MR. TURNER and Painting a Portrait of the Future of Existential Modernity

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON FEBRUARY 12, 2015

“What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it.  You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world.  You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.”  

- Morpheus, The Matrix

"My business is to paint what I see, not what I know is there."

 - J. M. W. Turner

MR. TURNER is a fascinatingly masterful film by the always brilliant English director Mike Leigh.  The film is a look at the life and work of the great British painter J. M. W. Turner.  The film is wonderfully acted by every single actor involved and the look of the film is breathtaking. Mr. Turner is truly a work of art in its own right, which in that regard lets its audience become aware of its respect for the artistry of its subject.

The film Mr. Turner follows “the painter of light” which Turner was commonly known as because of the beautiful sunsets he painted.  Early in his life he sketched and worked quite delicately and beautifully with water paint.  This talent for painting got him accepted into the Royal Academy of Arts in London.  He later moved on from water painting to oil and started painting these amazingly majestic landscape and sea canvases.  His father, William Turner worked with him mixing his paints and building his canvases.  When his father died this had a profound effect on Turner and his outlook on life and death which made its way into his paintings.

Turner became more subjugated from the people in the world around him.  He traveled to find new vistas and to revisit beloved old ones.  He visited brothels to sketch prostitutes and once had himself strapped high up to the mast of a ship during a massive snow storm at sea, so he could later accurately paint such a storm on canvas.  That particular incident gave him bronchitis which began a decline in his health that eventually led to his death in Chelsea, England in 1851.

Turner was not a soberly sane person which ended up being ideal for his craft.  Soberly sane people generally don’t make good artists in anything really.   The world’s great advances in creativity and invention were more often than not achieved by little encounters with madness.  This form of artistic madness can be destructive not only for the artist but for the poor people that are often in their company, but that is what is often required of the human mind navigating such a structured, controlled society in order to break itself free of the shackles of conformity.

Turner felt that there was something wrong with the world, like The Matrix quote from above, Turner felt it like a splinter in his mind.  He articulated this feeling on his canvases.  His marine paintings were pushing toward the edge of reality itself, where the existential angst of the coming modern machine world made it on his canvas.  Mankind at the time of Turner’s pivotal painting period was losing its religious solidarity.  Turner himself was at least agnostic during his life, forgoing the presence of God for the reality he was searching for in his paintings.  God was in the foreground for many centuries because people generally knew nothing about the natural world.  During Turner's time science was beginning to become just as much a part of life as religion.  For Turner and many other free thinking people, this started to push God to the background and in some cases, out of the picture entirely.  Instead of painting cathedrals he painted the Industrial Revolution as it unfolded.

"It is necessary to mark the greater from the lesser truth: namely the larger and the more liberal idea of nature from the comparatively narrow and confined; namely that which addresses itself to the imagination from that which is solely addressed to the eye."

 - J. M. W. Turner

The events leading up to the end of the film were at their most existential.  Death is coming for us all and as much rhyme or reason we might want to apply to it, it’s still coming.  This film sees us in our most naked form, spinning thousands of miles per minute in the bleak cold nothingness of the universe.  Turner tried to paint his way behind the curtain to see the truth like so many before him and so many after.  Like others though he became restricted by the very structure he was trying to escape.  The frames of his paintings were as far as he was permitted to go, where the poet is limited by the length of his page, Turner was only able to go so far.  This limitation though is where great art is born.  It’s because of these restraints that ideas hidden in the abyss of the mind can surface, and here the artist’s task is to diagnose them and articulate them in some form of creative expression. What Turner did do was pave the way for impressionism as well as abstract art, essentially launching Modern Art.  He not only painted beautiful landscapes and raging seas, he painted the wonders of science and progress, not necessarily optimistic progress but never the less progress.  He saw that mankind was on a bifurcating precipice and the times as he knew them would be changing forever.  He was born in the age of sail and died in the age of steam during the Industrial Revolution.

