Eastwood's Iwo Jima: Critical Engagements with Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima 9780231850438

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: Know Your Enemy, Know Yourself
PART ONE: HISTORY
The Making and Remaking of an American Icon: 'Raising the Flag on Iwo JIma' from Photojournalism to Global, Digital Media
The Forgotten Cinematographer of Mount Suribachi: Bill Genaust's Eight-Second Iwo Jima Footage and the Historical Facsimile
Flags of Their Stepfathers? Race and Culture in teh Context of Military Service and the Fight for Citizenship
PART TWO: FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS
Following the Flag in American Film
Care or Glory? Picturing a New War Hero
Beyond Mimesis: War, Memory, and Hisotry in Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers
Clint Eastwood's Postclassical Multiple Narratives of Iwo Jima
Haunting in the War Film: Flags of Our Fathers
PART THREE: LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA
Eastwood and the Enemy
East of Eastwood: Iwo Jima and the Japanese Context
Humanism Versus Patriotism: Eastwood Trapped in the Bi-polar Logic of Warfare
Suicide in Letters from Iwo Jima
PART FOUR: WAR TODAY
To Sell a War: Flags, Lies, and Tragedy
Banzai! Letters from Iwo JIma and Choosing the Enemy in Risk Society
Filmography
Index

Citation preview

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 1

29/5/13 13:48:30

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 2

29/5/13 13:48:30

e di t e d by r ikke sc h u ba rt & a nne g jelsvik

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA critical engagements with flags of our fathers and letters from iwo jima

WALLFLOWER PRESS LONDON & NEW YORK

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 3

29/5/13 13:48:30

A Wallflower Press Book Published by Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York • Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © Rikke Schubart & Anne Gjelsvik 2013 All rights reserved. Wallflower Press® is a registered trademark of Columbia University Press A complete CIP record is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 978-0-231-16564-8 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-231-16565-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-231-85043-8 (e-book) Design by Elsa Mathern cover photo: Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) © Warner Bros. and Dreamworks, Photographer: Merie W. Wallace

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 4

29/5/13 13:48:30

CONTENTS

vii ix

acknowledgements notes on contributors

Introduction: Know Your Enemy, Know Yourself rikke schubart & anne gjelsvik

1

PART ONE | HISTORY The Making and Remakings of an American Icon: ‘Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima’ from Photojournalism to Global, Digital Media mette mortensen The Forgotten Cinematographer of Mount Suribachi: Bill Genaust’s Eight-Second Iwo Jima Footage and the Historical Facsimile

15

36

bjørn sørenssen

Flags of Their Stepfathers? Race and Culture in the Context of Military Service and the Fight for Citizenship

57

martin edwin andersen

v

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 5

29/5/13 13:48:30

PART TWO | FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS Following the Flag in American Film

81

robert eberwein

Care or Glory? Picturing a New War Hero

100

anne gjelsvik

Beyond Mimesis: War, History, and Memory in Flags of Our Fathers

119

holger pötzsch

Clint Eastwood’s Postclassical Multiple Narratives of Iwo Jima

139

glenn man

Haunting in the War Film: Flags of Our Fathers

157

robert burgoyne

PART THREE | LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA Eastwood and the Enemy

173

rikke schubart

East of Eastwood: Iwo Jima and the Japanese Context

194

lars-martin sørensen

Humanism versus Patriotism: Eastwood Trapped in the Bi-polar Logic of Warfare

218

mikkel bruun zangenberg

Suicide in Letters from Iwo Jima

231

robert burgoyne

PART FOUR | WAR TODAY To Sell a War: Flags, Lies, and Tragedy

247

vibeke schou tjalve

Banzai! Letters from Iwo Jima and Choosing the Enemy in Risk Society

263

mikkel vedby rasmussen

276 279

filmography index

vi

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 6

29/5/13 13:48:30

Acknowledgements

We want to thank the University of Southern Denmark for hosting the international one-day seminar ‘Visions of War in a New World Order & Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers (2006) and Letters from Iwo Jima (2006)’ on 5 May 2008, organised by Rikke Schubart. The conference was opened by the Danish Minister of Defence, Søren Gade, who was also first speaker. Also, Rikke Schubart thanks the Danish Humanistic Research Council, who funded her research project ‘Hollywood’s Combat Zone: The American War Film in the New World Order, 1991–2009’. We are grateful for financial support for this publication from the Department for Art and Media Studies, NTNU, and from the Humanistic Faculty, University of Southern Denmark. We thank our editor, Yoram Allon at Wallflower Press, for his patience and faith in our anthology. And, finally, we thank all the contributors for their patience. A somewhat different  version of Robert Burgoyne’s two chapters appeared in Robert Burgoyne (2010) Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History (revised edition; University of Minnesota Press).

vii

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 7

29/5/13 13:48:30

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 8

29/5/13 13:48:30

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

martin edwin andersen was Assistant Professor and Chief of Strategic Communications at the National Defense University, Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies, the US Department of Defense. He is the author of Dossier Secreto: Argentina’s Desaparecidos and the Myth of the ‘Dirty War’ (Westview Press, 1993), La Policia: Pasado, Presente y Propuestas para El Futuro (Sudamericana, 2002), and Peoples of the Earth: Ethnonationalism, Democracy and the Indigenous Challenge in ‘Latin’ America (Lexington Books, 2010). robert burgoyne, PhD, is Professor and Chair of Film Studies at the University of St Andrews. His publications include Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History (revised edition, University of Minnesota Press, 2010); The Epic Film in World Culture (Routledge, 2010); The Hollywood Historical Film (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008); New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics (co-authored with Robert Stam and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, Routledge, 1993); and Bertolucci’s 1900: A Narrative and Historical Analysis (Wayne State University Press, 1992). He is working on a new project involving the body and affect in the war film.

ix

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 9

29/5/13 13:48:30

robert eberwein, PhD, is Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at the Department of English, Oakland University, Michigan. He is the author of The Hollywood War Film (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010) and Armed Forces (Rutgers University Press, 2007) and the editor of Acting for America: Movie Stars of the 1980s (Rutgers University Press, 2010) and The War Film (Rutgers University Press, 2005). anne gjelsvik, PhD, is Professor at the Department of Art and Media Studies, Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Her latest book Adaptation Studies: New Challenges, New Directions (co-edited with Jørgen Bruhn and Eirik Frisvold Hanssen; Continuum, 2013). She has also written is Vondt og vakkert. Vold i audiovisuelle medier (Bad and Beautiful: Violence in Audio Visual Media; Høyskoleforlaget, 2007). Among her publications are Femme Fatalities: Representations of Strong Women in the Media (Nordicom, 2004), co-edited with Rikke Schubart. She was chief editor of the Norwegian media studies journal Norsk Medietidsskrift from 2002 until 2006. She is currently working on a book about fatherhood in contemporary American cinema. glenn man is Professor at the English Department at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. His book Radical Visions: American Film Renaissance, 1967–1976 was published in 1994 (Greenwood). His most recent articles have appeared in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Trilogy (Cambridge University Press, 2000), American Cinema of the 1970s (Rutgers University Press, 2007), and A Family Affair: Cinema Calls Home (Wallflower Press, 2008). He is currently working on the multiple narrative film. mette mortensen, PhD, is Assistant Professor at the Department of Media, Cognition and Communication at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Her book Facial Politics: Photography and Identification is forthcoming (Museum Tusculanum Press, 2010) and she is Danish contributor to the three-volume History of European Photography in the 20th Century (Fotofo, 2010, 2011). She is co-editor of Passports: Identity, Culture, and Borders (Informations Forlag, 2004) and Geometry of the Face (The Royal Danish Library, 2003), and has written numerous articles on representations of war, the history of photography, and contemporary art. holger pötzsch, PhD, is a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Culture and Literature at Tromsø University (UiT) where he is associated

x

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 10

29/5/13 13:48:30

with the Border Culture research group. His field of research includes the war film, the relation between film and cultural memory, computer war games, and forms of enemy framing in audio-visual media. Pötzsch has published in academic journals such as Media, War & Conflict, Memory Studies, Nordicom Review, and Norsk Medietidsskrift, and has contributed essays to many edited anthologies. rikke schubart, PhD, is Associate Professor at the Institute for the Study of Culture, University of Southern Denmark. She currently works with emotions, gender, and film. She is the author of Super Bitches and Action Babes: The Female Hero in Popular Cinema, 1970–2006 (McFarland, 2007) and co-editor of War Isn’t Hell, It’s Entertainment: Essays on Visual Media and the Representation of Conflict (McFarland, 2009) with Tanja Thomas, Fabian Virchow, and Debra White-Stanley. She has written about the horror film, action cinema, and war cinema and is working on a book about the American war film after 1991. lars-martin sørensen, PhD, is Research Fellow at the Danish Film Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark. He is senior advisor to the Nordic Association for the Study of Contemporary Japanese Society (NAJS) and author of Censorship of Japanese Films During the American Occupation of Japan: The Cases of Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa (Edwin Mellen Press, 2009). Recent publications have appeared in a Post Script Special Issue on Japanese Popular Culture in Films (2009) and a Film Criticism Special Double Issue on Kore-eda Hirokazu (2011). Sørensen is currently working on a book on Danish cinema during the German occupation of Denmark. bjørn sørenssen is Professor at the Department of Art and Media Studies, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim. His main research interests focus on film history, documentary film, and new media technology. He has published on these and other filmrelated subjects in numerous international journals and anthologies. He has also published books in Norwegian, most recently Å fange virkeligheten. Dokumentarfilmens århundre (Catching Reality: A Century of Documentary, 2nd edition, Universitetsforlaget, 2007). vibeke schou tjalve, PhD, is a senior researcher and head of the International Security Section at the Danish Institute for International Studies, Copenhagen. Her research focuses on issues of war, security, democracy, and

xi

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 11

29/5/13 13:48:31

ethics, particularly in the American context. She is also the author of Realist Strategies of Republican Peace: Niebur, Morgenthau and the Politics of Patriotic Dissent (Palgrave, 2008), and her most recent publications have appeared in the journals International Political Sociology and Security Dialogue, and the edited anthology Civil Religion and Human Rights: A Possible Security Discourse? (Edward Elgar Publishers, 2012). mikkel vedby rasmussen, PhD, is Professor at the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen. Between 2006 and 2009 he was the Director of the Danish Institute for Military Studies. He has previously worked at the Danish Institute of International Affairs. He has recently published The Risk Society at War (Cambridge University Press, 2006) and is also author of The West, Civil Society and the Construction of Peace (Palgrave, 2003) and several articles and book chapters on security and strategy. mikkel bruun zangenberg, PhD, is Associate Professor at the Department of Literature, Media, and Cultural Studies, University of Southern Denmark. He is currently working on a monograph on Samuel Beckett and on a study of the relation between literature, politics, and morals 1960–2000. He completed his PhD on Beckett, and – funded by the Carlsberg Foundation – has since 2003 been working on the relation between art, war, and democracy at the end of the twentieth century. In 2004 he was Visiting Professor at the University of Washington. He has written numerous articles on literary theory, is a member of the editorial board of Journal of War and Culture Studies, London, and is a literary critic at the Danish newspaper Politiken.

xii

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 12

29/5/13 13:48:31

INTRODUCTION Know Your Enemy, Know Yourself ___ rikke schubart & anne gjelsvik

So it is said that if you know others and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know others but know yourself, you win one and lose one; if you do not know others and do not know yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle. Sun Tzu, The Art of War, sixth century BC (Tzu 2004: 109)

Taken together, Eastwood’s diptych Flags of Our Fathers (2006) and Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) form a unique contribution to film history. It was the first time a director made two films at the same time about the same event, which here is the battle over Iwo Jima in 1945 during World War II. And it was also the first time an American director made an American film in Japanese, since Letters from Iwo Jima (despite its English title) is entirely in Japanese. Finally, and what motivated us to produce this anthology, it was the first time a director touched us so deeply with his compassionate portrayal of soldiers, be they American or Japanese, and we simply were compelled to respond by bringing together this group of international scholars to write Eastwood’s Iwo Jima: Critical Engagements with Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima.

1

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 1

29/5/13 13:48:31

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

Joe Rosenthal’s photo of the second flag raising on Iwo Jima, taken on 23 February 1945, in which five US Marines raise the American flag on Mount Suribachi.

The first film, Flags of Our Fathers, traces the history of the men in arguably the most famous photograph in history, Joe Rosenthal’s ‘Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima’, which in the West stands for victory, unity, and democracy (Hariman and Lucaites 2007: 94). The second film, Letters from Iwo Jima, traces the almost forgotten history of the ingenious defence of Iwo Jima by General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, who turned a battle expected to last five days into the bloodiest battle of World War II, lasting thirty-six days. The first film gives us an American perspective, the second a Japanese perspective. Two questions have guided us: Why two films? And to what use can we put Eastwood’s diptych in thinking about war today? To comprehend the uniqueness of Eastwood’s contribution we have to start at the beginning, when a diptych was not yet in the making. We must go back to 2004, when Eastwood approached Steven Spielberg at the Oscar Ceremony. Eastwood had long wanted to film James Bradley’s bestselling nonfiction book Flags of Our Fathers (2000), written with journalist Ron Powers, about the six American soldiers raising the flag on Mount Suribachi, Iwo Jima. However, it turned out Spielberg owned the rights. Now, as Eastwood

2

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 2

29/5/13 13:48:31

INTRODUCTION

asked to buy them, Spielberg refused to sell, but suggested a collaboration with Spielberg as producer and Eastwood as director. Eastwood accepted. A script was written by William Broyles and Paul Haggis, the picture shot in 2005 in Iceland and on Iwo Jima, and the premiere set for 2006. As Eastwood researched the historical background for the battle, he discovered a book of General Tadamichi Kuribayashi’s letters, Picture Letters from the Commander In Chief, edited posthumously and published in Japanese in 2002. When the book was translated into English, Eastwood found a new side to the battle: the perspective of the enemy. He considered including a Japanese perspective in Flags of Our Fathers but decided instead on a second film. And this is where our story starts. However, let us begin with the prehistory of the battle of Iwo Jima and the flag raising immortalised by Rosenthal’s photograph taken on 23 February 1945, four days after the invasion of the small Japanese island in the Pacific. It was actually the second flag raising, the first having taken place earlier the same day. But the Secretary of the Navy wanted the flag as his souvenir, and to avoid the loss of the first flag, the Marines secured it and replaced it with a substitute flag. A worthless flag, they believed. But if this flag was a substitute, Rosenthal’s photo of the second flag raising was a once-in-a-lifetime image that immediately became an icon. The first editor to see the image reportedly said, ‘Here’s one for all time!’ (Hariman and Lucaites 2007: 93). And two days later, on 25 February, the photograph was on the cover of American newspapers. It showed six soldiers working together, their faces invisible, to put a heavy pole (a water pipe) into the ground and raise the American flag over a landscape littered with metallic and wooden debris, and rocks, with a heavy, dark sky behind them. There was something immortal about the image: it signalled victory, a struggle for democracy, the valour of the common soldier, and the desolation of war. It showed the American soldier as anonymous, yet heroic, the battle as won, yet a bleak landscape foreboding further losses. It spoke of the cruelty of war and the costs of freedom. Its sculptural and aesthetic qualities marked it as beautiful; its metaphorical richness made it mythic. A Congressman thought it represented ‘the dauntless permanency of the American spirit’ (Bradley and Powers 2006: 238). And it was hailed as ‘a masterpiece comparable to Leonardo’s “The Last Supper”’ (Times-Union quoted in Bradley and Powers 2006: 221). ‘The Photograph’, writes James Bradley in his book, ‘stood for everything good that Americans wanted it to stand for; it had begun to act as a great crystal prism, drawing the light of all America’s values into its facets, and giving off a brilliant rainbow of feeling and thought’ (Bradley and Powers 2006: 282).1

3

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 3

29/5/13 13:48:31

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

President Franklin D. Roosevelt handpicked the photo to serve as the symbol for the Seventh War Bond Drive and on 30 March ordered the six men in the photo back home. Of the six, three had been killed on Iwo Jima – Michael Strank, Harlon Block, and Frank Sousley. The three survivors, Ira Hayes, Rene Gagnon, and Navy Corpsman John Bradley, were sent on the Seventh War Bond Drive to raise the flag on papier mâché mountains in stadiums in front of cheering crowds, selling bonds for 26 billion dollars, twice as much as hoped for.2 On 8 May 1945, Joe Rosenthal received the Pulitzer Prize. The War Bond Drive began on 9 May in Washington and took the survivors through 33 cities in 27 days. The photograph became a stamp on 11 July 1945, the first American stamp to feature living people, and was turned into the world’s tallest bronze statue at Arlington National Cemetery, Virginia, in 1954. Much has been written about Rosenthal’s photo and its symbolism. In his book, however, James Bradley unfolds the untold story of the six flag raisers and the Seventh War Bond Drive. The propaganda took its toll. Ira Hayes, a Pima Indian and an alcoholic, suffered from survivor’s guilt and preferred to return to Iwo Jima rather than continue the show. He died in 1955, aged 32. Rene Gagnon was disillusioned as media attention evaporated after the war and died a bitter man in 1979. John Bradley ran a funeral parlour and raised a family with eight children, and was silent about the war. It is this silence his son, James Bradley, explores in his book Flags of Our Fathers, which is an homage to the soldiers and the sacrifices they made for their nation. When James was a child, John Bradley never spoke about the flag raising or the war. After his death in 1994, his family discovered three cardboard boxes in a closet containing letters, photographs, and a Navy Cross they did not know he had. Why did John Bradley never speak of the war? Or of his role as a flag raiser and part of the world’s most reproduced photograph? Perhaps, Bradley and Eastwood suggest in respectively book and film, because he never felt there was anything heroic about the flag or the war. Written before 9/11, Bradley’s book has clear dichotomies of good and evil, with the American soldiers as ‘boys of common virtue’ fighting Japanese soldiers who are ‘wolves’, ‘predators’, and ‘skilled torturers’ (Bradley and Powers 2006: 191, 138). Bradley presents the reader with the well-known image of a Greatest Generation, with soldiers’ sacrifices, and a heroism both common and extraordinary. Eastwood has a very different focus. Wanting to deconstruct the ‘rainbow of feeling and thought’ in Rosenthal’s photograph, he looks for the tragedy of the battle of Iwo Jima, which claimed 6,821 American lives and 19,217 casualties, the highest in World War II.3 Twenty-four Medals of Honor were

4

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 4

29/5/13 13:48:31

INTRODUCTION

awarded for Iwo Jima, almost one-third of all Medals of Honor awarded to Marines during the war. Written and directed after 9/11, Eastwood’s Flags is both an homage to the flag raisers and a critique of nationalism: the soldiers may be heroes but they are also victims of war and pawns in a government propaganda machinery using them as means to sell war bonds and win the war. Several of our contributors discuss the theme of heroism, which remains, we think, unresolved and ambivalent in the film. When Flags of Our Fathers premiered on 20 October 2006, reviewers saw it as ‘flawed yet admirable’, aesthetically close to Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998) but unlike Ryan eluding a clear stance on the necessity of war and the status of the ‘ultimate sacrifice’ (Burns 2007). It is while engulfed in this American perspective that Eastwood reads General Tadamichi Kuribayashi’s letters. Embedded in an American tragedy he discovers the Japanese perspective. Or, to use the vocabulary of French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, Eastwood hears the ‘call of the Other’ (Levinas 1981). Picture Letters from the Commander In Chief contained a selection of Kuribayashi’s letters to his family written from 1928 until his death in 1945, including nine of his forty-one letters from Iwo Jima.4 The General knew America well, having spent five years in the US as a military attaché. ‘His letters to his wife and children reveal a man of profound sincerity and kindness’, says Clint Eastwood in his foreword to the English edition of Picture Letters from the Commander In Chief. ‘It was these letters that compelled me to think about the lives of all The Japanese General Tadamichi the Japanese soldiers who fought and died on that Kuribayashi (1891 – 1945), who ingeniously defended the Japanese island.’ And, as Eastwood is quoted in the press island of Iwo Jima in World War II material for Letters from Iwo Jima, he had found in the bloodiest battle of the war in in the letters ‘a unique man, a man of great imaginathe Pacific. tion, creativity and resourcefulness’ (2006: 4). Many of the letters contained drawings by Kuribayashi, who in many ways was un-Japanese. He preferred to walk unarmed and led his soldiers in final battle (unusual for Japanese officers); he rejected the traditional Japanese war tactic of using pill boxes on the beaches and instead made his men dig out 28 kilometres of tunnels and 5000 caves in preparation for the invasion. He loved America and – like another officer on Iwo Jima, the equestrian Olympic gold

5

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 5

29/5/13 13:48:31

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

medallist Colonel Baron Takeichi Nishi – had American friends and respected American values and their way of life. Nonetheless, he remained faithful to the Emperor’s orders to fight to the death or the last man. Succumbing to the invasion forces of 110,000 American soldiers, 18,375 Japanese soldiers died. 216 survived. The last Japanese soldier surrendered on Iwo Jima in 1949 (Bradley and Power 2006: 247; Kakehashi 2007: 41). Loyal to their promise to fight to the death, the Japanese soldiers remained on Iwo Jima fighting in guerilla war. Buried within the story of the flag raising, Eastwood had found a universal story of war and loss. A very different story from the one he set out to tell. A script was quickly written by debutant screenwriter Iris Yamashita and co-written by William Broyles, roles were engaged by Japanese actors, and the film dialogue was spoken in Japanese, even though this would not sit well with American audiences. While doing post-production on Flags, a 75 million dollar blockbuster film, Eastwood shot Letters from Iwo Jima, a 15 million dollar film, in 32 days. In constructivist war strategy, writes Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen in his contribution in this anthology, it is argued that to define an enemy also means to define yourself. That is, to construct the identity of an enemy means to construct your own identity. Because you can only fight an enemy you understand. And this means understanding yourself, too. After 9/11, the easy location of enemies and Western values is no longer possible. One feature of war after 9/11 is the difficulty in finding common ground between West and East, be it religiously, culturally, politically, or existentially. In her contribution Anne Gjelsvik draws from Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy of ‘the Call of the Other’. For Levinas, ‘the original meaning or impact of ethics (and accordingly the meaning of every human action), does not have its origin in myself, but in “The Other’’’(Levinas 2006: 29–31). To put it simply, in Levinas’s philosophy an ethics is not formed in our ‘I’ but in our encounter with an ‘Other’. We become moral human beings by hearing the call of the Other and responding to the call. In fact, to hear the call is to respond. To hear is to engage. And to engage is to become a moral human being. We believe this is what happened when Eastwood read the Japanese letters. He heard the call of the Other. He understood that the enemy has a voice and face. And he responded by turning a blockbuster war film into a daring diptych. Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima are Eastwood’s response to the call. He asks that we view war from both perspectives. Our own and that of the Other. A unique and provocative stance, which is why Rikke Schubart in her contribution claims Clint Eastwood as a ‘minor utopian’.

6

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 6

29/5/13 13:48:31

INTRODUCTION

It is unlikely that Eastwood had in mind the Sun Tzu quote which opens this introduction. But we believe his diptych makes it possible to see war from two perspectives: our own and that of the enemy. Is it utopian to think we can see the enemy as an Other rather than as an enemy? That we can hear his call? Perhaps. But if such a state of mind exists, it is from here we want to imagine a future. Eastwood’s Iwo Jima is our response to Eastwood’s call. *** The anthology has four parts: the first part provides a historical context, the second and third are dedicated to readings of Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima respectively, and the last part is a political science perspective on war today. Opening the anthology is Mette Mortensen’s essay ‘The Making and Remakings of an American Icon: “Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima” from Photojournalism to Global, Digital Media’. She traces the history of Joe Rosenthal’s ‘Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima’ from the first symbolic moment in World War II atop Mount Suribachi to the restaging and remaking of the ‘Iwo Jima’ tableau during the ‘War on Terror’, both at Ground Zero and in Afghanistan. Asking what an icon is and what powers it holds, the essay sheds light on questions of authenticity, symbol, and myth, in relation not only to Rosenthal’s photo, but to photojournalism and documentation of war in general. It opens several recurrent themes in the anthology: the complexity of history, war, heroism, patriotism, memory, and the process of their representation. While Rosenthal’s photograph found its way into newspapers and souvenir shops as well as the Seventh War Bond Drive and made the photographer a legend, a second image of the same flag raising led an anonymous afterlife, and its photographer fell into oblivion. As related in James Bradley’s book and as seen in Eastwood’s film, there were two American photographers at work at the second flag raising. The forgotten cinematographer, Bill Genaust, who shot the scene on 16mm film, has his story told in Bjørn Sørenssen’s contribution, ‘The Forgotten Cinematographer of Mount Suribachi: Bill Genaust’s Eight-Second Iwo Jima Footage and the Historical Facsimile’. Sørenssen places Genaust in the history of documentary film and discusses the role of the Marines’ cameramen in the Pacific as well as the use of the documentary in telling war history – primarily as part of documentary series on television. Tracing the changes in how the Pacific War was told at different times, the essay demonstrates how contemporary issues reflect on the historical discourses. Finally,

7

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 7

29/5/13 13:48:31

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

Sørenssen addresses the function of the ‘historical facsimile’ and shows how this feature plays a significant role in Eastwood’s retelling of the war. Closing the first part, Martin Edwin Andersen in ‘Flags of Their Stepfathers? Race and Culture in the Context of Military Service and the Fight for Citizenship’ focuses on a lesser-known part of war history, namely the Native American and African American contribution in the American forces since the founding of the United States. Taking the experiences of flag raiser Ira Hayes as his point of departure, Andersen asks what military service meant for the two groups. World War II represented a major turning point for the status of both groups; however, while military service meant a potential integration into the larger American society and ‘a trial by fire to fight stereotypes’ for the Indians, African Americans faced a more enduring racism. The integration of minorities in the armed forces proved a slow process, a reality that provides yet another perspective on the military’s role in constructing nation and identity. The American flag has served as an important symbol in both American history and American cinema. With ‘Following the Flag in American Film’, Robert Eberwein opens the second part of the anthology by tracing the importance of and historical change in the representation of the flag in American war cinema. From the short film The American Flag in 1896 until Flags of Our Fathers in 2006, the flag changes from simple colourful glory to increasingly complex representations. Through readings of this motif in several movies, including Sands of Iwo Jima (1949, Allan Dwan), Patton (1970, Franklin J. Schaffner), and Born on the Fourth of July (1989, Oliver Stone), Eberwein gives a historical view of the flag raising theme. An important theme in war movies is the question of heroism. What does it mean to be a war hero and what does a true hero look like? Looking closer at the portrayal of John ‘Doc’ Bradley, Anne Gjelsvik in her contribution ‘Care or Glory? Picturing a New War Hero’ argues that he represents a hero who deviates from a long tradition of glorification of strong masculinity. Gjelsvik compares Ryan Phillippe’s Bradley to John Wayne’s heroic Sergeant Stryker in Sands of Iwo Jima and in her discussion of Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics argues that what we see here is the face of a new hero. A hero who is responsible in the true sense of the word, responding to the call from the Other in a caring and empathetic way. A caring hero. The next contribution by Holger Pötzsch, ‘Beyond Mimesis: War, History, and Memory in Flags of Our Fathers’, discusses how movies function as ‘memory-making films’ and how an individual film is transposed into cultural memory. Can fiction mould memories and can such memories provide

