Shaping mnemonic opportunity: Remembering Iraq in American Sniper

Remembering Iraq

Early scholarship on public memory of the Iraq War focused on public performances and online commemorative projects, often noting their ability to serve as sites for engagement over the war (Doss, 2010; Grider, 2007; Haskins, 2011; Knudsen and Stage, 2012; Pershing and Bellinger, 2010). Such engagement can be seen as working out a shared, negotiated memory of the war consistent with John Bodnar’s (1992) concept of memory as formed through an exchange of competing ideas in the public sphere (p. 15). In addition, since the war was ongoing at the time of these exchanges, the scholarship also draws attention to the link between public opinion and public memory scholars have observed in calling on public opinion polling to discuss issues such as the reputation of past US presidents (Lang and Lang, 1989; Schudson, 1993; Schwartz, 2008) or the memories of fascism (Forest et al., 2004; Koonz, 1994: 261; Olick, 2007). For Kurt Lang and Gladys Engel Lang, collective memory forms through a process of personal recollections by those who lived through events and the subsequent influence of public opinion about those events as time passes. For those not old enough to have lived through events, public memory becomes analogous to public opinion, a perspective that also meshes well with the rhetorical view that takes public memory as a resource for invention of further discourse in the larger public sphere. Thus, the public memory of the Iraq War can be identified by albeit imperfect measures of public opinion, as well as by looking at the kinds of arguments it enables in public discourse.

While the opinion of the war in the United States began shifting drastically away from support even by the end of 2003 (Pew Research Center, 2005), the memory of the war as a failure and a mistake became dominant following the last withdrawal of troops (Pew Research Center, 2014) and also in the discourse surrounding the war (Rancourt, 2013). If the 2016 Presidential campaign is any indication, the memory of the war remains critical, as indicated by both the Trump and Sanders campaigns touting their opposition to the war and criticizing their opponents’ support. Nonetheless, scholarship has been clear that public memory is always contested and partisan (Blair et al., 2010). Thus, there will always be nuanced judgments on events in the past, with political parties and other groups favoring the interpretation that best serves their needs in the present.

Mnemonic opportunity

The question then becomes, how is memory shaped, and what are the processes by which it changes? The greatest contribution to answering these questions has come from historians and sociologists interested in broad shifts in the meanings and memories of the past over time. Bodnar (1992) argues that cultural leaders struggle for the influence of “vernacular” interests against official memory represented by the state. Similarly, sociologists have examined how social movement groups and activists compete to shift memory much the way they compete for other types of social, cultural, and political change (Armstrong and Crage, 2006; Ghoshal, 2013; Harris, 2006; Kubal, 2008).

An under-examined concept of great significance in this scholarship is opportunity, sometimes described as “mnemonic opportunity” (Ghoshal, 2013; Korver-Glenn, 2015; Whitlinger, 2015). Raj Andrew Ghoshal introduces the term “mnemonic opportunity” to describe the factors contributing to activist groups’ success in shaping collective memory through public commemorations of racial violence, identifying three dimensions of what he calls mnemonic opportunity structures: the significance ascribed to events when they occurred, moral valence of the figures involved in the events, and commemorative capacity of those attempting to bring events into collective memory. An event might be considered significant if it generated attention in the media when it happened (p. 341). Such attention, however, presents a challenge if the significance is tied to a negative judgment of the moral valence of characters involved, such as the attempt to commemorate the lynching of a victim who was at the time accused of rape versus a pregnant woman seen as innocent. In the third aspect of his mnemonic opportunity structures, Ghoshal draws the concept of mnemonic capacity from Armstrong and Crage (2006). They defined mnemonic capacity as the ability of groups to produce a “commemorative vehicle”—a commemorative form such as a statue or a parade—by calling together potentially interested parties to support its creation. They do this by framing the issue, highlighting particular details so that it strikes a chord with the audience. This framing, in fact, can be seen to impact perceived moral valence, just as the events themselves were subject to framing at the time they occurred. In the memory of Iraq, President Bush’s moral valence has been under question in public opinion, but one could argue that as critical evaluation of Bush’s presidency wanes (Quinnipiac University, 2016), the critical view of the war begins to lose its footing. Commemorative vehicles aimed at rehabilitating or replacing his image may, in turn, be successful in rehabilitating the memory of the war. Such a focus on framing calls attention to the contribution rhetorical theory can make to the question of mnemonic opportunity and, by extension, the study of how groups shape memory. Rhetoric brings the rhetor into a central role in the process.

