others heal from the traumas of war by getting them engaged in wilderness programs and environmental activism. Both stories expose a range of traumas of war, both within wartime and in peacetime, and we see the ways in which their narratives of war have different reflections of what it means to heal during times of peace. This paper juxtaposes these two stories, their war imaginaries, and how one works to reinforce the military dispositif, while the other works to impede it in favor of human rights.

Capturing Iraq: Optical Focalization in Contemporary War Cinematography

This essay investigates different registers of embedded and fragmentary focalizations in war cinematography on the Iraq War (2003–11), focusing primarily on The Hurt Locker (2008) and the HBO mini-series Generation Kill (2008), but also addressing American Sniper (2014) and the Abu Ghraib scandal. I argue the “extreme close-up” that focuses almost unilaterally on the men on the ground during the Iraq War implicates a “bigger picture”: a larger frame of discourse put forward by the corporate media and the government. This is primarily achieved through recursive narrative structures and through the use of diegetic ocular apparatuses, which are embedded on screen. These renditions of mise en abyme implicate, renegotiate, and even argue with the wide-angle perspective which frames the Iraq War.