The great philosophers, poets, painters, psychologists and physicists all owe their work to those that came before them, and so the future generation will owe theirs to the present.  This work belongs to mankind; it’s a project to better understand ourselves and the space around us we all share.  Turner was a controversial figure during his time because he pushed at the walls of conformity.  Members of the aristocracy and royalty did not approve of many of his paintings, especially the final phase of his career where even his sinking ships and recognizable stormy seas were dissolving on his ghostly canvases, where his paint became quite free and loose blurring the land and horizon, leaving an impending hazy void that he subconsciously saw coming.

Turner’s long time housekeeper, who loved him dearly, was exploited by him sexually and was taken for granted.  She was for the most part, an object for him to use as he wished.  Once she discovered that Turner was living with a woman in Chelsea, she left heartbroken and after his death was left a drift.  Her life was structured around waiting hand and foot for Turner’s grumpy demands.  This defined her life and with him gone she no longer had any idea what to do with herself.  This has always been a tragedy for some people, where they devoted too much time towards the will of others and never really stopped to work on developing themselves. 

Turner’s relationship with the seaside landlady, Sophia Booth, who was a widower twice already, was certainly sad to see Turner die, but she lived on.  A perfect scene at the end of the film has her meticulously cleaning demarcated windows, recognizing life goes on and as such must be lived.  Unlike the hapless housekeeper, Sophia Booth was able to lose herself in structure and routine in order to carry on.  This is also a tragedy for some people where they cling to their things and their routines in order to avoid feeling the pain of loss.      

Society has become so structured that we no longer see the fine detail of it anymore.  If a double-decker city bus takes a busy London street corner at a fast speed, as they often do, the wannabe punk rocker standing on the sidewalk on that same corner, listening to the Sex Pistols through the re-mastered digital download on his iPhone, would barely blink an eye.  But if you were to remove the buildings, all the people, and other vehicles, placing him and the bus in an open field with the bus making the same maneuver, you might find that same bad ass punk-rocker soiling his leather pants.  The reason for this is the structure is an understood agreement in societies.  Without it, it would be just us alone in the world.  So the structure is our predictable Pavlovian maze trap that we as a member of society no longer see but yet require immensely.

J. M. W. Turner lived during a precarious time, where his contemporary Soren Kierkegaard developed existentialism, postulating that the anxiety we feel is the result of our total freedom to choose.  While the sodality of the church continued to proselytize people into believing what the church believes, many were looking to science for their answers about existence.  Alessandro Volta built the first electric battery and Pompeii was discovered at the base of Mount Vesuvius, which put an end to the frivolity of the Rococo Era ushering in Neoclassicism, which was a return to sterile academic form.  The Romantic Era followed as a philosophical and literary movement focused away from disciplines of the Neoclassics and more toward, feelings, emotions, introspection and atmosphere as mankind struggled against the forces of the natural world.   Turner became a vital figure in the art world and in how we look at ourselves while we look toward the horizon searching for the nature of reality.  Mr. Turner is a celebration of the artist's plight in life, the film is raw and as real as they come just as Turner would have wanted it. 

Jupiter Ascending and Harvesting the Most Precious Resource of all, Time

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON FEBRUARY 12, 2015

"Your Earth is a very small part of a very large industry.  Right now, Balem is entitled to Earth.  Once you claim it, the Earth will belong to you."

- Kalique to Jupiter

Jupiter Ascending was not a good movie but it also wasn’t that bad either.  The visual effects were stunning but the plot, character development and interactions were more problematic.  The space opera is about a young woman named Jupiter, who’s a Russian immigrant house keeper in Chicago that scrubs a lot of toilets, and is brought into this intergalactic turf war over whether or not she is a gene-matched reincarnation of a royal queen of the universe.

