Red, White and Blue Martyrdom: ‘American Sniper’

Introduction

Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper (2014), starring Bradley Cooper, is a loose adaptation of the autobiography of Chris Kyle, a veteran of the Iraq War and the deadliest sniper in US military history. The film depicts his military exploits, the strain his service put on his family life and finally his murder by Eddie Ray Routh, a veteran suffering from PTSD. Various critics have alluded to how the film presents Kyle’s death as a martyrdom, but none have interrogated how the extensive Christian tradition connoted by this phrase is inherited by the film.[1] St Augustine asserts that ‘the cause, not the suffering, makes the martyr,’[2] and so, for Middleton, martyrdom is never ‘ideologically neutral.’[3] In Butler’s terms, martyrdom is a ‘frame’ that ‘work[s] to differentiate the lives we can’ grieve (through martyrisation) ‘from those we cannot’ by virtue of the cause for which they died, asserting its righteousness in the process.[4] Upon analysis of the film it becomes apparent this frame functions as propaganda in support of the Iraq war, reinforcing the American exceptionalism by which it was justified. As such, using American Sniper as a case study, this essay will examine how propaganda in support of the so-called ‘War on Terror’ frames US soldiers martyred in the pursuit of global democracy as the only grievable victims of the conflict, rendering Middle Eastern Muslims savages fighting for terror itself, and thus unworthy of martyrological recognition. By drawing attention to the means by which it is contrived, I hope to exploit the ‘vulnerability […] to critical instrumentalization’ that Butler identfies in the frame, to resist its differential assignment of grievability.[5]

Martyrology and ‘The War on Terror’

A martyrology is a text that recounts the lives of those that suffer (generally in death) for a cause and is typified by John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, a book of Protestant martyrdoms. King recounts that Foxe’s text significantly influenced the ‘consciousness of Early Modern England,’ demonising Catholics as violent persecutors in the wake of the Counter-Reformation and venerating their victims in order to consolidate English Protestant identity.[6] Catholic equivalents depicted the violence of the Reformation,[7] and so, in Middleton’s terms, a ‘propaganda war to control martyr stories’ ensued.[8] Soueif has described the WoT (War on Terror) as a ‘contest of narratives: stories protagonists tell about themselves, [and] about their enemies,’ and so the potential efficacy of Foxe-style martyrology in this contest is obvious.[9]

Butler suggests that frames ‘must circulate in order to establish their hegemony.’[10] Foxe’s martyrology fulfils this criteria, as King notes that he ‘integrated image with text,’ appealing to the ‘ongoing culture of images’ resulting from centuries of Catholic iconolatry to reach a popular readership.[11] King insists that the ‘impact of this book on worldwide Anglophone culture endures to the present day,’[12] and this is perhaps nowhere more apparent than wartime cinematic propaganda. Haddow, calls the WoT a ‘crusade of the visual,’ arguing that the Christian ‘economy of [...] images […] has today been absorbed into advanced capitalism,’ most notably in the ‘mass-produced entertainment’ that hoped to garner support from British and American citizens.[13] Coyne and Hall note that in 2001, ‘Bush’s senior advisor and deputy chief of staff Karl Rove met with the chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America […] and other industry insiders,’ to deliver a list of seven ideals to be portrayed in films about the upcoming wars that— among many things— encouraged military enlistment and public support.[14] In the tradition of Foxe’s book, the military sought to employ the populist, visual medium of cinema to depict the suffering of US soldiers in order to sway public opinion of the cause for which they fought.