While rhetorical scholars refer to the rhetor’s framing of issues, social movement-oriented scholars of collective memory have given attention to what is sometimes referred to as the “mnemonic entrepreneur.” The theory suggests that such figures both help events from the past reach a larger public (Armstrong and Crage, 2006; Ghoshal, 2013) and influence present activities and attitudes (Kubal, 2008; Whitlinger, 2015). While “entrepreneur” might suggest an individual invested in the outcome, thinking of this agent as a “rhetor” helps focus on how it is not only their choices in framing the issue but also their ethos, or reputation, that helps to gain support for their commemorative efforts. In one of the earliest uses of the term “entrepreneur” to refer to advocates for commemorative projects, Robin Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz (1991) describe Vietnam veteran Jan Scruggs’ work in raising funds and support for the construction of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. This case is particularly instructive for understanding how the Iraq War is remembered given Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz’s focus on Vietnam as an unpopular war largely commemorated by separating the soldier from the cause (p. 389). Unlike the case of American Sniper, Scruggs was both a soldier and an advocate for the commemorative project, a mnemonic entrepreneur who initiated the movement that would lead to the construction of a national memorial. As Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz note, Scruggs appealed to the media and other influential groups because he held the character of a fully integrated returning veteran and the authority of a wounded veteran to speak for both those who returned from the war and those who never did (p. 390). Scruggs’ example demonstrates that part of a group’s mnemonic capacity, then, is the mnemonic entrepreneur’s credibility and ability to shape at least the initial message to gain support.

Just how much control a rhetor has in shaping the message has been a matter of debate among rhetoricians interested in the relationship between the rhetor and the rhetorical situation. For rhetorical scholar Lloyd Bitzer, each situation calls for a specific rhetorical act to address the problem in question. To illustrate the point of an objective rhetorical situation, he offers examples of famous rhetorical texts from The Declaration of Independence to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, arguing that “each is a clear instance of rhetoric and each indicates the presence of a situation” and that “it does not follow that a situation exists only when the discourse exists” (p. 2). However, this is precisely what Richard Vatz (1973) argues in his response to Bitzer: facts chosen to describe a situation are selected from an infinite array of information that could be seen as relevant to an event to which rhetors give meaning according to their needs. For instance, the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery at Gettysburg was selected by Lincoln as an opportunity to give a speech. Lincoln created the situation: he marked the occasion as significant and imbued it with historical meaning by the very act of speaking. However, Lincoln did not respond to a discrete set of facts and deliver precisely the appropriate speech required by the situation. Indeed, as Garry Wills (1992) points out, the power of the address is that it rose above the situation and remade America by speaking to the larger circumstances of the war and American history. In other words, Lincoln did not seize an objectively significant opportunity; he created the opportunity to cement public memory of the Battle of Gettysburg for years to come.

There is, of course, a middle ground between the strict objective and strict subjective notions of rhetorical situation. Scott Consigny’s (1974) criticism of Bitzer (1968) and Vatz (1973) offers further illumination on the role of the rhetor in creating opportunity. Vatz’s position does not take into account any constraints on a rhetor’s ability to invent problems to be addressed. Consigny (1974) argues that “If the rhetor is to function effectively in novel rhetorical situations, disclosing relevant issues in each, he (sic) requires a capacity which allows him (sic) to be receptive and responsive to the particularities of novel contexts” (p. 180). This capacity is what Consigny calls an art of rhetoric, suggesting that the rhetor’s framing of situation is a creative and responsive act. Thus, Lincoln composed his speech in response to the real-world fact that many soldiers had died at Gettysburg (and in the Civil War) and delivered a speech artfully crafted to pay tribute to their memories and mourn the human cost of war. Opportunity, on this view, is neither there waiting to be seized nor simply conjured out of thin air but is rather shaped by the artful rhetor from the available contextual factors. The audience, one can conclude, will accept the rhetoric to the extent that the artful shaping remains invisible or convincingly resonates with their prior frames of reference.