Jupiter, with the help of Caine Wise, a human/wolf genetically engineered interplanetary warrior, discovers that she is in fact royalty.  She must then legally claim her royal position and what inheritance comes with it, namely possession of Earth.  When it is discovered that the matriarch of the House of Abrasax, which is the most powerful of all the alien dynasties, has died, her three children Balem, Kalique and Titus go to war over many years for the inheritance.  Then it becomes known that Jupiter has the same genetic signature as the matriarch of the House of Abrasax and is the rightful heir.  The matriarch’s three children all one way or another, want Jupiter to hand over her inheritance to them.  The more extreme case here is Balem who wants her dead so he can claim the inheritance.

Caine Wise with his pointy ears and Atomic Anti-Gravity boots that allow him to rollerblade in the sky and off building surfaces, comes to Earth to protect Jupiter so she can claim her royal position and reinstate him as a legionnaire, which is a mercenary-type organization that he was banished from for ripping out the throat of what's known as an Entitled, which is another way of saying privileged or elite.  Balem has put a bounty on Jupiter’s head, resulting in her and Caine being intercepted and attacked by interplanetary lizard hunters with wings, these little Gollum-like alien creatures that are able to shape shift into human form, and a number of other bounty hunters.  Caine and Jupiter fight off and evade a number of these unwanted forces until a couple of bounty hunters finally capture Jupiter and take her into space.

Jupiter is acknowledged as royalty and is helped to make it official by space military forces who wish for new representation, after fighting in a number of wars.  Jupiter is then captured by Kalique, daughter of Jupiter’s genetic signature which they call a Recurrence, and told of the great resource that is fought so hard for in space, which is - time.  Kalique demonstrates this by walking into a plasma pool as a woman that looks like she’s in her later forties, submerging herself and then exiting the same pool looking like a twenty year old woman, her age is actually over 14 millennia.  Jupiter is clearly amazed at this level of technology and is then rescued by Caine where she is taken again but this time to Kalique’s brother’s massive gold-plated ship.  There Jupiter is told about the harvesting of human beings into a youth serum that allows these well-to-do aliens to live forever.  She is told by Titus that many planets just like Earth are farms for the purposes of harvesting, once the humans on that planet reach their Darwinian state of perfection and have exhausted all their resources.

Jupiter Ascending is pretty silly throughout and there is zero chemistry between Jupiter and Caine, even though the story attempts to create a romance between them.  The real interesting part here is the extent that capitalism is willing to go so the filthy rich get to live forever.  This movie knocks that home in the clearest sense, if the oligarchy of this planet scientifically found a way to harvest the third world for their life force, would they do it?  They absolutely would within a fraction of a blink of an eye.  In the movie people are described in the form of a pyramid with the royalty on top where the people at the bottom are seen as mere cattle.

The movie is saturated with so much visual effects that it will make the average candy-junkie truly feel what a sugar rush is, but hidden beneath all the explosions and cheesy dialogue is a true commentary on the future of mankind in cautionary tale form.  This movie demonstrates the potential effects of capitalism, if technology allows it to exploit even more of this planet and its living organisms for profit.  The movie explores the extent of what ownership means to the elite as well as the poor people that inhabit the lands that are being bought up by corporations.

Jupiter Ascending is about the future of mankind after abandoning the socialist recommendations of Karl Marx, where the fruits of industry must be shared for mankind to prosper.  Clearly that project was railroaded by the power structure because the world we live in today is cutthroat capitalistic economics, where the rich kill anything or anyone that even breathes near their piles upon piles of money.

Probably the greatest fallacy of not only human existence but all living organisms is that everything dies.  Human beings are in the unique and probably unfortunate position to be aware of their own mortality.  The fear of all our impending deaths has given rise to all manner of beliefs to distort that reality.  Everything from religions to reincarnation were invented by men as an illusory scapegoat from death.  Most of our existence is based on lies that can be traced back to that first major cover-up; we die and that’s it.  There’s no heaven for us to visit long dead loved ones while we sip red wine at a dinner banquet with God.  There’s no soul that lives on as our bodies die and are reincarnated into some other life form.  We die, like any other species on this planet.  We are only special because there isn’t anything else around that can tell us otherwise.  Every human on this planet was born into this lie and most believed it because the thought of death scares the hell out of them.  Not to mention its abstract, the very concept is almost incomprehensible because our only experience on this planet is living.  So life after death was invented to carry on that experience.
  

