Post 8: American Sniper and Orientalism
In my previous post COVID-19 Thoughts from an International Student, I mentioned Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism when discussing the former President Donald Trump called COVID-19 “Chinese virus” or “Wuhan virus”. This theory describes how western societies discriminate the eastern countries, the orient, and in this post, I want to analyze more specifically Said’s theory through the 86th Oscar Academy Best Picture: American Sniper. By the end, you can gain a better understanding of today’s western media industries’ formation, especially those in America, namely the impact of imperialism on culture and literature.
The movie demonstrates an American sniper’s war experience in Iraq in which local men, women, and children are depicted as evil war zealots. In the following clip, you can see how the sniper shoots a woman and her kid who carry a bomb:
To some extent, it is understandable that the sniper shoots bomb carriers, but the primary problem is the perspective of the entire scene is through the sniper’s eyes: this is “Iraq” for the viewer. This is the western cultural representation of “the Orient” where Iraq was in the military conflict against America. The American cultural industries portray the middle east as permanently in war or chaos and present all Arab people as potential threats.
This unfair representation has immediately reminded me of Edward Said’s work of Orientalism first published in 1979 wherein the book he conveys the idea of studying the western cultural representation of the east and critiquing them, looking for systematic patterns, and initiating an entirely new field of “post-colonial studies”. To be specific, Said’s first argument is the Ontological Distinction of East and West:
“Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient” and (most of the time) ‘the Occident’. Thus a very large mass of writers, among whom are poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and imperial administrators, have accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions, and political accounts” (Said 1979: 2).
Here, Said delivers a simple but important idea: a major basis for the production of culture in western societies, especially former or current colonial nations, is the belief that east and west are inherently different. Therefore, the basis for many art and culture is either explicitly exploring that difference, or having it naturalized as a part of the background of the story. In America Sniper, the film stages this distinction as the literal separation by physical boundaries between the Iraq people and the US military. They have no direct contact except through violence; and they are physically marked as distinct: one wears official military gear, the other wears peasant-like “non-western” people.
Secondly, Said considers Orientalism as productive “discourse”:
“My contention is that without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage and even produce the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period” (Said 1979: 3).
In this paragraph, Said delivers that Orientalism is a way of thinking and talking about the east, and all of that thinking takes on a material form when it gets inscribed into texts like movies or novels, or political speeches. As Stuart Hall says, people encode the media’s messages and take them for real. In other words, language helps to create reality. Here, orientalism as a kind of language/discourse creates a certain vision of the east that can become a reality for the people who believe it. Back to America Sniper, when the character calls the Iraq woman an “evil bitch”, he is basing on stereotypes of “dangerous” Iraq women and audiences will further propagate it as a legitimate vision of Iraq and its women, and it goes on forever.
Thirdly, Said believes Orientalism is an artistic process
“I use the notion of strategy simply to identify the problem every writer on the Orient has faced: how to get hold of it, how to approach it, how not to be defeated or overwhelmed by its sublimity, its scope, its awful dimensions. Everyone who writes about the Orient must locate himself vis-a-vis the Orient; translated into his text, this location includes the kind of narrative voice he adopts, the type of structure he builds, the kinds of images, themes, motifs that circulate in his text-all of which add up to deliberate ways of addressing the reader, containing the Orient, and finally representing it or speaking in its behalf” (Said 1979: 20).
The key idea here is that orientalism does not just restrain the authors and their creativity, it is the basis of creativity. The major task for the artist then is to figure out how to be creative within the paraments laid out by orientalism — its binary worldview. This is always a combination of aesthetic creativity and politics. One is about style and form, the other is about how people perceive their status in the world.
Lastly, Said’s fourth argument is: Orientalism is not about the Orient.
“Orientalism stands forth and away from the Orient: that Orientalism makes sense at all depends more on the West than on the Orient, and this sense is directly indebted to various Western techniques of representation that make the Orient visible, clear, “there” in discourse about it … Orientalism responded more to the culture that produced it than to its putative object, which was also produced by the West” (Said 1979: 22).
Here, Said argues that the West’s creation of an Orient perception has very little to do with the Orient itself. It relates more with the West’s own various cultural anxieties and concerns and then projecting them onto the passive screen of the “Orient”. In other words, the Orient in Orientalism is a made-up idea that helps the west settle some of its problems and issues. Hence, we as audiences need to keep in mind that what we see is not an attempt to really portray the East, but rather, a set of projections and fantasies essential to the West’s own cultural identity.
This is especially obvious in American sniper. Despite being about Iraq, the movie has no real Iraq characters nor a real scene of the place or its people. Rather the real story is about the sniper’s various dilemmas whereas “Iraq” just happens to be the backdrop for this exploration of American morality and psychology to unfold.
To conclude, Orientalism is a worldview that western people think about the Orient and the west itself. Deeply it is a fantasy meant to bolster the Americans’ understanding of their selves and culture. However, it has brought a real change around us that includes academic and political knowledge, and people use that worldview to affect reality in the world. Eventually, this becomes circular: we see these discourses and believe them to be true, and then we act them out in reality.
References:
Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. NY: Vintage.
