Clint Eastwood's War Prayer: The Sociopath as Hero

February 04, 2015

Clint Eastwood's War Prayer

The Sociopath as Hero

by PAUL EDWARDS

The boxoffice big winner of the moment is a movie about a military man who kills people from a distance, unseen by his victims. He enjoys his “job” because he hates them, imagining an entire nation his enemy: “savages” who kill his buddies, and are collectively guilty, deserving assassination.

This point of view is not new in the psychology of men in war. Remarque examined it in WWI in All Quiet On The Western Front; Tolstoy, before him in War and Peace; Mailer, after, in The Naked and The Dead. In Vietnam, I heard hardassed combat grunts say, “Kill ‘em all; let God sort ‘em out”.

American movie audiences have long loved violent heroes who, in morally iffy circumstances, cut through insoluble complexities of relentless evil by ending them in more or less justifiable murder.

In the more intelligent, ethical versions, these heroes are good men, trying to do the right thing until they run out of options and have to kill. It ends for them, not in triumph or exaltation, but in an emotional downdraft that looks much like regret or remorse. Gary Cooper grimly leaves the town that betrayed him; Shane, called back by a heartbroken boy, knows that boy’s world is forever spoiled for him by what he had to do, and rides away.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/02/04/the-sociopath-as-hero/