The Sociopath as Hero
By Paul Edwards
February 04, 2015 "ICH"
- The boxoffice big winner of the moment is
a movie about a military man who kills
people from a distance, unseen by his
victims. He enjoys his “job” because he
hates them, imagining an entire nation his
enemy: “savages” who kill his buddies, and
are collectively guilty, deserving
assassination.
This point of view is not new in the
psychology of men in war. Remarque examined
it in WWI in All Quiet On The Western Front;
Tolstoy, before him in War and Peace;
Mailer, after, in The Naked and The Dead. In
Vietnam, I heard hardassed combat grunts
say, “Kill ‘em all; let God sort ‘em out”.
American movie audiences have long loved
violent heroes who, in morally iffy
circumstances, cut through insoluble
complexities of relentless evil by ending
them in more or less justifiable murder.
In the more intelligent, ethical versions,
these heroes are good men, trying to do the
right thing until they run out of options
and have to kill. It ends for them, not in
triumph or exaltation, but in an emotional
downdraft that looks much like regret or
remorse. Gary Cooper grimly leaves the town
that betrayed him; Shane, called back by a
heartbroken boy, knows that boy’s world is
forever spoiled for him by what he had to
do, and rides away.
In the simple-minded, morally ugly
varieties, the dynamic remains the same but
the nature of the hero is completely
altered. The key change, obvious but unclear
to, or intentionally ignored by, the
ethically obtuse, is that the hero’s
character is vicious. All that matters is
that revenge and retribution are ferocious
and absolute. In other words, in an
infantile mutilation of the idea of the
classic hero’s journey, the whole game turns
here on brutal, sadistic and complete
destruction of “evildoers”. (A phrase of our
erstwhile imbecile President, not used
otherwise since the days of Cotton Mather.)
The kind of film-making that uses this
latter formula–simplistic, cartoonish, and
vacuous–is far more appealing to people of
lower intelligence and undiscriminating
taste, which is to say, the majority of
moviegoers. The list of examples is long but
Dirty Harry movies clearly define the
category.
Clint Eastwood–film’s Sociopath
Emeritus–chose in American Sniper the
perfect vehicle to manifest his
intelligence, his politics and his
character.
Perfect because what it displays–besides a
retailing of baldly ridiculous ideas long
universally discredited, and a politics
rooted in deep, indomitable ignorance and a
form of stupidity that prides itself on
denial of irrefutable reality–is the sleazy
depravity of a mind that can craft a
mawkish, fawning tribute to a diseased
serial killer from a biography in which the
killer himself spells out in appalling
detail his own disgusting sickness.
So much has been written about this paean to
a subhuman monster– much of it on whether or
not it is moral and heroic to murder people
wholesale for flag and country–that the only
truly important thing about its success has
not been articulated. That is the grossly
ugly fact that such a huge number of
Americans jubilantly support this morally
dirty film and its message.
Of course, an audience that embraces films
featuring all kinds of vicious, repulsive,
sadistic murderers–cannibals, necrophiles,
zombies, vampires- -can be expected to flock
to any flic that promises to satisfy its
craving, and promotion for American Sniper
puts it right in their wheelhouse.
What is profoundly disturbing culturally but
should not be surprising is that, unlike
goofy trash about chainsaw maniacs,
anthropophagous esthetes, and midnight
bloodsuckers, American Sniper glorifies a
real self-confessed serial murderer, and its
supporters don’t care. It makes no
distinction, that is, between imbecile
fantasy and appalling truth. The fact that
the “hero” and much of his story was real
only enhances his glamour in their eyes.
What gives the film its fierce attractive
power for them is that the relentless
propaganda of “the Global War on Terror” has
imbued them with the same hateful, furious,
kneejerk, Nazi-style “patriotism” that Kyle
embodied.
As long as the tag-team of our “news” media
and the Hollywood War Porn industry
continues, the fan base for U.S. military
ubermensch horror films will grow. As
Germany learned in the deadly 1930s, there
is nothing quite so dangerous to a nation’s
liberty as a furious, stupid,
violence-addicted, enemy-fixated underclass.
The monster that a culture creates and keeps
in its basement can sometimes break its
chains, to rend and dismember it.
Paul Edwards lives in Montana. He can be
reached at: hgmnude@bresnan.net -
http://www.classwarfilms.com/
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