A rhetorically informed view of mnemonic opportunity requires consideration of such factors as the choice of form or commemorative vehicle and the link to past or contemporaneous related commemorative projects, the constructed character of the mnemonic entrepreneur and allies, and moral valence of key figures in the events. Above all, opportunity is shaped by how the mnemonic entrepreneurs frame the memory project to resonate with current events or deeper cultural mythology and ideology. I turn now to an examination of American Sniper and the filmmakers’ artful framing of opportunity along these lines.

Opportunity and the mnemonic vehicle of American Sniper

To return to the question of the memory of the Iraq War represented in American Sniper, it is beneficial to begin with consideration of the commemorative vehicle and its framing. Various scholars have noted the power of popular film to influence collective memory of events (Sturken, 1997: 23; Hansen, 2001; Storey, 2003: 101). One also finds support for this position in the movement-oriented research. Examining the Argentinean social movement most famously associated with Madres de la Plaza de Mayo demonstrations aimed at raising awareness of the military dictatorship’s brutal program of disappearing dissenters following the 1976 coup, Claudia Feld (2012) examines the use of fiction films to create emotionally potent drama and to document the past which cannot be easily depicted by static images. Feld notes that the films have found significant secondary lives as they continue to circulate as teaching tools and inspire commemorative rituals that even impact and involve those who have not seen the films. Thus, the realm of social movements and memory extends far beyond the local commemorations considered by other movement-oriented scholars to include popular film, which builds on existing opportunity structures but creates a potentially more pervasive, mass-audience-oriented memory vehicle.

Although the limited box office success of early Iraq War films may suggest limited potential impact on memory of the war compared to blockbuster predecessors Saving Private Ryan (1998) or Platoon (1986), these films provide a generic and thematic context against which American Sniper is likely to be read and evaluated. Studies examining films such as Redacted (2007), The Hurt Locker (2008), and Green Zone (2010) have noted a common theme in which the films’ disjointed narratives and fragmented forms reflect political concerns over the war. Perhaps most notable among the observations is an emerging picture of a crisis in American masculinity (Rancourt, 2016; Robinson, 2014; Tasker and Atakav, 2010). As Janet S. Robinson (2014) notes, for instance, the body of Sergeant James in The Hurt Locker “represents a contradiction rather than a clear symbol: his hard-muscled body simultaneously represents hypermasculinity but also ineffective weaponry” because it is riddled with scars and ultimately vulnerable to the violence of war (p. 162).The vulnerability of the male body at war becomes a focal point in films reflecting a conflicted politics of war. Read alongside other films in the genre, the vulnerability of the Iraq War soldier reflects a comparable critique to that common in post-Vietnam era films, in which vulnerability invoked a sense of failing among soldiers and veterans.

In truth, the crisis in Iraq War films is far less pronounced than in their post-Vietnam counterparts, including those examined by Susan Jeffords (1989) in her groundbreaking work on the emasculation of the American male in the Vietnam era and the “remasculinazation” that took place in popular media, especially film. In films such as The Deer Hunter (1978), First Blood (1982), and Full Metal Jacket (1987), Jeffords finds the crisis of masculinity apparent in the male characters psychologically and physically disabled by the war and emasculated at home by the rise of the women’s movement. Such films often feature an overcorrection for this apparent emasculation in the rage of a resentful white male persona exemplified by John Rambo in his question to his former commanding officer when invited to go on a new mission in Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985). “Do we get to win this time?” he asks, exuding self-pity and implying that the victimized male soldier was sabotaged by an ungrateful and unsupportive home front that sacrificed the soldier in exchange for liberal ideals. National Review writer Rich Lowry exemplifies this apparent crisis to which American Sniper responds in his review of the film, expressing contempt for liberals for making war ambiguous and soft. He writes that the Left “hates and distrusts the idea of the war hero, believing it smacks of backwardness and jingoism. Its notion of compelling war movies were the tendentiously antiwar flops Green Zone, Stop-Loss, and In the Valley of Elah.” This sentiment speaks not only to the conservative reveling in the failures of the left but also to the nuance of a politics that makes everything from war to gender less stable than once assumed.