Jupiter Ascending is a cartoonish movie with big ideas. On its surface it wants us to have a fun and exciting movie going experience.  Beneath its gloss it wants us to feel that there's something wrong with the current system we are all living under. Governments and corporations are controlling our potential, they are controlling our minds ability to evaluate what's truly right or wrong for our well-being.  Instead our ability to evaluate has been appropriated for the purposes of mass consumption.  We are being lured away by fantasies of being famous and recognized and are severing ourselves from the very planet that we need to survive.  If this wasn't so incredibly pervasive and omnipresent it might be seen for what it truly is, sheer madness. 

In the ancient past the stars and the sun were gods, then the Greeks and the Romans anthropomorphized them into their gods which led polytheism to monotheism.  Today along with superheroes and celebrities, average people are scratching the eyes out of competitors in order to deify themselves into god-like status.  In our consumer society, we've become increasingly desperate to be seen and someone special but sadly, not with skills and talent.  We want the fast food route to greatness without all the work and struggle that Nietzsche said was required to overcome what holds us back.  The villains of Jupiter Ascending 'harvested' entire planets to benefit themselves both physiologically and financially, without any real afterthought of the millions of lives whose future potential was stolen from them. This is the unfortunate path we as a society are seeing ourselves on as corporations and governments harvest our wills to live outside their overpowering agendas. 

AGORA: Hypatia and being a Philosophical Woman in a Violently Religious Ancient World

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON JANUARY 24, 2015

“Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fantasies.  To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing.  The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them.  In fact, men will fight for superstition as quickly as for living truth, even more so, since a superstition is intangible, you can’t get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, as so is changeable.”  

- Hypatia of Alexandria

AGORA, a word that means 'gathering place' or 'assembly', is a period piece film set back in the 4^th century AD, Roman Egypt, that tells the story of a brilliant Greek philosopher and astronomer named Hypatia.  She was a free thinking woman that was a teacher and mentor; she was an inventor, mathematician and authority on the philosophy of Plato.  She lived in Alexandria, in northern Egypt off the coast of the Mediterranean, with her father Theon who was the director of the Musaeum of Alexandria, which was an institution for music, poetry, philosophy and science.  It also housed the vast number of texts in the great Library of Alexandria.  Hypatia would teach future leaders and scholars in assembly rooms.  

Alexandria, in its inception, was to become a multi-cultured metropolis where all types of people who seek knowledge and growth were to reside.  Philosophers, scientists, mathematicians, astronomers and high priests were all to co-exist under the same sky directly above Alexandria, where writers and scientists would debate and pioneer thought.  It was a dream imagined by Alexander the Great where all knowledge could be stored in one place.  The intellectual city combined this wonderful mix-match of Roman, Greek and Egyptian architecture to erect its monuments and build its temples.

When the Christians arrived they soon began to mock and defile the pagan gods which forced the Pagans to take action.  The Pagans ambushed the Christians, causing many deaths, leading to a massive bifurcation of the city where Pagans and Christians stood apart.  This social unrest began to challenge the Roman rule as the Christians began to take over, gaining more and more power. 

Hypatia was a non-believer; she was a woman of science and philosophy and was quite frankly thinking about more important things than fake gods that scared Christians were forcing people to believe.  When the Pagans instigated the battle with the Christians, they ended up finding themselves barricaded in the Library of the Serapeum, a massive temple where the documents and texts from mostly all the worlds thinkers were held.