The Martyr’s Cause

As mentioned, the cause, not the suffering, makes the martyr, and so it is important to examine how WoT propaganda appeals to established American mythological narratives to frame the cause of military martyrdom. In 1839, John O’Sullivan wrote in the Democratic Review, that the US was ‘destined to manifest to mankind […] God's natural and moral law of equality […] brotherhood.’[15] Then, in 1845, he coined the term ‘manifest destiny’ to describe the nation’s God-given mission of spreading these Enlightenment ideals through the conquest and re-population of the American continent.[16] The notion of manifest destiny soon proliferated widely through American political discourse, and became tied to the frontier myth. In 1893, William J. Turner famously summarised this myth, writing that ‘the frontier is the outer edge of the wave—the meeting point between savagery and civilization,’ and that the ‘most important effect’ of the ‘Indian wars’ that had pushed the frontier Westward ‘has been the promotion of democracy.’[17] America defined its exceptional identity by reference to the myth of manifest destiny, which framed the real and violent expansion West of the frontier as a democratizing conquest of savage Indian lands. Up until the turn of 20th century America’s destiny was limited to the continent, since, in Gray’s terms, Americans had been ‘reluctant to ‘act as the world’s policeman.”[18]

However, over the course of the World Wars, and more aggressively during the Cold War, the US abandoned its isolationism, so much so that by 2002, Vice President Cheney could claim that “with our help” “the freedom-loving people of Iraq will have a chance to promote the values that can bring lasting peace.”[19] Cheney suggested that the war in Afghanistan had shown that “America acts not to conquer but to liberate.”[20] Moreover, Bush was unambiguous in declaring the divine origin of this foreign policy, reportedly telling a Palestinian foreign minister: “God would tell me ‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq.’ And I did.”[21] For Gray, this departure from isolation was justified by ‘a belief that the world can be made safe by a Pax Americana [(c.f. Pax Romana/ Britannica)] in which America’s global hegemony is entrenched.’[22] In this Pax Americana, we find an internationalisation of the aforementioned myths: spreading what Bush called ‘the single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise’[23] beyond the national frontier became the new manifest destiny of the US. For this reason, Carter writes of “the cultural-ideological influence that the myth of the [Wild] West still holds over […] the United States in its self-assumed role of figurative policeman.”[24] Indeed, Robert Kaplan, who worked as an embedded journalist in Afghanistan and Iraq recounts that soldiers repeatedly welcomed him to “Injun country,” concluding that “the war on terror was really about taming the frontier.”[25]

American Sniper is not subtle in its appeal to these myths. Early in the film, a speech delivered by Kyle’s father summarises the assumptions of the Pax Americana myth, declaring that “there are three types of people in this world: sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs.” [26] Sheep are too weak to protect themselves from the “evil,” “violent” wolves that prey on them, but sheepdogs are those like Kyle “blessed with the gift of aggression and an overpowering need to protect the flock” by confronting the wolf.[27] Unlike the wolves of the world, it is implied, the US uses violence to liberate, not conquer. Meanwhile, the delivery of this monologue over a shot of a bible insinuates the divinity of this violence.[28] However, the myth most explicitly reproduced is the frontier, as a soldier tells Kyle upon arrival: ‘Welcome to Fallujah: the new Wild West in the old Middle East.’[29] Krishnan and Trivedi argue that the film’s employment of the Western genre— whose cowboys and Indians epitomise the frontier’s divide— ‘encourages its audience to frame the Iraq War in a specific manner, evoking a mythical past’ to present the war as a continuation of the Turner thesis.[30] In summary, Butler asserts that the frame ‘depends upon conditions of reproducibility in order to succeed’[31] and American Sniper is demonstrative of how the WoT has offered the conditions for reproducing American mythical frames, presenting its military conquests as the latest in a history of liberations from savagery.