8

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 8

29/5/13 13:48:31

INTRODUCTION

access to the factual past? According to Pötzsch, Flags of Our Fathers shows a process of translation and negotiation where the remediation of the battle of Iwo Jima turns truth into myth and raises the central question of whether it is possible to represent the past as it was. Drawing on box-office figures and critical reception, he demonstrates the movie’s impact on historical discourse and concludes that a polyphonous and multi-vocal fiction film may be the closest thing we find to something that can provoke the public into thinking critically about the past. Glenn Man’s contribution, ‘Clint Eastwood’s Postclassical Multiple Narratives of Iwo Jima’, provides both a genre perspective and an auteur context by discussing Eastwood’s diptych in light of postclassical narration and multi-protagonist plots. Eastwood’s use of multiple narratives in both films is an example of a trend in contemporary cinema and also a continuation of his Mystic River (2003), but at the same time it represents a bold experiment of its own in postmodern war cinema. Laying out the structures of the two films, Man provides both a map for reading the anthology’s subsequent articles and a close analysis of the differences in the narrative structures in Flags and Letters and their impact on viewers’ understanding. Last in this section is Robert Burgoyne, who with ‘Haunting in the War Film: Flags of Our Fathers’ explores the motif of haunting in the war film, a motif he sees as a neglected trait in a genre whose realism and verisimilitude are regarded as primary characteristics. Speculating about the role of the uncanny in the war film, Burgoyne says that a ‘defining and distinguishing feature of the genre is the haunting of the present by the past, the past trying to possess the present’. Through his examination of voice, space, place, and the extensive uses of flashbacks, Burgoyne demonstrates how the living are haunted by both the past and the dead and offers a new perspective on Flags of Our Fathers as well as on the war film as a genre. This relationship between the present, the past, and the process of memory is a recurring theme in Eastwood’s Iwo Jima. Opening the third part of the anthology, Rikke Schubart in ‘Eastwood and the Enemy’ starts with a simple question: Why two films? And how do Flags and Letters differ in making the audience see the enemy? Analysing viewer emotions generated by the films, she argues that Flags calls for our empathy with characters and Letters for our sympathy. Reading General Kuribayashi as a tragic hero whom the audience sympathises with, she argues that viewers gain a new understanding of the enemy, sacrifice, and nationalism from Letters from Iwo Jima. She claims Eastwood as a ‘minor utopian’, a director with the courage to question ‘history’ and ‘truth’ by showing us plural perspectives

9

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 9

29/5/13 13:48:31

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

and, in the end, creating a vision of a better world. A world with combatants but without enemies. In ‘East of Eastwood: Iwo Jima and the Japanese Context’, Lars-Martin Sørensen places Letters from Iwo Jima in a Japanese context. How did the Japanese perspective influence Eastwood’s choices in the making of his second movie? And how was Letters received in Japan? Sørensen says the film’s Japanese background, the controversies about the past, as well as current nationalistic public debates, create grounds for caution. For instance, argues Sørensen, the gore and gruesome detail of war is downplayed to meet the preferences from audiences on both sides. However, catering to a Japanese audience does not mean adjusting in one direction, since, as Sørensen’s essay shows, there is no such thing as one Japanese perspective. He discusses four kinds of Japanese nationalism – peace nationalism, revisionist nationalism, ‘petit nationalism’, and ‘healthy nationalism’ – and sees Eastwood’s movies in the light of these contemporary public discourses. Whereas most essays in our anthology embrace Eastwood’s films, Mikkel Bruun Zangenberg in his ‘Humanism versus Patriotism: Eastwood Trapped in the Bi-polar Logic of Warfare’ challenges the notion that the project succeeds in representing a universal humanism or that it succeeds as a critique of patriotism. Zangenberg claims Eastwood is caught in a dualist trap. This claim is supported by an analysis of what he calls uneven narrative strategies. These narratives – the national narrative, the narrative of friendship, the humanism narrative, and the narrative of the enemy – work in different directions and illustrate the challenge of representing warfare without reproducing the very dualities Eastwood tries to deconstruct. Zangenberg, however, argues that nationalism re-emerges and ‘that both films harbour hints of a proud, nationalist narrative – there’s something distinctly noble about the Japanese general Kuribayashi, who insists on dying for his country, and something touching about the American soldiers sacrificing life and limbs as opposed to the politicians back in Washington, shipping off their sons to Harvard and Princeton’. In the second part of his own diptych on Eastwood’s movies, Robert Burgoyne also approaches the question of humanising the Other and understanding the practice of honour suicide. He sees Eastwood’s use of the suicide theme as a frame in which history, ideology, and cultural differences are brought ‘into a close microscopic view’. He investigates the themes through a close analytical examination of the role of the letters, the voices, and the framing of suicide within cinematic discourse. Reading the suicidal sacrifice as a speech act echoing the letters found in the ground at Iwo Jima, Burgoyne

10

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 10

29/5/13 13:48:31

INTRODUCTION

claims Eastwood’s achievement is to make the ‘Otherness’ of suicide less unfamiliar and to bring the past closer to the present. Unifying narratives are typical of political leadership, says political scientist Vibeke Schou Tjalve in the fourth and last part of the anthology, which looks at politics and war today, and we are reminded of this by George W. Bush’s well-known presidential phrase ‘with us or against us’. Warfare is also a question of communication, and Tjalve investigates the history of political communication. She discusses Flags of Our Fathers as a critique of the American war machine, which sells a war by telling lies and feeds flags and idealisation to the public. Tjalve challenges the conception that people want to be lied to. Discussing the dualism between the ‘noble lie’ needed to gain unity and confidence and the tragic language of truth allowing for dilemmas and doubt, her essay, ‘To Sell a War: Flags, Lies, and Tragedy’, places these World War II films within contemporary politics, where they rightfully belong. Do we need more lies in today’s warfare? Do we have a choice? Can individuals, soldiers, or directors change history or the course of war? Our final essay, ‘Banzai! Letters from Iwo Jima and Choosing the Enemy in Risk Society’, relates these questions to late-modern society and discusses the relationship between Eastwood’s narrative of war, Japanese Banzai warriors, and al-Qaeda’s contemporary suicide bombers. Political scientist Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen relates the issues of war, citizenship, and sacrifice to the core of modern identity. To ask ‘Who am I’ is to acknowledge that ‘I have a choice.’ Drawing on Ulrich Beck’s concept of ‘risk society’, Vedby Rasmussen argues that our perception of future results informs the choices of the present. He concludes: ‘In a society where identity is something you choose, assuming the identity of war is also a choice.’ So, what do we choose? Do we listen to politicians and terrorists? Or do we hear the call of the Other? In the same way as we listened to and engaged with Eastwood’s two war films, we hope this anthology will enable a reader to hear the call. And make her own choice when responding.

Notes

1

To a European the photo also recalls another portrayal of a flag, the French Marianne holding the Tricolore in one hand, a bayoneted musket in the other hand, leading the people in the July Revolution of 1830 in Eugène Delacroix’s allegorical painting Liberty Leading the People (1830). Later, a photograph of firefighters raising the

11

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 11

29/5/13 13:48:31

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

American flag on the ruins of the World Trade Center echoed Rosenthal’s photo. See Mette Mortensen, ‘The Making and Remakings of an American Icon’, in this anthology. 2 The government expected 14 billion dollars from the Seventh War Bond Drive. Sources vary about the amount obtained: James Bradley puts it at 26.3 billion dollars, as does Wikipedia, while the bonus material on the Flags DVD says 24 billion. Bradley and Powers, Flags of Our Fathers, 294; Wikipedia accessed from http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_the_Flag_on_Iwo_Jima#The_7th_war_bond_drive_ and_the_sixth_man_controversy on 8 September 2008. 3 The numbers vary according to source. These, and the later Japanese casualties, are from Wikipedia, ‘The Battle of Iwo Jima’, accessed on 17 February 2010. 4 Another book that inspired Eastwood was Kumiko Kakehashi’s Letters from Iwo Jima (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007), originally published as Chipuzo Kanashiki in 2005 by Shinchosha Co., Ltd. Tokyo.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bradley, James and Ron Powers (2006 [2000]) Flags of Our Fathers. New York: Bantam. Burns, Sean (2007) ‘Heartbreaking Letters’, review of Letters from Iwo Jima. The Improper Bostonian, 56, 10–23 January. ‘Flags of Our Fathers Production Information’ (2006) Press material for Flags of Our Fathers. Hariman, Robert and John Louis Lucaites (2007) No Caption Needed: Iconic Photo­ graphs, Public Culture and Liberal Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kakehashi, Kumiko (2005) Letters from Iwo Jima: The Japanese Eyewitness Stories That Inspired Clint Eastwood’s Film. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson (original Japanese edition 2005). Kuribayashi, Tadamichi (author) and Eric Searleman (editor) (2007) Picture Letters from Commander In Chief. VIZ Media LLC. Levinas, Emmanuel (1981) Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, translated by A. Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ____ (2006) Humanism of the Other. Urban & Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Tzu, Sun (2004 [sixth century BC]) The Art of War. Translated by Thomas Cleary. Boston: Shambhala.

12

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 12

29/5/13 13:48:31

PA RT ON E

___

HISTORY

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 13

29/5/13 13:48:31

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 14

29/5/13 13:48:31

THE MAKING AND REMAKINGS OF AN AMERICAN ICON ‘Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima’ from Photojournalism to Global, Digital Media ___ mette mortensen

On the poster for Clint Eastwood’s 2006 movie Flags of Our Fathers we see the allegedly most extensively reproduced icon in American popular culture, Joe Rosenthal’s Pulitzer Prize-winning image from February 1945 of United States Marines raising ‘Old Glory’ atop Mount Suribachi on the Japanese volcano island Iwo Jima. ‘A single shot can end the war,’ the poster’s tagline says. This is a pun. In the context of a war movie, ‘shot’ would normally be associated with a gunshot. Here, however, it also refers to a photographic ‘shot’ or ‘snapshot’, namely the prominent picture taken by Rosenthal. With this wordplay on the double meaning of ‘shot’, the tagline highlights one of the key points of the film. Photography is a powerful weapon in modern warfare. Or, to put it in the words of Joe Rosenthal’s character in the film: ‘The right picture can win or lose a war.’ The Iwo Jima photograph has remained in the public eye for well over half a century. As an ever-powerful symbol of heroism, patriotism, and unity in the collective memory, it is re-circulated to meet ideological, political, or commercial ends or simply to entertain. This chapter is going to pursue the argument that ‘Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima’, as the photograph is officially called, has been mobilised in various historical settings to justify state action and win the support of the home front for the foreign policy. As the then Vice

15

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 15

29/5/13 13:48:31

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

The flag raising scene from Joe Rosenthal’s photograph taken February 23, 1945 on Iwo Jima, as the image on the poster for Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers (2006).

16

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 16

29/5/13 13:48:32

THE MAKING AND REMAKINGS OF AN AMERICAN ICON

President Richard Nixon declared at the ceremony for the erection of the Marine Corps War Memorial in 1954, the motif ‘symbolizes the hopes and dreams of America and the real purpose of our foreign policy’ (Marling and Wetenhall 1991: 17). Even if it sounds like a washed-out cliché to call the Iwo Jima picture an icon, we have yet to take a step back and explore the full implications of that label. The ambition of this chapter is to address the fundamental questions: What power lies in the dissemination, mobilisation, and mass consumption of photographic icons? And, moreover, which historical changes have these mechanisms undergone from the photojournalism of World War II to the digital, global media of today? As is characteristic of icons, the photo has a long history of ‘referential slippage’ prompted by political interests and strategic manoeuvres (Hariman and Lucaites 2007: 105). When circulated in the mass media, a shift occurs from the photograph’s referential meaning to its symbolic meaning, that is, from the original intention and historical circumstances to projected values such as fellowship, conquest, and victory. As John Hariman and Robert Louis Lucaites point out in No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture and Liberal Democracy (2007), the image may foster a sense of cultural and political continuity, yet it does not convey a fixed message apprehended by spectators across time and place (Hariman and Lucaites 2007: 111). Rather, an icon seems to contain a universal message while in effect giving way to situated identifications that employ its historical background as an interpretive framework to legitimise current political beliefs and calls for action. Three appropriations of the landmark motif, from as many continents, will be examined in this chapter. The first appropriation is the story told in Flags of Our Fathers, of how the referential slippage takes place instantly due to a demand for iconic images to unite the nation in the last months of World War II and raise money for the continued war effort. The second example is Thomas E. Franklin’s image of three The firefighters planting the flag ‘Iwo firefighters planting the American flag ‘Iwo Jima Jima style’ in the ruins of the World style’ on the ruins of the World Trade Center Trade Center in Thomas E. Franklin’s photograph ‘Ground Zero Spirit’ (2001). (Willis 2002: 276). Finally, a video from 2007

17

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 17

29/5/13 13:48:32

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

created by Danish soldiers during their service in Afghanistan will serve as an example of how the tableau has entered into the popular iconography of the ‘War on Terror’.

A Mountain of Cash ‘A chance shot turned an unremarkable act into a remarkable photograph’ (Bradley and Powers 2006: 258). In this way, James Bradley, son of flag raiser John ‘Doc’ Bradley, sums up the legacy of the Iwo Jima photo in his bestselling book Flags of Our Fathers (2000), upon which Eastwood’s film is based. Repeatedly Joe Rosenthal of the Associated Press has been met with the accusation that ‘Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima’ is staged. The persistent, albeit unjust, rumours are spurred on mainly by the confusion over the scene immortalised by Rosenthal being actually the second planting of the American flag on the strategically important Mount Suribachi.1 The photographer for Leatherneck, Lou Lowery, recorded the first flag raising, yet the Marine magazine withheld the series so as not to compete with Rosenthal’s photo, which soon became the official documentation of the event (Marling and Wetenhall 1991: 61). Similarly, the original flag raisers received neither public nor military recognition until much later, even though they had secured a vital enemy installation, whereas the replacement flag was only of symbolic importance (Marling and Wetenhall 1991: 87). Rosenthal seized the opportunity to shoot his celebrated picture when later on the same day, 23 February 1945, the second flag was raised because the Secretary of the Navy wanted the first flag as his souvenir and, the Secretary claimed, so that a larger flag would be visible from all over the island. According to Rosenthal, he was unsure how the random snapshot would turn out. However, when he sent off the negative for processing, the image almost assumed a life of its own. Two days later it cleared the front page of the New York Times and 200 other Sunday papers. Some 137 million postage stamps were issued, selling 3 million copies on the first day alone (Baudry 2007: 19). As early as March 1945, congress decided to adopt the image as the logo for the Seventh War Loan Drive and hire the three surviving men of the six in the photo, James ‘Doc’ Bradley, Rene Gagnon, and Ira Hayes, as the star attractions of the tour, raising an unparalleled $26.3 billion for the war effort in three months. On occasion of the bond drive, the photo was printed on no less than 3.5 million colour posters as well as some 15,000 billboards and 175,000 cards to be placed on streetcars and buses. The picture also formed

18

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 18

29/5/13 13:48:32

THE MAKING AND REMAKINGS OF AN AMERICAN ICON

the basis of Allan Dwan’s Sands of Iwo Jima from 1949, starring John Wayne along with Bradley, Gagnon, and Hayes, who briefly re-enact the celebrated scene with the actual flag from Iwo Jima. And not least, the Marine Corps War Memorial created by artist Felix de Weldron was erected in 1954, which was based on Rosenthal’s picture. Since then, the victorious image has been reprinted on commemorative plates, woodcuttings, key chains, cigarette lighters, matchbook covers, beer steins, lunch boxes, hats, T-shirts, calendars, credit cards, trading cards, postcards, stick-on tattoos, and other merchandise. The photo most likely became so tremendously popular because after more than three years of war the American public craved to hear that victory was at hand, and to feel the sense of national unity expressed in the bond tour’s catchphrase ‘Now all together’. Photographic icons tell people what they know already or what they would like to be told. Like other canonical wartime icons, the photo triggers an emotional response in confirming and strengthening the predominant beliefs, hopes, and sentiments about the war. The government capitalised on these emotions to convince the population to buy war bonds; as President Truman says in the film: ‘You fought for a mountain in the Pacific, now you need to fight for a mountain of cash.’ From the outset, political agendas went hand in hand with popular culture in the reception of the picture.

What is an Icon? ‘Plenty of other pictures were taken that day but none anybody wanted to see. What we see and do in war. The cruelty ... it’s unbelievable. But somehow we gotta make some sense of it. To do that we need an easy-to-understand truth and damn few words.’ In this manner the character of Joe Rosenthal, played by Ned Eisenberg, introduces the major conflict of Flags of Our Fathers in the beginning of the movie. This is the split between on the one hand the complex brutality of war and on the other hand the clear-cut, legible pictures offering the home front a symbolic understanding of the combat zone. Icons create an ‘illusion of consensus’, as Susan Sontag phrases it (Sontag 2003: 5). They address a political and national unity as if it can be taken for granted, although they are themselves instrumental in creating that unity. Particularly when political and economic interests orchestrate the writing of history with icons, they are unlikely to offer a visual entrance to a more profound understanding of war, but rather may block that very same entrance with one-dimensional and schematic depictions.

19

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 19

29/5/13 13:48:32

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

As Flags of Our Fathers compellingly exhibits, icons are powerful in their symbolic references to shared myths and values that endow them with local, national, or even worldwide significance. To quote photography critic Vicki Goldberg, ‘they concentrate the hopes and fears of millions and provide an instant and effortless connection to some deeply meaningful moment in history’ (1991: 135). Photographic icons claim to compress complex phenomena and represent history in exemplary form. They are objects of powerful emotional identification; yet the response to icons is never limited to one single emotion (Hariman and Lucaites 2007: 114). Instead, they activate an open and expansive public emotionality. In the case of Rosenthal’s image, it ranges from hope over nostalgia and sentimentalism to patriotism and protectionism, just as it may trigger the very negation of these emotions, for instance anti-patriotism and antagonism. Used to refer equally to pop stars, bestselling brands, and religious imagery, the notion of an ‘icon’ has become a favourite popular culture, marketing, and art history term to describe familiar, mass-produced pictures that make first the front pages and, in time, the history books. In order to escape the indiscriminate use of the word, it is beneficial to use German historian Cornelia Brink’s definition of secular icons in her article ‘Secular Icons: Looking at Photographs from Nazi Concentration Camps’, from 2000. According to Brink, secular icons share four qualities with religious cult images: 1) authenticity, 2) symbolicity, 3) canonisation, and 4) a simultaneous showing and veiling of reality (Brink 2000: 135–50). Brink’s theory may shed new light on Flags of Our Fathers, since the intricate role pictures play in warfare is determined by the mechanisms of iconisation, even though this is scarcely acknowledged in the international literature on war and the media. First, the importance attributed to ‘authenticity’ can hardly be exaggerated. Authenticity not only addresses the basic question of whether the picture is true or manipulated. The concept is intimately connected with war photography, and the photographic medium as such. Since their subtext is the risk of death for both the subjects and the photographer, war photographs make an urgent claim to our attention and are often believed to touch us more directly and deeply than most other genres (Brothers 1997: xi). Furthermore, photographs bear a close and, to borrow a semiotic term from Charles S. Peirce (1965: 143–44; 156–73), indexical relation to reality. Although they easily acquire a symbolic meaning, photographs can never be merely symbolic, since their subject is represented specifically and intensely in time as well as in space. ‘Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima’ purveys the impression of visual transparency, with the six men seemingly unaware of the camera and unconscious of their

20

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 20

29/5/13 13:48:32

THE MAKING AND REMAKINGS OF AN AMERICAN ICON

own appearance. In the place of the triumphant trophy shot possibly to be expected of this event, they are caught in the course of action, and the raising of the American flag is performatively to be completed over and over again in the viewers’ imagination.2 Finally, to accentuate an overlooked point, as a tool for visual persuasion icons are able to move on and bestow new frameworks, stories, and agendas with authenticity. One of the greatest powers as well as one of the lurking dangers of icons is their capacity to authorise diverse ideologies and political standpoints. If there is no connection between the new context and the original one, the icon readily fills in as the missing link and may, for example, sanction the gloating self-image of Danish soldiers posted in Afghanistan, to which I shall return in the last section. This leads us to the second characteristic of icons, symbolicity. Why is it, to use another line from Rosenthal in Flags of Our Fathers, that ‘everybody saw that damn picture and made up their own story about it’? To cut a long answer short, semantic openness and emotional appeal comprise the successful formula behind the photo’s symbolic power. The six bodies are in harmony, knees moving together as if marching in step. No one stands out, no individual traits are show, no ranks are visible. Even if Rosenthal’s character in the film regrets that the Marines’ faces are not distinguishable, this has most likely boosted the popularity of the photo, because the figures may stand for all Marines – and have actually come to stand for all Marines, with the Marine Corps Memorial dedicated to fallen Marines from 1775 to the present day. Since the image does not offer any facial clues as to what might constitute an appropriate response, the six men become blanks that national sentiments and governmental and military interests might be projected onto. Likewise, the empty sky and the featureless island are left open to projections. From conquering the wilderness to the 1969 moon landing, flag raisings in a vast and bare landscape make up an often-repeated motif in American popular culture, as also discussed by Robert Eberwein in his ‘Following the Flag in the American Film’ in this anthology. With its idealised, decontextualised battlefield, the image alludes to the utopia of making a new start after successfully winning over enemy fortifications that goes back to the first settlers on the North American continent. The third characteristic of secular icons is canonisation, or the process by which wide circulation elevates certain images to objects of veneration and intense emotional identification for the larger public. Canonisation is the complex outcome of an image gaining momentum for expressing in an exemplary way the public’s concerns or hopes in a particular historical situation.

21

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 21

29/5/13 13:48:32

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

The media, political players, and popular demand set the pace and scope of canonisation, sometimes in mutual exchange, as in the process presented in Flags of Our Fathers, sometimes with a conflict of interests, for instance when the media uncover conditions in a striking image against the will of the politicians. It is important to emphasise that canonisation in itself becomes part of the image’s meaning. Icons are always self-referential and carry with them their own histories of past appropriations; hence the audience is bound to respond emotionally to the icon’s iconicity, and not only to the represented subject matter. Canonisation confers photographs with the weight of history. Solemn and grave, they sometimes grow to be sacred images for a secular society (Lucaites and Hariman 2007: 1–2). Lastly, the fourth characteristic of icons is the way in which they simultaneously show and veil reality. Using an oxymoron, Brink remarks that ‘the visible makes us blind’, in the sense that ‘these pictures have pushed themselves between ourselves and reality like a “protective layer”’ (Brink 2000: 144). This is clearly the case with the second flag raising of Iwo Jima. We remember the way it was captured by Joe Rosenthal sooner than we recall the historical events the photo refers to. One might even make the case polemically that the greater the symbolic power of an icon, the lesser our curiosity tends to be about its factual content and context. The four characteristics of icons first proposed by Cornelia Brink reveal the power structures behind the production, dissemination, and consumption of images and help us dig deeper into the film’s key conflict.

Behind the Icon What do we see when looking at Rosenthal’s picture? Once they enter collective memory, icons convincingly claim to be undemanding and self-explanatory, not least because they are rooted in mainstream culture and experienced within the everyday routines of looking through a newspaper or illustrated magazine, watching television, surfing on the internet, and so on. They present a political paradigm or set of beliefs as if it was a matter of course or a natural order. Flags of Our Fathers goes behind the icon with its three separate time frames. 1) The original context, i.e. battle scenes from Iwo Jima. 2) The initial canonisation of the image, i.e. the bond tour. 3) The picture’s historical significance, i.e. James Bradley’s present-day investigation of his father’s wartime

22

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 22

29/5/13 13:48:32

THE MAKING AND REMAKINGS OF AN AMERICAN ICON

story. During the course of the movie, the three narratives reveal the deep conflict between the frontline experiences of Ira Hayes, John Bradley, and Rene Gagnon and the popular interpretation of the picture. On the bond tour, the demand is for the three men to fit into the flag raising picture. Or rather, fit into the projected identities of their represented characters as heroic, brave, and self-sacrificing Marines. Hayes, Bradley, and Gagnon thus personify the recurring ethical dilemma of wartime representations documenting a specific event at the same time as being part of the strategic managing of pictures. To begin with, it was a top priority to the military, the politicians, and the media to identify the six men in Rosenthal’s picture. However, the motive for this hunt for the truth, or ‘authenticity’ in the vocabulary of Cornelia Brink, was above all the desire to make the most of the photo’s symbolic potential. The real stories behind the picture quickly came to serve as a general air of authenticity that was taken advantage of politically and commercially. This is the reason why, in the film, Hayes’s objections to joining the bond tour were over-ridden. It is also the reason why politicians were unconcerned about flag raiser Harlon Block being mistaken for Hank Hansen, who helped raise the first flag, even though the drawn-out confusion caused grief for the involved families. Authored by political craftsmanship, the media, and national myths, the haphazard snapshot has shaped our view of World War II. The writing of a new version of the battle of Iwo Jima on the basis of the photograph, and the simultaneous overwriting of the real wartime events the photo originates from, is particularly evident in the key scene when Gagnon, Hayes, and Bradley re-enact the flag raising in front of 100,000 cheerful spectators on the Soldier Field Stadium in Chicago. While presenting the enthralling illusion of performing a past reality, the re-enactment in effect creates a new reality that suppresses the men’s actual frontline experiences. During the show their consciousness flickers back and forth between their reluctant conquering of a papier mâché Mount Suribachi and the traumatic memories this performance brings back of the violent deaths of their comrades on Iwo Jima. One of the transitions between the present and the past is prompted by the call ‘Corpsman’, at which John Bradley turns around and a camera flash goes off in his face. In the painful recollection that follows of Navy Corpsman Bradley finding his best friend Iggy dead, the flash is metaphorically linked to military hardware lighting up the dark night of Iwo Jima. Once again, the film underscores that if the camera is a weapon in itself, modern war is also fought on the propagandistic visual battlefield.