One way American Sniper addresses this crisis is by answering the critique of post-Vietnam war films. For instance, a young Kyle impresses his father by killing a deer on his first hunting trip, calling to mind The Deer Hunter, in which Robert de Niro’s character promotes a masculine code exemplified by the slogan, “one shot” (Jeffords, 1989: 94). He fulfills this code on a hunting trip prior to the war. However, after experiencing the trauma of Vietnam, he embarks on a similar trip, coming face to face with a deer but elects to fire into the air, allowing it to escape. If Vietnam stripped the American male of its allegiance to masculine codes, American Sniper takes its position in the war genre by reasserting that masculinity in the form of a prepubescent boy. The film is a counterpoint to the messiness of the post-Vietnam war film and allies instead with the likes of Zero Dark Thirty’s (2012) vision of a capable, heroic, professional Navy SEAL team efficiently executing its mission, a heroic narrative lost following Vietnam and only returned briefly with Saving Private Ryan (Ehrenhaus, 2001; Owen, 2002). However, there is another way in which the filmmakers shape the mnemonic opportunity to create an effective mnemonic vehicle and that is by drawing on conventions of masculinity beyond the war genre.

American Sniper adopts a hegemonic vision of the masculine hero in part by framing the film and Kyle’s character in the American western frontier tradition. In so doing, they cross genres and choose from what rhetoricians call “inventional resources” that may not even have been recognized as available under a more objective, Bitzerian perspective of opportunity. Early in the film, images and dialogue establish a western, cowboy theme that allows the film to construct an alternative masculinity uncommon in recent manifestations of the war genre. This is accomplished in dialogue between a young Chris Kyle, his father, and his younger brother, Jeff, at the dinner table. His father sermonizes,

There are three types of people in this world: sheep, wolves and sheepdogs. Some people prefer to believe 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 got predators.

Here, the scene cuts to a schoolyard bully beating young Jeff as the father’s voice continues as voice-over:

They use violence to prey on people. They’re the wolves. Then there are those blessed with the gift of aggression and an overpowering need to protect the flock. They are a rare breed who live to confront the wolf. They are the sheepdog. We’re not raising any sheep in this family.

The father lashes his belt against the dining room table. “I will whup your ass if you turn into a wolf,” he says. Seemingly giving the permission to “win” Rambo and Vietnam veterans lacked, Kyle’s father continues, “We protect our own. If someone tries to fight you, tries to bully your little brother, you have my permission to finish it.” Chris then speaks up: “The guy was picking on Jeff.” “Did you finish it?” the father asks. Chris nods sternly. Up to this point, the sequence might not be obviously indicative of a western, cowboy theme, but the scene then cuts to a rear wide shot of Chris silhouetted in the threshold of a barn door as his father’s voice-over continues, “Well, then you know who you are.” The voice pauses, and the shot cuts to a front zooming shot as Kyle closes the barn door and walks forward with his head down, his face covered by the wide brim of his appropriately white cowboy hat. He stops and finally looks up, gazing into the distance in a pose reminiscent of a vintage cigarette advertisement, as the voice-over concludes: “You know your purpose.” The scene cuts to Kyle mounting a bull as his name is called over the rodeo loudspeaker. Although the metaphor seems mixed, there can be no mistaking the fact that Kyle is framed as a cowboy complete with the masculine swagger and the toughness to protect the sheep.

At first glance, the image of a rodeo cowboy is of little value in framing a memory of the Iraq War, but on closer inspection, the juxtaposition of the kitchen table dialogue and the image of Kyle as a cowboy reveals a strong political opportunity to reclaim the memory of the war. In their exploration of the image of the Bush Administration’s Iraq War rhetoric, Wendy M. Christensen and Myra Marx Ferree (2008) note that the cowboy represents the genderization of protection where Europe was the feminized, timid “wimps and sissies” (p. 291) in need of protection, and the United States was the confident, masculine cowboy eager to provide it. Bush cultivated this image of the western hero after 9/11 not just in his tough talk in the press but also in his staging of events at his Crawford, Texas ranch (West and Carey, 2006). Most notably, as Christensen and Ferree (2008) note, the rhetoric of protection calls on fear to establish this binary of protector/protected, building on a western simplification of politics exemplified by a quote by the quintessential American movie cowboy (and soldier), John Wayne, who allegedly once spouted, “They tell me everything isn’t black and white … [W]ell, I say why the hell not” (p. 291). In this light, the wolf/sheepdog allegory is very much in line with the western cowboy tradition, as well as consistent with the character of dualistic thinking identified by Richard Godfrey (2009: 206) in his work on military masculinity. It is also consistent with the politics of the Bush Administration. Kyle is offered as a more authentic image of the protecting cowboy fulfilling the task of the frontier hero. He is the “gunfighter” in Richard Slotkin’s (1992) conception of the long tradition in US mythology that sees the frontier as a “savage” threat—to echo Kyle’s own language (Kyle et al., 2013: xii)—that must be defeated “by an armed and virile elite that is willing and able to take the law into its own hands” (p. 182) for the progress of civilization. Again, this is an artful shaping of mnemonic opportunity that constructs the mnemonic vehicle by drawing on unexpected resources to create a form suitable to the needs of the mnemonic entrepreneurs.