The myths that WoT propaganda invokes rely on a binary opposition between two causes, evident in Bush’s remark that “the allies of terror are the enemies of civilisation,”[32] and labelling of the war as “a conflict between good and evil.”[33] Bharucha argues that the implication inherent in the WoT— that ‘terror is an adversary, an Enemy’— establishes a ‘false Manichaeism,’[34] and Krishnan and Trivedi echo this in their analysis of American Sniper. They write that its Western frame ‘transfigures a politically complex conflict into a moral, Manichaeist struggle between civilisation and savagery.’[35] In this frame, Middle Eastern Muslim insurgents— the wolves to the military’s sheepdog— become the embodiment of terror itself, as a commanding officer tells Kyle that due to the evacuation of a target city, “any military-aged male is here to kill you.”[36] Insurgents are not resisting invasion; the nuances of their cause are ironed out and replaced by a desire to kill Americans— they quite literally are killing. This reductive perspective is epitomised by the ‘Butcher,’ an enforcer working under al-Zarqawi, a real-life militant Islamist in Iraq. Unlike al-Zarqawi, the Butcher is a total fabrication, crafted by Eastwood to serve as a pantomime villain and a caricature of radical Islamic terror.[37] Spivak writes of how ‘the terrorist is taken to be numbed to terror,’[38] and Bharucha argues that this notion reduces them to “machines.”[39] Indeed, the scene in which the Butcher unflinchingly kills a young boy using a power drill— his apparent ‘numbness’ juxtaposed with the assumed horror of the audience at the graphic violence— reflects this view of the terrorist:

The Butcher murders a boy.[40]

Even his alias, a verb as well as a noun, implies that he lives solely to butcher.

In Butler’s terms, WoT discourse ‘cast[s]’ insurgents solely ‘as threats to human life,’ and given Augustine’s aforementioned dictum, it is no surprise that they cannot be martyred or grieved.[41] ‘Grievability,’ Butler writes, ‘is a presupposition of life that matters.’[42] Given that distillations of murderous terror cannot be said to matter, insurgents are not really ‘living populations’ in the WoT’s frame, and so they are thus “lose-able.”[43] This is apparent from the infamous opening of American Sniper, in which Kyle shoots a young boy and his mother attempting to throw a grenade at a military vehicle.[44] Later, Kyle describes the attack as “evil like I never seen before,” and a soldier reassures him of the rectitude of his decision, saying: “she could’ve taken out ten marines.”[45] Butler distinguishes between ‘apprehending’ and ‘recognizing’ a life, suggesting that the former denotes ‘registering, acknowledging without full cognition.”[46] Just as any military-aged male is killing incarnate, the mother and child are evil, and so their deaths are merely apprehended. They are excluded from the recognition and grievability inherent in the martyrisation that the marines would no doubt have been subject to. When Kyle tells his future wife Taya: “I’d lay down my life for my country […] it’s the greatest country on earth,” it is clear that the act of laying down his life can be a grievable martyrdom only because America’s exceptionality ensures the virtue of its military cause.

The Martyr’s Suffering

Despite Augustine’s words, the subject of the Early Modern martyrologies was, first and foremost, the depiction of suffering. Suffering was crucial to martyrdom because, as French Protestant Jean Crespin wrote in his 1554 Histoire des Martyrs: “among the marks of the true Church of God, one of the chief has [… has been] that he has sustained the attacks of persecution.”[47] When one suffers for a ‘true’ cause, that suffering serves as a ‘mark’ to substantiate its truth. Lawrence and Jewett assert that recent Hollywood war films have sought to frame ‘American soldiers as the primary victim of their respective conflicts.’[48] This is certainly true of American Sniper, as upon returning from his third tour, Kyle tells Taya: “They’re fucking savages,” and her response: “It’s not about them, it’s about us,” is emblematic of Hollywood’s wider representational concerns.[49]  In the light of Crespin’s words, it is clear that this representation not only speaks to the ungrievable status of non- American ‘savages’, but also seeks to valorise the American cause further. Jason Hall, American Sniper’s screenwriter, insisted that the film is a “character study about what the plight is for a soldier […] not a political discussion about war,”[50] but of course it is precisely whose plight is studied that constitutes the film’s politics. The choice to portray Kyle’s martyrdom is emblematic of both the grievability of his life and the film’s support for the American foreign policy that brought about his death.

