The Person is a Thing..

2014. People make movies purporting to be stories of characters; a human tale. AMERICAN SNIPER (2014) is both a personal portrait, and, more accurately, a story of a machine.
The machine is also the person, and the human story of this machine is about the emotions felt behind its focus upon its target, and the emotions felt when blocking out either the present or the past.

The more the gun can take on the decisions of the human...the more the human can move as swiftly and stealthily as the weapon; the two are married; enmeshed.

The industrialization of our culture is more readily noticed in 2014 via the further marriage of the self and the technological.  The finger and the voice both control the phone. The phone is the computer and it is now always on the body.

Just as  David Cronenberg has depicted the part industrial part human integration (of automobile and driver in CRASH and to a subtler degree COSMOPOLIS, e.g.)  the sniper rifle of Clint Eastwood's film is a humanized machine.  We track the protagonist who is not a person, but more accurately the "person + Gun" when the two are are successfully acting as one: the human infuses the machine with thought and strategy; the gun abides the human's commands, performing with accuracy and exceptionialism never possible from a person alone.  There is a sense I felt watching  it,  as if being exposed to the bold energy of a new idea, yet one that ultimately is not committed to radical thought.  Some passages retain that light: there are sequences shown during his first and second tour when everything is blocked out but the focus of quick decisions; when to shoot and when not to.
The strength of  mind and body in committing murder to serve one's national security is executed both mechanically and with the uncanny semblance of human hesitation...these sequences fascinate.

In JERSEY BOYS (2014), also directed by Clint Eastwood, the commitment to ideas felt total and clear.  The main character is our protagonist, yet he is amazingly stiff, heavy , like a young man suddenly old during much of the film.  He is only briefly alive, at the film's beginning, and then everything goes down hill, burdened by the failings of the band and family around him; his desire to maintain, survive and REGAIN that youthful dominance is everything in the world. Why does he seem robotic or affected?  My reaction following my viewing was that this man was only young for a brief moment, and the rest of the film he was actually an old man desperate to regain and replay his life, his artistic zenith, the 15 minutes his spirit soared and glowed.

JERSEY BOYS: Frankie weighed down by threat of traumatic loss

Now i also think that Frankie is not just an old man but a movie itself, a piece of media, a technologic wonder that dances and sings and is chasing a happy ending that feels increasingly impossible, until, just like the final moments of De Palma's OBSESSION, it suddenly comes, and it conquers.

MAGIC OF REVERSE AGING: movie finale