While taking refuge behind the walls of the Serapeum, Hypatia continued thinking about the widely believed astronomical, geocentric Ptolemaic system that the Earth was the center of the Solar System, a theory that philosopher Aristotle believed to be true as well.  This model she felt was widely flawed but she was still baffled by the possibility that the Earth was in fact moving.  She considered the 3^rd century astronomer Aristarchus of Samos’ Heliocentric hypothesis that the Earth and the planets, which Hypatia at the time called ‘wanderers’, actually circled the Sun.

Soon an envoy of the Roman Emperor declared that the Pagans would all be pardoned, however the Christians would be allowed access to the library to do with it as they wish.  Hypatia and a number of others furiously scramble to gather as many important scrolls and texts from the Library as possible before fleeing.  Christians ended up overtaking the library, destroying statues and burning all the remaining works of philosophy, science, literature, poetry and mathematics scrolls that were unavoidably left behind.  A body of knowledge that one could only imagine about the possibilities of even furthering an understanding of our species, how we live our lives and the elements that form the world and space around it.  Civilization itself stood still that day as all that knowledge was destroyed out of fear of difference, fear of oneself, fear of loneliness, fear of abandonment and fear of change.  Paganism became outlawed and the Ancient World ended giving birth to what we now call - Modern History.   

“Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.” 

– Hypatia of Alexandria

As the years past, the Christians began to dominate Alexandria where even the current Prefect was converted to Christianity.  Their power grew and they wanted to impose their Christianity onto other communities within Alexandria.  Jewish people at this point became their new rivals and sadly remain so to this day in various forms of disagreement.  The Jewish people believe their God of Abraham is the true God were the Christians are saying that Jesus is the true son of God.  The battle back and forth, as these ludicrous futile arguments go, leads to violence against each other.  Christians kill some Jews, Jews stone some Christians, Christians take up swords and kill more Jews and round and round we go.  These two groups among too many on this planet, fight over wanting to be number one, the sad thing here is, they both claim to be peaceful as they cowardly kill one another because these incredulous, hypocritical believers loathe opposition to their insane way of thinking.

“All formal dogmatic religions are fallacious and must never be accepted by self-respecting persons as final.”  

- Hypatia

While all the men fight in the streets over piety, Hypatia continued work on her theory that the Earth not only revolves around the Sun but it doesn’t do so in a perfect symmetrical circle.  She also was trying to prove the Earth was in fact moving even though everyone on it wouldn’t necessarily feel it moving.  Clearly here she wasn’t considering what we know now about gravity, but her insight into the physics of the planet was ambitious.  The Christians figured that the world must be flat because if it was a sphere which was being suggested, then why aren’t people and animals falling from the top of the earth down the side and then sliding off it?  It seems a bit silly these days, to even consider such a thing, but we were all born into a planet where all these questions had answers.   To Christians, the Book of Genesis is their scientific text that explains how the Earth came to be.  All Christians and certainly many Christians to this day believe that God created the Earth and the Stars.  They believe the geocentric model is the center where God placed his blessed children, and thinking otherwise is an act of heresy.

Hypatia didn’t believe in any of it and today we know now she was more or less correct in not believing in it.  Her purview was still understandably limited by the senses and the capacity of the mind with such a minute amount of cosmic information.  She continued to prove that the Earth was moving and that the motion would not affect a falling object on the Earth itself.  The Christians ended up forbidding Hypatia to teach at school anymore because of their objections against heliocentrism.

While being subjugated by the Christians, Hypatia still focusing on her work, discovered an astrodynamic theory that the Earth orbits the Sun in an elliptical motion, not a circular one.  This explains why the Sun sometimes appears closer to the Earth than other times.  This oval orbit placed the Earth in various distances from the Sun and thus explained why the seasons changed.

The Christians, reading straight from their bible that a woman should never be in a position of power over a man, declared Hypatia a witch, a godless woman and inciting religious turmoil, and vowed to kill her.  Hypatia, a lover of wisdom and the endless possibilities of human thought, was kidnapped on her way home by a group of Christians.  This mob of mad men tore her clothing off, stripping her naked in front of an increasing heathen crowd.  They dragged her naked into the Caesaruim, which was a temple and then converted to a church, and grabbed sharp pieces of any wood or rock they could find and they then began to fillet her alive.  Once she was dead, like a pack of wolves, they pulled her limbs apart and took her dismembered body parts to the edge of the city and burnt them.  