WoT propaganda centres the American soldier’s suffering through appeals to notions of martyrdom that extend beyond death. Stancliffe notes that the medieval Irish church ‘revered as martyrs not only those who died for their faith, but also those whose ascetic discipline made their lives a daily kind of immolation for Christ.’[51] These martyrs were classified in the seventh century Cambrai Homily according to three categories:

This is the white martyrdom to man, when he separates for the sake of God from everything he loves [...] This is the blue martyrdom [… when he] suffers toil in […] repentance. This is the red martyrdom to him […] destruction for Christ’s sake.[52]

White denoted ascetic separation, blue the grief of repentance, red death. Employing these categories as a means to frame the martyrological frame, we might say that American soldiers are red, white, and blue martyrs, enduring multifarious sufferings in the name of the Star-Spangled Banner. This is apparent in American Sniper. Kyle’s white martyrdom, his separation from his wife and family in the US, is afforded a prominent position in the film. Taya repeats how much she misses Kyle when he is away (“You guys nearly done out there? […] I miss you real bad”), though Kyle rarely says the same.[53] Instead, it is left to Taya to express his suffering, as she tells him: “Even when you’re here, you’re not here.”[54] In the shot below, Kyle tells Taya of his intention to return for a fourth tour, and the juxtaposition of the bedroom setting— ostensibly a place of connection— with their obvious lack of intimacy speaks to how Kyle’s preoccupation with Iraq prevents him being ‘here’ with his wife:

The couple lie awkwardly in bed.[55]

Evidently, the psychological effect of warfare has rendered Kyle’s white martyrdom— his separation from his beloved Taya— perpetual. Less obvious is the film’s portrayal of blue martyrdom. We might expect Kyle to be repentant for his record 160 confirmed kills, but when a psychiatrist asks Kyle if he regrets them, he responds:

No […] They were trying to kill our soldiers and I’m willing to meet my creator and answer for every shot that I took. The thing that haunts me are all the guys I couldn’t save.[56]

Insurgents are ‘trying to kill our soldiers,’ so Kyle’s repentant grief is limited to those fighting for his creator, those whose deaths warrant the textualized haunting that is martyrology. American Sniper is loaded with depictions of red martyrdom, though besides Kyle’s, the most notable is that of his friend Biggles. In the tradition of Foxe’s ‘spectacular woodcut illustration[s]’[57] of martyrdom, the film graphically depicts Biggles’ suffering, as he is shot in the face and later dies during surgery:

Biggles’ wound.[58]

Significantly, all we are told about Biggles is that he has recently been engaged.[59] Thus, his death, which separates him from his fiancé, conflates the suffering of white and red martyrdom. Meanwhile, Kyle’s response to Biggles’ injury— returning for a fourth tour— is indicative of his blue martyrdom, his guilt-fuelled desire to save more soldiers.

Alternatively, Kyle’s red martyrdom does not follow the established principles of martyrology, taking place offscreen and coming at the hands of Routh rather than a ‘terrorist.’ However, the abnormal circumstances of his martyrdom in fact heighten its utility as propaganda. Foxe claimed that one objective of his book was to represent “God’s great mercies and judgments in preserving his church,’ among other examples of divine intercedence.[60] For this reason, Kyle, as the martyrological embodiment of global manifest destiny, cannot be defeated by the savage terrorists that persecute him. His ability to survive the conflict is evidence of the divine origin of the cause. Moreover, Routh’s PTSD allows the film to further emphasise the suffering of American soldiers through an appeal to the long-established trope of ‘going native.’ Krishnan and Trivedi help illustrate how this trope is integrated into the Western, writing that it tells ‘the story of a man caught […] between wilderness and civilisation.’[61] Symptomatically, American Sniper’s screenwriter spoke of how the film depicts “a hero […] slipping over the dark side.”[62] Although he is talking about Kyle’s desire for vengeance, his words might easily be applied to Routh, who changes sides by killing veterans. Thus, Routh’s PTSD is framed as a kind of ‘going native,’ yet another form of suffering caused by the separation from civilisation inherent in military white martyrdom. Furthermore, Hall’s allusion to the ‘dark side,’ is a parapraxis indicative of the racial elements to this frame, suggesting Routh’s PTSD is also a ‘going Iraqi.’ Thus, his role as proxy terrorist allows the film to further demonise Iraqis without compromising the evidence of divine providence. As mentioned, the film does not depict his death, instead electing to deliver the message through onscreen text: ‘Chris Kyle was killed that day by a veteran he was trying to help.’[63] The tag ‘trying to help,’ again emphasises the fact that veterans— the real victims of the war— are in need of help, and yet the issue of representation remains.