23

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 23

29/5/13 13:48:32

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

Capturing the Hero Flags of Our Fathers takes as its point of departure one of the most legendary icons and ends by showing in the credits eighty-nine photographs, many of them forgotten, from the front line of Iwo Jima: trenches, wounded soldiers, and corpses, as well as views from the bond tour and the flag raising.3 With this remarkable frame, the film demonstrates the potential and limitation of the principal medium through which the home front experienced World War II. It can offer a multitude of perspectives, but also has limitations, as when the canonisation of one photograph leaves all others to collect the dust of oblivion. Instead of fulfilling the medium’s democratic promise, let alone exploiting its documentary capacity, the stereotypes of ‘us’ versus ‘them’ central to war imagery are closely coupled with the photographic medium throughout the film. For instance, upon arriving on Iwo Jima the Marines first face the Japanese enemy in photographs. Pima Indian Ira Hayes, played by Adam Beach, is flipping through a pile of pictures. His fellow Marines teasingly ask if he is looking at his ‘squaw’, but they are silenced when shown the photographs of Japanese soldiers beheading war captives with a samurai sword and similar appalling views. Just as the identity of the American hero is constructed on the basis of Rosenthal’s photograph, the identity of the Japanese enemy is constructed via photographs. The film illustrates how it may be almost as oppressive, objectifying, and reductive to play the part of the hero as it is to be cast in the role of villain – especially since this projected identity involves notions of race and nationality, highlighted in the film by the character of Ira Hayes. According to the film, it was desirable to have his ethnicity represented in the image of the American hero. To mention just one example, President Truman says to Hayes: ‘Being an Indian, you are a truer American than any of us.’ All the same, Hayes is constantly discriminated against with reference to stereotypical ideas of Indians, which are also part of the national imagery. Though it may be crucial for the national self-understanding to include minorities in the photos uniting the nation, they are included on terms set by the majority, as is addressed further by Martin Edwin Andersen in his essay in this volume, ‘Flags of Their Stepfathers? Race and Culture in the Context of Military Service and the Fight for Citizenship’. Hayes’s figure is situated at the tragic intersection of two powerful visual stereotypes: the war hero in a democratic America where everybody holds equal rights regardless of race and class, and the traumatised, poorly

24

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 24

29/5/13 13:48:32

THE MAKING AND REMAKINGS OF AN AMERICAN ICON

integrated, and alcoholic American Indian. Due to this duality, he has become a myth in American popular culture, notably through the song ‘The Ballad of Ira Hayes’, performed by artists such as Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash, and the film The Outsider, in which he is played by Tony Curtis. In Flags of Our Fathers, press photographers zoom in on the returned American Indian war hero shaking hands with the president and making an appearance at the Bond Tour, just as they eagerly cover the process of Hayes knocking himself off the pedestal he never wanted to be on in the first place with repeated drunkenness and arrests for public disorder. ‘Ira always made the news’, the voice-over laconically utters, when Hayes is captured once again in both the literal and symbolic sense; behind bars he remains a most wanted subject by the press. In concluding this section on how the medium of photography fulfils the national desire for heroes, a scene towards the end of the film deserves mentioning. An all-American family driving by catches sight of Hayes working in a field and stops their car. The father asks Hayes to pose in a snapshot with his wife and children. A subtle change occurs during the photographic act. Before taking the picture, the man tentatively asks: ‘You’re him, aren’t you. You’re the hero, right?’ Afterwards, he states with more conviction: ‘That’s a hero, kids.’ Ostensibly, photographing Hayes serves to establish his heroic identity; the camera not merely reproduces but in fact produces heroes. The family takes off, and Hayes is left standing with some money given to him by the man and a small American flag, a disillusioned embodiment of photogenic heroes as a patriotic longing, a commodity and a political tool.

Iwo Jima Revisited or Revised? ‘As soon as I shot it, I realized the similarity to the famous image of the Marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima’, recalls photographer Thomas E. Franklin of the New Jersey newspaper Bergen Record, speaking of taking the picture of the three firefighters raising a flag on the debris of Ground Zero in the afternoon of September 11, 2001.4 To inspire hope and unite the home front for the forthcoming foreign policy, that is, the ‘War on Terror’, strong wills were at work politically and ideologically to let history repeat itself and install the photo as the ‘unrivalled icon’ of 9/11 (Andén-Papadopoulos 2003: 97–8). ‘Ground Zero Spirit’, as the photo is entitled, cleared front pages of newspapers worldwide, and was soon reprinted on coffee mugs, shirts, bumper stickers, commemorative buttons, gold-plated Christmas ornaments, ashtrays, mouse pads, and so on. The tableau was turned into a three-dimensional display at

25

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 25

29/5/13 13:48:32

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

the New York branch of Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum, just as the firemen re-enacted the scene at a World Series baseball game in Phoenix, Arizona. On the six-month anniversary of 9/11, a 45-cent stamp presenting the image was revealed at a special ceremony hosted by President Bush in the Oval Office for the three firefighters, George Johnson, Dan McWilliams, and Billy Eisengrein. Often the media juxtaposed the photos from Iwo Jima 1945 and New York 2001, which seemed to suggest that the United States would prevail again. As a side effect, ‘Ground Zero Spirit’ raised awareness of World War II history, particularly among the younger generation (Spratt, Peterson and Lagos 2005: 117–36). As Pat Seremet of The Hartford Courant declared: ‘New York was Iwo Jima’ (quoted in Spratt, Peterson and Lagos 2005: 126). The image legitimised the link between 9/11 and the ‘War on Terror’, as a remarkable symbolic transaction makes evident. After raiding Taliban headquarters in October 2001, US forces left copies of the picture behind with the words ‘Freedom Endures’ superimposed on them (Hampson 2001). As an act of visual warfare, the message of this alternative calling card was unmistakable. The invasion of Afghanistan was tantamount to the United States delivering in a sense the ‘promise’ made by the photo to eliminate those responsible for 9/11. With another loaded gesture, the flag that waved over Ground Zero was subsequently shipped to Afghanistan, where it was raised over the airport in Kandahar, one of the main al-Qaeda hideouts. Passed from the hands of the firefighters to those of the Marine Corps, the flag-performance, as it might be called, designates a shift in America’s interests from a host of domestic needs towards a policy aimed at military operations overseas (Willis 2002: 376–7). The circle between the two flag raising photos was closed when Marines once again hoisted a victorious flag on foreign ground. Or so it seemed. However, two problems arise from canonising Franklin’s photo as Iwo Jima revisited rather than revised. First, like its forerunner, ‘Ground Zero Spirit’ constitutes the American hero as a figure for uniting the nation. If that was troublesome in 1945, it proves to be unachievable in 2001. Second, in returning to photojournalism and establishing Iwo Jima as an interpretive frame for national response, the photo does not urge the public to deal with the novelty of the situation post-9/11. The canonisation of Franklin’s image points toward a fervent wish to unite the US against a common enemy. Negotiations of identity took place to make the depicted men fit the ideal of the American hero established by the public discourse on ‘Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima’. Again, race played a crucial role in at least one of the adaptations. Stemming from what art historian Erika Doss has accurately termed the ‘Memorial Mania’ following 9/11, plans were

26

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 26

29/5/13 13:48:32

THE MAKING AND REMAKINGS OF AN AMERICAN ICON

conceived in the spring of 2002 to install a monument for dead firefighters based on the picture at the Fire Department of New York headquarters in Brooklyn (Doss 2008, 2009). However, the projected 19-foot bronze monolith counterpart to the Marine Corps War Memorial caused too much controversy and was never erected (Anon. 2009). Like the majority of the firefighters in the New York City Fire Department, the three portrayed firefighters in Franklin’s photo are white. Nevertheless, in the study for the memorial only one of the firefighters was represented as white, while the two others were shown as black and Hispanic respectively. Frank Gribbon, a spokesman for the New York City Fire Department, explains this choice to represent the multi-ethnic makeup of the victims as follows: ‘Given that those who died were of all races and all ethnicities and that the statue was to be symbolic of those sacrifices, ultimately a decision was made to honor no one in particular, but everyone who made the supreme sacrifice’ (Anon. 2002). At stake was once more the problematic transition from the authentic scene to the symbolic implications of the image, or from the individual firemen in the photo to the myth of heroes uniting the nation through diversity. In this case, the manoeuvre was even more difficult than it was during World War II because the men and their faces were fully visible in the picture. Therefore they did not represent an abstract ideal of American heroism, but put identifiable, ordinary, and human faces on the hero instead. Secondly, the image is a classic example of how the media framed the terrorist assault with well-known visual references and expressions, since 9/11 left not only the United States but also global security politics in a vulnerable and uncertain state. Purportedly 9/11 is the most richly documented event in history; nonetheless, the media persistently reproduced the same images over and over again, and thereby created stable, easily recognisable portrayals of heroes and enemies (Kellner 2003: 54). Like the symbolic name indicates, ‘Ground Zero Spirit’ was welcomed as an icon right away, and the immediate media distribution assigned the picture an instant authority over the interpretation of the day’s events. The photo interacted with the mythical World War II image to help define current beliefs and positions. Men in uniform raising a flag anew gives notice that Americans stand together and are prepared to fight outside threats by force of arms if necessary (Andén-Papadopoulos 2003: 98). Audiences are invited to interpret US resolve and call for action through an image taken while the events were still unfolding, an image that transformed tragedy into triumph (Griffin 2004: 388). As is characteristic of icons, the news value is limited. ‘Ground Zero Spirit’ does not offer spectators an understanding of the issues that American domestic and foreign policies had to deal with post-9/11.

27

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 27

29/5/13 13:48:32

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

To a certain extent, the urge to frame 9/11 with familiar visual references also explains why old-fashioned photojournalism proved itself so powerful in the age of 24-7 news coverage on television and the internet. The medium of photography facilitated a simple, straightforward way of dealing with the overwhelming reality of the attack, and a ‘compact form of memorizing it’ (Sontag 2003: 19). Photojournalism marked a return to an imagined age of media innocence and clear-cut heroes during World War II that seemed pure and unambiguous in comparison with the current political state of affairs defined, on the one hand, by globalisation and advances in the weapons industry and information technologies and, on the other hand, by a bewildering new enemy. As a calm, collected, and tradition-bound response to the violent and chaotic pictures of Islamic Fundamentalist terror, the simple composition with the three firefighters looking upward evokes the ‘Christian trinity’ (Hill and Helmers 2004: 7). Hence, the comeback of photojournalism should also be regarded in light of the ongoing visual warfare that 9/11 set a new standard for with al-Qaeda staging the attack to look spectacular and generate maximum shock effect on live television. Franklin’s picture works as a corrective to the disturbing video footage that was broadcast with high frequency on 9/11 and the weeks to follow of the hijacked planes crashing into the twin towers. ‘Ground Zero Spirit’ contributes to another version of history in which the intertext of Joe Rosenthal’s photojournalistic milestone denotes US moral and military supremacy. In the manner of icons, ‘Ground Zero Spirit’ shows the popular imagination of Iwo Jima and hardly adds anything to the understanding of the event that had just taken place in New York.

Visual Warfare War has a propensity to push the development and propagation of visual information technologies. By and large, every modern war has been defined by a signature medium determining the home front’s access to information about the battleground while also creating and canonising future icons to remember the war by. Seeing as the reception of pictures is influenced by the medium through which they are transmitted, the changing technologies have a bearing not only on the amount, type, and variety of visual material but also on the public’s understanding and knowledge of the war. Flags of Our Fathers lays bare how photojournalism was the dominant means of expression during World War II. The Vietnam War was the first so-called ‘living room war’, where the atrocities of the front line were broadcast into Western homes, and

28

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 28

29/5/13 13:48:32

THE MAKING AND REMAKINGS OF AN AMERICAN ICON

The flag as part of the internet war in Danish Army Recon (2007), a video made by Danish soldiers and posted on the website YouTube.

the Gulf War was the first war to be transmitted live on TV. Today, during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, global and digital visual culture enables every participant in war to produce and distribute pictures.5 Symptomatic of this development, Danish soldiers stationed in Afghanistan have distributed their very own version of the Iwo Jima icon. In this final section, I would like to investigate how Rosenthal’s image enters into the iconography of the ‘War on Terror’. An Iwo Jima adaptation is featured in a video called Danish Army Recon from 2007. At the time of writing, more than 50,000 have watched it on internet sites such as YouTube and LiveLeak.6 Like a high-speed, action-packed video game, Danish Army Recon focuses on combat, explosions, and firearms in amateur stills and video sequences accompanied by a heavy metal soundtrack. The re-enactment of the Iwo Jima tableau constitutes the grand finale after nearly five minutes of one fragmented scene of war after the other. With a luminous Afghan desert sunset in the background, three Danish soldiers squat underneath a waving red and white flag. The soldier in the middle appears to be holding the bough with the flag tied to it, while the soldiers to the right and left carry a machine-gun pointing in opposite directions. On this background, the rolling title exclaims: ‘Many Taliban were either wounded or killed during the making of this film. It’s fantastic!’ This last still summarises and unifies the video.

29

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 29

29/5/13 13:48:33

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

If we remember the distinctions outlined by Cornelia Brink, authenticity was the first attribute of secular icons. Yet the third flag raising picture is less anchored in a past reality than in its reference to Rosenthal’s original photo and the previous copies. Given that the small country of Denmark is in alliance with the world’s only remaining superpower, the inspiration from American popular culture is hardly surprising. No national frames of understanding are applicable to the soldiers’ service in Afghanistan, since Denmark does not have a long tradition of engaging troops in combat outside of Europe. The American visual legacy of World War II fills the blank in this representation of Denmark’s identity as a warring nation. The glowing sunset suggests a tourist’s gaze at the Afghan desert. Even though Danish troops take part in NATO’s alliance ISAF to secure peace, stability, and democracy in the war-torn country, the photo resembles a colonial narrative of winning over exotic ground. While the two previous photos hinted at impending victory, the Danish soldiers have prevailed already and are prepared to defend this newly conquered territory under the protection of the flag and with the use of force. Designating harmony and fellowship, the three bodies are united in an almost symmetrical figure. Only seen as dark silhouettes, they become in a sense a symbolic representation of ‘the Danish Soldier’. The picture has become something of an icon in Danish soldiers’ videos on the internet, just as it is featured on the homepage of the Army’s Operational Command.7 It appears as if a soldier has taken the photo, but typical of the challenges the internet poses to source criticism, it has not been feasible to establish neither the photographer nor the exact place and time of origin. It is not at all unusual for canonisation on the internet to go hand in hand with a lack of information about the basic who, when, where, and why of the picture, leaving the spectator bemused as to how he or she is supposed to act in response or extract knowledge from it. This is the result of the medium of photography no longer being merely a propaganda tool deployed by warring nations. Soldiers and others publish digital footage on the internet as an active part of warfare to strengthen their morale or cope with the brutal realities of war, to humiliate the enemy, to mourn dead comrades, to make threats or promises. Examples include hostage tapes, tributes to fallen soldiers, and triumphant videos like Danish Army Recon. ‘Visual warfare’, as this development might be called, is an integrated and determining part of war, affecting it on many levels, from soldiers’ everyday lives to global politics (Mortensen 2009). The question is, what impact might a photo embedded in warfare have? The background for reviewing the Danish material is the growing risk constituted

30

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 30

29/5/13 13:48:33

THE MAKING AND REMAKINGS OF AN AMERICAN ICON

by user-generated digital, visual culture. In the last years, we have seen numerous examples of how the global circulation of images from war zones not only influences public opinion and the political decision-making process, but also leads to local instability and violence. When bearing this in mind, it is striking how the enemy is scorned in the jubilant outburst: ‘Many Taliban were either wounded or killed during the making of this film. It’s fantastic!’ And indeed, the video became the eye of a local media storm in August of 2007 on account of its hostile tone. Along with concern over what future Danish recruitment the video may attract, objections were voiced regarding the Danish effort being represented as war against Taliban rather than partaking in the NATO alliance. Moreover, military sociologist Claus Kold pointed out the risk of the video and similar footage from Iraq causing danger to the Danish troops if deployed by Taliban or al-Qaeda as propaganda (Farver 2007). In short, the Iwo Jima motif has joined the digital front line as a powerful, contentious, and potentially risky symbol of Danish national identity and activist foreign policy. Each time Joe Rosenthal’s motif is recycled in a new historical context, a negotiation of national identity is set off. ‘Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima’ and ‘Ground Zero Spirit’ became officially sanctioned as visual testimonies of World War II and 9/11, but left the depicted men feeling trapped in their visual personae when the imagery was utilised to bring the American people together in support of the foreign policy. Along the same lines as Hayes, Gagnon, and Bradley, the firemen have stated that they do not see themselves as heroes and would have preferred to remain anonymous (Hampson 2001). By contrast, the Danish soldiers have taken control over their visual identity and present themselves as heroes. Yet evidently this photographic performance of Danish national identity holds no appeal to the population at large. These controversies illustrate the public emotions and the political determination invested in the mobilisation and mass consumption of photographic icons.

The End of Icons? ‘Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima’ has followed a route seldom taken. From the big stadiums, cheering crowds, and brass music of mainstream culture to a subculture of war videos on the internet. In contrast to the huge political and commercial machinery behind Rosenthal’s icon, the publication of the Danish video through unofficial, digital channels requires much less effort and is targeted at a narrow host of spectators.

31

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 31

29/5/13 13:48:33

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

‘Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima’ and ‘Ground Zero Spirit’ exemplify the long, complex relationship that the icons of American photojournalism bear ‘to the production of national identity and its international extensions’, as Liam Kennedy writes (Kennedy 2008: 279–94, 280). But what are the icons of today? Is it telling that the Danish video from Afghanistan resorts to an old classic icon rather than a contemporary one? Might global, digital media be the end of great, unifying icons? The photo of the hooded detainee standing on a box with electrodes attached to his hands, and a couple of the other pictures from the Abu Ghraib prison, is probably the closest we come to icons from the Iraq War. Considering that the Abu Ghraib scandal also happens to be the most famous example of soldiers acting as war photographers, this is quite remarkable. Digital media have made canonisation less controllable and predictable, given that nonmainstream media and even private citizens may spark it off. Time and again, soldiers and others involved in war have produced the visuals generating ‘breaking news’ in the international media. While the public is increasingly sceptical of pictures designed to become icons and too obviously serving as governmental propaganda, amateur footage might appeal to the spectator because of its raw authenticity and insights into scenes of war we do not normally have access to. In so doing, it is sometimes successful in revealing the principles behind the traditional media’s framing, selection, and editing of news from combat zones as well as war-faring nations’ agendas on the visual representations of war (Mortensen 2009). With regard to the future of icons, a central point is the quantity of images distinctive of digital culture. To sceptics, ‘the pictorial turn’ announced by art historian W. J. T. Mitchell in 1994 and the vast number of images in global circulation have resulted in a general disbelief in the individual image being able to make a difference (Mirzoeff 2005: 67).8 The argument goes that the mass of pictures weakens the critical apparatus of visual consumers, for whom one single picture can hardly make a difference any longer. It is indeed likely that the number of icons uniting the public in shared opinions and emotions will be reduced, just as losing perspective is an imminent danger. Still, when taking a positive stance, the bulk of new representations might be closer to the complexity of war than ‘Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima’. The time seems to have passed when ‘A single shot can end the war’, to cite the tagline of the poster for Flags of Our Fathers once more.

32

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 32

29/5/13 13:48:33

THE MAKING AND REMAKINGS OF AN AMERICAN ICON

Notes

1

2 3 4

5

6

7



8

Photographs taken from different angles by his colleagues verify that it is a spontaneous snapshot. They are shown at the end of Flags of Our Fathers and reprinted in various sources. Rosenthal also took a posed picture with Marines standing in front of the flag, but photo editors preferred ‘Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima’. According to the extra material of the DVD version of Flags of Our Fathers, several of the photographs inspired scenes in the film. Many scholars have reflected on the reception of ‘Ground Zero Spirit’ in light of ‘Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima’ from different angles than mine. See for instance Hariman and Lucaites (2007) and Spratt, Peterson and Lagos (2005). While the simplicity of producing and publishing pictures is specific to the digital era, it should be noted that a long history exists of soldiers taking photos. An earlier documented example is German soldiers on the Eastern Front during World War II. See Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann (eds) (1995), Vernichtungskrieg: Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941–1944. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition HIS Verlagsges. For different angles on this video see Mortensen (2008, 2009b). The video is accessible online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FtSEq27cfU or http://www. liveleak.com/view?i=77e_1174526783. See http://haeren.smugmug.com/gallery/4029804_TdJoE#234575877_i5dnW. Other videos featuring this photo include Heltene (The Heroes): http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=HBcUhz2Ecq8; Danes Trains for Helmand, Afghanistan: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=fd6_1206624541; and Danish Soldiers Fighting in Helmand: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xDeV3TxElE. E.g. Nicholas Mirzoeff (2005: 67).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Andén-Papadopoulos, Kari (2003) ‘The Trauma of Representation: Visual Culture, Photojournalism and the September 11 Attack’, Nordicom Review, 2, 29–104. Anon. (2002) ‘Statue of Trade Center Flag-Raising Rebuked’, Baltimore Sun, 1 December. Anon. (2007) ‘Forsvaret vil ikke censurere voldsvideoer fra Afghanistan’ [The Defence Will Not Censor Violent Videos from Afghanistan], Urban, 24 August. Anon. (2009) ‘Icons: The Photo Seen ’Round the World. Thomas E. Franklin’s firefighters raising the flag photo.’ Available at: http://septterror.tripod.com/firephoto.html (accessed 25 March 2010). Bradley, James and Ron Powers (2006 [2000]) Flags of Our Fathers. London: Pimlico.

33

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 33

29/5/13 13:48:33

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

Braudy, Leo (2007) ‘Flags of Our Fathers & Letters from Iwo Jima’, Film Quarterly, 60, 4. Brink, Cornelia (2000) ‘Secular Icons: Looking at Photographs from Nazi Concentration Camps’, History & Memory, 12, 1, 135–50. Brothers, Caroline (1997) War and Photography: A Cultural History. London: Routledge. Doss, Erika (2008) ‘Memorial Mania’, Museum, March/April 2008. Available at: http:// www.aam-us.org/pubs/mn/memorialmania.cfm (accessed 25 March 2010). ____ (2009) ‘War Porn: Spectacle and Seduction in Contemporary American War Memorials’, in War Isn’t Hell, It’s Entertainment: War in Modern Culture and Visual Media, eds. Rikke Schubart et al. Jefferson: McFarland. Farver, Laust (2007) ‘Flere krigsfilm med danske soldater’ [More War Movies with Danish Soldiers], Jyllands-Posten, 29 August. Goldberg, Vicki (1991) The Power of Photography: How Photographs Changed Our Lives. New York: Abbeville Press. Griffin, Michael (2004) ‘Picturing America’s “War on Terrorism” in Afghanistan and Iraq: Photographic Motifs as News Frames’, Journalism, 5, 4, 381–402. Hampson, Rick (2001) ‘The Photo No One Will Forget’, USA Today. Available at: http://www.usatoday.com/news/sept11/2001/12/27/usatcov-unforgettable.htm (accessed 27 December 2009). Hariman, Robert and John Louis Lucaites (2007) No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture and Liberal Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hill, Charles A. and Maguerite H. Helmers (2004) Defining Visual Rhetorics. London: Routledge. Kellner, Douglas (2003) From 9/11 to Terror War: The Dangers of the Bush Legacy. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Kennedy, Liam (2008) ‘Securing Vision: Photography and the US Foreign Policy’, Media, Culture & Society, 30, 3, 279–94. Marlin, Karal Ann and John Wetenhall (1991) Iwo Jima: Monuments, Memories, and the American Hero. London: Harvard University Press. Mirzoeff, Nicholas (2005) Watching Babylon: The War in Iraq and Global Visual Culture. London: Routledge. Mortensen, Mette (2008) ‘Den digitale slagmark: Danske soldaters krigsvideo fra Afghanistan’, Kosmorama: Tidsskrift for filmkunst og filmkultur, 241, 24–35. ____ (2009a) ‘Nationale ikoner eller private mindesmærker. Krigsbilleder, censur og nye medier’, in Hvor går grænsen? Brudflader i den moderne mediekultur, eds. Christa Lykke Christensen and Anne Jerslev. Copenhagen: Tiderne Skifter, 121–49. ____ (2009b) ‘The Camera at War: When Soldiers Become War Photographers’, in War Isn’t Hell, It’s Entertainment: War in Modern Culture and Visual Media, eds. Rikke Schubart et al. Jefferson: McFarland, 44–60. Peirce, Charles Sanders (1965) Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. II. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Spratt, Meg, April Peterson, and Taso Lagos (2005) ‘Of Photographs and Flags: Uses and Perceptions of an Iconic Image Before and After September 11, 2001’, Popular Communication, 3, 2, 117–36.

34

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 34

29/5/13 13:48:33

THE MAKING AND REMAKINGS OF AN AMERICAN ICON

Sontag, Susan (2003) Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Penguin Books. Stanworth, Karen (2002) ‘In Sight of Visual Culture’, Symbloke, 10, 1–2, 106–117. Willis, Susan (2002) ‘Old Glory’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 101, 2, 375–83.

35

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 35

29/5/13 13:48:33

THE FORGOTTEN CINEMATOGRAPHER OF MOUNT SURIBACHI Bill Genaust’s Eight-Second Iwo Jima Footage and the Historical Facsimile ___ bjørn sørenssen

When, on 23 February 1945, atop Mount Suribachi, Joe Rosenthal clicked on the shutter of his camera, set at a speed of 1/400th of a second, f-stop between 8 and 16, and thus secured himself and the group of men he was photographing immortal fame, he was not alone in preserving this moment for eternity. By his side stood Sergeant Bill Genaust, who with his 16mm Bell & Howell Filmo Auto Master movie camera secured the eight seconds it took for the group of Marines to raise the second flag on Mount Suribachi on 198 frames of Kodachrome colour film. When James Bradley describes the flag raising moment in Flags of Our Fathers, it is based on Genaust’s shot: The boys converged in a cluster behind Harlon, who bent low at the base. Doc gripped the pole in the cluster’s center. Rosenthal spotted the movement and grabbed his camera. Genaust, about three feet from Rosenthal, asked: ‘I’m not in your way, am I, Joe?’ ‘Oh, no,’ Rosenthal answered. As he later remembered, ‘I turned from him and out of the corner of my eye I said, “Hey, Bill, there it goes!”’ He swung his camera and clicked off a frame. In that same instant the flagpole rose upward in a quick arc. The banner, released from Mike’s grip, fluttered out in the strong wind.

36

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 36

29/5/13 13:48:33

The Forgotten Cinematographer of Mount Suribachi

In Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers the famous photographer Joe Rosenthal (played by Ned Eisenberg) is seen next to the less well-known motion picture photographer Bill Genaust (played by Kirk B. R. Woller).

Rosenthal remembers: ‘By being polite to each other we both damn near missed the scene. I swung my camera around and held it until I could guess that this was the peak of the action, and shot.’ And then it was over. The flag was up. (Bradley and Powers 2000: 218)

One of the reasons why fame came to Joe Rosenthal and not Bill Genaust may be the fact that Bill Genaust did not survive Iwo Jima. In a rainstorm on 3 March 1945, he walked into a cave that was thought to have been ‘secured’ in order to dry himself. As he turned on his flashlight, Japanese soldiers inside the cave opened fire, killing Genaust and the Marine who had gone in with him. Other Marines cleaned out the cave with flamethrowers, and bulldozers blocked up the entrance, so Genaust’s body was never found (Buell 2006: 162–4; Buell 2005). So it was Joe Rosenthal who went on to win the first Pulitzer Prize ever awarded for a photograph – and although Genaust’s footage became the central dramaturgical point in the documentary To the Shores of Iwo Jima, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short in 1945, he was never given any credit for it. Indeed, Bill Genaust’s contribution to the iconic stature of Iwo Jima was not formally acknowledged until 1995, when a plaque in his honour was placed atop Mount Suribachi (Thome 2008). The present essay will focus on Genaust’s footage and the role it came to play in the subsequent cinematic treatment, both in fiction film and documentaries. Finally, the footage will be discussed in connection with Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers, as the source material for what will be termed a historical facsimile in that movie.