Opportunity and the mnemonic entrepreneurs of American Sniper

The western genre framing of American Sniper also warrants discussion of the mnemonic entrepreneurs behind the film. While Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz (1991) present Scruggs’ entrepreneurship as a starting point for what would evolve into a multi-generic and “multifocal” monument to the Vietnam War (p. 408), the mnemonic entrepreneurs of American Sniper played an even larger role in not only initiating but also shaping the genre-crossing vehicle. It might be argued, in fact, that the prominent naming of such entrepreneurs as the director on movie posters and in the film’s credits means that the reputation of the mnemonic entrepreneur is more essential in a feature film than in the case of a project such as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in helping to influence how the vehicle is received. In particular, Eastwood takes on an essential role in helping shape expectations for American Sniper. Although he was not the initiator of the project, or even the first choice to direct, he ultimately comes to be seen as the “right” choice among many possible directors.

The genesis of the project began with Hall, who began meeting with Kyle to research and write the script in 2010. Hall pitched the idea to lead actor and co-producer Bradley Cooper as a western, which immediately appealed to Cooper (Block, 2015). This is a clear example of how the initial mnemonic entrepreneur gains allies through the framing of the vehicle, and given Cooper’s rising star in Hollywood, this was a major move in making the film a success. Signing Eastwood on to direct, after first choice Steven Spielberg decided to leave the project, carried perhaps the greatest weight in shaping the way the story would be told. From a Bitzerian (1968) perspective, it may seem that Eastwood was the only proper choice for a western-influenced war film, but this would be an error in thinking that the final product as we see it is precisely the film required by the rhetorical situation. In fact, the outcome would have been much different with Spielberg at the helm and would have seemed equally natural to the viewer satisfied with that version of the film. Hall seized and shaped the opportunity of the project to win the favor of Cooper and Eastwood, and so the final product evolved from that point.

To the casual movie-goer, Eastwood might be best known as Dirty Harry, the urban vigilante hero of the streets putting a twist on the gunfighter tradition (Slotkin, 1992: 633–634), or his many roles as the mysterious stranger riding into the frontier town to, according to a simplified reading, clean it up before riding off into the sunset. The impression such viewers may gain from these roles is of a conservative hero representing all the violence and individualist masculinity one might expect from the man many might remember from his bizarre and highly mocked performance at the 2012 Republican National Convention. Such viewers may, therefore, be skeptical of Eastwood’s ability as a director to tell a war story with anything but a hawk’s jingoism. However, as Drucilla Cornell (2009) observes in her book on masculinity in Eastwood’s directorial films, “Despite [his] long association with the Republican Party, the ethical struggles he portrays in his films prevent him from making a purely positive, conservative Hollywood film” (p. 151). This is true in his westerns and his war films, alike. In fact, Eastwood has voiced opposition to the Iraq War (Galloway, 2015), and he has demonstrated a strong critique of war through his films in the past, including the classic 1976 western-war hybrid The Outlaw Josey Wales (Cornell, 2009: 139–147) and the paired films Flags of Our Fathers (2006) and Letters from Iwo Jima (2006). One might argue that Flags and Letters represent not only some of his most beautiful and artistic work but also, as Cornell (2009) argues, a clear antiwar critique of the myth of masculinity at war (p. 168). Appearing in 2006 in the midst of the Iraq War, the films tell the stories of combat at Iwo Jima in World War II, Flags telling the American side of the story, and Letters telling the Japanese side with almost no English dialogue or American point of view in the film. Together, these films suggest that “War is no longer portrayed as what makes a man ‘a man’, but rather as what can shatter him” (168). It is, of course, debatable whether American Sniper is a strict celebration of patriotic masculinity or a subtle critique of the moral failings of war alongside Eastwood’s previous films in the genre. In fact, the question here is not about whether it is antiwar or pro-war but rather about what it does for rehabilitating the public memory of the war that serves the interests of those publics who supported the Iraq War and generally tend to take a hawkish position. Eastwood brings to the commemorative vehicle the credibility of a skilled and, one might say, impartial or even skeptical storyteller in the war genre.

