In Hollywood, the Iraq war is a story few want to tell and even fewer want to hear. American Sniper, Clint Eastwood’s biopic of military marksman Chris Kyle — who arrives on the big screen in the form of a bearded, bulked-up Bradley Cooper — is the latest venture into what remains a cinematic no-man’s-land, a territory littered with the carcasses of previous blink-and-you’ll-miss-it failures.

In the 12 years since Bush Jr’s troops first set foot in Iraq, only a handful of mainstream films have addressed the topic, with stars and critics seemingly powerless to turn the tide of public indifference. Films as diverse as Redacted, Body of Lies, The Messenger and In the Valley of Elah all sank at the box office despite A-list involvement and critical approval.

The only notable exceptions have been Green Zone, which saw Paul Greengrass’ signature shakycam follow Matt Damon as he kicked down Baghdad doors in a (nominally fictional) sham search for WMDs, and Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, which won six Oscars in 2010. Still, these two were hardly heavy hitters at the box office. Green Zone outperformed most Iraq-focused dramas, but its global takings didn’t cover production costs. In Hollywood terms, it was a flop. Meanwhile, The Hurt Locker currently stands as the lowest-grossing best picture winner of all time, once inflation is accounted for.

American Sniper could break this tradition. Eastwood’s picture has performed promisingly in the US during a fortnight-long limited release and hopes will be high as it opens nationwide, on both sides of the Atlantic on January 16.

If The Hurt Locker was the closest Hollywood has come to hitting on a successful formula, Bigelow’s approach was notable for sidestepping the politics, opting instead to treat the war as a window into the anguished male psyche. Switching close-quarters bomb disposal for long-distance sharpshooting, American Sniper abides sticks to much the same blueprint, maximising the potential for videogame-style, first-person tension. This political evasiveness may prove crucial at the box office.

Yet politics and profits seem intrinsically linked. While Eastwood’s film may stay outwardly non-partisan, the secret to its success may lie in the fact that it is easily pitched at a conservative audience. Its poster promises the story of “the most lethal sniper in US history”, the star-spangled banner billows conspicuously in the foreground, while the title evokes ideas of chest-thumping military triumphalism.

This is in stark contrast to many of its ill-fated predecessors. Redacted and In the Valley of Elah both paid a high price for taking on real-life stories of US military scandals, while The Messenger’s focus on the (US) human tragedy of Iraq was never likely to win hearts, minds or ticket sales. You’ve probably never heard of Stop-Loss, Kimberly Peirce’s angry, well-regarded study of PTSD and villainous enlistment policies in blue-collar Texas for the same reason. It’s a thematic minefield that even the dual billing of Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Channing Tatum couldn’t salvage from obscurity.

Interestingly, those four films all came between 2007 and 2009 — perhaps too soon to win popular approval — but with almost no comparable releases to speak of since, it’s fair to presume that their fortunes have acted as a warning to any would-be imitators.

This year marks the fourth anniversary of the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. By the same point after the Vietnam war, The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now’s US box office receipts alone covered their extravagant production budgets.

Those two films not only combined heady profits with cinematic greatness but were also unafraid to wade into the politics of combat and openly reflect the profound disaffection the US’s bureaucrats had fostered within swaths of their populace. Vietnam and Iraq are separate cases, of course, with wildly differing social contexts, but it remains faintly staggering that no film about an eight-year war of such public contentiousness has yet caught itself a decent audience.

Despite the surfeit of political complexity that continues to surround the invasion of Iraq, we appear no closer to seeing it unravelled on the big screen any time soon. Hollywood is stuck in a chicken-and-egg deadlock between audience ambivalence and boardroom reluctance.

Eastwood’s film — fine as it is — doesn’t bear comparison to those great anti-war movies of the 70s because it has nothing great to say about its war, but perhaps it might coax cinema-goers into accepting Iraq as a subject worthy of the screen, and worthy of the ticket price. It’s the least the topic deserves. But as Eastwood himself once said: “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”

By arrangement with the Guardian

Published in Dawn January 15th , 2015

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