The core of all this isn’t necessarily religion, the core is fear which at its feet spawns violence, through the rationalization of rejecting fear and weakness, violence in the mind becomes reasonable if one wants to protect the very structure of their being.  This is the madness found at the heart of most all religions.  It promises so much and is never able to live up to those promises, thus moving the believer into a psychotic disposition that must force its fantasy into the world and oddly, in this person’s fractured mind, validate it.  Here they would have believed that they were doing God’s work for him and would have excused themselves of all blame, which would relieve any guilt, which would make them feel better about themselves and ultimately this would result in an avoidance of fear. 

Alexander the Great would have been profoundly disappointed to what eventually happened to his great city.  This city was to be a place of enlightenment yet that act of barbarism blew out the candle of Alexander’s dream of a more knowledgeable, informed future.  Instead of human growth, understanding, respect to all the living, silly superstitions manifested into real world consequences was how these men chose to solve what they perceived as a problem, a problem that we all know too well today.  Thankfully Christianity has matured to the point that in the developed countries this type of thing doesn't regularly happen.  All Hypatia wanted was to learn and teach what she had learned to a group of open-minded people in a city that welcomed difference and thrived on change.

Hypatia’s achievements are even more exceptional because she was able to study the stars in a very male dominated ancient world.  She was a humanist, a person that looked beyond gender, allowing her mind, equal neurologically to anyone else’s, to expand without the weight of everyday banality and religious dogmatism truncating it.

“Life is an unfoldment, and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend.  To understand the things that are at our door is the best preparation for understanding those that lie beyond.”  

- Hypatia

American Sniper: Propaganda and turning an American Psycho into a War Hero of the People

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON JANUARY 21, 2015

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.  If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.  If you know neither the enemy not yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” 

- Sun Tzu, The Art of War

“Just because war is hell doesn’t mean you can’t have a little fun.” 

- Chris Kyle

American Sniper, directed by Clint Eastwood, is a war movie about a man with a talent for precision sniper shooting that is deployed to Iraq after the September 11, 2001 attacks.  Chris Kyle finds out about his deployment while at his wedding in the midst of celebrating his union with his, soon to be annoying, complaining all the time, wife. This scene happens in so many action movies that here it comes off as hollow.  Chris Kyle was responsible for killing 255 people, 160 of which were officially confirmed by the Department of Defense.  This movie is a celebration of all those kills and never discusses the moral cost of killing so many people.

The movie, lacking pathos and insight, is based on Chris Kyle’s bloodthirsty, unapologetic, zero regret, autobiography American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History.  The very fact that it is an achievement worth celebrating really shows how far down the rabbit hole Americans truly are.  This marksman perched himself of a roof and picked off ‘the evildoers’ one by one.  He became known as the ‘Legend’ by his fellow Navy SEAL brethren and soon by most of the military forces.

Where to begin with the propaganda oozing from this six time Oscar nominated movie.  American Sniper is a commercial for going to war and killing terrorists without ever really knowing why or caring to know why for that matter.  It’s a jingoistic and xenophobic thoughtless movie that’s only wish is to hypnotize the herd-coward mentality of the American, certainly more in the conservative mid section, people into unconditionally believing in its message of blind patriotism.  Socrates warned his fellow Athenians about sheepishly going alone with the majority and without asking yourself ‘why am I going alone with this’.  Clearly in America, Socrates’ philosophical legacy is a forgotten piece history.