This is a picture of mnemonic entrepreneurs who frame the story artfully to get others involved and create a vehicle that will be compelling, reach a wide audience and, potentially, therefore, impact public memory. It took some message framing on the part of Hall to bring the others into the project, but one can also see how, just as Jan Scruggs’ character could be depicted in subtly different ways to mobilize support for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz, 1991: 391), even the reputations of American Sniper’s mnemonic entrepreneurs depend on some artistic framing, as well. Is Eastwood a conservative Dirty Harry hell-bent on cleaning up the streets of liberal trash, or is he an artist capable of making an honest and powerful war film? Audiences will approach the film with expectations based on these questions, some of which will be fulfilled for some viewers and others which will be subverted.

The debate of just what kind of film this is hinges largely on the ability of the filmmakers to, as Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz (1991) note, separate the soldier from the war, a task Eastwood accomplishes expertly in previous films (Cornell, 2009: 151). Thus, we turn now to the most significant aspect of the mnemonic opportunity in this case, the moral valence of Chris Kyle as the commemorated figure.

Opportunity and the moral valence of Chris Kyle in American Sniper

When the film American Sniper was released, there was a massive outcry of objection by those who viewed Kyle’s depiction of Iraqi and Muslim people in his book as racist, to which his admirers often responded with threats and online abuse in defense of patriotism (West, 2015). The film frames his moral character not by eliminating all of his controversial remarks but by attempting to contextualize them within the anguish of war and as genuine expressions of his patriotic fervor and faith. For many of his critics, of course, this was a whitewashing of racism not easily forgiven, but for many others, it appears to have succeeded (West, 2015). While Ghoshal (2013) depicts the moral valence of the commemorated figure as objective and a seemingly universal challenge, Eastwood, Hall, and Cooper construct a character framed in such a way that many will be forgiving of Kyle’s attitude toward his victims because he displays such self-assurance that he only killed those who were “deserving.” This contributes to the character’s masculinity through what Godfrey (2009) identifies as a characteristic of military masculinity: reductionist thinking. In the film and in the book, Kyle echoes Bush’s religious rhetoric (Ivie, 2004) by reducing war to a battle between good and evil, defending his killing as consistent with his father’s teachings earlier in the film. In fact, editing makes this justification of violence clear. The film opens with Kyle on a rooftop scanning the surrounding buildings and streets for threats to a US convoy about to pass through the area. He spots a woman and a young boy walking out of a building and watches as the woman hands the boy a grenade. The scene then cuts to a flashback to Kyle’s childhood, and over 20 minutes pass for the audience before the viewer sees what happens to the boy with the grenade. The audience sees Kyle’s life leading up to this moment: the moral lessons of his youth, the inspiration to join the military on seeing the American embassies under attack in Tanzania and Kenya, his training, and his marriage. When the moment comes, he pulls the trigger. The boy falls, and when the woman springs to his side to retrieve the grenade and throw it at the convoy, he kills her, too. When his companion on the rooftop begins to celebrate the kills, Kyle refuses. He has gained no joy from it but neither does he feel guilt.

As is common in the films he directs, Eastwood makes the vulnerability of the masculine character driven by the responsibility to protect others central to the film (Cornell, 2009: 4), a move that he sees as politicizing in American Sniper, though the outcome is perhaps beyond his intention. In a scene late in the film, following Kyle’s last tour, a Veterans Administration psychiatrist asks if he thinks he has seen or done anything he wishes he had not. Cooper delivers his lines awkwardly with uncomfortable cadence, and his insistence that, “Oh no, that’s not me” seems unreliable as he explains that his only guilt is that he did not do more to protect his fellow US service members. At the same time, his actions throughout the film do support the interpretation that any anguish he experiences is directed at failing to fulfill his mission as a sheepdog and a man, not protecting his fellow Americans enough. Eastwood describes this dialogue as part of the reason he sees the film as antiwar (Galloway, 2015), and yet it does not change the fact that Kyle’s assurance supports the rehabilitation of the war in public memory. This is done first by highlighting Kyle’s heroic deeds and second by aligning the film with the rhetoric emerging since the 1991 Gulf War that casts the protection of troops, rather than the political justification leading to the war, as the ultimate purpose of war (Stahl, 2009). If compared to war’s destructiveness in The Hurt Locker or even Flags of our Fathers, any critique available in this scene is, to say the least, subtle. Rather, Kyle’s self-assured attitude throughout the film suggests a character not unscarred by war, but one who has nonetheless, as he sees it, risked his life to protect his country. In the logic of reductionist thinking of military masculinity, the politics is a simple conflict between the good American and the evil insurgent, a position welcomed by a conservative audience tired of the nuance of liberal politics and the previous batch of Iraq War films, and even those nostalgic for Bush’s post-9/11 rhetoric.