37

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 37

29/5/13 13:48:33

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

The Film Photography Unit of the US Marine Corps in the Pacific By the time Bill Genaust’s 16mm material reached the United States, Rosenthal’s photo had already attained iconic status in the minds of the American public, having been published on the front page of numerous newspapers within 24 hours of the moment it was captured (see Mortensen’s essay ‘The Making and Remakings of an American Icon: “Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima” from Photojournalism to Global, Digital Media’ in this volume). The film material was at this stage on its way to the United States as part of a considerable batch of 16mm colour film shot by photographers in the Photography Unit of the United States Marines. Although material filmed by this unit during World War II would function as the source material for such documentaries as With the Marines at Tarawa (1944), which won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short in 1945, and To the Shores of Iwo Jima, mentioned above, there is relatively little information about this unit during World War II on record. In a 2008 issue of the Historical Journal of Film and Television, Marsha Orgeron published an interview with one of the veterans from the Marines’ movie operations in the Pacific War theatre, Norman Hatch. Hatch was the coordinator of film activities at the battle of Iwo Jima. In this interview he gives some background to the fact that the Marine cinematographers in action at Tarawa and Iwo Jima were shooting on 16mm Kodachrome, using pre-loaded cartridges. According to him, one of the main reasons for this was that the photographic units of the Army, the Navy, and the Air Corps had bought all the existing lightweight and very popular Bell & Howell Eyemo 35mm cameras, leaving the Marine Corps photographers with the sole option of amateur 16mm film equipment, in order to have lightweight camera equipment available. According to Hatch, following the battle of Tarawa, all the material shot by Marine combat photographers was on 16mm Kodachrome colour film (Orgeron 2008: 161–4). With the Marines at Tarawa was not the first American World War II film shot on 16mm colour film, or awarded an Oscar. In 1942, Navy Captain John Ford of Hollywood fame was present at the Battle of Midway with a 16mm camera – and afterwards he supervised the editing of the documentary The Battle of Midway, which won an Academy Award for Best Documentary in 1942. Although Ford was later given credit as director and photographer, and part credit as editor, for this movie, the credits on the original read: ‘Photographed by the U.S. Navy in Technicolor from a 16mm original’ and are followed by the placard: ‘This is the actual photographic report of the

38

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 38

29/5/13 13:48:33

The Forgotten Cinematographer of Mount Suribachi

Battle of Midway. In number of surface and aircraft destroyed it is the greatest naval victory of the world to date. The following authentic scene was made by U.S. navy photographers.’ At the 1942 Academy Awards, the award was credited to US Navy/20th Century Fox. However, there was little doubt about Ford’s claim to the title of director. He commanded his own film unit and made sure that he was able to supervise editing and post-production work, bypassing regular routines for the use of film material in order to be sure that the scenes he had shot would appear only in the documentary and not be used as newsreel material. Henry Fonda, who had recently starred for Ford in movies like Young Mr. Lincoln (1939, John Ford) and The Grapes of Wrath (1940, John Ford), was used for one of the narrating voices, and the documentary has since found a secure place in the John Ford filmography. One aspect of this documentary’s success was important for future military film activities in the Pacific: the transfer from Kodachrome 16mm amateur format to the movie standard Technicolor system. The Battle of Midway was delayed for some time as Eastman-Kodak initially claimed that such a transfer could not be done successfully. Ford, suspecting that the company feared cheaper production methods in the film industry, had to use his clout with the military to get the transfer made. It was eventually distributed statewide in 500 prints (Gallagher 1986: 207). This opened up the use of 16mm colour film material in subsequent documentaries like With the Marines at Tarawa, To the Shores of Iwo Jima and Glamor Gal (1945). The first testing of the 16mm equipment for the Marines’ cameramen came with the invasion of the Tarawa atoll in the South Pacific at the end of November 1943. This bloody battle gave the American forces an idea of the challenges awaiting them in the drive northwards. More than 1,000 US Marines were killed and 2,300 wounded in overcoming the 5,000 Japanese defenders, of whom only 17 survived (Wright 2001: 93–4). Norman Hatch and a crew of cameramen equipped with the 16mm cameras and a Bell & Howell 35mm Eyemo camera were among the Marines who went into action in that battle. The bulk of the material was shot on 16mm, while Hatch was the only cameraman who made it to the beach in the first landing with his 35mm Eyemo. After the battle, the film was shipped back for editing to the United States, where Hatch’s footage, which contained the most actionpacked scenes, was separated from the 16mm and used in newsreels, while the 16mm material ended up at the Warner Brothers studio in Hollywood. According to Hatch, Hollywood director Frank Capra, who was supervising the documentary footage for the Army Signal Corps, was unhappy with the lack of action in the colour material and only at a later stage discovered the

39

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 39

29/5/13 13:48:33

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

35mm footage, which was then tinted ‘with a kind of rosy hue’ to blend with the Kodachrome material for With the Marines at Tarawa (Orgeron 2008: 162–5). The opening sequence, depicting the preparations aboard the ships headed for Tarawa as well as the troops setting out in the landing craft, is shot in 16mm colour, while the fighting scenes on the island are mainly from the 35mm black-and-white material shot by Hatch. With the Marines at Tarawa was one of the World War II documentaries (the other was John Huston’s The Battle of San Pietro, 1945) that influenced the camerawork in the D-day sequences of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan in 1998 (Haggith 2002: 335–6).1

Filming at Iwo Jima According to Hatch, who was the photo officer of the 5th Division, each of the three Marine divisions had deployed 30 photographers, both still and motion, for the Iwo Jima campaign – something that necessitated thorough coordination in order to avoid too much duplication of material. There was a plan for what each division would shoot and this plan called for the creation of a number of ‘stories’ assigned to each division. Hatch gives as one of his examples how a group of photographers were assigned to an artillery crew manning a gun, following the crew and the gun during the entire campaign. This resulted in the production of the short documentary Glamor Gal, about an artillery gun with this nickname and its crew, released in 1945 for public screening. Other movie projects were not intended for the public, but were meant to be used as instructional films. Norman Hatch mentions that one of his Marine photographers was allowed with his camera into the operating room aboard one of the supply ships: ‘And it was brutal stuff: shots of doctors cutting off arms, showing what a bloody mess it all was’ (Orgeron 2008: 167–8). In addition to the photographers who were assigned to do ‘stories’, Hatch also had a number of ‘free roamers’ under his command, photographers who were to ‘shoot whatever they saw’. One of these ‘free roamers’ was Bill Genaust, and when Hatch got word about the expedition bringing a larger flag to the top of Mount Suribachi, he ordered Genaust and still photographer Bill Campbell to go up with them (Buell 2005: 104). On their way up, they met AP photographer Joe Rosenthal, who informed them that a flag had already been raised at the summit. However, the three of them decided to make the climb to the top, and here they eventually secured what was to

40

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 40

29/5/13 13:48:33

The Forgotten Cinematographer of Mount Suribachi

become a photographic legend, covering the raising of the second flag atop Mount Suribachi. The film material went from Iwo Jima to the United States in two batches. The first, containing the flag raising footage, covered the first eight days of the battle (D-day to D+8) and was taken by the photo officer of the 4th Marine Division, Herbert Schlossberg, to Washington, DC, for inspection by the Joint Staff. It was then sent to Hollywood for further processing. In Hollywood, the material was prepared by editors for use in newsreels and documentaries. Hatch, who had brought in the material covering D+8 to D+18, was working on the documentary that would eventually be released as To the Shores of Iwo Jima (Orgeron 2008: 168–9). The Genaust footage appeared on the Universal Newsreel of 19 March 1945 – exactly one month after the battle started, but still with a week to go before it ended – with the caption ‘Old Glory Flies Over Iwo Jima’. By this time, the flag raising was not considered a top news item, not compared to an item about a bombing raid on Tokyo captioned ‘Carriers Hit Tokyo!’ The commentary to the Iwo Jima item, read by Ben Grauer, emphasises the cost of the battle in terms of American lives and contains footage blown up from 16mm Kodachrome to 35mm black-and-white stock. At the beginning of the two-and-a-half-minute newsreel item, there is a rare glimpse of American bodies on the beach accompanied by the commentary: ‘These Americans bought with their lives the vital stepping stone to Tokyo.’ Seven seconds of the footage showing the raising of the flag, which by now had become a national icon thanks to Rosenthal’s photograph, is introduced at the very end of the item with the words: ‘But take it they did, to their everlasting glory! The blood-soaked volcanic ash will live for ever, as their monument.’ The item is concluded with two seconds showing Mount Suribachi seen from the sea and the music tuning out.2 By the time the flag raising scene appeared in the American newsreels, Norman Hatch was in Hollywood overseeing the transfer of the 16mm material to 35mm Technicolor for the documentary To the Shores of Iwo Jima. This documentary, making use of the extensive footage from the Marines’ cinematographers on Iwo Jima, was rushed through production for release on 7 June 1945, at a time when the bloody battle for Okinawa was still raging, and it was undoubtedly intended to bolster US morale. The Genaust footage literally occupies the centre of this twenty-minute documentary, with the eight seconds inserted exactly at midpoint (9:58 into the movie). To the Shores of Iwo Jima perpetuates the myth about the flag being raised by the patrol that first reached the top of Mount Suribachi, by

41

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 41

29/5/13 13:48:33

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

making the raising of the flag an integral part of an edited story about the ascent of the mountain. While the first half of the documentary deals with the initial naval bombardment of Iwo Jima and the subsequent landing, the dramatic climax is built around the raising of the flag. It is here presented as a crucial aim of the first phase of the battle. After showing how Navy vessels bombard the mountain, while patrols are getting ready for action on the ground, an insert shot of the admiral in charge is accompanied by the commentary: ‘Admiral Turner gives the order to cease fire.’ Images of men moving up the side of the mountain are intercut with close-ups of men in cover looking out of the frame: ‘Our guns are quiet as they make the climb. We wait for a sign.’ The voice-over for the images of soldiers reaching the summit offers a low-key ‘Suribachi is ours.’ Then the Genaust footage is inserted with a musical fanfare and a triumphant ‘Suribachi is ours!’ But the commentary immediately moves on to remind the spectators that this glorious moment is only one small step on a long and torturous road: ‘A toehold on the southern tip of the island. But ahead the main strength of the Jap garrison was entrenched in steel and concrete. The show was just beginning.’ The remainder of the documentary then goes on to emphasise the struggle and the cost in men and material to secure the entire island. The underlying urgency of this message is undoubtedly related to the need to convince a warweary population of the necessity of sacrifice in the final stage of the war. While To the Shores of Iwo Jima was being released the battle for Okinawa still raged, claiming twice the number of American lives relative to the combined losses at Tarawa and Iwo Jima.

Iwo Jima in TV Documentary Victory at Sea, The World at War, and Ken Burns’S The War

As will be discussed below, the most prominent use of the Genaust footage immediately following the war was as a source of inspiration for Allan Dwan’s fiction feature film Sands of Iwo Jima from 1949, starring John Wayne. The end of the war also spelled an end to military documentaries meant for movie theatres, and film production by the established photography units of the US military forces was now largely channelled for internal use, as instructional or informational films. However, with the post-war development of television as the most important mass medium in the United States, a new outlet for documentaries was opened up. In 1952 one of the three major television networks, NBC,

42

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 42

29/5/13 13:48:33

The Forgotten Cinematographer of Mount Suribachi

announced the start of a prestigious historical documentary series to be run in no less than 26 segments: Victory at Sea. The decision to launch this kind of programming in a medium hitherto regarded as synonymous with light entertainment was at the time seen as a bold attempt to raise the status of television. The originator of the series was Henry Solomon, who also functioned as its producer. He had been an assistant to Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison, who in 1942 had been commissioned, with the rank of admiral, by President Roosevelt to write the history of the US naval operations ‘while the events were happening’ (Rollins 1973: 465). Having finished his work with Morison (whose monumental 15 volume History of United States Naval Operations in World War II was published between 1947 and 1963), Solomon left the Navy in 1948 and approached Harvard classmate (and son of the RCA CEO David Sarnoff) Robert W. Sarnoff with the idea of a television series based on the film material he had encountered while working on the history project. Sarnoff was enthusiastic about the idea, which eventually led to a weekly Sunday broadcast, starting 26 October 1952 and ending 3 May 1953. The series was a great success with the audience, putting aside all doubt that ‘serious’ television programming could do well in the audience ratings, capturing the number one spot in the ratings from the popular crime show The Untouchables (Rollins 1973: 464). Episode 23 of the series aired on 12 April 1953 with the title ‘Target Suribachi’ and dealt with the battle of Iwo Jima. The episode opens with a five-minute review of the bombing raids on Japan in the last months of the war and the heavy losses inflicted on the Japanese. We then see a B-29 landing on Iwo Jima for refuelling, and the commentator reminds the audience of how important this island was for the success of the American Air Force: ‘Before the war is over, more than 25,000 airmen will owe their lives to Iwo Jima.’ The episode then takes the audience back to the events leading up to the battle, with the obvious intent of functioning as a reminder of the logistics involved. For an audience used to the fast-paced editing rhythm of contemporary television, this part of the episode spends a seemingly endless amount of time presenting the supposedly placid and uneventful camp life of the soldiers waiting to go into action. The producers make good use of newsreel material aimed at assuring the home front that the boys were taken good care of, and this material also allows composer Richard Rodgers to include popular light music as a relief from the more austere martial musical themes dominating the score. Ultimately, the convoy bound for Iwo Jima sets off and the drama is introduced by reminding the television viewers that the Navy also had to battle the elements of nature in addition to the enemy, illustrated by a series of

43

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 43

29/5/13 13:48:33

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

dramatic shots of ships encountering a typhoon. The material relating directly to the battle for Iwo Jima is not introduced until the final third of the episode. Since the main emphasis of the series is on the Navy, the naval bombardment of the island, as documented by Navy cinematographers, is given far greater significance than in To the Shores of Iwo Jima, where the main interest was in the actions of the Marines. The images from the battle itself are largely drawn from the 16mm colour footage shot by the Marine movie photographers, but converted to, and intercut with existing, 35mm black-and-white material (colour television had not yet been introduced in the United States). During the last minute and a half, the myth of the direct connection between the ascent onto Mount Suribachi and the emblematic raising of the flag is repeated and reinforced. Over a collection of shots of Marines climbing up the mountainside, the commentary runs, suggestively: ‘Five hundred and sixty feet Mount Suribachi towers above the island. Five hundred and sixty feet the Marines fight their way upward’ and, over Genaust’s flag raising shot: ‘Five hundred and sixty feet from disaster to victory!’ A dissolve is then made to the American memorial that was later erected on the summit and a close-up of the plaque at its base, modelled after Rosenthal’s photo, while the first lines of Joseph Rodman Drake’s patriotic poem ‘The American Flag’ (1835) are solemnly recited: When Freedom from her mountain height Unfurled her standard to the air, She tore the azure robe of night, And set the stars of glory there.

The episode then ends, as all the episodes in the series do, with the well known ‘V’ for victory letter superimposed and animated on the screen. In an article in the Journal of Popular Culture in 1973, Peter C. Rollins sees Victory at Sea in a Cold War perspective, pointing out the uncritical nationalist rhetoric present in the series, something that is clearly evident in the final sequence of the ‘Target Suribachi’ episode referred to above. Rollins’s position in 1973, articulated while the Vietnam conflict was still very much a part of US everyday life, is one of concern: ‘Victory at Sea’ draws our attention away from reality, it bestows upon us a national pat on the back; but it does not give us what we really needed in 1952 and what we need all the more in 1972 – an insight into our real duties as Americans and as human beings in a world of suprapersonal

44

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 44

29/5/13 13:48:33

The Forgotten Cinematographer of Mount Suribachi

organizations, monstrous weapons and a penchant for violence. (Rollins 1973: 481)

Rollins cites several examples from the series of a national rhetoric and implicit racism that at times borders on jingoism, and this rhetoric does, as he points out, in its celebration of the innocence and the unequivocal benevolence of the American nation, come very close to presenting a form of political consensus that tends to view dissent as treachery (Rollins 1973: 469). At the time when Rollins’s article on Victory at Sea was published, another large undertaking in the popularisation of the history of World War II for the television screen was underway. At the British Independent Television Channel production company Thames Television, producer Jeremy Isaacs was putting the finishing touches to the 26-part series The World at War, to be broadcast between October 1973 and May 1974. This series was at the time the most ambitious and costly documentary project in British television. The obvious antecedents were Victory at Sea and the BBC’s 1964 documentary series on World War I, The Great War, but Jeremy Isaacs was determined to make The World at War into something radically different from the previous audiovisual treatment of World War II history. The Cold War was on the wane and the media images of the ongoing Vietnam War made it increasingly difficult to glorify war. ‘War was now a continuing nightmare which nobody could entirely ignore or easily romanticize’ (Mattheisen 1992: 244). The official reason for Isaacs’ proposal of a series of this kind was based on the fact that there was now, thanks to international efforts and technological advances in film archives, finally public access to the major part of the thousands of miles of film footage existing from the war. In addition, a number of the central actors on the political and military scene were going into retirement, something that would make it easier to obtain information in the form of interviews. According to historian and associate producer Jerome Kuehl, there was also an unofficial reason for ITV to take on this project – an unexpected windfall in the form of lowered taxes had made the considerable sum needed for the project available (Rosenthal 1980: 38–9). And The World at War does really present itself as a new and different way of telling history on the screen, something that undoubtedly may be ascribed to the producers’ background in television documentary and actuality programmes of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Where Victory at Sea represented the old-style historical compilation film, where the story was bound together by an omniscient narrator, further enhanced by the symphonic score of Richard Rodgers, the use of interviews in The World at War made it possible to hint at

45

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 45

29/5/13 13:48:33

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

gaps in the narrative and the possibility of different interpretations of events. Although using interviews with central and famous figures like Albert Speer, Karl Dönitz, Jimmy Stewart, Bill Mauldin, Curtis LeMay, Lord Mountbatten, Anthony Eden and historian Stephen Ambrose, the producers also decided to include a number of interviews with ‘ordinary’ men and women about their war experiences. It is this last category of interviewees that really makes the series representative of the ‘new’ television style in documentary. This becomes very obvious in the episode where the Genaust footage surfaces in the series. Episode 23 is titled ‘Pacific: The Island War’ (February 1942 – July 1945). Following an expository segment explaining the background for the American offensive in the South and Central Pacific (read by Laurence Olivier, who was used as commentator throughout the series), the invasion of Tarawa is treated in depth, using the material Norman Hatch referred to being used in With the Marines at Tarawa – at times it looks like whole segments from this documentary have been used. Where The World at War radically differs from its wartime precursor is in the use of interviews of participants as an indirect commentary to the images. The interviews with veterans from US Marines and Navy who had participated at Tarawa and Iwo Jima were conducted by director and producer John Pett, who was deeply touched by these memories and the intensity and the horror they managed to convey, and used them to great effect in the ‘Pacific’ episode (Rosenthal 1980: 59). The episode contains four in-depth narratives. In addition to Tarawa, they are the naval battle of Marianas, also referred to as the ‘Turkey Shoot’,3 the battle for Iwo Jima and, finally, the battle for Okinawa. The treatment of these histories represents a marked departure from the style and tenor of Victory at Sea. For one thing, there is the technological development of the medium. In the ‘Pacific’ episode of The World at War the producers had access to the colour film material of the US Marine and Navy photographers, something that helped enhance the image of war as a gruesome and ghastly reality, material that now, thanks to the development of colour TV, might be shown in a television documentary in its realistic colour and not in the bleaker black-andwhite version of the television technology of the 1950s. This is used to the full extent in the Iwo Jima sequence, where the combination of the colour footage from the landing on the beach and the fighting is juxtaposed with the interviews where the veterans remember what it was like, being 18- and 19-year-olds, scared to death and rushed into the inferno of explosions, projectiles, death and destruction on the lava sands of Iwo Jima. And it is visions of Hell John Pett has chosen to use as a recurring theme from his many hours of interviews, having four different veterans stating:

46

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 46

29/5/13 13:48:33

The Forgotten Cinematographer of Mount Suribachi

veteran 1: The waste, the barrenness of that place ... it was actually like a nightmare. It was the closest thing you could see to Hell. veteran 2: If Hell ever looks like anything, it looks like Iwo Jima. veteran 3: And as you hit the island, and you saw the ash, nothing living, it was ... if there ever was a Hell, this was it. veteran 4: If there is a Hell, I’ve lived through it now, so I don’t have to worry about going to Hell any time in the future, I’ve been there.4

This sentiment is echoed by Donald J. Mattheisen in his comparative study of Victory at Sea and The World at War, where he sums up the message of the series as ‘War is Hell’, emphasising the plight of the victims over the glory of victory (Mattheisen 1992: 245). The Iwo Jima segment represents the longest coherent narrative in the episode and runs for 13 of its 50 minutes. The first five minutes are dominated by the images and voice-over interviews dealing with the violent scenes of chaos at the landing; then follows an interesting explanatory sequence in stark contrast with the apparent chaos the previous images have conveyed. Images of supply craft arriving and unloading ammunition, tanks, bulldozers, and other vital supplies are accompanied by a rational explanation that does not invoke heroism or a soldier’s strong character: ‘It may have looked confusing at times, but the supply organisation backing up the assault force was proof of the factor that made America’s victory over Japan inevitable right from the day of Pearl Harbor: her overwhelming industrial strength.’ After this interlude of rational efficiency, the film returns to the sand, dirt, mortar shells, flamethrowers, wounded and dead on the long road to the top of Suribachi. Ten minutes into the segment, Genaust’s footage appears for a few seconds, to the commentary: ‘After three days of fighting on Mount Suribachi, the Stars and Stripes flew on the summit’, followed by a commentary by one of the interviewees about the importance of the flag: ‘A lot of the boys started to howl: “There goes the flag!” And I don’t care where you were on that island, but you could see right up to Suribachi as the flag was raised and everybody started to howl because they thought that the island was secure, but it was far from secure.’ Ironically, the shot from the foot of Mount Suribachi illustrating this quote is a shot of the smaller first flag that was raised at the summit, to be replaced by the larger flag pictured by Genaust and Rosenthal. Donald J. Mattheisen sees the flag raising scene in the ‘Pacific’ episode as a well-planned and executed anti-climax compared to the almost triumphant use of the same footage in Victory at Sea:

47

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 47

29/5/13 13:48:33

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

We see more and more victims: wounded men in pain, dead bodies, burning bodies, part-bodies, pieces of bodies. Towards the end we are almost literally wading through the gore. It is too much. When the flag goes up on Mount Suribachi, we feel more sickened than triumphant, more convinced than ever that War is truly Hell. (Mattheisen 1992: 249)

The overall sentiment of the ‘Pacific’ episode of The World at War, in contrast with that of ‘Target Suribachi’ in Victory at Sea, is that a transition has taken place, from a portrayal of national heroics to one of individual courage. In this context, the short glimpse of the five men raising the Stars and Stripes on the summit becomes a small parenthesis, a symbol of hope for men mired in a Hell of dust, dirt, flames, explosions, blood and death, only looking for survival. The turn of the century saw a renewed interest in films about World War II, as implied by the subject of this book. In the United States, renowned documentary film-maker Ken Burns, who had successfully produced several television series on historical subjects for public television (The Civil War, 1990; Baseball, 1994; Jazz, 2001), presented in the autumn of 2007 together with co-director Lynn Novick his series on World War II. Simply titled The War, the series was in seven episodes, each lasting two hours. In the same vein as his previous historical series, Burns’s aim was to write history ‘from below’, relying as much on interviews with survivors as on available film and photo archival material. According to Burns himself, one of the things that motivated him to undertake this six-year project was the realisation that some 1,000 veterans of the era were dying each day, and, as he formulated it, ‘It hurt me that we were hemorrhaging these memories’ (Walpole 2007). He decided to interview veterans of the war, both soldiers and those on the home front, from four cities and towns in the United States – representing geographical and demographic differences within the country and emphasising the viewpoint ‘from below’. The wish to present the war in an alternative way, removed from the narratives centring on patriotic duty, is even more strongly pronounced here than in The World at War series. In a ‘Letter from the producers’ included in the DVD edition, Ken Burns and Lynn Novick state: We have done our best not to sentimentalize, glorify or aestheticize the war, but instead have tried simply to tell the stories of those who did the fighting ... Through the eyes of our witnesses, it is possible to see the universal in the particular, to understand how the whole country got caught up in the war;

48

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 48

29/5/13 13:48:33

The Forgotten Cinematographer of Mount Suribachi

how the four towns and their people were permanently transformed; how those who remained at home worked and worried and grieved in the face of the struggle; and in the end, how innocent young men who had been turned into professional killers eventually learned to live in a world without war.

The segment on Iwo Jima in The War appears in the sixth episode, ‘“The Ghost Front” December 1944 – March 1945’. The sequence opens with a standard establishing shot in the series: an aerial shot of one of the four cities, in this case Mobile, Alabama. Still photos of a movie theatre front and the audience within give way to the opening of a newsreel about B-29s on a bombing raid over Tokyo. The newsreel’s black-and-white images of the route then dissolve into a colour graph with a voice-over explaining the strategic importance of Iwo Jima. Then follows a compilation of the colour material shot by the Marines at Iwo Jima, first shots of the bombardment, then shots from the landing craft and the landing on the beach. Five minutes into the segment, the local and personal angle is presented: ‘Sergeant Ray Pittman of Mobile was there.’ After his voice is heard over shots from the chaos at the beach, he is shown in person, talking about how he worried about how many men he might lose. Another Marine from Mobile, Maurice Bell, then tells how he watched the initial landing from one of the warships off Iwo Jima. The images being shown while Bell relates incidents from the invasion are to a large extent the same that were used in both To the Shores of Iwo Jima and the ‘Pacific’ episode of The World at War. But there is a shot that is conspicuously absent from Ken Burns’s rendition of the events on Iwo Jima, and that is the shot showing the raising of the flag on Mount Suribachi. This becomes apparent when comparisons are made to the similar events in To the Shores of Iwo Jima, Victory at Sea and The World at War. All four documentaries make similar use of the same visual material, the 16mm Kodachrome footage shot by Bill Genaust and the other Marine and Navy cinematographers during the campaign. And we find the same shots used over and over, not in chronological order but always within a chronological narrative frame: the bombardment by Navy vessels and aeroplanes, Marines boarding the fleet of landing craft, shots from the passage to the beach, Marines entering the beach, the fight to gain a toehold on the beach, the movement inland with tanks and troops towards Suribachi, and the advance up the mountainside. At this point, where the three other documentaries have inserted Bill Genaust’s footage of the raising of the flag, Burns cuts to the movie theatre in Mobile and a clip from a newsreel – possibly Fox Movietone News – about the continued fighting on Iwo Jima, before

49

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 49

29/5/13 13:48:33

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

returning to the colour archive material. The image of the flag raising is there, though: in the newsreel the title ‘THE MARINES FIGHT THE TOUGHEST BATTLE IN THEIR HISTORY’ is superimposed over Joe Rosenthal’s photo. A few seconds of the newsreel informs the audience, represented by intercut still images, that in the first week of the battle, more than 2,000 American soldiers were killed on Iwo Jima. This sets the tone for the last part of Burns and Novick’s Iwo Jima narrative, where they use the film footage from the battle to underline the cost and the horror of it, by showing shots where the colour film enhances the bloody scenes of American wounded and dead being brought in. One segment has a clear reference to Ken Burns’s first historical television series, The Civil War: over a still black-and-white image of the sprawling body of a young GI, reminiscent of the victim in one of Matthew Brady’s civil war photographs, the names of four soldiers from Waterbury, Mobile, Sacramento, and Luverne are recited, while the camera zooms in and pans on the photo in what has become known as ‘The Ken Burns effect’.5 The marginal presentation the Iwo Jima iconic image has been given in this film further underlines the tendency from The World at War to move the interest from a national to a personal level, explicitly avoiding the kind of imagery associated with the idea of the nobility of sacrifice for a higher cause. The people we meet in this narrative all recount their war experience primarily as one of personal survival. In a larger perspective it is interesting to note how contemporary issues reflect on the historical discourse in the three television series here discussed. While Victory at Sea mirrors nationalist post-war and Cold War mentalities of the 1950s, The World at War reflects the Vietnam War era’s distrust of the ‘good war’. At the same time, it might be inferred that Burns and Nowick’s 2008 television series in many respects represents a retreat from the far more explicit socially conscious stance in the British series of 1974 into a more markedly personal space.