Ventriloquism and Performative Martyrology

 Writing on the execution videos circulated by Islamic State in the mid-2010s— the converse side of the propaganda war— Haddow notes that ‘in almost all cases’ in which the death is shown, ‘the victims are not ventriloquised;’ ‘it is the event of death itself that is the focus.’[64] The term ‘ventriloquised,’ refers to those videos in which victims delivered scripted monologues before their deaths. More widely though, Haddow means the act by which a ‘corpse’ is ‘hollow[ed] out’ like a puppet and made to ‘perform’ support of a cause in a voice that is not ‘its own.’[65] Haddow’s observations can be applied to American Sniper’s varying martyrdoms: in the case those soldiers killed onscreen, red martyrological suffering is the focus. Conversely, while Kyle’s death is important, it cannot be allowed to detract from his ventriloquised performance of the American cause, itself the prerequisite for any of the film’s suffering to take on martyrological value. King writes that Foxe’s book occupied the ‘cultural space’ left by the iconoclastic Protestant destruction of Holy relics: ‘the enduring remains of martyrs’ consisted not of material relics, ‘but texts that undergo preservation within a tomblike history.’[66] In the same way, American Sniper’s ventriloquisation of Kyle transforms him from a corpse to a signifier of red, white, and blue martyrdom. This is symbolized by one of the film’s final shots:

Kyle’s coffin.[67]

Just as the flag covers his coffin, so too does the mythological cause it represents eclipse his suffering in the film’s representational hierarchy. Contrary to Hall’s assertion, it is not Kyle’s plight, but rather what this plight stands for, that is the focus of American Sniper.

Understanding martyrology as ventriloquism points to how it is a performative operation of power. Bharucha cites Butler’s definition of performativity as “the power of discourse to produce what it names,”[68] in order to argue that ‘the discourses of terror […] are what make terror.’[69] Likewise, in framing deaths as martyrdoms, martyrologies produce martyrs. Thus, Middleton insists: ‘the central character is not the most important element in the creation of a martyrdom; it is the narrator.’[70] These narrators (martyrologists) employ their performative discourse to ventriloquise corpses and make them valorise a cause. It is the prerogative of martyrology to conceal its performative/ ventriloquising nature, as accepting this fact constitutes an acceptance that martyrdom is entirely subjective. By extension, this necessitates a concealment of the martyrologist. For this reason, cinema is an ideal medium as Altman writes:

The sound track is a ventriloquist who, by moving his dummy (the image) in time with the words he secretly speaks, creates the illusion that the words are produced by the dummy […] to disguise the source of the sound.[71]

This begs the question: what is ‘the source of the sound’ in American Sniper? At first glance we might say that the voice of the real-life Kyle speaks through Cooper the ‘dummy,’ though the numerous alterations that the film makes to its source material problematise this. Likewise, we could argue that Hall or Eastwood speak through Cooper-as-Kyle, and yet Rove’s aforementioned meeting with Hollywood moguls suggests the presence of the US government’s ‘voice’ in the film’s ventriloquisation of Kyle. However, this perspective is dismissed as reductive by Takacs. She suggests that although the US military and White House have circulated WoT propaganda through popular media, the proliferation of this propaganda cannot be seen as an entirely ‘top-down’ endeavour.[72] Instead, we must recognise that government rhetoric perpetuated a fear of terror and a belief in the US’ divine mission to confront it, both of which were internalised a public already used to such myths, resulting in a demand for media that confirmed these beliefs, especially in the wake of scandals such as the Abu Ghraib report.[73] This is conveyed in American Sniper when a soldier tells Kyle: “I just want to believe in what we’re doing here.”[74] This demand gave Hollywood a profit incentive to perpetuate fear of terror and faith in the military through cinema, both because popular audiences would consume these films and because in their consumption they would create even greater demand.[75] Market forces, as much as government desire to control the narrative, are responsible for films such as American Sniper, and its status as the highest-grossing war film of all time speaks to this.[76] Lawrence and Caldwell write that ‘a convergence of interests’ between the government, military and the media ‘has provided a powerful incentive for creating military-themed media programming for US audiences,’ and so we might say that the Kyle’s martyrologist, the ‘source of the sound’ is these interests.[77]