However, the dedication of the self-assured cowboy ideal of masculinist protection is only one part of the framing of Kyle’s character. His greatest appeal arguably resides in his status as a legend, a hero, and above all a “badass” Navy SEAL. The appeal is an issue of resonance as much as it is an issue of artfully shaping the mnemonic opportunity. By highlighting Kyle’s membership in the famed Navy SEALs, the filmmakers take advantage of a latent association in the minds of viewers. It is true that Kyle was in the SEALs and, therefore, seems a “natural” part of the narrative, but the filmmakers make rhetorical choices to highlight this fact in the film in order to play on the familiarity and admiration of many viewers. In the scene in which Kyle meets his eventual wife, Taya, his membership in the SEALs is the central topic of conversation. As she and Kyle begin talking, she looks alternately at her drink and at him standing beside her. When she speaks to him, she must do so looking upward, visually representing subordination and suggesting admiration, even as she tells him her sister was engaged to a SEAL, and she, therefore, knows “all about you guys,” then proceeds to call SEALs “arrogant, self-centered pricks.” Kyle is busy pouring a drink when she speaks this line. An over the shoulder shot (OTS) facing Kyle allows the viewer to focus on his reaction but to do so without the intensity of a close-up. Thus, there is a subtlety to his reaction that helps to highlight his sincerity. When Taya says the word “pricks,” Kyle blinks, then looks at her, and turns serious. He leans against the bar and speaks, invoking the protection frame and saying,

Why would you say I’m self-centered? I lay down my life for my country … because it’s the greatest country on earth and I’d do everything I can to protect it. Look, I’m sorry what happened to your sister, but that’s not me.

This “not me” is echoed in the psychiatrist scene noted above and in both cases suggests a clear distinction between a morally dishonorable other in his mind—a SEAL who mistreats a woman, a soldier who is emotionally weakened by the experience of war, both tropes of post-Vietnam era and Iraq War films. As Kyle concludes, a close-up shot of Taya’s face shows guilt for judging Kyle and the SEALs. This is significant because close-ups are often thought to be most suitable for inviting identification with a character (Elsaesser and Hagener, 2015: 68), whereas an OTS maintains some distance from identification. Thus, the dialogue and the framing work together to, first, highlight the nobility of the patriotic Navy SEAL who is to be looked up to and, second, move the viewer to guilt for not adequately honoring that nobility. If this scene highlights Kyle’s membership in the SEALs and associated sincerity, other scenes highlight just how “badass” they are.

The Navy SEAL has become a symbol of the badass American male in recent years, especially as they have been associated with the 2011 raid to kill Osama bin Laden, as depicted in Zero Dark Thirty. Scenes depicting the grueling SEAL training help build a case for Kyle’s moral character as an exemplary member of this elite group, and his skill throughout the film only strengthens this point by showing that he is the best of the best. Even Marines engaging in house-to-house raids marvel at his skill and character, and when he offers to show them how to do their job, they agree with mouths agape, as if modeling the film spectator. This is the screen dominance of the male lead Laura Mulvey (1975: 12–13) describes in her landmark work on film spectatorship. The other male characters recognize Kyle as the focal point, as the ideal male to be emulated and followed, just as the audience recognizes Bradley Cooper’s command of the screen, complete with the 30 pounds of muscle he added for the part. One Marine approaches him from the back of the group and makes explicit the admiration, saying, “You’re that guy, the one they call the Legend. They say you got like twenty four confirmed kills … That’s fucking ‘badass’.” Kyle shrugs off the compliment and proceeds to lead the next raid. The final combat scene of the film demonstrates Kyle’s admirable mix of skill and confidence when from a miraculous 2100 yards away he identifies and takes out the enemy sniper who has killed two of his buddies. This “one shot” demonstrates his discipline and skill even as it demonstrates a willingness to take risks in potentially endangering his comrades by revealing their position. Studies of hegemonic masculinity among members of the military suggest that service members do engage in practices that construct masculinity through such behaviors and attitudes as risk-taking and toughness (Barrett, 1996; Hinojosa, 2010). So American Sniper’s depiction of the badass character plays on public perceptions of the SEALs as intense, tough, and masculine heroes at the top of the hierarchy of military masculinity. Thus, the mnemonic entrepreneurs shape the story from available material to best resonate with the audience while countering previous frames of masculinity in war films from the post-Vietnam and post-Iraq-invasion eras.

