Deconstruction of a patriot: a sniper through the eyes of Derrida Back in 1941, an ordinary Texas guy, hearing on the radio about the treacherous attack of militaristic Japan on Pearl Harbor, with a sacrificial readiness to defend his native land, enlists in the army and goes to the front. Much later, historians will argue that the U.S. government and security forces knew in detail about the impending attack, but did not try to prevent it and even considered it beneficial for themselves. And yet there was a real attack with real soldiers and torpedoes, and any Johnny from Texas could be a hero.
In 1998, an ordinary Texan guy Chris Kyle, after watching on television terrorist attacks against American embassies in Africa, with the same sacrifice, enlists in the elite troops and in 2004 already takes part in the Iraq War. No Iraqis who attacked the United States with bacteriological weapons were found.
Clint Eastwood is hardly familiar with the legacy of twentieth-century European philosophical thought, but his transfer of World War II patriotism to modernity is very reminiscent of the deconstruction of Jacques Derrida.
For the army leadership, Chris Kyle is a legendary hero, a defender of the state, and for the enemy, an aggressor, a murderer of more than a hundred people, for whose head a reward is assigned. The war itself gives rise to the original opposition “defender – killer”, which, according to Derrida, must be overturned – in the head of the Western audience.
The rollover begins with the fact that the director supposedly deliberately gives the image of Chris devoid of any reflection near-heroic obstinacy, which often stands between the sniper and his entourage. “I want to believe in what we’re doing,” admits the “reflective” fighter. “You want these bastards to get to ...” New York? the defender replies. And then the wife accuses Chris that even when he is at home, he continues to protect someone in the remote Arab desert. In the second half of the film, the rollover becomes more obvious: the viewer notices that Kyle is ready to shoot a child with a weapon, and the defender is aiming at the defeat, and not in the arm, for example. And finally, the rollover is done - Chris's best shot moment, this apogee of the defender's career, is accompanied by the words of his framed friends in arms: "We are trapped." Damn you, legend!
In the next phase of deconstruction, the line between opposites should be erased, which the director is already doing when he brings Chris home. "Defender" and "murderer" are combined in the word "sniper", and the peaceful situation perfectly shows the two sides of the word. While one veteran sincerely considers Chris his hero and savior, another has his own opinion about the sniper.
After Katherine Bigelow seemingly finally translated modern heroism into a sporting and technical framework in The Storm Lord, waiting for a movie like The Sniper looked like an empty pursuit. But Clint Eastwood managed to scrape in the modern cynical world the remnants of the spirit of the defender of the American people, almost by force push them into a pile of muscle and energy called “sniper” and parachute to a far-flung country. Making a good half of American fighters shun this spirit while its incarnation is defending by killing and killing by protecting.
The famous philosopher has always called for deconstruction to fight injustice in society and politics. By eroding to the level of identity the “irreconcilable” opposition thrown at us by the media, we will be able to keep our position and not get involved in a fight where modern manipulators so passionately desire it.
6 out of 10
Original