The ‘Historical Facsimile’ in Fiction Film The Sands of Iwo Jima and Flags of Our Fathers

Several times during David W. Griffith’s epic and problematic movie The Birth of a Nation (1915) there appears a note on the intertitle card, as in the scene depicting Lincoln’s assassination, where the intertitle runs as follows: ‘A gala performance to celebrate the surrender of Lee, attended by the President and

50

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 50

29/5/13 13:48:33

The Forgotten Cinematographer of Mount Suribachi

staff. The young Stonemans present. AN HISTORICAL FACSIMILE of Ford’s theatre as on that night, exact in size and detail, with the recorded incidents, after Nicolay and Hay in “Lincoln, a History”.’ This was not the first time Griffith used the concept of ‘historical facsimile’, and he would use it on later occasions. Although not widely used after the coming of the sound film, it has come to denote, in historical fiction film, a kind of indexical function, vouching for the historicity of the scene in question. Addressing an audience often more than eager to question the accuracy of such representations, the film industry has often spent considerable sums on historical research in order to give some of the more prestigious productions of historical fiction film this quality hinted at in Griffith’s veracity claim. Although seldom referred to in literature on film and history, apart from in the discussion of Griffith’s movies and especially The Birth of a Nation, the concept of the historical facsimile nevertheless permeates the very wide genre of historical film, especially in what historian Robert Rosenstone terms the ‘mainstream historical film’ (Rosenstone 1995: 54 ff). At the heart of this concept lies, as stated above, a claim of veracity – this is how it was – and, as Rosenstone points out, inherent in this claim lies the danger of ‘false historicity’: [T]he myth of facticity [is] a mode on which Hollywood has long depended. This is the mistaken notion that mimesis is all, that history is in fact no more than a ‘period look,’ that things themselves are history, rather than become history because of what they mean to people of a particular time and place. (Rosenstone 1995: 60)

This allows the movie industry to disguise a historically anchored discourse as ‘historical fact’ and by doing so de-ideologise it. To counter this tendency, Rosenstone advocates experimental encounters in cinematographic history, citing films like Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potyomkin, 1925, Sergei Eisenstein), October (Oktyabr, 1928, Eisenstein), Antonio das Mortes (O Dragão da Maldade contra o Santo Guerreiro, 1969, Glauber Rocha) and Walker (1987, Alex Cox). The image provided by Rosenthal’s photo and Genaust’s footage of the raising of the American flag on Mount Suribachi clearly lends itself as a source for this kind of representation, and in conclusion there will be a short discussion of how Genaust’s images are treated in two fiction films almost sixty years apart – Allan Dwan’s Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) and Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers (2006).

51

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 51

29/5/13 13:48:33

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

In Lawrence Suid’s comprehensive study Guts & Glory: The Making of the American Military Image in Film (2002), the author claims that although several American movie actors had created memorable military characters before 1949 – he mentions Victor McLaglen, Lon Chaney, Wallace Beery and Randolph Scott – none of these actors became the symbolic American fighting man. Not until John Wayne created the role of Sergeant Stryker in Sands of Iwo Jima and then merged his own personality with the character did Americans find a man who personified the ideal soldier, sailor or Marine. More than fifty years after he appeared in Sands of Iwo Jima, Wayne and his military image continue to pervade American society and culture. (Suid 2002: 16)

As Suid implies, the story in Sands of Iwo Jima centres around a Marine sergeant, John Stryker, and his mission in making a group of individually highly different youngsters into an effective combat team. Stryker is portrayed as a man with a troubled private background who, in spite of flawless performances in battle, has never risen above the rank of sergeant. The movie tells the story of how the young men under his tutelage first come to resent his rough methods, but then, having learned from hard experience during the battle of Tarawa, become just the fighting unit he wanted them to be, before he falls victim to a sniper’s bullet on the summit of Mount Suribachi just as the Stars and Stripes is going up (see also Anne Gjelsvik’s essay ‘Care or Glory? Picturing a New War Hero’ in this volume). Indeed, Rosenthal’s image was one of the initial inspirations for Republic Pictures producer Edmund Grainger, when in 1949 he wrote a 40-page treatment for a film after having seen the line ‘sands of Iwo Jima’ in a newspaper article, with the flag raising as a climax. The treatment was later turned into a script by Harry Brown and submitted to studio head Herbert Yates and veteran director Alan Dwan for consideration. The budget would be the largest this studio, belonging to Hollywood’s ‘smaller three’, had ever spent on a single production (Suid 2002: 118; Bradley and Powers 2000: 321). The leadership of the Marine Corps, worried about rumours that powers within Congress and the US Army were pushing for the inclusion of the Marines in the Army, were looking for ways to promote the Marines as an independent unit and seized the opportunity a film like this provided to influence public opinion. Accordingly, the US Marine Corps decided to give full assistance to the studio, granting the use of the grounds of the training base Camp Pendleton for all exterior shooting and the use of Marines as extras.

52

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 52

29/5/13 13:48:34

The Forgotten Cinematographer of Mount Suribachi

A Marine captain was assigned to serve as the film’s technical advisor and to ensure technical veracity in the film (Suid 2002: 119).6 As a final PR coup, the studio could announce that the three surviving flag raisers, Ira Hayes, John Bradley, and Rene Gagnon, would participate as themselves, re-creating the flag raising scenes for the Hollywood film cameras. The final scene in the movie consists of stock footage from the Iwo Jima campaign with Mount Suribachi looming in the background, intercut with action scenes shot at Camp Pendleton, showing Sergeant Stryker and his men fighting their way to the summit. Right before reaching their destination, the commanding officer orders a halt to artillery support and calls upon Stryker, pulling out a folded flag: ‘The colonel gives orders to put up this flag as soon as the top is secured. Make sure it gets there.’ Stryker then turns to a group of men, among these Hayes, Gagnon, and Bradley, giving them the flag and ordering them to find something they can use as a flag standard. Seconds after sending this group away, while offering cigarettes to his men, he is shot, and the men cluster around him, grief-stricken. They find an unsent letter to his boy and one of the men reads this aloud. At the end they look up the hill, just in time to see the flag being raised to the background music of the US Marine hymn ‘From the Halls of Montezuma’. Then they literally disappear into the fog of war. This final scene was shot at the Republic studios, and in his book, James Bradley publishes an excerpt from a letter his father wrote about the event: They didn’t get us out to California to help make the picture. All that was a cheap publicity trick to get a little free advertising for the movie. Republic Studios is making the movie, we were out there only two days and most of that time was spent fooling around. I think they only took about two shots of the flag raising and that only took about ten minutes. (Bradley and Powers 2000: 322)

The re-enactment of the flag raising in Sands of Iwo Jima is about the same length as the Genaust footage, but it seems obvious that the movement is not based on that source. A picture in Lawrence H. Suid’s book does, however, give a clue to the source for this specific historical facsimile. Suid’s picture caption, which probably stems from a Republic publicity shot, reads: ‘Felix W. de Weldon, sculptor of the Iwo Jima monument, advises the actors representing the three survivors of the flag raising, Ira Hayes, John Bradley and Rene Gagnon, on the proper position to take during the shooting of this climactic scene’ (Suid 2002: 122).

53

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 53

29/5/13 13:48:34

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

At that time de Weldon, originally Austrian, but a naturalised American citizen, was working on what was eventually unveiled in 1954 as the USMC War Memorial at Arlington, Virginia. He had been using Rosenthal’s photograph as his model, contributing to the position of that image in American military iconography, so the flag raising scene in Sands of Iwo Jima owes more to Rosenthal’s photography than Genaust’s footage. But Bill Genaust’s time would eventually come: one of the ‘behind the scenes’ documentaries included on the DVD version of Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers opens with Clint Eastwood and actor Kirk B. R. Woller, portraying Bill Genaust, standing on a hill in Iceland. Woller holds a 1940s 16mm Bell & Howell Filmo Auto Master movie camera in his hand and listens attentively to Eastwood’s instructions (‘You’re kind of not sure about it. And then you look back and say “Oh – there it goes....”’). And the flag raising sequence, which in this movie takes on a different meaning from the earlier representations on film, not only follows the Genaust footage, but also presents Genaust as being present, standing side by side with Joe Rosenthal, recording the moment. The sequence, sticking close to James Bradley’s description, cited above, opens with Mike Strank, portrayed by Eastwood instructs actor Kirk B. R. Woller in his role Barney Pepper, tying the flag brought as Bill Genaust in Flags of Our Fathers. by Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) to a metal pipe. Cut to Rosenthal and Genaust getting their equipment ready, Genaust mumbling ‘I’m not in your way, am I, Joe?’ and Rosenthal answering ‘Oh, no.’ Rosenthal looks up and says, ‘There she goes!’ and both photographers raise their cameras. The flag raising sequence fulfils the function of historical facsimile by staying very close to Genaust’s footage, but freezing the frame at the very moment Rosenthal’s shutter clicks. It was, after all, the photo and not the film sequence that made the moment historical. Another interesting detail about Eastwood’s re-creation of the moment when compared with Genaust’s footage is the way the brilliant Kodachrome colours of Genaust’s film have been replaced by a greyish, almost colourless hue, as if to underline the desolation of the island, the harshness of the landscape, and the bleak horror of the war. Compared to other filmic representations of the flag raising at Iwo Jima, Flags of Our Fathers is unique in its reflexive aspect, the acknowledgement of the photographers present something that strengthens its function as

54

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 54

29/5/13 13:48:34

The Forgotten Cinematographer of Mount Suribachi

historical facsimile. For this, full credit has to be given to Property Master Michael Sexton, whose meticulous research has made sure that the Bell & Howell 16mm movie camera that Kirk Woller is holding in his hands is very much the same as the one Bill Genaust was using when he shot his 198 frames in the cold winter wind of Mount Suribachi in February 1944. This way, the short sequence in Flags of Our Fathers becomes a tribute to the many anonymous men with similar cameras. As John Pett, the director of The World At War, who had been watching a large number of hours of this material, would put it: Those unknown cameramen deserve more than a mention. They got the most incredible shots and, at the same time, made it the bloody business it was... And, again, those cameramen – whose names would flash by on the slates at the top of the uncut rushes, or who were totally unnamed – deserve as much credit as Jeff or myself, and many of them didn’t survive. (Rosenthal 1980: 60–1)

Notes

1 2 3

4 5 6

A major visual inspiration for Spielberg’s D-day landing scenes was, of course, the shots by Robert Capa on Omaha Beach. The newsreel is available in digital format at http://www.archive.org/ details/1945-03-19_Carriers_Hit_Tokyo. On 19 June 1944, American Navy pilots attacked and destroyed a large Japanese carrier-borne aeroplane group near the Marianas Islands. The planes were attacked while attempting to land and were virtually defenceless, hence the reference to turkey shooting. The episode was later referred to as ‘The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot’. All citations from The World at War are transcriptions from the soundtrack of the DVD edition made by the author. ‘The Ken Burns effect’ is an entry on Wikipedia. Norman Hatch was also one of the consultants working on Sands of Iwo Jima; see Orgeron (2008: 155).

55

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 55

29/5/13 13:48:34

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bradley, James and Ron Powers (2000) Flags of Our Fathers. Westminster, MD: Bantam Books. Buell, Hal (2005) ‘The Unsung Filmmaker of Iwo Jima’, Parade, 20 February 2005. ____ (2006) Uncommon Valor, Common Virtue: Iwo Jima and the Photograph That Captured America. New York: Berkley Pub. Group/Penguin Group. Gallagher, Tag (1986) John Ford: The Man and His Films. Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press. Haggith, Toby (2002) ‘D-Day Filming – For Real: A Comparison of “Truth” and “Reality” in Saving Private Ryan and Combat Film by the British Army’s Film and Photographic Unit’, Film History, 14, 3/4, 332–53. Mattheisen, Donald J. (1992) ‘Persuasive History: A Critical Comparison of Television’s Victory at Sea and The World at War’, The History Teacher, 25, 2, 239–51. Orgeron, Marsha (2008) ‘Filming the Marines in the Pacific: An Interview with World War II Cinematographer Norman Hatch’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 28, 2, 153–73. Rollins, Peter C. (1973) ‘Victory at Sea: Cold War Epic’, Journal of Popular Culture, 6, 3, 463–82. Rosenstone, Robert A. (1995) Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rosenthal, Alan (1980) The Documentary Conscience: A Casebook in Film Making. Berkeley: University of California Press. Suid, Lawrence H. (2002) Guts & Glory: The Making of the American Military Image in Film. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky. Thome, Tedd (2008) Immortal Images: A Personal History of Two Photographers and the Flag-Raising on Iwo Jima. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press. Walpole, N. H. (2007) ‘Another War, Another Epic from Ken Burns’, interview with director Ken Burns in New York Times, 16 September 2007. Wright, Derrick (2001) Tarawa 1943. Oxford: Osprey History.

56

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 56

29/5/13 13:48:34

Flags of Their Stepfathers? Race and Culture in the Context of Military Service and the Fight for Citizenship ___ martin edwin andersen

Ira Hayes, a Pima Indian from the hardscrabble Gila River reservation in Arizona, was a central character in Flags of Our Fathers. Memorably portrayed by a Canadian-born member of the Ojibwa Indian Nation, Adam Beach, Hayes played a principal part both in the second – posed – raising of ‘Old Glory’ on the equally hardscrabble island of Iwo Jima, and in its aftermath. A second-class citizen in the land of his forefathers, Hayes thus participated as a main protagonist in an epochal event, one that spawned a national icon ‘owned and operated by various interests for particular cultural experiences … [T]he famous photograph … provid[ing] a quintessential moment of American heroic triumph, and a celebration of the virtues of the common soldier’ (Lilenthal 1993: 8–12, 9). A Marine parachutist and one of the six Corpsmen who participated in the raising of the colours, Hayes was one of only three of those flag raisers who left the island alive, but like his two surviving peers, he also left part of himself behind – in his case, even more so because of where he came from and where he would return. Hayes’s ‘coming home’ denied the everyman reality of his battle experience – he had after all fought in three major battles in the Pacific theatre – replacing it with an official myth carefully crafted for purposes other than that of his well-being or celebrating his personal honour, including giving

57

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 57

29/5/13 13:48:34

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

The Marine Corps War Memorial outside Arlington Cemetery, Washington, DC, was based on Joe Rosenthal’s photograph and inaugurated in 1954. It was the world’s biggest bronze statue. Photo by Barbara Borzuchowska Andersen.

the Marine Corps a precious prop for its looming battle for survival in the newly reorganised post-war Pentagon. Upon meeting President Truman during a tour selling war bonds, the accidental chief executive extolled Hayes and the others as ‘heroes’ before a nation credulous about the flag raising’s realism and authenticity. Hayes recoiled from such praise and the popular adulation and lavish lifestyle enjoyed by him and his buddies, asking later: ‘How could I feel like a hero when only five men in my platoon of 45 survived; when only 27 men in my company of 250 managed to escape death or injury?’ (Whittaker 2009). Having joined the Corps after being enjoined by his tribal chief to bring honour to his tribe, Hayes’s private toll included battlefield memories and survivor guilt, and he suffered untreated from what psychologists now call post-

58

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 58

29/5/13 13:48:34

Flags of Their Stepfathers?

traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Frequently arrested for drunkenness and mired in a world of menial jobs, in 1954 Hayes diffidently went to Washington, DC, to attend the dedication of the Iwo Jima monument, the bronze cast whose image was based on the famous photo. Former Allied supreme commander and President Dwight D. Eisenhower – whose government was then carrying out a full assault on Indian reservations and communal land rights – lauded Hayes and the others as American heroes. Seventy-five days later, the 32-year-old Hayes was found dead face down in his own vomit and blood in a drainage canal, ‘the single source of water that was provided for his people by the same government he’d proudly served’ (Whittaker 2009). When Hayes was buried with full military honours in Arlington National Cemetery, his fellow flag raiser Rene Gagnon included in his eulogy an acknowledgment of the discrimination Hayes and other Native Americans still faced: ‘Let’s say he had a little dream in his heart that someday the Indian would be like the white man – able to walk all over the United States’ (Voices 2009). The story of the life, death, and memory of Ira Hayes offers a thumbnail sketch of the promise and plight of Native Americans in the period spanning two world wars and their aftermath. Unlike the prejudice against blacks, during the first half of the twentieth century prejudice against Indians, though accented by racism, was more cultural than racial. Before Flags of Our Fathers was produced, ethno-historian Frederick E. Hoxie noted that textbook renditions of Hayes’s personal contribution to victory over Japan had not contributed to ‘a rounded view of native life. They can provide sharply new and provocative visions of conventional historical narratives, but they do not add substantially to an understanding of the rich, complicated history of particular cultural or ethnic communities’ (Hoxie 1997: 595–615, 602). In 1949, Hayes played himself in the movie Sands of Iwo Jima along with celluloid The tomb of flag raiser Ira Hayes at Arlington serial Indian-killer John Wayne and Cemetery, Washington, DC. Photo by Barbara Gagnon and John Bradley, the two Borzuchowska Andersen.

59

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 59

29/5/13 13:48:34

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

other survivors of the second flag party. ‘It is hard to find any images of our people in the 1940s era that represent us as heroes’, noted Adam Beach, the Canadian-born Indian who played Hayes in Flags of Our Fathers. About Hayes, he added: ‘We’re very proud’ (Strachan 2007). More than a decade later dominant society’s iconography of Hayes appeared complete. In 1961, Tony Curtis, who grew up as Bernie Schwartz in Brooklyn, no stranger to personal tragedy, offered a sensitive portrayal of Hayes in The Outsider. In 1964, the legendary Johnny Cash took the ‘The Ballad of Ira Hayes’, written by Peter LaFarge, a Native American folksinger, to the top of the country music charts as a single. The acoustic happening in which a white man interpreted the work of an Indian appeared to echo a complaint made four decades later by Beach, himself no stranger to discrimination, who noted that even in the first decade of the twenty-first century, in order to successfully sell an Indian movie, the plot needed to show ‘a white person come to a reservation, be introduced to the culture and then help the Indian person become more aware of their culture through a white perspective’ (Strachan 2007). Native Americans and African Americans have fought for the United States since the beginning of the nation’s history in both domestic and foreign wars. Yet, the challenges each group faced differed significantly. Slavery was abolished during the 1860s, thus enabling all African Americans at least theoretical access to equal treatment under the law; Native Americans as a group did not become US citizens until after World War I. Indians participated as war fighters, and were valued as such by white society, throughout American history, although white commanders came late to the realisation that Native American troops ‘could perform effectively in battle as well as on the trail’ (Wooster 1988: 204). Blacks in the military faced segregated conditions until the late 1940s, and their relegation to service and support units until then was seen – especially by those anxious to serve – as limiting their ability to claim full rights of citizenship as civilians. During the Civil War, Union manpower needs had caused large numbers of African Americans to be mobilised and armed. Black troops serving on the American western frontier and in the Spanish-American War also acquitted themselves well, but were forced to serve in segregated units led by white officials. Native Americans, although also treated as lesser human beings, did not serve in segregated units (except as auxiliary troops in the Civil War). The appointment of the first African American to the rank of general was preceded by more than eight decades by Lieutenant Colonel Ely Parker receiving the rank of Brevet Brigadier General after the Civil War, a conflict in which the Seneca chief and non-citizen made the formal ink copy of General Ulysses S.

60

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 60

29/5/13 13:48:34

Flags of Their Stepfathers?

Grant’s letter that spelled out the terms of the 1865 Confederate surrender at Appomattox Courthouse. It was followed by the promotion of an Indian to admiral. The military-citizenship leapfrogging by the much smaller minority group over a much larger one happened despite the fact that, due to the former’s unusual status in federal law – in which reservation tribes belonged to ‘domestic, dependent nations’ within the United States – Indians as a group did not become US citizens until 1924. This occurred even though two-thirds had already received citizenship through, among other means, service in the military. Even with citizenship, some states, particularly in the West, denied Indians the right to vote with legal subterfuge not unlike that exercised against blacks in the South; Arizona, Maine, and New Mexico were the last to grant voting rights to Indians. And not all Indians had wanted it, seeing citizenship as ‘the possible destruction of their tribal integrity and individual rights’ (Tax 1961).1 Native American contributions to the US military in World War I showed their capacity for integration into the armed forces and helped stimulate greater federal efforts to bring Indians into the mainstream of American life, with the unforeseen consequence that the government’s ‘assimilationist’ actions actually boomeranged as they fostered the creation of modern Indian militancy. Not until World War II and the Korean ‘police action’ were African American contributions as warriors similarly appreciated, serving to open doors in civilian life.

The Native American Experience Today, more Native Americans proportionally serve in the US armed forces (2.1 percent of the active-duty military) than any other ethnic group, a tradition that goes back to the beginning of the Republic.2 Indian tribes fought on both sides during the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the Civil War. In 1866, the US Army established its Indian Scouts to take advantage of what was seen as Native Americans’ particular aptitude for scouting enemy lines, and these played important roles in the latter part of the nineteenth century in the American West. During the Spanish-American War Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders in Cuba also included Indian scouts, and they played a role in General John J. Pershing’s campaign in pursuit of the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa in 1916. In 1831, the tribes’ legal status had been enshrined in the Supreme Court’s determination in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia that Native Americans belonged

61

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 61

29/5/13 13:48:35

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

to ‘domestic dependent nations’ and their relations to the federal government ‘resemble that of a ward to his guardian’. Legal scholar Felix S. Cohen summed up the meaning of that unique classification in law that has stood until today, noting: ‘The whole course of judicial decision on the nature of Indian tribal powers is marked by adherence to three fundamental principles. (1) An Indian tribe possesses, in the first instance, all the powers of any sovereign state. (2) Conquest renders the tribe subject to the legislative powers of the United States and in substances terminates the external powers of sovereignty of the tribe … but does not by itself affect the internal sovereignty of tribes, i.e., its powers of local self-government. (3) These powers are subject to qualifications by treaties and by express legislation by Congress but, save as thus expressly qualified, full powers are vested in the Indian tribes and in their duly constituted organs and governments’ (Cohen 1971: 123). White patience with the small, apparently vanishing Indian population was tempered by a large degree of paternalism and an assumption of assimilation into white (Christian) society. Anthropologist Nancy Oestreich Lurie noted: ‘For the “White Man,” the very existence of Indians constitutes the Indian Problem … From the beginning it was assumed that the Indians would disappear as a result of military campaigns. When armed conflict ceased, the Indians were scattered on reservations where disease, unsanitary conditions, and nutritional deprivation almost completed their extinction … [S]urvivors were expected to hurry along the path of the white man as the only course open to them … Although this was believed to be a natural, desirable, and inevitable process, the government endeavored for many years to hasten it by repressing Indian culture, language, and native forms of leadership’ (Lurie 1961: 479). Being Indian relegated Native Americans to second-class civil status. ‘Regardless of whether American Indians adopted the lifestyle of EuroAmericans, the government refused to grant them the right to obtain citizenship under the 14th Amendment’, ethnologist Martha Menchaca wrote. She found that even the ‘history of racial repression and discrimination against members of the Mexican-origin community in the United States’ was due to the use of ‘Indianism’ by government officials ‘to construct an image of Mexican-origin people as inferior and therefore deserving of separate and unequal treatment’ (Menchaca 1993: 583–603, 592, 600). A military historian of the period between the Civil War and World War I added: ‘The overwhelming majority of strategists after 1865 believed that Indians were inferior savages unequal to the white man … [who] needed to be removed to reservations, where a few of the more advanced might progress if given sufficient time. Other officers,

62

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 62

29/5/13 13:48:35

Flags of Their Stepfathers?

less certain of the Indians’ fate, preferred to separate those tribes already on the pathway to “civilization” from those who had clung to their “barbaric” ways. Some subscribed to reformist principles and pointed out that the tribes had suffered repeated injustices at the hands of unscrupulous whites. All … allowed paternalism to influence their convictions’ (Wooster 2008: 208–9). During World War I more than 12,000 Native Americans, many of whom US citizenship had not been extended to and were thus not required to serve, joined the military. Producer Patty Loew, whose Wisconsin Public Television network documentary Way of the Warrior debuted in 2007, said that as she grew up she often wondered why her Ojibwe grandfather had volunteered. ‘I always imagined him with his hand up, taking that oath to defend the Constitution, as all military personnel do. And I thought it was so ironic, because he wasn’t a citizen and had no protections under the Constitution’ (Rath 2007). Many Indians’ inability to speak English prevented them from signing up; however, once in the service they did not confront the racial segregation and its humiliating consequences faced by blacks (Rath 2007). Thomas Britten notes ‘service during World War I was a defining moment’ for Native American soldiers, reinforcing tribal identity among Indian ‘doughboys’ and giving them the chance to meet members of other tribes and to share their experiences, thus cultivating among them a pan-Indianism – an intertribal movement of resistance to white domination and assimilation and a return to traditional beliefs. Travelling abroad to fight, Indians observed ‘different lifestyles and cultures’, received a ‘firsthand look at how the majority society worked and thought’, and were ‘treated as equals’ by their white colleagues during combat. The latter took from the experience ‘de-villainize[d] and demythologize[d] popular conceptions’ about Native Americans, whose population of 244,000 throughout the United States included only 15,000 urban residents. Military service also provided ‘mechanical and clerical skills, hygiene, and the English language’ (Britten 1977: 183–5). Reflecting the reservation Indians’ legal status as members of ‘dependent, domestic nations’ (cited above) within the United States, the Iroquois Confederacy had declared war on Germany in 1917. Some 600 Oklahoma Indians, mostly Choctaw and Cherokee, participated as members of the 142nd Infantry of the 36th Texas-Oklahoma National Guard Division, which fought in France. Choctaw-speaking field telephone operators’ quick, secure transmissions in their own language confused Germans on the battlefield and presaged the celebrated efforts of Navajos and other Indian ‘code talkers’ recruited by the US Marine Corps during World War II – the latter immortalised on celluloid by John Woo’s Windtalkers (2002), starring Adam Beach as a

63

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 63

29/5/13 13:48:35

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

Navajo soldier fighting at Saipan in June to July 1944, fully six months before Iwo Jima (Jevec 2001). During World War I the 32nd ‘Red Arrow’, made up of Michigan and Wisconsin National Guard units and the only foreign unit awarded a nom de guerre by the French – the ‘Les Terribles’ Division – included large numbers of Native American soldiers. It lost almost 60 percent of its fighting strength in combat. Indians in the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) suffered five times the number of casualties as the force as a whole (Anon. 2009). White assimilationists promoted an ‘Indian scout syndrome’ as a ‘natural instinct’, one critic wrote acidly, portraying Native Americans as ‘more stealthy, attuned to their environments, and [with] better eyesight than their non-Indian comrades in no-man’s-land. Either that, or their commanders were simply using them for cannon fodder … Indians in the trenches of World War I found themselves in a situation that would have been ludicrous had it not been so lethal’ (Holm 1996: 89). A former federal Indian Service physician expressed amazement at ‘the stoic Indian falling victim’ to shellshock; his race-tinged analysis alleging it ‘disproves all theories of weak nervous systems as being the cause of it’ (Barsh 1991: 276–303, 282). With the outbreak of World War II, the Iroquois Confederacy did not need to declare war on Germany, as it had never entered into a peace treaty with it following World War I. This time eligible for the draft due to the citizenship law of 1924, many Indians did not wait to be called up to serve. This despite having been the object of a concerted effort by Nazi propagandists to woo them before the outbreak of hostilities, with – during the interwar period – the German regime sending agents posing as anthropologists, art dealers, and students to study the various Indian languages (Townsend 2000). Volunteers included Sioux-Assinibois descendants of those who defeated General George Armstrong Custer. ‘The Iroquois took it as an insult to be called upon under compulsion’, noted one writer. ‘They passed their own draft act and sent their young braves into National Guard units. There were many disappointments as well-intentioned Indians were rejected for the draft. Years of poverty, illiteracy, ill-health and general bureaucratic neglect had taken its toll’ (Morgan 1995: 22–7, 23).3 The Selective Service reported that, of a total of 4,000 Navajo males between ages 18 and 35, 88 percent were classified as illiterate (Sasaki and Olmstead 1953: 89–9, 89). Noted one army historian: ‘In spite of years of inefficient and often corrupt management of Indian affairs … Indians saw the Axis Powers as a threat to their liberty, and the Indian tribes responded patriotically … Indians took extreme measures to get into the war … Illiterate Papago Indians memorized a few English phrases and learned to write their names when called to the induction centers. The Navajo, also rejected in large