As Bruce Bennett (2010) notes, early Iraq War films resisted narrative closure, leaving unfinished the war and the struggle of the protagonists. In American Sniper, Hall fabricates this scene and this rivalry narrative to give victorious closure to a story about a war that could make no such claims to neat cohesion. The implication is that the war could have been won if left to the hands of such capable men as Chris Kyle. It suggests a positive way to remember the war: as a proving ground for American service members who served boldly despite flagging support at home. The questionable aspects of Kyle’s moral character are obscured by masculine images of patriotism, self-assurance, and skill that were inadequate justifications of sacrifice in Eastwood’s previous war films but which fit right at home in a western-war hybrid.

Conclusion

On 2 February 2013, Chris Kyle was shot and killed on a shooting range in Texas by fellow veteran Eddie Ray Roth. Hall explains that Eastwood and others considered adding a scene depicting his death to the film. Ultimately, they elected not to film or include the scene out of respect for his children (Baker, 2015). The film is an unabashed tribute to Kyle, an attempt to lionize him, which in the process offers audiences images by which to reconsider the Iraq War. The choice not to include scenes of his death suggests that the American hero must be depicted as the dispenser of violent justice, never the victim of senseless violence. It simply would not have fit in the film.

As time passes, memory of the Iraq War is shifting toward seeing it as just another part of the War on Terror, despite the lack of connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. While previous Iraq War films called into question the purposes of the war, American Sniper makes it clear that remembering Iraq is about remembering the sacrifice of bold individuals in the struggle against evil. In fact, the nature of public memory does not require that all spectators articulate such a political statement. They need to only hold in their minds the images from this film that can be invoked in subsequent discourse about the war. In this rhetorical view of public memory, audiences need not literally think of American Sniper when they encounter a rhetor making an argument about the war. They only need to have a set of positive associations drawn from various sources in order to be open to such arguments. American Sniper is able to provide these associations because it was artfully constructed to respond to the mnemonic opportunity of an apparent crisis in American masculinity with the image of a confident, skilled, badass Navy SEAL.

In August 2015, candidate Ben Carson was asked a question about “enhanced interrogation” techniques in the first Republican debate of the 2016 Presidential campaign season. Although it was not a question specifically about Iraq, it is certainly the kind of question that relies on or struggles against memories of Abu Ghraib. Against this memory of Iraq, Carson answered, “I’ve talked to a lot of the generals, a lot of our advanced people. And believe me, if we gave them the mission … they would be able to carry it out” (The Washington Post, 2015). Carson did not need to invoke the name of Chris Kyle or the Navy SEALs to benefit from American Sniper’s impact on public memory, nor did auditors need to think of the film on hearing his answer. The nature of public memory is that the competing images of the bold, unencumbered American at war and images of tortured prisoners stand at the ready, as if waiting to be called forth in arguments about the war or about issues related to the war. Carson invoked images which certainly existed prior to the film but were made more salient by the popularity of American Sniper, images which themselves resonated for audiences at least in part because the filmmakers responded to the available trends in public discourse to separate the soldier from the cause and shape mnemonic opportunity.

In terms of the judgment of the war, the question of how it will be remembered, these are the differences between judging the war as a shameful mistake and judging it as an important step in preserving democracy at home and abroad. This is the difference between remembering George W. Bush’s Texas swagger as sheer arrogance embodied in foreign policy and remembering Chris Kyle’s Texas swagger as worthy of admiration. If public memory is a competition between publics over the influence of judgments about the past, then American Sniper is a point in favor of conservative publics and a small step toward making large-scale fronts in the War on Terror palatable again.