American Sniper, directed quite sloppily by Eastwood, holds no responsibility for telling a story that truthfully represents the world it is depicting.  If the movie was a fantasy or a comedy, exceptions can be made, but here, if they are dealing with honor in a real world scenario, then they owe it to their audience to be as forthcoming as they can about the historical record.   Instead the so-called ‘evil terrorists’ are shaded in black and nameless, faceless as they scurry around dilapidated buildings to kill ‘American freedom’, who they would have you believe, are good by virtue for simply being Americans.

Chris Kyle, in his autobiography, had no remorse and saw ‘the enemy as savages and despicably evil’ also saying his only regret was that ‘he didn’t kill more of them’, that he had ‘fun’ killing and that ‘if you see anyone from about sixteen to sixty-five and there male, shoot’em.  Kill every male you see’.  This is the great American Hero this movie is celebrating.  They should all be ashamed of themselves but the problem here is the filmmakers and actors are drinking the same FOX News, patriotic we-are-the-greatest-country-in-the-world bullshit as well.  Chris Kyle, a man with no imagination to speak of, was a sociopath that became a cardboard cut-out poster boy for the American Military Petroleum Complex.  He was trained to shoot the enemy so they could win a war that they started in the first place.  These so-called savages would have been just fine if the mass of the military power of the United States didn’t invade them for unsubstantiated reasons so they can take the poor country’s resources, specifically the oil.

There is no doubt that people in various parts of the world are subjected to horrible living conditions.  There are people living under strict religious and governmental dictatorships, but to say that the world power is there to help them and instead is actually there to rob them is the most immoral of deceptions.  Even the poor soldiers, along with Chris Kyle, don’t even know better because they were born into the lie of the American Dream, and that God is on their side so they must be right in this fight for liberty and freedom.

American Sniper is a cowardly boring movie.  It’s praying on the stupidity/patriotism of its simplistic audience rather than challenging them like much superior films like Three Kings and The Thin Red Line or even Hurt Locker for that matter.  Sadly a movie like American Sniper exists and is taken seriously by backward thinking Americans because these same people are unable to accept that the war in Iraq was a failure, it allows them to ignore the consequences of invading a country with no weapons of mass destruction and was not involved in 9/11.  Their fabricated livelihood is hinged on this massive lie that American is great and anything she does is in the spirit of the Christian God.  Otherwise they would have to except they are culpable for electing a government that is responsible for massive war crimes.  More Iraqi people were killed during the American invasion, starting in 2003 then Saddam Hussein was allegedly responsible for.

Like Zero Dark Thirty, but much worse, American Sniper turns Chris Kyle, a dehumanizing racist murderer, into a hero and the war in the Middle East into a virtuous fight for freedom to suit its own ideology.  Zero Dark Thirty was a convoluted mess about the hunt for Osama Bin Laden while justifying torture methods to get him, which have proven to yield little to no intelligence but don’t tell that to lawyers vindicating it to the President’s ear.  That film come off as complicated so all the simple people couldn’t keep up and then wrapped it’s story, ‘based on true events’ apparently, by capturing and killing the alleged mastermind of 9/11.

Like religion, American Sniper and movies like it have a purpose and that purpose is to string the lie along, so those who rule over us all can get away with murder by calling it an act of righteousness.  This movie transmogrifies real life into propagandized entertainment; it codifies truth to shape its narrative but ultimately at the expense of objectivity.  The problem is the movie remains one-sided throughout and leaves a message of morality and justification as it runs its credits.  The movie doesn’t bore us with all the political ramifications of invading a foreign land, or that many of those so-called terrorists are simply defending their land and their families.  The movie is quite clearly scared to death at the possibility of humanizing the Iraqis, people that have dreams for the best life possible for themselves and their families, not unlike any other place in the world.

American Sniper and the marksman on the trigger side of its crosshairs see the world in demarcated terms of good and evil.  The problem is the main character and the movie never see, and actually never want to, is the relativity of good and evil.  They turn their murderous cause into a virtue and then call it a 'true story' about the fight for freedom for the greatest nation on the planet.

“One of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror.” 

- George W. Bush