64

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 64

29/5/13 13:48:35

Flags of Their Stepfathers?

numbers for not speaking English, were extremely determined to serve. They organized remedial English training on their reservations to qualify’ (Morgan 1995: 24). On 7 January 1942, one month after Pearl Harbour, the War Department issued Memo 336, addressing the question of Native Americans’ racial identity in order to facilitate the flow of men into the armed services. Repeating an earlier decision that ‘members of the Indian race will be inducted as white trainees’, it admitted doubts about a registrant’s ‘Indianness’ by giving local draft boards the ability ‘to delay … induction of persons registered as “Indian” pending the proper determination of classification (White or Colored)’, to be determined within 60 days (Townsend 2002: 93). Compelled by patriotism, the search for better economic opportunities, a thirst for adventure, and a desire to honour a proud warrior tradition shared by many tribes, some 44,500 Indian men, out of a total population of less than 350,000, served between 1941 and 1945. Hundreds of Native American women also joined the WACS (Women’s Army Corps), WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) and Army Nurse Corps. In addition, more than 40,000 Indians left the reservation to work in war industries; Alaskan Indians participated in that territory’s defence. Native Americans purchased more than $50 million in war bonds – the same scrip4 promoted by Hayes, Gagnon, and Bradley stateside – and made generous contributions to the Red Cross and the Army and Navy Relief societies. A US Army analysis noted that Indians not only ‘excelled at basic training … their talents included bayonet fighting, marksmanship, scouting, and patrolling. Native Americans took to commando training; after all, their ancestors invented it’ (Morgan 1995: 25). The importance of the some 400 Marine Navajo ‘code talkers’ was underscored by their contribution to the decisive victory achieved at Iwo Jima (although only the Navajo language code remained unbroken by the enemy, more than a dozen tribes provided code talkers in both world wars).5 And even before the first African American reached the rank of general, the Native American Major General Clarence Tinker, an Osage pilot and World War I veteran who led the Army Air Forces in Hawaii since shortly after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour and who died during the Battle of Midway, had achieved that rank. Joseph J. ‘Jocko’ Clark, the first Indian graduate of the Naval Academy, was promoted to rear admiral in the segregated Navy in 1944 (Morgan 1995: 22).6 For some Indian soldiers, sailors, and pilots, service in the armed forces was ‘an assimilating experience’, and included a steady paycheck, exposure to consumer culture, ‘respect and equal treatment’, and an appreciation for a

65

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 65

29/5/13 13:48:35

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

dominant society educational system in which participation was rewarded by the tangible prospect of future success (Burt 1992: 924). The same was true for some Native American participants in defence industries. ‘World War II signaled a major break from the past and offered unparalleled opportunities to compete in the white man’s world’, one army historian has noted. The war meant that many Indians ‘made a decent living for the first time in their lives … Military life provided a steady job, money, status, and a taste of the white man’s world’ (Morgan 1995: 25). As we will see in the case of African Americans, World War I ‘may have constituted another major turning point for Native Americans in the United States … Their wartime experiences … stimulated the greater political participation of Native Americans in local and state politics … When war veterans and defense workers returned to their communities in 1945, they were unwilling to accept their prewar status’ (Nash 1992: 534). In a study of two southwestern tribes, the Navajo and the Zuni, anthropologists found that for the former, ‘new elements of culture impinging upon the Navahos via the veterans of World War II constitute only another phase of a long record of cultural change and development’. The tribes’ differing socio-cultural systems, the Navajos’ ‘receptiveness’ versus the secretive Zunis’ ‘resistance’ to the veterans as ‘cultural innovators’, meant each tribe’s servicemen lived their contact in the armed forces in different ways, and that the two communities responded in dissimilar fashion to returning veterans at war’s end. The Navajo veterans, they found, ‘have tended to be regarded as potential forces for constructive change even by the most conservative Navaho leaders; the Zuni veterans have tended to be regarded as forces for destructive change and have been forced to accept the traditional Zuni values or to leave the pueblo’ (Adair and Vogt 1949: 547, 554, 558). In the 1950s to the mid-1960s, Indians again faced federal programmes designed to assimilate them through a policy aimed at terminating the government’s trusteeship, guaranteed by treaty, of Indian reservations, making Native Americans assume the responsibilities of full citizenship, and to relocate them, primarily in urban centres. The federal plans for acculturating Indians were matched by rising unemployment and poverty on the reservations themselves, in part because of the ‘brain drain’ caused by out-migration to the cities. Native Americans did not face the extreme degrees of racism that were faced by African Americans; at the same time ‘the harshness and pervasiveness of racism against blacks over so many years had forged among them a common, shared experience, which, in response, provided some measure of unity and cooperation’. Therefore Indians whose way of life was under siege from a wide

66

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 66

29/5/13 13:48:35

Flags of Their Stepfathers?

variety of forces did not enjoy the ‘personal support mechanisms’ that blacks had come to enjoy, such as urban advocacy groups and African American churches that served to help protect their identity (Townsend 2000: 222). Larry Burt, a specialist on the history of Native Americans in the United States, has noted that although many Indians moved into mainstream America and ‘[d]etribalization and acculturation resulted … the fact that so many moved to cities near reservations and lived a kind of in-between cultural existence testified to the persistence of tradition’. Indian veterans ‘challenged [the] celebration of separatism and tribal rights’ and ‘used the language of the emerging civil rights movement to fight against forms of discrimination like bans on alcohol and the lack of voting rights and to agitate for the removal of restrictions on trust lands’. However, being more knowledgeable about dominant society and its constitutions, its majority rule principles, and its legal procedures, over time ‘the war experience also gave rise to the more recent movement for self-determination in Indian communities’ (Burt 1992). Army historian Thomas D. Morgan added: ‘Those who left traditional cultures did not necessarily reject their heritage. Instead, they forged a new PanIndian identity to cope with the differences they perceived between themselves and whites … Whites believed that World War II had completed the process of Indian integration into mainstream American society … Indians did not want equality with whites at the price of losing group identification’ (Morgan 1995: 26). Despite an enduring racist subtext that questioned Indian identity and restricted their civil rights, with a federal policy whose active challenge of the legality of long-standing treaties served also as an attack on identity, historian Kenneth William Townsend found that ‘When confronted with threats to tribal sovereignty and established treaties, with issues that questioned their very identity, and with postwar directions that potentially submerged them as second-class citizens, American Indians chose to resist the system. The clearest evidence of the Indians’ exercise in self-determination that emerged from their World War II experiences was a conscious and spirited reassertion of their ethnic identity in white America. The path so many Indians chose to follow after 1945 was that leading directly toward a renewed pride in Indian culture and history – the forerunner of the Red Power movement that arose in the 1960s’ (Townsend 2000: 227–8). During the Korean conflict, Native Americans participated with distinction in the Cold War ‘police action’, with World War II veterans and new recruits taking part in numbers far beyond their numerical percentage in the US population. As in wars past, they won a similar percentage of medals, including

67

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 67

29/5/13 13:48:35

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

three Medals of Honor. A Public Broadcasting System (PBS) special, Way of the Warrior, noted, however, that despite their sacrifices, ‘at home Indian vets suffered the indignity of job discrimination and vilification in popular Hollywood “Cowboy and Indian” movies’ (Anon. 2009). Ira Hayes died as that peninsular ‘police action’ came to a close.

The African American Experience Since the founding of the United States, African Americans have fought for democracy on two fronts – at home and abroad – with their service in times of national crisis viewed by many blacks ‘as proof of their loyalty and as a brief for their claim to more equitable, humane treatment’ (Gatewood 1975: 31–4, 31). The military records of ‘colored patriots’ such as Crispus Attucks, Peter Salem and Lemuel Haynes during the American Revolution and the War of 1812 were, according to William Cooper Nell, the first African American historian, indelible ‘passports to the honorable and lasting notice of Americans’ (Gatewood 1975: 31). During the course of the Civil War some 185,000 blacks joined the combat ranks of the Union Army, despite the racist practices of white officers and the segregation imposed on them, while another 30,000 African Americans served in the more benign shoals of the Union Navy. Black troops serving in the American West – ‘where the presence of other ethnic groups (especially Indians) even lower on the frontier social ladder tended to temper prejudice against Negro troops’ – formed four regiments with ‘an enviable record during the Indian wars’. These became ‘elite units in which alcoholism and desertion, the major problems of the army in the late nineteenth century, were virtually unknown’ (Gatewood 1975: 33–4). And even as the shadow of the wings of Jim Crow – laws regarding racial segregation that were enforced in the US from the 1870s to 1964 – darkened the landscape of much of the country, during the Spanish-American War, ‘Negro regulars served in Cuba, where their exploits transformed them, momentarily at least, into national heroes’ (Gatewood 1975: 31–4). Their exploits are all the more remarkable given the lack of strategic military policy planning – resulting in a dependence on ‘intuition, individual experience, and random chance’ – inside an army run by whites (Wooster 1988: 203). The US entered World War I with white southerner Woodrow Wilson, the Democrat whose administration imposed racial segregation in Washington, DC, in the White House, and policies affecting black soldiers reflecting the full force of Jim Crow racism. W. E. B. Du Bois, writing in the NAACP magazine

68

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 68

29/5/13 13:48:35

Flags of Their Stepfathers?

Crisis, called for black volunteers: ‘The leaders of the race would fight for democratic principles abroad, Du Bois argued. And by their blood sacrifice, they would force white America to recognize the rights of black people at home’ (Boyle 2004: 86–7). Such calls to action were, however, frustrated by the peculiar application of Wilson’s demand for ‘the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments’: in a word, democracy (Boyle 2004: 86). ‘There was never any question that the army would be segregated’, noted historian Kevin Boyle, ‘but no one was ready for the flagrant insults the military leveled’ (Boyle 2004: 88). Young black recruits at a special training camp in Des Moines ‘were told that when they went to war they would all serve in a single division commanded by whites; not one of them would be commissioned at field rank. The very best black officers were simply shunted aside’ (ibid). Increasing racial tensions and episodes of violence between black troops and whites caused opinion ‘to turn against the use of Negro soldiers’, noted military sociologist Charles C. Moskos, Jr. Racial prejudice coloured the view of white military analysts, he adds, while ‘Evaluation of Negro soldiers was further lowered by events in World War I. The combat performance of the all-Negro 92 Infantry, one of its regiments having fled in the German offensive at Meuse-Argonne, came under heavy criticism. Yet it was also observed that Negro units operating under French command, in a more racially tolerant situation, performed well’ (Moskos 1966: 133–4; see also Colley 2004: 18). Opportunities for blacks to show their battlefield valour were few and far between. ‘Despite assurances to black leaders that a considerable number of Negro draftees would be permitted to serve in combat units, the War Department assigned a vast majority to labor and stevedore battalions, “the military equivalent of the chain gang”’, noted historian Willard B. Gatewood, Jr. ‘Worried that the French would “spoil” the Negro soldier, American military authorities provided them with explicit instructions on how he should be treated and why … (t)he experience of Negro servicemen in World War I gave birth to a “new spirit” among blacks – a determination never again to accept passively the assaults and indignities that had been heaped upon them in the past’ (Gatewood 1975: 34). ‘We return from the slavery of the uniform which the world’s madness demanded us to don to the freedom of civilian garb’, wrote Du Bois in the May 1919 edition of Crisis. ‘This country of ours, despite all its better souls have done and dreamed, is yet a shameful land. It lynches … It disfranchises [sic] its own citizens … It encourages ignorance … It steals from us … It insults us … We return. We return from fighting. We return fighting’ (Du Bois 1919: 13–14).

69

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 69

29/5/13 13:48:35

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

By the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, the US armed forces represented ‘the worst racist excesses of American society’, historian Jack D. Foner has noted (Foner 1974: 132). In 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, running a second time for re-election and facing the liberal candidacy of Republican Wendell L. Willkie, tried to co-opt blacks ‘determined to prevent what they regarded as the wholesale segregation and discrimination to which their soldiers had been subjected in World War I’ (Dalfiume 1969: 42–55, 48–9). Brandishing the slogan ‘the right to fight’, the important symbol of their position in the military was seen as de facto denial of their rights to full citizenship. In the interwar period, blacks were relegated to messmen positions in the Navy, shut out of the Army Air Corps and the Marines entirely, and prevented from service in the Army except in the four shrunken Regular Army Negro units created at the end of the Civil War. As the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour approached, only five Army officers were black (including three chaplains), and blacks made up just 5.9 percent of the troops (Dalfiume 1969: 42–55; Moskos 1966: 134). Echoing an argument later used against service by homosexuals emphasising considerations of ‘unit cohesion’, Secretary of War Harry H. Woodring told Congress that the robust enlistment of blacks would ‘demoralize and weaken the effect of military units by mixing colored and white soldiers in closely related units, or even in the same units’ (Dalfiume 1969: 46). The argument was shown to be completely false by the example of black soldiers both in World War II and in the Korean conflict (Moskos 1966: 134). Similarly Navy Secretary Frank Knox claimed that he faced a nearly impossible situation given the close living quarters on board ships (Dalfiume 1969: 51) (this physical proximity issue was not, in the main, raised in relation to Native Americans). Although Roosevelt did have Army Colonel Benjamin O. Davis promoted to the rank of general, making him the first African American on the general staff, appoint a black assistant to the Secretary of War, and reiterate a series of promises adopted without fanfare by the War Department in 1937 to increase the number and opportunity of segregated black units in the armed forces, the failure to end segregation in the military created an issue, the emotional impact of which continued to reverberate throughout the war. Historian Richard M. Dalfiume noted that ‘The hypocrisy involved in fighting with a segregated military force against aggression by an enemy preaching a master race ideology was too obvious for Negroes’ (Dalfiume 1969: 53–5). Black soldiers who saw combat had a ‘mixed’ record, with the purported undependable performance of the 92nd Infantry Division during the Italian campaign juxtaposed against the wintertime feats in the bitter

70

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 70

29/5/13 13:48:35

Flags of Their Stepfathers?

German Ardennes counteroffensive (the ‘Battle of the Bulge’) by mixed-race companies that were previously all white. ‘Both in terms of Negro combat performance and white soldiers’ reactions, the Ardennes experiment was an unqualified success’, Moskos wrote (Moskos 1966: 134). The role of black Army Air Force pilots – the legendary Tuskegee Airmen who earned a measure of glory in the European theatre – also helped prove to sceptics the usefulness of African American participation in war fighting. Still, by the end of the war, the armed forces’ policy towards blacks ‘had changed only marginally’ (Foner 1974: 135). In congressional testimony in 1948 General Dwight Eisenhower admitted that ‘In the war, when we became so desperate for Infantry replacements in the Fall of 1944, we did not make the best use of our Negro manpower’ (quoted in Mitchell 1954: 204). And, not unlike southern black schoolteachers who opposed educational integration because of worries about what such a move would do to their jobs and status in the community, some black service careerists worried that they would suffer diminished prestige if forced to compete against whites in a desegregated military (Dalfiume 1969b: 47). The returning black veterans proved to be catalysts for social change in a country where racist attitudes and Jim Crow social conventions still held large sway. ‘American war propaganda stressed above all else the abhorrence of the West for Hitler’s brand of racism and its utter incompatibility with the democratic faith for which we fought’, C. Vann Woodward noted. ‘The relevance of this deep striving of the American conscience for the position of the Negro was not lost upon him and his champions. Awareness of the inconsistency between practice at home and propaganda abroad placed a powerful lever in their hands’ (Woodward 2002: 131). In 1949, more than a decade before the now-fabled sit-ins by black and white activists at the beginning of the 1960s in places like the F. W. Woolworth Company store in Greensboro, North Carolina – a movement that in less than two years generated tens of thousands of protest participants and thousands of arrests – white and black airmen had paved the way at ice cream counters and pharmacies in San Antonio, Texas (Gropman 1998: 63–95, 98–9). Civil rights leader Medgar Evers, a combat veteran in France and Germany, cut his teeth on rights activism by heading a group of World War II veterans to register and vote in segregated Decatur, Mississippi (Dettmer 1995: 1). Other African American veterans became leaders in the civil rights movement, such as Amzie Moore and Aaron Henry. Harry Briggs, one of the fathers in the watershed school desegregation cases collectively known as Brown v. Board of Education, was also a Navy veteran (Patterson 2001: 4, 24–6).

71

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 71

29/5/13 13:48:35

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

At war’s end, the armed services were slowly moving towards integration, with the Air Force stealing a march on their uniformed colleagues, led by a group of forward-thinking officers in key positions – including Colonel Noel Parrish, who during the war commanded the Tuskegee air base – who saw segregation as wasteful, inefficient and of doubtful constitutionality. Although still opposed by many in the military as social engineering, the Truman Administration put the racial initiative into high gear. In 1946, it was the segregated Navy, followed by the newly reorganised Air Force. Pressure from civil rights groups and military reformers, together with white liberals in the Democratic Party and bald considerations of electoral advantage, convinced President Harry Truman the time had come to order the end of racial discrimination in the military (Gropman 1998: 73–85). On 26 July 1948, Truman issued an executive order ‘that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin’. Just as C. Vann Woodward was able to show how Jim Crow was a social convention susceptible to changes in the country’s legal structure (Woodward 2002),7 so the change in policy, which resulted in changes in military units’ racial makeup, served to help change the racial attitudes of men in uniform. ‘Such change was partly due to the hierarchic system where a combination of loyalty and threat forced compliance with directives’, noted Robert Carroll of the US Military Academy. ‘It was partly due to the already deeply entrenched leveling mechanism of the Army, where economic, social, and educational background mean less than in civilian life. It was partly due to the exigency of combat, where success, spelled in terms of life and death, required compliance, acceptance, and cohesion’ (Carroll 1970: 567). As integration of the military services continued into the Eisenhower administration, black soldiers’ contributions in the Korean conflict served to end any discussion of the efficacy of their integration into military units with whites. Segregated units, noted one observer, ‘had been the weak spots in the line which the enemy attacked first. Thus segregated units came to be regarded by professional soldiers during the Korean War as a highly pernicious form of organisation. Integration gave the military uniform line strength – something very necessary in the rules of warfare, which tend to emphasize the importance of exploiting the weakest points in an opponent’s defenses as a means to victory’ (Stillman 1969: 139–59, 141–2). By 1954, ‘integration in the military became a fact and all groups concerned favored it, although for different reasons. Professional officers supported it because it produced homogeneous line strength, the end of racial tensions, and an easier means

72

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 72

29/5/13 13:48:35

Flags of Their Stepfathers?

of human resource allocation … But to Negro citizens, military integration meant advancement toward an ideal of human equality with white men, an achievement that became a reality even before the Brown decision of the Supreme Court’ (Stillman 1969: 141–2).8 By 1966, Moskos observed that one of the most segregated institutions just two decades before – the US military – had done such an about-face that ‘military life is characterized by an interracial equalitarianism of a quantity and of a kind that is seldom found in the other major institutions of American society’ (Moskos 1966: 141).9

Conclusion Writing in 1968 about the integration by African Americans in the armed forces, Richard Stillman II pondered the seeming miracle of racial reconciliation within the military due to the desegregation policy: ‘How is it that the traditionally most conservative body in America, the army, became the most liberal and advanced group in race relations? Why should the most authoritarian element of the American way of life be the pace setter in fostering human equality? How did this interesting paradox happen?’ (Moskos 1966: 142). This essay has sought to put these questions into the context of the experiences of both Native Americans and blacks. Both faced high bars to effective integration on their own terms at the beginning of the twentieth century. Many Indians lacked US citizenship, lived in rural areas where English was not commonly spoken, were the objects of stereotype and racism, and faced a price of military service that appeared both to dominant whites and to tribal traditionalists as being the cost paid through assimilation. Depending on tribal heritage, individual merit and experience under arms, Native Americans acquired both the tools for integration with dominant white society and a broader view of Indian Country that promoted a pan-Indian view and a nascent desire to preserve tribal culture. Military service was then both a trial by fire to fight stereotypes and unrealised opportunities, and a chance to redefine relations among Indians and with the larger American society. In contrast, African Americans – numerically a much greater percentage of the US population than Indians and therefore perceived as a greater potential threat to white society – faced a deeper, more enduring racism. Citizenship, although much devalued during the time of Jim Crow, was guaranteed with the abolition of slavery. Unlike Indians, who were accepted into combat units during Jim Crow’s reign, blacks had to battle for ‘the right to fight’ – seeing

73

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 73

29/5/13 13:48:35

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

in armed validation the possibility of redefining their relations in a whitedominated social order. Military leaders justified US armed forces’ racial integration, not ‘to improve the social situation’, but rather as ‘a matter of getting the best out of the military personnel that was available’.10 Still, unrestricted military service helped begin to thaw Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s maxim that, in the case of blacks, America was a melting pot that did not melt. Blacks in uniform, like Native Americans, found the privileges, opportunities and benefits of being soldiers to their liking, Stillman noted: ‘In the military, they get good pay, regular meals, adequate housing, and patriotic pride from wearing a rank on their shoulders. What opportunities can compare in civilian life for poor Negroes with little education … The military turns the role of Negroes upside down, from being scapegoats out of service into privileged members of their country while in uniform’ (Stillman 1969: 158). Rather than immediately creating a phenomenon akin to ‘pan-Indianism’, the perspective gained by blacks even in peacetime military service overseas allowed African Americans the chance ‘to witness societies where racial discrimination is less practiced than it is in [their] home country. Although the level of Negro acceptance in societies other than America is usually exaggerated, the Negro soldier is hard put not to make invidious comparisons with the American scene’ (Moskos 1966: 145). Out of such overseas comparisons came new ways to visualise possible relationships at home. One reason the military may have been able to carry out their desegregation agenda even before Brown v. Board of Education sent white racists racing to grab their fire-hoses and guns was that very few white women belonged to the military. Certainly, the ‘protect our women’ rhetoric characteristic of white protests against school and residential desegregation was absent during what was arguably a social revolution in the barracks. Moskos’s explanation, however, appears to be closest to the mark in explaining why the military establishment was uniquely suited to implement what was arguably the most ambitious and most successful social experiment of its time: ‘The military establishment has means of coercion not readily available in most civilian pursuits. Violations of norms are both more visible and subject to quicker sanctions. The military is premised, moreover, on the accountability of its members for effective performance. Owing to the aptly termed “chain of command,” failures in policy implementation can be pinpointed. This in turn means that satisfactory carrying out stated policy advances one’s own position’ (Moskos 1966: 148). Ira Hayes’s short and tragic life did not extend long enough for him to see how those changes played out for the good of his country in an institution in

74

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 74

29/5/13 13:48:35

Flags of Their Stepfathers?

which he served with honour. In life, Hayes was hailed for a cinematographic version of bravery and sacrifice, but not for the story of his own life. His memory, however, reminds us of a common valour on the battlefield and beyond.

Notes

1

Tax was coordinator of the American Indian Chicago Conference. ‘Warriors honored on powwow poster’, Targeted News Service, 11 July 2006; ‘Gainey Celebrates American Indian Heritage, Military Diversity’, American Forces Press Service, 1 November 2006. 3 ‘A Chippewa Indian was furious when rejected because he had no teeth. “I don’t want to bite ’em,” he said. “I just want to shoot ’em.” Another Indian, rejected for being too fat to run, said that he had not come to run, but to fight.’ 4 ‘Scrip’ is any substitute for currency which is not legal tender and is often a form of credit. 5 ‘In Their “Twilight Years,” Navajo Code Talkers Called into Service to Help Save Endangered Native Languages’, US Newswire, 13 November 2006. ‘Twilight Years’ was in reference to three of the last living Navajo code talkers, all in their eighties. 6 The film The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1954), based on the James Michener novel, depicted a Korean War mission flown against railway bridges in North Korea as part of a series of ‘Cherokee Strikes’, as their planner – Clark – called them. 7 His central argument exploded the ideological underpinnings of racial segregation at a time institutional change and individual action threatened the existence of ‘Jim Crow’ laws and mores that, unlike feudal laws, ‘did not assign the subordinate group a fixed status in society … [but rather] were constantly pushing the Negro farther down’ (Woodward 2002: 108). 8 Foner agreed that by the end of that year ‘segregation had been officially eliminated from the internal structure of the active military forces’ (Foner 1974: 194). However, Mitchell trenchantly observed that same year, 1954, ‘It is a cruel fact that colored members of the Armed Forces have greater protection against unjust treatment off the posts when they are in Imperial Japan or Ex-Nazi Germany than they do in Alabama or Mississippi’ (Mitchell 1954: 213). 9 For a striking ratification of Moskos’s judgement, see Richard Stillman II. The military, Stillman wrote, ‘is unique in American life, since it is the most physically integrated group of people in the nation’ even though the Army was ‘the traditionally most conservative body in America’ (Stillman 1969: 140). 10 The military man quoted was Brigadier General Anthony C. McAuliffe, who commanded the defending 101st Airborne troops during the Battle of Bastogne, Belgium, and during the Battle of the Bulge in World War II, and was a former head of Army personnel. 2

75

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 75

29/5/13 13:48:35

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adair, John and Evon Vogt (1949) ‘Navaho and Zuni Veterans: A Study of Contrasting Modes of Cultural Change’, American Anthropologist, 51, 4, part 1, 547–61. Anon. (2009) Way of the Warrior. PBS. Available at: http://www.pbs.org/wayofthewarrior/ (accessed 7 June 2009). Barsh, Russel Lawrence (1991) ‘American Indians in the Great War’, Ethnohistory, 8, 3, 276–303. Boyle, Kevin (2004) Arc of Justice. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Britten, Thomas A. (1997) American Indians in World War I: At Home and at War. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Burt, Larry (1992) ‘Review of Alison R. Bernstein, American Indians and World War II: Toward a New Era in Indian Affairs’, American Historical Review, 97, 3, 924. Carroll, Robert (1970) ‘Review’, American Journal of Sociology, 75, 4, 567. Cohen, Felix S. (1971) Handbook of Federal Indian Law. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Colley, David P. (2004) Blood for Dignity. New York: St Martin’s Griffen. Dalfiume, Richard M. (1969a) ‘Military Segregation and the 1940 Presidential Election’, Phylon, 30, 1, 42–55. ____ (1969b) Desegregation of the Armed Forces: Fighting on Two Fronts, 1939–1953. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Dettmer, John (1995) Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Du Bois, William E. B. (1919) The Crisis, 19 (May 1919). Foner, Jack D. (1974) Blacks and the Military in American History: A New Perspective. New York: Praeger. Gatewood, Willard B., Jr (1975) ‘Review: Black Americans and the Military’, Reviews in American History, 3, 1, 31–4. Gropman, Alan L. (1998) The Air Force Integrates, 1945–1964, 2nd edition. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Holm, Tom (1996) Strong Hearts, Wounded Souls: Native American Veterans of the Vietnam War. Austin: University of Texas Press. Hoxie, Frederick E. (1997) ‘Ethnohistory for a Tribal World’, Ethnohistory, 44, 4, 595–615. Jevec, Adam (2001) ‘Semper Fidelis, Code Talkers’, Prologue Magazine, US National Archives & Records Administration, 33, 4, available at: http://www.archives.gov/ publications/prologue/winter_2001_navajo_code_talkers.html (accessed 7 June 2009). Lilenthal, Edward T. (1993) ‘Shaping a Heroic Presence: Iwo Jima in American Memory’, review of Karal Ann Marling and John Wetenhall, Reviews in American History, 21, 1, 8–12. Lurie, Nancy Oestreich (1961) ‘The Voice of the American Indian: Report of the American Indian Chicago Conference’, Current Anthropology, 2, 5, 479. Menchaca, Martha (1993) ‘Chicano Indianism: A Historical Account of Racial

76

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 76

29/5/13 13:48:35

Flags of Their Stepfathers?