Conclusion

Butler writes that ‘the frame breaks with itself in order to reproduce itself, and its reproduction becomes the site where a politically consequential break is possible.’[78] This essay has examined how and why American Sniper’s martyrological frame reproduces— in the context of the WoT— American myths that have been employed throughout its history to frame its violent in terms of a divine, civilising mission defined in opposition to a savage, evil Other. In this examination I hope to have introduced the kind of break that Butler describes. They argue that frames of war are ‘representational regimes through which [war] operates and which rationalize its own operation’ on the grounds that those who ‘bear the burden’ of its destruction are ungrievable.[79] When we acknowledge that ‘frames not only structure how we come to know and identify life but constitute sustaining conditions for those very lives,’ the importance of demolishing these frames cannot be understated.[80]

Endnotes

[1] S. Krishnan and Mridul Trivedi, ‘The Old Wild West in the New Middle East,’ Film International 18, 1 (2020): 12-27. 24

Liane Tanguay, The ‘good war’ on terror: rewriting empire from George W. Bush to American Sniper,’ Critical Studies on Security, 3 (2015): 297-302. 300.

John Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett, ‘The Mythic Shape of American Sniper (2015),’ in American Cinema in the Shadow of 9/11, ed. by Terence McSweeney (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 23-48. 28.

[2] Quoted in Paul Middleton, ‘What is Martyrdom?,’ Mortality 19, 2 (2014): 117-133. 125.

[3] Middleton, 118.

[4] Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2016), 17, 19.

[5] Butler, 19.

[6] John N. King, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and Early Modern Print Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 1-2.

[7] Arthur G. Dickens, John M. Tonkin and Kenneth Powell, The Reformation in Historical Thought (London: Harvard University Press, 1985), 52.

[8] Middleton, 126.

[9] Ahdaf Soueif, ‘The Function Of Narrative in the War on Terror,’ in ‘War on Terror’, ed. by Chris Miller (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 28-43. 28.

[10] Butler, 19.

[11] King, 18.

[12] King, 3.

[13] Sam Haddow, Precarious Spectatorship: Theatre and Image in an Age of Emergencies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), 40-41.

[14] Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail R. Hall, Manufacturing Militarism: U.S. Government Propaganda in the War on Terror (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021), 224.

[15] John L. O’Sullivan, Democratic Review, quoted in Julius W. Pratt, ‘The Origin of ‘Manifest Destiny,” The American Historical Review, 39, 4 (1927): 795-798. 797.

[16] O’Sullivan, quoted in Pratt, 798.

[17] Frederick J. Turner, ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History.’ American Historical Association, accessed April 25, 2023, https://www-historians-org.ezproxy.st-andrews.ac.uk/about-aha-and-membership/aha-history-and-archives/historical-archives/the-significance-of-the-frontier-in-american-history-(1893).

[18] John Gray, Al Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern (London: Faber, 2003), 88.

[19] Richard Cheney, ‘Speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars National Convention,’ quoted in Coyne and Hall, 110.

[20] Cheney, quoted in Coyne and Hall, 110.

[21] Ewan McAskill, ‘George Bush: ‘God told me to end the tyranny in Iraq,” The Guardian, October 7, 2005, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/oct/07/iraq.usa.

