Kyle m. jumpcut5/18/2023 Girgus’s Clint Eastwood’s America-has confirmed his stature as a towering figure in American cinema: only John Ford surpasses him as a mannerist of the American West, but Eastwood was his own John Wayne, a gunslinger/bounty hunter/lawman with a pathological edge that Wayne exposed only in The Searchers (1956). A spate of respectful criticism-most recently, David Sterritt’s The Cinema of Clint Eastwood: Chronicles of America and Sam B. And-as long as we’re not really looking down the business end of the weapon-we’re happy enough to hold our breath, squeeze gently, and fire away.Įastwood has played the seductions of gunplay both ways: in the Leone cycle and the Dirty Harry franchise as bloody good fun in his greatest film, Unforgiven (1992), as a deconstruction of most of what he had built his career on. ![]() Here the possessive gaze is not Eros but Thanatos. ![]() ![]() Hitchcock made a fetish out the homicidal voyeurism of peeking through the circular frame, but Hitchcock liked to watch even more than he liked to kill. 300 WinMag that Chris Kyle shouldered on the rooftops of Fallujah, Ramadi, and Sadr City to become the deadliest sniper in U.S. Like shooter video games, killer’s-eye-view cinema seems to satisfy an elemental urge, tapping into the genetic coding of a hunter species, testing a talent privileged by evolution, weeding out the low scorers and favoring the bloodlines whose aim is true: rock, slingshot, crossbow, flintlock, on down to the. Yet Eastwood is too introspective, too multilayered, and too knowing about the backfire from on-screen violence to print the legend of the man Kyle’s awed comrades called “the Legend.” The Chris Kyle of American Sniper, the memoir, is not the Chris Kyle of American Sniper, the movie, which makes for a more interesting-and ultimately more celebratory-portrait of a man who, by his own account, reveled in his work as a flesh-and-blood Predator drone.Įver since some early pioneer of cinema-Porter? Griffith? somehow, I think he must have been an American-realized the scopophilic buzz from placing the viewer behind the gun barrel, squinting over the sight or through the crosshairs, the motion-picture spectator and the rifleman have locked eyes and met cute. 44 Magnum (“the most powerful handgun in the world and would blow your head clean off”) seems a match made in Second Amendment heaven. That the story of Kyle’s body count-he racked up 160 confirmed kills during four tours of duty in Iraq-would be told by the make-my-day triggerman brandishing a. Clint Eastwood and Chris Kyle, artist and subject, auteur and marksman, and (the inevitable pairing) shooter and shooter, each made their bones as gunslingers, one cinematic, one authentic, pure products of clenched-teeth, true-grit, born-in-the-USA masculinity.
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