Repression in the United States’, American Ethnologist, 20, 3, 583–603. Mitchell, Clarence (1954) ‘The Status of Racial Integration in the Armed Forces’, Journal of Negro Education, 23, 3, 204. Morgan, Thomas D. (1995) ‘Native Americans in World War II’, Army History: The Professional Bulletin of Army History, 35, 22–7. Moskos, Charles (1966) ‘Racial Integration in the Armed Forces’, American Journal of Sociology, 72, 2, 133–4. Nash, Gerald D. (1992) ‘Review of Alison R. Bernstein, American Indians and World War II: Toward a New Era in Indian Affairs’, Ethnohistory, 39, 4, 924. Patterson, James P. (2001) Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rath, Jay (2007) ‘Proud Warriors: PBS Special Focuses on Native Americans Who Served in America’s Wars’, Wisconsin State Journal, 5 November 2007. Sasaki, Tom T. and David L. Olmstead (1953) ‘Navaho Acculturation and EnglishLanguage Skills’, American Anthropologist, 55, 1, 89–99. Stillman II, Richard (1969) ‘Negroes in the Armed Forces’, Phylon, 30, 2, 139–59. Strachan, Alex (2007) ‘TV Stardom, Working for Clint Eastwood All in a Day’s Work for Aboriginal Awards Host Adam Beach’, CanWest, 28 March 2007. Tax, Sol (1961) ‘What the Indians Want’, Chicago Sun-Times, 11 June 1961. Townsend, Kenneth William (2000) World War II and the American Indian. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Voices, Spirit (2009) ‘Ira Hayes: Pima Indian, US Marine’, available at: http://thegoldweb.com/voices/irahayes.htm (accessed 7 June 2009). Whittaker, Mark (1955) ‘Time Capsule: Ira Hayes, Reluctant Hero of Iwo Jima, Dies at 32’, The Australian, 24 January, available at: http://www.theaustralian.news.com. au/story/0,25197,23071111-5012694,00.html (accessed 7 June 2009). Woodward, C. Vann (2002) The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wooster, Robert (1988) The Military and Indian Policy 1865–1903. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

77

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 77

29/5/13 13:48:35

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 78

29/5/13 13:48:35

PA RT T W O

___

FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 79

29/5/13 13:48:35

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 80

29/5/13 13:48:35

Following the Flag in American Film ___ robert eberwein

On the Library of Congress website is a 40-second film, Raising Old Glory Over Morro Castle,* which celebrates the peace treaty formally ending the Spanish-American War (J. Stuart Blackton, 1899). We see a pole with a Spanish flag in front of a crudely painted backdrop of a castle. This flag is lowered and replaced with an American flag that flaps in the breeze for 20 seconds.1 Midway through Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers (2006), we see two flag raisings at the top of Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima. The second results in the iconic photograph that becomes the centrepiece of the Seventh War Bond Drive and serves as the narrative focus of the film. This essay follows the trajectory in American war cinema from the first filmed flag raising in 1899, celebrating American success at the beginning of its nationalist expansion, to Eastwood’s stunning cinematic achievement, examining the problematic aspects of another flag raising that functioned as a symbolic indication of American victory over Japan. Specifically, I want to look selectively at some key moments in film history, with the hope of demonstrating the increasing complexity evident in the presentation and use of the flag in American cinema. I begin by considering early cinema, when the flag first became a subject for filmmakers, particularly in films about the SpanishAmerican War, which began in 1898. These works established important

81

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 81

29/5/13 13:48:35

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

political, historical, and aesthetic emphases that continued to be significant in the sound era, especially in musicals and documentaries made at the time of World War II such as Yankee Doodle Dandy (Michael Curtiz, 1942). Post-war depictions of the flag became increasingly complex, as is evident in Sands of Iwo Jima (Allan Dwan, 1949). Representations of the flag in films during and after the Vietnam era revealed even more probing treatments of its political, historical and aesthetic aspects. This is especially the case with the film Patton (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1970), which is about World War II but which has been read in light of the Vietnam War. Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July (1989), his second film to explore the impact and significance of Vietnam for America, devotes much attention to the flag. Eastwood’s film offers the most noteworthy foregrounding of the flag thus far and serves as a matrix of the complex issues that attend its use.

I. The Silent Era The flag became an object of attention for early filmmakers even before the Spanish-American War began in April 1898. Starting in 1896, a close harmony between political, historical and aesthetic elements appeared in numerous works, with titles signalling their focus on ‘the American Flag’ or ‘Old Glory’. The American Flag (American Mutoscope, December 1896) appears to be the first film about the flag, using hand tinting and stencilling to display the colours.2 The colouring that worked to make the flag an object of visual pleasure was perceived as supporting its political purpose, as indicated in an Edison catalogue description for another version of The American Flag (Thomas A. Edison, 1898): ‘This picture shows our national flag waving in the breeze. Coloring adds greatly to the effectiveness of this film’ (Musser 1997: 409). By linking the American and Cuban flags, at least one film anticipated the conflict that would occur, in part a result of increased agitation to support Cuba’s desire for independence from Spain. American and Cuban Flag/Old Glory and the Cuban Flag, No. 1 (Thomas A. Edison, produced March 1897) is touted in the distributor’s catalogue in March of 1898 as ‘showing the Stars and Stripes and the Flag of Cuba Libra fluttering in the breeze. The flags appear in the foreground, one after another, and the effect is very dramatic. Appeals to the prevailing popular sentiment. Excellent when colored’ (Musser 1997: 275). As I have discussed elsewhere, the Spanish-American War of 1898 was the first war to be filmed (Eberwein 2004: 1–4). The American flag figured

82

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 82

29/5/13 13:48:35

Following the Flag in American Film

significantly in the three kinds of works that were made about it. Actualities documented events pertaining to the war, such as Burial of the ‘Maine’ Victims* (Edison Manufacturing Co., 1898). The film provides a record of the ceremony at Key West, showing servicemen followed by flag-covered hearses and mourners. Other films showed the flag as it appears on war ships, such as Reviewing the ‘Texas’ at Grant’s Tomb* (J. Stuart Blackton, 1898). The trade magazine The Phonoscope’s description demonstrates the aesthetic appeal of the short film’s presentation of the flag: ‘Grant’s tomb rears its snow white dome against the sky. The bow of the “Texas” swings into view; and Old Glory seems to wave right through the screen, so close were our artists’ (Musser 1997: 461).3 The second kind of early war film was the re-enactment. No actual combat scenes were ever filmed of the war, but various staged reproductions of battles could be filmed and offered to audiences eager to see them. For example, U.S. Infantry Supported by Rough Riders at El Caney* (Thomas A. Edison, 1899) shows actors portraying a group of infantrymen approaching from a wooded area to a clearing, one soldier carrying a large flag. They kneel, fire, and advance, with the effect of intensifying the centrality of the flag as it moves closer to the foreground. The scene is repeated, and the film concludes with the arrival of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. Narrative films about the war constituted the third kind of work. Love and War* (James H. White, 1899), the first American narrative war film, unfolds in six scenes. It begins as a youth leaves his anxious family to go to war. Next his mother reads papers for accounts of battles. His father comes in with a dismal report that their boy has been killed or wounded, leaving the family in tears. We then see the battle, which is the centrepiece of the film and shows the hero fighting courageously before being wounded. After going to a field hospital he returns home to his grateful family. The battle is of particular significance because of the special attention given to the flag for over 30 seconds, almost one-fifth of the length of the three-minute film. We see it approaching from the distance with the American soldiers, who are driving off the Spaniards. As they come closer, the flag moves into the centre of the frame, increasingly prominent in the foreground until it moves off to the right, accompanying the soldiers in their pursuit of the enemy, leaving us with a sight of the downed hero. This suggests the continuing power of the nation, as embodied in the flag that accompanies the soldiers in their advance. While all three kinds of works point to the prominence of the flag as a key element in war films, the re-enactment Raising Old Glory Over Morro Castle is certainly the most important in thinking about Flags of Our Fathers.

83

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 83

29/5/13 13:48:35

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

Viewed on the website, it seems a patently obvious and unpersuasive simulation. Even so, the language used in The Phonoscope commentary suggests the importance of the political and historical aspects to the contemporary audience: ‘Down goes the Spanish flag, and up floats the Stars and Stripes. Down falls the symbol of tyranny and oppression that has ruled in the new world for four hundred years, and up goes the Banner of Freedom. In the distance are the turrets and battlements of Morro, the last foothold of Spain in America’ (Musser 1997: 482). The most striking film in the silent era in terms of political, historical and aesthetic aspects appeared in 1927, Arthur Maude’s The Flag: A Story Inspired by the Tradition of Betsy Ross.4 Lasting a little over 20 minutes, it used the two-strip Technicolor process (still a relatively new technique, introduced first in 1922) to tell the story of the creation of the flag. George Washington asks Betsy Ross to design a flag that will embrace all the colonies.5 The two characters stand outside on a porch and observe a sunset dominated by red and white streaks. This inspires Ross, who describes the flag she’ll make: ‘Stars on a field of blue, one for each colony, the bars of red for the blood of sacrifice, and a field of white for love and peace.’ In a second narrative thread at work in the film, a British spy is now behind enemy lines; he is the husband of a friend who is visiting Ross as she works on the flag. He finds his way to Ross’s home and hides there. Washington pays a visit and detects the spy hiding behind what is the very first American flag. But the future president gallantly refuses to expose him. Instead, he paroles him into the safekeeping of Betsy Ross. The spy says: ‘We are on opposite sides now, but, as God is over all, someday we will be united in a common cause.’ Then a title states: ‘And in 1917 – ‘united in a common cause’. And we see explosions on a battlefield followed by three soldiers carrying the British, American, and French flags. By expanding its historical frame of reference to include what was then called the Great War, the film encompasses two major conflicts, one still fresh in viewers’ memories.6

II. The Sound Era World War II

As the United States moved closer to involvement in World War II, Warner Bros. played an active role in developing and promoting films with a strong patriotic thrust, most notably in Sergeant York (Howard Hawks, 1941)

84

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 84

29/5/13 13:48:35

Following the Flag in American Film

(Birdwell 1999; Welky 2008).7 The immensely popular film, for which Gary Cooper won an Oscar, concerns the life of Alvin York, the most famous America soldier in World War I, noted for single-handedly capturing a large number of Germans. The political and historical emphasis on the flag begins in the opening credits. Both Cooper’s name and the film’s title are presented in letters made out of stars and stripes. The remaining credits use flag striping within the letters. Warner Bros. continued this practice in its next major patriotic film, Yankee Doodle Dandy, a celebration of the life of George M. Cohan, played by James Cagney, who won the Oscar. Cohan was an enormously successful entertainer, composer, and Broadway producer in the first part of the twentieth century. His patriotic songs include ‘I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy’, ‘Over There’, and, significantly, ‘You’re a Grand Old Flag’. The film’s credits begin by presenting the names of Cagney, Cohan, and the major stars and filmmakers with letters composed of stars and stripes. The film uses a flashback structure, beginning with the old Cohan being summoned to the White House by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who will present him with the Congressional Medal of Honor. Cohan tells Roosevelt the story of his life, beginning with his birth on 4 July 1878, when his father struggles to get home to be with Cohan’s mother as she is giving birth. His father successfully makes his way through countless marchers and celebrants, all waving American flags. The visual attention to flags sets up the constant focus on them and on patriotism that will dominate the film, obviously in the ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’ number, which correctly identifies the singer as one ‘born on the fourth of July’. At one point, someone asks Cohan: ‘Can you write a play without a flag?’ The most ‘flag-heavy’ number in the film is ‘You’re a Grand Old Flag’, in which soldiers and wars from American history are invoked: the Revolutionary War by a group representing ‘The Spirit of ’76’, the Civil War by African Americans gathered at the Lincoln Memorial as words from the Gettysburg Address are heard, and World War I by soldiers and nurses. During this, Cohan/Cagney stops to explain the symbolism of the flag, using somewhat different language than that of Betsy Ross in the 1927 film mentioned earlier: ‘The red is for the firey dawn of the country, the white for the snow at Valley Forge, the blue for the free open sky, and the stars for the thirteen sister colonies by the sea.’ At one point in the number, Cohan’s musical family, part of his show, appear dressed in costumes with flag designs and are joined by dancers similarly garbed. The film ends with a reprise of ‘Over There’, Cohan’s famous song about World War I, as he leaves Roosevelt and joins a group of soldiers marching

85

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 85

29/5/13 13:48:35

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

in front of the White House. Interestingly, the film opened in New York on 6 June 1942, during the Battle of Midway then raging in the Pacific. It would have been impossible for the film’s narrative to suggest that World War II had started since Cohan received his award during the run of his play I’d Rather Be Right in 1937. But the symbolic resonance involved in Cohan’s joining marching soldiers is inescapable. Another film that ends with soldiers marching is This Is the Army (Michael Curtiz, 1943), the next major example showing the omnipresence of the flag in a Warner Bros. musical. Based on a popular stage show by Irving Berlin, this film was financially the most successful film released during World War II and received glowing reviews. Profits from the show, whose cast consisted primarily of soldiers currently in the armed services, most notably Ronald Reagan, went to the Army Relief Fund. Its credits also use the by-now standard flag lettering design seen in the earlier Warner Bros. films. The film begins by showing what happens to four soldiers from New York during World War I. Before going overseas, they put on a musical revue for men at their training camp. When World War II begins, Jerry Jones (George Murphy), now a theatrical producer, is inspired to revive the earlier revue and use soldiers to entertain the troops. He’s assisted by his stage manager son Johnny (Reagan). The film’s main focus is on the musical numbers, interspersed with a romantic subplot involving Johnny. One of the most powerful moments in the film is the only one that does not occur as a production number: Kate Smith singing ‘God Bless America’, which for many replaced ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ as the US national anthem. Performing on radio in a studio, backed by a chorus, Smith sings the song three times. During two of these, Curtiz cuts to the men who fought together in World War I. One is a grocer whose son is putting a tiny flag in a floral centrepiece. This unobtrusive presentation of the flag is countered later in the ‘Stage Door Canteen’ number, in which dozens of servicemen in drag appear costumed in flag colours, the first such example I am aware of in American film in which the flag supplies the clothing for a drag routine. What’s striking, of course, is how this routine (one of several examples of drag in the film) is in no way perceived as unpatriotic or, given the times, even sacrilegious. Later examples in which the flag is worn as clothing during the Vietnam War will produce a different response.8 These films in which the musical numbers demonstrate a harmonious emphasis on the patriotic and aesthetic appeal of the flag were joined by two important documentaries. The first was John Ford’s Oscar-winning The Battle of Midway (1942).9 The director, now a Naval Commander, sustained some wounds while filming events in this battle. After some explanatory titles, the

86

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 86

29/5/13 13:48:35

Following the Flag in American Film

Technicolor film begins with a drawing that locates Midway Island, identifying it by means of a small flag, in the Pacific. After displaying aircraft accompanied by ‘Anchors Aweigh’, and inserting a few bars of ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’, Ford shifts to the ‘Marine Anthem’ as he shows them marching, one carrying the American flag. He intersperses shots of servicemen with voice-over commentary by two well-known actors from Ford films: Jane Darwell, who speaks as if she knows one of the boys and his family, and Henry Fonda, who responds to her statements and questions. After the take-offs of a number of B-17 bombers, actual aerial attacks occur. Then, seen against a backdrop of smoke and flames, with a voice-over saying, ‘Yes, this really happened’, men raise the flag, which has clearly been subject to the effects of the attack: its right edge is slightly tattered. Ford films artistically, from a low angle, in a way that shows the flag from below, framed against the blue sky, thus emphasising its heroic elevation as the words sung from ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ indicate ‘the flag was still there’. Then Ford uses a long shot of the tall flagpole, with the flag framed in front of dense black billowing smoke. After showing those men who returned successfully, and those who were rescued and need medical attention, he presents two burial services, one in the bombed-out crater that used to be a chapel, and another on board ship. In both cases, flags cover the coffins of the dead. In the last shot of the island, before the reckoning of Japanese casualties, Ford returns again to the long shot of the flag framed by black smoke, this time with the musical background of ‘My Country ’Tis of Thee’. Another significant documentary appeared in 1945, a joint production of the Navy, Marines, and Coast Guard, To The Shores of Iwo Jima (Milton Sperling, 1945). While the title might suggest its focus is entirely on the flag raising, this is not the case. Practically all of the 19-minute film is devoted to showing combat-related information, including events before the landing (Navy ships bombarding it, aerial attacks), coming to the island, rooting out the Japanese, devastation, the aftermath with helmets of dead Marines, and graves. The flag raising itself by six men receives no voice-over preparation; it just happens, almost ten minutes into the film, and presents the motion picture clip shot by Bill Genaust of the momentous action by James Bradley, Harlon Bloch, Rene Gagnon, Ira Hayes, Franklin Sousley, and Mike Strank. The film, which was nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary, opened in June, 1945, during the middle of the Seventh War Bond Drive, in which Bradley, Gagnon, and Hayes were participating. The other men had died on Iwo Jima.

87

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 87

29/5/13 13:48:35

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

III. The Flag in Post-War America Iwo Jima and John Wayne

Bradley, Gagnon, and Hayes would appear again on film as soldiers in a reenactment of the flag raising in The Sands of Iwo Jima (Allan Dwan, 1949). In a brief shot Sgt Stryker (John Wayne) gives them the flag he’s received from his commanding officer to carry up the top. From the perspective of film history, this event offers a fascinating example of a cinematic re-enactment in which some of the characters seen are in fact engaged in representing an event in which they really participated.10 But one needs to understand the difference between Genaust’s simple, even stark documentary record presented in the 1945 documentary and the event as rendered in Dwan’s film. The political, historical, and aesthetic aspects we’ve been following continue to be of interest. But something has happened. The flag now has an extra layer of signification that extends beyond those I have been following thus far. A scene on the troop ship headed toward the island prepares for the flag raising. Benny Ragazzi (Wally Cassel), one of the comic figures in the film, shows his bunk mates how to fold the flag. He boasts he’s going to ‘occupy this island in the name of the United States’. One soldier says ‘maybe you’ll need more than one of you’. Benny concludes his lesson by responding ‘one was enough on Tarawa’, the site of an important battle in the Pacific in November 1943. This is the flag he brings to Stryker after the men are ordered to go to the top of Mount Suribachi. But Stryker gives the much larger one that he’s received from his CO to Bradley, Gagnon, and Hayes. By this point in the film, we know that Stryker is divorced and apparently somewhat estranged from his son, has a drinking problem, and has slowly begun to resolve the tensions in his relationship with Pfc Conway (John Agar), who resents his authority. This is no simple, gung-ho Marine leader. Rather the film reveals his psychological problems even as it foregrounds his bravery and effective leadership. He and the men settle down and relax, and Stryker starts to light a cigarette when he’s shot by a sniper, who is quickly dispatched by Pfc Brown (Charlie Bass). The five men who had been relaxing with Stryker are all positioned in a way that shows them huddled on the ground leaning to their left around his body. Then Pvc Thomas (Forrest Tucker) reads an unfinished letter to Stryker’s son. As he does, Dwan systematically cuts from a medium close-up of Thomas, to one of Cpl Dunne (Arthur Franz), to Benny, back to Thomas, to Brown, again to Thomas, to Pfc Conway, and then back to Thomas, who

88

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 88

29/5/13 13:48:36

Following the Flag in American Film

announces the letter is unfinished. Conway says he’ll complete it. Then the men become aware of the flag raising, shown in the familiar image. In a series of reaction shots, Dwan partially replicates the pattern of cutting among medium close-ups he has just used while the men listened to Thomas reading the letter: Thomas, Conway, Brown, Dunne, Benny. Another shot of the flag is followed by one of the men rising and then another series of medium close-ups: Thomas, Dunne and Benny in a two-shot, Brown, and Conway. The latter looks down and we see a medium close-up of Stryker’s back, with a bullet hole and his name printed on his jacket. Conway gives the order to ‘saddle up’. The design and pattern of the cutting suggest to me that one reading of this remarkable sequence involves seeing Stryker as linked symbolically to the flag. The one given him by his CO is much bigger than Benny’s. Our last image of Stryker is of his back, with a bullet hole in his jacket. Obviously a flag and a jacket aren’t the same, but the visual treatment of those around him with medium close-ups is rendered in a similar manner to the one used for the flag. The effect is to connect the triumphantly standing flag with the troubled hero of the film. That is, Dwan and the script writers, Harry Brown and James Edward Grant, build in a level of complexity. In no way is the flag’s signifying power in terms of politics and history challenged. But it acquires an extra layer of signification by its association with the heroic and troubled hero. That is, the flag acquires added significance because it is linked to Stryker, by virtue of the similar cutting patterns used for both.11 The Flag and Vietnam

Two major films present the flag in ways that demonstrate conflicted attitudes towards the Vietnam War. Franklin J. Schaffner’s Patton (1970) exemplifies the increasingly complex ways the flag functions in American film. Released at the height of the Vietnam War, it won seven Oscars, including those for Best Picture, Director, Actor (George C. Scott, who refused it), and script (Francis Ford Coppola and Edmund North). The film concerns the famous George S. Patton, a World War II general whose campaigns in Africa and Europe played a vitally important role in contributing to the defeat of the German army, led by Field Marshall Erwin Rommel. The film is particularly notorious because of Richard Nixon’s enthusiasm for it, Nixon having watched it several times before deciding to bomb Cambodia in 1970 (Toplin 1996: 171–5). Interestingly, the film opened in New York on 21 January 1970, the same day as Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H, a film about a military army surgical

89

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 89

29/5/13 13:48:36

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

General George S. Patton (George C. Scott) giving his speech in front of the American flag in Franklin J. Schaffner’s film Patton (1970). Copyright: Photofest.

hospital during the Korean War. Both films have been read as anti-war films critiquing the disastrous experience of America in the Vietnam War, which was then at its height. Roger Ebert, for one, dismisses the argument in regard to Patton: ‘It was nothing of the kind. It was a hard-line glorification of the military ethic, personified by a man whose flaws and eccentricities marginalized him in peacetime, but found the ideal theater in battle. In this he was not unlike Churchill; both men used flamboyance, eccentricity and a gift for self-publicity as a way of inspiring their followers and perplexing the enemy. That Patton was in some ways mad is not in doubt – at least to the makers of this film – but his accomplishments overshadowed, even humiliated, his cautious and sane British rival, Montgomery’ (Ebert 2002). That a film can be read as anti-war and anti-Vietnam while simultaneously encouraging the prime booster of the War to continue his hopeless and deadly endeavour suggests something of its complexity. I think the antithetical tensions of these interpretations are crystallised in the opening six minutes of the film.12 It opens with the shot of a stage on which we see the backdrop of an immense American flag framed by top and side curtains. We hear male voices, an order – ‘Ten hup’ – and then silence as Patton appears from below, evidently climbing stairs until he appears standing in the middle of the stage,

90

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 90

29/5/13 13:48:36

Following the Flag in American Film

the background totally filled by the American flag. A trumpet plays ‘To the Color’, the music traditionally played in conjunction with displaying and taking down the flag. During the solo, Schaffner cuts from various shots of Patton, fragmenting him almost like a Cubist painting: medals, face, pistol, and so on. Patton then begins an almost five-minute monologue directed at his unseen audience of soldiers. The mise-en-scène forces the viewing audience in a 1970 theatre to identify with the unseen auditors of Patton’s monologue. One of his first comments seems temporally inappropriate: ‘All this stuff you’ve heard about our wanting to stay out of the war is a bunch of horse dung.’ While I am not certain about the date (or actual delivery) of this speech, by the time Patton was head of the Third Army, there was no question about the US staying out of the war. Thus those who read the film as being about Vietnam have some ammunition for their argument. He goes on to say, ‘Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser … I actually feel sorry for those poor German bastards. We’re going to cut out their living guts and use them to grease the tracks of our tanks … We’re going to murder those lousy Huns by the bushel.’ During the monologue, Schaffner changes the camera-subject relation of the shots as Patton moves in front of the flag, sometimes tightly framing him against the red-and-white striped background, sometimes showing him close to the blue field with stars, sometimes using a long shot in front of the entire flag. The effect is to imbricate Patton in an almost tactile relationship to the flag. It is as if each is a kind of extension of the other. In fact, Patton’s appearance from under the flag and his return to it at the speech’s conclusion indicate that he has literally if not figuratively emerged from it. While the American flag is the nation’s standard, it’s clear by the speech and cinematic rendering that this in fact signifies Patton’s vision of the country. Thus the flag in this film serves a profoundly complex purpose. It symbolises the United States and connects with the country’s legitimate aims of destroying Nazism during World War II. It is also a projection of the uncompromising and uncontrollable violence needed to achieve this, here presented by Patton. The next significant film to consider is Born on the Fourth of July (1989), the second feature in director Oliver Stone’s Vietnam trilogy (Platoon, 1986; Between Heaven and Earth, 1993). He received the Oscar for Best Director. His co-author was Ron Kovic, whose autobiographical book of the same name gives the film its title. The film shows how the patriotic Kovic goes to Vietnam, sustains wounds that make him a paraplegic, endures a horrible rehabilitation, and eventually becomes an activist against the war. The film concludes as he prepares to address the 1976 Democratic Convention. This

91

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 91

29/5/13 13:48:36

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

film makes the most extensive use of the American flag of any Vietnam film. Its political and historical aspects dominate Stone’s film, which simultaneously makes stunning visual use of its complex aesthetic potential as well. The film opens with a brief scene of the young Kovic (Bryan Larkin) playing at war with his friends in Massapequa, New York, in 1956. A child tells Kovic, ‘Ronnie you’re dead’ after getting him on the ground. Ronnie says, ‘No I’m not’ and Stone cuts quickly to a firecracker going off, an event that initiates the first of the several parades and public processions that dominate the film. It’s the Fourth of July, Kovic’s actual birthday, and Stone immerses us in a street filled with hundreds of flags and marchers. Like so much in the film, the opening evokes the Fourth of July parade that occurs early in Yankee Doodle Dandy, appropriately enough since the music being played here is George M. Cohan’s ‘You’re a Grand Old Flag’. Kovic holds a small flag as he sits straddled on the shoulders of his father (Raymond Barry). Included in the parade are veterans of previous wars, some of whom flinch visibly at the sound of guns. His father says proudly of Ron: ‘He’s a little firecracker.’ His mother (Caroline Kava) calls him ‘my little Yankee Doodle Dandy’. Flags appear in ensuing scenes at the gym, where the teenaged Ron (Tom Cruise) loses a wrestling match, and in the school auditorium, in which a Marine officer (Tom Berenger) tries to recruit boys for the service. Stone takes the newly enlisted Ron from his senior prom, which he crashes without a date in order to dance with Donna (Kyra Sedgwick), to Vietnam for a horrific series of events: killing innocent women and children by mistake, his ‘friendly fire’ shooting of a young soldier in his company, and then his own wounding, which leaves him a paraplegic. His rehabilitation experiences in a veterans’ hospital are shocking, characterised by incompetence and callousness. Stone prefaces a scene in which a doctor tells Kovic he will never walk again with a shot of a flag outside the window. The flag next appears on the television set in the hospital on which Kovic and others are watching contentious protestors being arrested by police outside the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, the first of three nominating conventions covered in the film. At this point Kovic still supports the Vietnam War and scoffs at the protesters who are burning a flag: ‘Love it or leave it you hippy bastards. This is burning the American flag!’13 The issue recurs when Kovic returns home and discovers that his younger brother doesn’t believe in the war. A quarrel ensues at the dinner table and Kovic says: ‘You want to burn the flag. Love it or leave it.’ Kovic is welcomed home by a parade in his honour in the film’s second Fourth of July celebration, again with the music of ‘You’re a Grand Old Flag’.