[22] Gray, 85-86.

[23] George W. Bush, ‘The National Security Strategy of the United States of America,’ September 17, 2002, https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/nsc/nssall.html.

[24] Matthew Carter, Myth of the Western: New Perspectives on Hollywood’s Frontier Narrative, quoted in Krishnan and Trivedi, 25.

[25] Robert D. Kaplan, Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground, quoted in Soueif, 38.

[26] American Sniper, dir. by Clint Eastwood (Warner Bros. Pictures, 2014), https://www.amazon.co.uk/American-Sniper-Bradley-Cooper/dp/B00XBWI9DO/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3QOD2GYN8XWTL&keywords=american+sniper&qid=1682425867&s=instant-video&sprefix=american+s%2Cinstant-video%2C103&sr=1-1.

[27] American Sniper.

[28] American Sniper.

[29] American Sniper.

[30] Krishnan and Trivedi, 19.

[31] Butler, 19.

[32] Bush.

[33] Tom Carver, ‘Bush puts God on his side,’ BBC News, April 6, 2003, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2921345.stm

[34] Rustom Bharucha, Terror and Performance (Oxon: Routledge, 2014), 11.

[35] Krishnan and Trivedi, 13.

[36] American Sniper.

[37] American Sniper.

[38] Gayatri Chakrvorty Spivak, Terror: A Speech after 9/11, quoted in Bharucha, 11.

[39] Bharucha, 11.

[40] American Sniper.

[41] Butler, 25.

[42] Butler, 20.

[43] Butler, 25.

[44] American Sniper.

[45] American Sniper.

[46] Butler, 17.

[47] D.  Benoit, Histoire des Martyrs, quoted in Dickens (et al.), 42.

[48] Lawrence and Jewett, 23.

[49] American Sniper.

[50] Erik Kain, ‘American Sniper Isn’t Pro-War Propaganda,’ Forbes, quoted in Krishnan and Trivedi, 13.

[51] Clare Stancliffe, ‘Red, White and Blue Martyrdom,’ in Ireland in early medieval Europe: studies in memory of Kathleen Hughes, ed. by Dorothy Whitelock, Rosamond McKitterick, and David Dumville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 21-46. 21.

[52] Thesaurus Palaeohibernicus, quoted in Stancliffe, 23.

[53] American Sniper.

[54] American Sniper.

[55] American Sniper.

[56] American Sniper.

[57] King, 1.

[58] American Sniper.

[59] American Sniper.

[60] John Foxe, Acts and Monuments, quoted in Dickens (et al.), 45.

[61] Krishnan and Trivedi, 16.

[62] Alex B. Block, ‘The Making of American Sniper: How an Unlikely Friendship Kickstarted the Clint Eastwood Film,’ quoted in Krishnan and Trivedi, 16.

[63] American Sniper.

[64] Haddow, 41-42.

[65] Haddow, 32, 37.

[66] King, 5-7.

[67] American Sniper.

[68] Judith Butler, Critically Queer, quoted on Bharucha, 20.

[69] Bharucha, 20.

[70] Paul Middleton, Martyrdom: A Guide for the Perplexed, quoted in Middleton, 130.

[71] Rick Altman, ‘Moving Lips: Cinema as Ventriloquism,’ quoted in Jaimie Baron (et al.), ‘Introduction: Theorizing Media Ventriloquism,’ in Media Ventriloquism: How Audiovisual Technologies Transform the Voice-Body Relationship, ed. by Jamie Baron, Jennifer Fleeger, and Shannon Wong Lerner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 1-18. 9.

[72] Stacy Takacs, Terrorism TV: Popular Entertainment in Post-9/11 America, referenced in Tim Lenoir and Luke Caldwell, The Military-Entertainment Complex (London: Harvard University Press, 2018), 30.

[73] Takacs, referenced in Lenoir and Caldwell, 30.

[74] American Sniper.

