MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Critics and audiences responded with enthusiasm to Clint Eastwood’s 2014 effort American Sniper. However, critics and audiences were united in their criticism of the figures of children that appeared in the film. Some critics wondered why the children kept appearing so often. Others commented on the poor production values of the artificial infants used in shots in the film, what media critics came to call the “fake baby” that marred the films otherwise grippingly intense character. Throughout the film, Kyle trains his sights on a variety of bodies, including suspected terrorists, civilians, and, repeatedly, children who themselves appear as potential threats. This paper suggests one set of anxieties animated the film’s reception, worries articulated to the coincidence between technological advancement and the work of a military empire. While the film was in preproduction public anxieties about drones, captured most dramatically by a 13-hour filibuster by Senator Rand Paul in March 2013, circulated widely in American media. Offering a reading of the figure of the child in the film, I follow theorists who figure the child as a figure of queer possibility as an aperture through which American political energy struggle to manage anxieties about an autonomous, technologically advanced, and nearly instantaneously-decisive war machine. The trauma of being human, according to the film, is characterized by becoming exhausted and worn-out by making distinctions not only between friend and foe, but also human and non-human. Outsourcing the political operation par excellence—the designation of some bodies to suffer violence—to an autonomous war machine realizes a posthuman version of empire. I suggest the film attempts to steal authority back from the autonomous war machine by positing that only humans can distinguish between bodies of threat and bodies of potential.