Alex writes about Selma, American Sniper, and the way truth is presented in cinema.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n When watching a movie that purports to be about something that occurred in real life, there are myriad ways to judge its makers\u2019 intellect, but I prefer to focus on the two most frequently discussed ways. One can look at a film like Selma and say \u201cThat strays from some of the facts I read on Wikipedia; ipso facto, I am outraged,\u201d or upon seeing American Sniper they can think, \u201cWell, I guess this is a simple action movie that is forgoing facts.\u201d Each of these options is in play for both movies, but typically some things are decided pretty quickly. Whenever you watch a film, there is a feeling-out process of sorts that happens between the movie and its viewers. With the first few minutes of a film, we immediately judge the merits of the picture, its stylistic choices, and its narrative structure. With an expertly-directed movie like Whiplash, the first scene shows us a microcosm of the movie itself: two people around a drum set, one teaching, one learning, and JK Simmons being tremendous. Historical dramas like American Sniper or Selma tell us in the opening how each film is going to treat history: whether it is going to try to shape it into something new and interesting, or fit what actually is interesting about the story into the pre-existing mould we\u2019ve been making metaphorical lime Jello with for years. How we judge those few minutes typically ends up helping us decide how we are going to accept this film: as a piece of historical fiction that is interesting – and therefore we get upset when it strays from the truth – or a film that treats history so ludicrously as to completely invalidate its intended meaning.<\/p>\n Put simply, the storytelling qualities of each of these movies can be boiled down to one simple fact: I remembered how one movie begins, and totally forgot the other. Selma starts with Martin Luther King Jr. rehearsing a speech and talking to his wife about the perpetual silliness of ascots. Following that, while King gives the speech he was rehearsing, the film transitions to a scene of four schoolgirls walking down a set of stairs, having an innocuous conversation. I was confused by this sequence initially; I didn\u2019t know who these girls were, nor why the scene was going on so long. And then a bomb goes off. The four girls are killed in what turns out to be the 16th<\/sup> Street Baptist Church Bombing, and as a viewer we learn even more about the environment the film exists within. Most importantly to the way we judge the film, we are learning this information in an interesting way. We\u2019re asking questions until the film gives us the answers; we even see King asking questions of himself and his words before we see him speak them. With American Sniper, however, we know the answers long before we get to them. When I re-watched the introduction to American Sniper to jog my memory, I saw the film beginning in media res, and I recalled sitting in a theatre thinking, \u201cOh this is going to flash back to Kyle\u2019s childhood.\u201d A gunshot goes off, and we\u2019re in the past, because of course we are.<\/p>\n Bradley Cooper and Clint Eastwood have each publically expressed their confusion about the way their film has been perceived. Each of them sees it as a film about post-traumatic stress disorder and the way war destroys a family, a viewpoint that is not hard to see when watching the actual film. But what neither man seems to realize is that they have made a terrible fucking movie about PTSD and the way war destroys a family. All of the thoughts about PTSD are clearly there \u2013 a man ignoring the effect war has had on him, that same man then lashing out irrationally, before finally being convinced that this is a real problem and accepting help. Kyle even aspires to help others, right up until a man suffering from PTSD murders him. This is all present in the film, and PTSD is the film\u2019s villain (but not its most prevalent bad guy), because it indirectly kills our hero. Its depiction is simply not very interesting. American Sniper was never going to expose anybody to something we weren\u2019t already aware of, something the film\u2019s very basic level of examination ensures. Instead, the film focuses on idiotic action movie constructions – the enemy sniper, for example – without ever making a comment on them. These super villains are just people that exist to give Bradley Cooper PTSD, I guess. It was a construct we\u2019ve seen in almost every action movie we\u2019ve ever watched, so we immediately know how to understand it and roll our eyes at its idiocy. This is real life, we\u2019ve been told. Real life has no single enemy that follows you around, we know instinctively. American Sniper is shenanigans, we think. This is something we see throughout the training sequences, Chris Kyle\u2019s wedding, and pretty much every conversation Kyle has (especially stateside, where ideas are so unexamined that the film frequently transitions into accidental satire). We see the most basic version of these interactions, and we simply roll our eyes at them. Nothing else in the film ever had a chance.<\/p>\n