[75] Takacs, referenced in Lenoir and Caldwell, 30.

[76] Krishnan and Trivedi, 12.

[77] Lawrence and Caldwell, 163-164.

[78] Butler, 23.

[79] Butler, 25.

[80] Butler, 23.

Bibliography

Baron, Jamie (et al.). ‘Introduction: Theorizing Media Ventriloquism.’ In Media Ventriloquism: How Audiovisual Technologies Transform the Voice-Body Relationship, edited by Jamie Baron, Jennifer Fleeger, and Shannon Wong Lerner (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1-18.

Bastide, Roger. ‘Color, Racism, and Christianity.’ Color and Race 96, 2 (1967): 312-327.

Bharucha, Rustom. Terror and Performance (Oxon: Routledge, 2014).

Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2016).

Bush, George W. ‘The National Security Strategy of the United States of America.’ September 17, 2002, https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/nsc/nssall.html.

Carver, Tom. ‘Bush puts God on his side.’ BBC News, April 6, 2003. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2921345.stm.

Coyne, Christopher J. and Abigail R. Hall, Manufacturing Militarism: U.S. Government Propaganda in the War on Terror (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021), 233.

Dickens, Arthur G, John M. Tonkin, and Kenneth Powell. The Reformation in Historical Thought (London: Harvard University Press, 1985).

Eastwood, Clint, director. American Sniper. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2014. https://www.amazon.co.uk/American-Sniper-Bradley-Cooper/dp/B00XBWI9DO/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3QOD2GYN8XWTL&keywords=american+sniper&qid=1682425867&s=instant-video&sprefix=american+s%2Cinstant-video%2C103&sr=1-1.

Elliot, Andrew B. R. Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media: appropriating the Middle Ages in the twenty-first century (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2017).

Gray, John. Al Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern (London: Faber, 2003).

Haddow, Sam. Precarious Spectatorship: Theatre and Image in an Age of Emergencies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019).

King, John N. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and Early Modern Print Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

Krishnan, S. and Mridul Trivedi. ‘The Old Wild West in the New Middle East.’ Film International 18, 1 (2020): 12-27.

Lawrence, John Shelton and Robert Jewett. ‘The Mythic Shape of American Sniper (2015).’ In American Cinema in the Shadow of 9/11, edited by Terence McSweeney (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 23-48.

Lenoir, Tim and Luke Caldwell. The Military-Entertainment Complex (London: Harvard University Press, 2018).

Martini, Edward A. “Prowarrior, But Not Necessarily Prowar’: American Sniper, Sheep, and Sheepdogs.’ In Imperial Benevolence, edited by Scott Laderman (Berkely: University of California Press, 2018), 50-70.

McAskill, Ewan. ‘George Bush: ‘God told me to end the tyranny in Iraq.” The Guardian, October 7, 2005, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/oct/07/iraq.usa.

Middleton, Paul. ‘What is Martyrdom?.’ Mortality 19, 2 (2014): 117-133.

Pratt, Julius W. ‘The Origin of ‘Manifest Destiny.” The American Historical Review, 39, 4 (1927): 795-798.

Soueif, Ahdaf. ‘The Function Of Narrative in the War on Terror.’ In ‘War on Terror’, edited by Chris Miller (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 28-43.

Stancliffe, Clare. ‘Red, White and Blue Martyrdom,’ In Ireland in early medieval Europe: studies in memory of Kathleen Hughes, edited by Dorothy Whitelock, Rosamond McKitterick, and David Dumville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 21-46.

Tanguay, Liane. The ‘good war’ on terror: rewriting empire from George W. Bush to American Sniper.’ Critical Studies on Security, 3 (2015): 297-302.

Turner, Frederick J. ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History.’ American Historical Association, accessed April 25, 2023, https://www-historians-org.ezproxy.st-andrews.ac.uk/about-aha-and-membership/aha-history-and-archives/historical-archives/the-significance-of-the-frontier-in-american-history-(1893).