92

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 92

29/5/13 13:48:36

Following the Flag in American Film

This time it’s Kovic who winces when he hears the sounds of firecrackers. An unidentified little boy sitting on his father’s shoulders also has a flag, one he rolls up and points as if it were a gun at those in the parade. Now the parade watchers include protesters against the war, one who gives the finger. Although he is primed to deliver an encouraging speech, Kovic comes emotionally undone at the ceremony. We see him reacting viscerally to the sound of a helicopter. And after beginning his speech, delivered under a red, white, and blue canopy, he can’t continue. Stone skilfully incorporates the elements of public rallies, protests and parades in key scenes in the film. Kovic finds himself in the middle of a protest gathering at Syracuse University when he visits Donna shortly after the Kent State massacre that ensued as students protested Nixon’s bombing of Cambodia. While he has arrived on campus still supportive of the war (and wearing a red, white, and blue tie), he finds that Donna is against it. Abbie Hoffman, the well-known activist, delivers an angry speech before police begin cracking heads and arresting students. Kovic is roughed up, even though he is not part of the protest.14 A key event before the next parade occurs when Kovic visits the family of the soldier he killed by mistake. He wears a checkered shirt of red, white and blue. The soldier’s son, whom he never saw, has jeans on with the inside cuffs exposed to reveal the same colours. The child plays with a toy rifle during the painful scene in which Kovic confesses his guilt. As Stone shows Kovic leaving the home of the dead Marine, he has a shot of a bleached-out waving flag that is not part of the diegetic material at this point, accompanied by the strains of ‘When Johnny Comes Marching Home’, which originated in the American Civil War.15 With the music still audible, he shows another flag, one that carries the insignia used for the colonies during the Revolutionary War. This is one of the flags being carried in the film’s third parade, this time a very different public setting from those seen earlier. In his wheelchair, Kovic is part of a large crowd of protesters and veterans in wheelchairs outside the Republican National Convention in Miami in 1972. He has a large flag and joins the veterans in their collective chant: ‘One, two, three, four, we don’t want your fucking war.’ One of the protesters carries a flag that has been redesigned, and now carries the blue field in the lower right-hand corner. Kovic and others manage to get into the convention hall, which is totally inundated with American flags and populated by security forces and conservatively dressed Republicans in blue blazers wearing straw hats with the flag colours as borders. He is able to say some words against the war to television

93

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 93

29/5/13 13:48:36

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

interviewers before being thrown out. One statement is of particular relevance, given his earlier statements to protesters about the country: ‘Love it or leave it.’ Now he states: ‘People say, if you don’t love America, get the hell out. I love America.’ He has reached a point where he sees that loving America doesn’t preclude criticising the deeply flawed leadership and hopeless war. After being ejected, he is subject to targeted violence from the police, for he is in fact helping in the organisation of this protest. They drag him out of his wheelchair even though he tells them he’s paralysed. Fortunately he is picked up and carried to safety by an African American, an action that recalls his rescue after being shot in Vietnam in the earlier battle scene. ‘You’re a Grand Old Flag’ is repeated for a third time in the last scene of the film when Kovic, now an important figure in America, prepares to address the 1976 Democratic Convention in New York City. A well-wisher asks for his autograph on his book, Born on the Fourth of July, and we see him about to enter the convention hall, in which flags are visible. He tells a reporter, ‘I feel like I’m home again.’ Kovic and Stone have shown how the flag can embody all the tensions and contradictions in American life: patriotic and pro-war as well as patriotic and anti-war. It is in fact ‘grand’, not just for the reasons that motivated Cohan in writing the song, but precisely because Kovic’s passage from patriotism to protest is motivated by love of the very same flag and the country. Flags of Our Fathers

One hundred and twenty-seven years after the appearance of Raising Old Glory Over Morro Castle, Eastwood’s film presents two re-enactments. The first one offers a cinematic re-enactment of the first flag raising on the morning of 23 February 1945, the second of the second flag raising a few hours later the same day. In the first, we see Staff Sergeant Louis Lowry taking a photograph. The second includes both Joe Rosenthal and Bill Genaust recording the event on still and motion picture cameras. As noted above, Genaust’s actual film appears in To the Shores of Iwo Jima. Eastwood momentarily freezes the second film in what will become the iconic shot of World War II, a photograph that embodies all the issues of interest in this essay. Its striking appearance overwhelmed everyone, and officials in Washington quickly realised its potential in raising money for the Seventh War Bond Drive. Eastwood’s Flags is unique in being the first war film to thematise the issue of the historical reality presented by war films (I comment on this in my discussion of the film and Letters from Iwo Jima in Eberwein 2009: 136–51,

94

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 94

29/5/13 13:48:36

Following the Flag in American Film

especially 139). In talking about this film a number of critics have cited John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1961) as a relevant model (see for example Foundas 2006 and McCarthy 2006). In that film the answer to the question of who in fact shot the villainous Valance (Lee Marvin), Ransom Stoddard (Jimmy Stewart) or Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), is resolved by the revelation that the latter killed him. But Stoddard is presented as the hero because he is perceived that way, leading the town’s newspaper editor to say: ‘When the legend becomes the fact, print the legend.’ In Flags, the narrative follows the impact of the photograph on the lives of Doc Bradley (Ryan Phillippe), Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford), and Ira Hayes (Adam Beach), the three surviving flag raisers, who find themselves at the centre of the fraudulent myth. They know they were the second team and that one of their buddies, Harlon Bloch (Benjamin Walker), who raised it with them, has not been properly acknowledged; instead another soldier, Hank Hansen (Paul Walker), receives credit for his participation; he had been one of those who raised the first flag. Eventually the truth comes out, but that does not change the iconic status of the Rosenthal photograph. As the older Dave Severance (Harve Presnell) says to Bradley’s son, one picture can change the perception of a war (as occurred with Eddie Adams’s famous shot of the South Vietnamese officer shooting a Viet Cong soldier through the head). The content of the Rosenthal photograph was taken as a sign that America was winning the war. In purely visual terms, it has its own incredible integrity and aesthetic power. For David Denby ‘the photograph is an accidental masterpiece of classical construction, with the diagonal line of the pole supported by the surging upraised arms of the men and balanced, at the base, by a marine poised at a right angle to it’ (Denby 2006). Stephanie Zacharek says ‘the picture is virtually a silhouette, an “action” shot in which the arrangement of the men’s bodies (the composition is eerily similar to that of classical sculpture) tells us more than their faces do ...’ (Zacharek 2006; for other thoughtful commentary on the film see Scott 2006, Sklar 2007, and Turan 2006). Its visual appeal is at the base of its political and historical importance as a signifier of American power. The re-enactment the three men perform at Soldier Field in Chicago and the proliferation of posters that surround them on walls maintain both the truth and the falsity of the event: yes, they raised the flag, but not the first one; yes, they were part of the team that raised the second one, but not everyone in that group has been recognised. The lack of full disclosure of the truth, which eventually does emerge, takes its most forceful toll on Hayes, who loses himself in alcohol. In a powerfully understated

95

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 95

29/5/13 13:48:36

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

scene late in the film, we see Hayes reduced to working in the fields in Arizona, a novelty for tourists who seek him out and ask to have their pictures taken with the ‘hero’. He takes a small flag out of his pocket and holds it while a father photographs him with his family. The disparity in size between the little flag and the earlier manifestations of it underscores the incongruity of Hayes’s sad fate.16 But Bradley too is troubled, especially when he has to tell Mrs Hanson which of the figures represents her son Hank. I think William Broyles, Jr, and Paul Haggis, who wrote the script, use the specific personal anguish caused by the temporary hiding of the actual facts to suggest a higher general truth about the nature of representation. In one sense, it could be argued that the distance between Raising Old Glory and Flags is incongruously immense: a crude, characterless film reenacting a historical event as opposed to a brilliantly conceived account of the impact of a seminal moment in history on a nation and on characters who matter to us as viewers. But I think the ultimate achievement of the film is that it offers an uncompromising admission of the fact that perhaps no cinematic and photographic records of war can be equal to the events they purport to present. The film thus deconstructs its own narrative, destabilising and challenging assumptions about the historical truths conveyed in war films, even those that use ‘actual’ photographs and footage. Although with a different emphasis, Flags thus joins other films made since World War II which challenge the kind of stable truths about patriotism that are centred in the flag.

Notes

1

2 3 4 5

All the Spanish-American War films whose titles have asterisks here are viewable on the Library of Congress website: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/sawhtml/sawhome. html American Film Institute, online catalogue. Unfortunately many of the silent films listed in this catalogue are lost. This pre-war film is not on the Library of Congress website. The film can be viewed on the web: video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-22943830 79970936235 I am grateful to Joshua Yumibe for drawing my attention to Edwin S. Porter’s Three American Beauties (1906). This one-minute film uses hand tinting as it displays three images: a young woman in a yellow dress; dissolve to a red rose opening; dissolve to the American flag.

96

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 96

29/5/13 13:48:36

Following the Flag in American Film

6

In the climactic battle in D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), carrying the Confederate flag, the Little Colonel runs towards enemy lines and pushes it into the opening of a Union cannon. The United States flag dominates the scene. Unlike the two films mentioned here, the colour in Griffith’s film involves a tinting process in which an entire section of film is coloured: often red for battles, blue for night, and so on. This scene in particular is in sepia. 7 The studio’s active involvement in anti-Nazi filmmaking began with Confessions of a Nazi Spy (Anatole Litvak, 1939). 8 Warner Bros. was not the only studio that made musicals with patriotic numbers. Paramount’s Holiday Inn (Mark Sandrich, 1942) contains a production number in which Bing Crosby sings about the freedoms enjoyed by Americans. At one point he sings in front of a curtain with elements of the flag, although not a replica. As the song moves to its conclusion, improbably (given the performance space of a Connecticut inn, the film’s primary setting), a movie screen appears on which is projected a succession of uplifting images of Americans involved in the war effort. It concludes with a shot of Franklin Delano Roosevelt that dissolves into an image of the flag waving in the breeze. This sequence echoes the last part of the major production number in Footlight Parade (Lloyd Bacon, 1933). In it dancers hold up individual cards that form the image of the flag and then reverse them to reveal a photograph of FDR. 9 The film is available on DVD and can also be seen on the Internet Archive: www. archive.org/details/Battle.of.Midway.1942 10 For a description of the men’s experience participating in the film, see Bradley and Powers (2000: 321–2). 11 It is important to see the film in relation to other post-war works about the military that share a more problematic depiction of military life and the problems faced by those in leadership positions, such as Command Decision (Sam Wood, 1948), in which the chief officer ordering air strikes has to contend with complicated personnel relationships, and Twelve O’Clock High (Henry King, 1949), in which the general in command of a bomber unit has a nervous breakdown. 12 I did not see the film on its initial release. According to the anonymous reviewer, who I assume is describing the experience of seeing it in either New York or Los Angeles, ‘The film’s pre-title “overture” is a bold, gutsy gambit. Sans the 20th logo, the screen is suddenly filled with an American flag. For two solid minutes, there is no sound; during this period, the eye will wander to count 48 (not 50) stars, while vocal expressions from the audience both of pride and criticism of the flag are likely to occur, then die away just before a razzberry [sic] begins.’ Variety, 21 January 1970. 13 I am grateful to Thomas Doherty for drawing my attention to Arthur Penn’s Four Friends (1981), which contains a scene set during the Vietnam War in which a character observes a flag burning. Another televised flag appears in Hal Ashby’s Coming Home (1978) in a brief scene in which the heroine, Sally Hyde (Jane Fonda), visits a friend’s apartment. A television station is signing off by playing the national anthem (a long-abandoned practice now, given 24/7 network and cable programming). The friend starts to turn off the television set, but Sally, at this point still very much a

97

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 97

29/5/13 13:48:36

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

supporter of American military policy and her officer husband who’s fighting in Vietnam, asks that it be left on. She watches and is clearly moved. The scene serves as an important marker of Sally’s personal and political sentiments, since she will develop much more complex attitudes in regard to the war after she falls in love with Luke Martin (Jon Voight), a paraplegic and dissident Vietnam veteran. The cover of the current DVD release version of the film shows the couple against the backdrop of an American flag – a scene that does not occur in the film. 14 An Abbie Hoffman-esque protester wearing a flag suit appears in Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1993). Forrest, of course, does not get the significance of the protest. Hoffman, who committed suicide in April 1989, did not live to see Stone’s film. 15 The shot anticipates Steven Spielberg’s use of a similarly weathered flag at the beginning and end of Saving Private Ryan (1998). 16 I am grateful to the anonymous reader of an earlier draft of this essay for reminding me of this poignant scene.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Birdwell, Michael (1999) Celluloid Soldiers: Warner Bros.’s Campaign Against Nazism. New York: New York University Press. Bradley, James and Ron Powers (2000) Flags of Our Fathers. New York: Bantam. Denby, David (2006) ‘Battle Fatigue’, The New Yorker, 30 October. Ebert, Roger (2002) Review of Patton, Suntimes.com, available at: http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20020317/REVIEWS08/203170301/1023 (accessed 27 June 2009). Eberwein, Robert (2004) The War Film. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. _____ (2010) The Hollywood War Film. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Foundas, Scott (2006) ‘Print the Legend’, Village Voice, 17 October. McCarthy, Todd (2006) Review of Flags of Our Fathers, Variety, 9 October. Musser, Charles H. (1997) Edison Motion Pictures, 1890–1900: An Annotated Filmography. N.p.: Smithsonian Institution Press. Scott, A. O. (2006) ‘Blurring the Line in the Bleak Sands of Iwo Jima’, New York Times, 20 December. Sklar, Robert (2007) Reviews of Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, Cineaste, 32, 2, 44–6. Toplin, Robert Brent (1996) History by Hollywood: The Use and Abuse of the American Past. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Turan, Kenneth (2006) Review of Flags of Our Fathers, Los Angeles Times, 20 October, available at: calendarlive.com (accessed 27 June 2009). Welky, David (2008) The Moguls and the Dictators: Hollywood and the Coming of

98

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 98

29/5/13 13:48:36

Following the Flag in American Film

World War II. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Zacharek, Stephanie (2006) Review of Flags of Our Fathers, 20 October, Salon.com, available at: http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/review/2006/10/20/flags/ (accessed 27 June 2009).

99

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 99

29/5/13 13:48:36

Care or Glory? Picturing a New War Hero ___ anne gjelsvik

The state of war suspends morality; it divests the eternal institutions and obligations of their eternity and rescinds ad interim the unconditional imperatives. In advance its shadow falls over the actions of men. War is not only one of the ordeals – the greatest – of which morality lives; it renders morality derisory. (Levinas 1961: 21)

The beginning of Clint Eastwood’s World War II movie Flags of Our Fathers (2006) puts the viewer directly into something that looks like a war zone. Only this time the soldier, John ‘Doc’ Bradley (played by Ryan Phillippe), seems to be all alone as he runs across the battlefield, except for the sounds of gunshots and of the voices of men calling. The cry ‘Corpsman!’ seems to keep him running, but without any direction, and the camera can only echo his confusion, desperately but fruitlessly circling over the barren landscape. At the call ‘For God’s sake, corpsman!’ he turns around, trying to locate the caller, but remains bewildered. The camera closes in on his face, streaked by a lonely tear. When he started his search for the secret story about his war hero father, James Bradley only knew one thing for certain, as he notes in his book Flags

100

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 100

29/5/13 13:48:36

Care or Glory

John ‘Doc’ Bradley (Ryan Phillippe) responding to the call from the battlefield in Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers (2006).

of Our Fathers: ‘I knew from an early age that my father had been some sort of hero’ (Bradley 2006: 4). In order to answer the question ‘What kind of hero?’ I will take a closer look at Doc Bradley and the depiction of the soldier hero in Eastwood’s movie. The depiction of heroes and the glory of heroism run as a theme throughout the movie, for instance when fellow flag raiser Rene Gagnon tells the other soldiers that he joined the Marines because there was ‘no sense being a hero if you don’t look like one’, and the Marines had the best uniforms. I will argue that Flags of Our Fathers portrays a soldier less concerned with winning the war or killing the enemy than with being a caretaker, considering the movie’s emphasis on the role of corpsman James Doc Bradley, an untypical war hero and a character whose actions put others’ needs first. I will concentrate my analysis on two important elements in the movie’s opening, namely the call and the face, and the role they serve in Eastwood’s adaptation of the story about Bradley and his fellow soldiers at Iwo Jima, and how the movie can be said to construct a new kind of war hero. Drawing on perspectives from Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical framework and his account of the ‘face-to-face’ encounter with ‘the Other’, I will discuss how the important role of the compassionate soldier Doc could be said to shed light on an ethical hero. According to Levinas, ethical responsibility and compassion are irreducibly related to responding to ‘the Other’, and the demands and needs seen in his or her face. Focusing on the important function of the close-up of the caretaker’s face (or of what I will term as the ‘face of sympathy’), I will show how this caring hero differs from American cinema’s traditional war hero, as represented by the Marine in World War II, and how this challenges a traditional depiction of masculinity. As my primary example of the traditional masculine hero I will use John Wayne, who through both westerns

101

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 101

29/5/13 13:48:36

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

and war movies ‘has proved to be the supreme American representation of manly toughness, courage and competence’ (Freeman 2007). Following these perspectives I will discuss the different ways in which John Wayne’s Sergeant Stryker in Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) and Ryan Phillippe’s Doc Bradley in Flags of Our Fathers respond to the call from the battlefield. Flags of Our Fathers has been described as ‘not so much anti-war, as antiidolatry’ (Stuart 2006). As one of American cinema’s greatest icons himself, Clint Eastwood sets about the task of deconstructing the public image of one of the most iconic photographs in American history. Bradley’s (and Powell’s) book is much more about remembering and paying homage to the forgotten heroes from the past, whereas the movie to a larger degree questions what it means to be a hero and how one becomes a hero (see also Rikke Schubart’s essay ‘Eastwood and the Enemy’ in this anthology). Their portraits of the enemy differ as well, and the author and the auteur’s different approaches to the enemy are even more evident when we take Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) into consideration. The question asked in this article concerns the kind of picture that Eastwood constructs in his movie and how it differs from the image of the soldier as a patriotic superhero. In relation to his western Unforgiven (1992), Eastwood claimed that he ‘demythologizes idolizing people for violent behaviour’ (Bingham 1994: 2). In his discussion of Eastwood as a revisionist, Dennis Bingham argues that Eastwood has taken a brutal approach to the myths of masculinity that he himself used to embody, and that his evolution has led his films to ‘constitute an evolution into a less “masculinist” male identity’ (ibid.). This evolution seems to find its fulfilment in his almost meta-critical Gran Torino (2008), which could be said to simultaneously reveal and deconstruct his own screen persona to date, but I will now investigate how the director Clint Eastwood and scriptwriter Paul Haggis could be said to portray a new masculine identity in Flags of Our Fathers.

War Cinema and Masculinity at War At war, and in war cinema, many things are at stake, one of which is masculinity. The relationship between cinematic heroes and society is a complex and intriguing one and it is difficult to discuss the importance or influence either way, but there are several reasons why war heroes represent an especially interesting case study. In Armed Forces (2007) Robert Eberwein foregrounds the special relationship between the fictionalised depictions of soldiers and

102

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 102

29/5/13 13:48:36

Care or Glory

the audiences’ assumptions of what real soldiers are like. Whereas cowboys, gangsters and detectives are fictional characters within the realm of Hollywood cinema, situated in worlds separated and distinct from our own, the reality of soldiers is something we relate to based on knowledge of actual war or even on our own experiences (Eberwein 2007: 5–6). In an illustrative comparison, Janine Basinger pinpoints the distinction between ‘the West’ and ‘the war’: ‘Westerns are based on myths, even though there was a real West. World War II films are based on reality, even though there is a myth’ (Basinger quoted from Eberwein 2007: 5). ‘The standard of realism’, as David Slocum has termed it, is crucial for the legitimacy of war cinema and for how we consider historical representations of war according to their representativeness, but also for how ‘cinema shapes viewers’ understanding of war’ (Slocum 2006: 13).1 In particular, Hollywood’s depiction of World War II has come to constitute a cultural framework for understanding war, to an extent that soldiers during the Vietnam War were said to suffer from a ‘John Wayne Wet Dream Syndrome’, imagining that going to war would be like serving beside John Wayne (as illustrated by Sergeant Stryker in Sands of Iwo Jima, or by Colonel Mike Kirby in the Green Berets, 1968) (Slocum 2006: 14). In Guts and Glory Lawrence H. Suid shows how profound the influence of ‘John Waynism’ has been, for instance in recruiting Marines, as well as other decisions made by soldiers and officers in the years and wars after World War II (Suid 2003: 116–135). Robert Eberwein argues that the depiction of the soldier in fiction films is distinctive, because spectators tend to assume that these representations represent the truth, as seen before in newsreels, or even more significantly, as depictions of how men really are (Eberwein 2007).2 As mentioned, the purpose of James Bradley’s quest was to discover the truth about his father, that is to say find the real man behind the stoic and silent former soldier and flag raiser.3 In Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War (1997), Barbara Ehrenreich describes war as both a heritage from mankind’s primitive response to danger and a substitute for ‘underemployed male hunterdefenders’ (Eberwein 2007: 5). Both Eberwein and Ehrenreich see war as one of the most rigidly gendered activities possible and an activity that has often served to define manhood itself, where becoming a man or being a man often valorises an aggressive masculinity. Drawing on the cultural and historical heritage from sources as different as Theodore Roosevelt’s descriptions of manhood (1897)4 and the first war film, Love & War (1899),5 Eberwein gives an account of a quintessential manhood – not yet touched by modernity’s crisis of masculinity – where masculine virtues in life and in battle could be

103

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 103

29/5/13 13:48:37

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

summarised as personal courage, physical as well as moral; physical power; and virility. Masculine heroism in Love & War is displayed as powerful and without softness or weakness; even being wounded in battle does not damage the hero’s masculinity in this short film (Eberwein 2007: 11–14). This hyper-masculinity of soldiers has come to be challenged in war movies from subsequent decades, but has nevertheless been strongly present in World Word II movies, such as in the aforementioned John Wayne character Sergeant Stryker in The Sands of Iwo Jima (Slocum 2006: 11). The story of how, to quote John Wayne, ‘A man takes eight boys and has to make men out of them’ has become an iconic cinematic portrayal of a war hero.6 Being, as Lawrence H. Suid points out, ‘the symbolic Marine’, the Stryker figure serves as an interesting comparison with what I will term the new war hero in Flags of Our Fathers, and even more so because of the similarities in setting, scenes and theme between the two movies. I will use The Sands of Iwo Jima as a contrast to Flags of Our Fathers in relation to the movies’ depictions of heroism, but without claiming that Stryker is representative of earlier war heroes as such, and being aware that other members of his squad represent alternative depictions of masculinity, different from Wayne’s ‘Marine of Marines’. To trace changes in depictions of war heroes or masculine models from 1950 and over a period of more than 50 years is beyond the scope of this essay, however. I will therefore limit my comparison to the aforementioned two films. But following Susan Jeffords, we can see a change from a ‘hard’ to a ‘soft’ masculinity through the post-war decades, where the Reagan era serves as the peak of the ‘hard body ideal’, but where the definitive role model has yet to be found (Jeffords 1994). As both Jeffords and Stella Bruzzi have shown, the 1990s and the turn of the century make for a period where masculine identity is ambivalent, contradictory and negotiable (Bruzzi 2006). Nevertheless, I will claim that the caring hero represents one of the most striking changes in contemporary genre movies, and that Flags of Our Fathers is part of this tendency.7 My approach will therefore be to focus on the depiction of individuals in the two movies in question. As David Slocum points out, it is typical for Hollywood war films to focus on ‘the motivations, attitudes and behaviour of individuals preparing for or immersed in combat’ (Slocum 2006: 8).8 The men’s motivations for going to war range from ‘the pursuit of excitement or heroism, duty, faith, and revenge to love, friendship, camaraderie, and belonging’ (ibid.). To describe the values at stake in a war film, it is useful to study these individual motivations and actions, and in the following I will take a closer look at Doc Bradley’s character, actions and motivations. The old Doc Bradley is described in the book as a silent and introverted man, while in the

104

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 104

29/5/13 13:48:37

Care or Glory

movie the young Bradley comes over as a charming and warm companion to his fellow soldiers during the time leading up to the battle. In particular he is shown to take care of his friend, the younger ‘Iggy’, Ralph Ignatowski (Jamie Bell), before and during the battle. In his book, as well as in the documentary Words on the Page (2006), James Bradley foregrounds the battle of Iwo Jima as an honourable moment in American War history: ‘It was America’s most heroic battle. More medals for valor were awarded for action on Iwo Jima than in any battle in the history of the United States’ (Bradley 2006: 10).9 During the war the Marines were awarded 84 Medals of Honor, which amounted to approximately two a month, but Marines received 27 medals during just one month of fighting at Iwo Jima. John Doc Bradley was one of them, and received both a Navy Cross and a Purple Heart for his ‘extraordinary heroism in action against the enemy at Iwo Jima on February 21, 1945 as a hospital corpsman attached to a Marine Rifle platoon’.10 I will now move on to discuss how this extraordinary heroism is depicted in the movie, by way of seeing it as a response to the call from the battlefield.

The Face of the Other The opening scene in Flags of Our Fathers turns out to be the dream of the old John (Doc) Bradley, a repeated call and a haunting scenario; throughout his life he has had recurring dreams of the cries from fellow soldiers in battle. This recurring event, which I have termed ‘the call’, fits hand in glove with Emmanuel Levinas’s discussion of what makes people become moral human beings. I will discuss the role of this call in relation to Levinas’s philosophy. Tina Chanter formulates the importance of the call in Levinas’s writings as follows: ‘to read Levinas cannot be distinguished from responding to a call’ (Chanter 2001: 1). Being aware that condensing Levinas’s challenging ethical framework into questions such as ‘What calls us to responsibility?’ makes for an unsatisfactory reduction of his theory, I will nevertheless use this approach as a starting point for my analysis of Doc Bradley’s call. My aim is first and foremost to foreground the importance of the call in the movie, and not to deliver a full-fledged overview or discussion of Levinas’s theories. I will start my discussion with a synthesis of Levinas’s ethics in Tina Chanter’s words: To what, then, are we called; what calls us to responsibility? … To ask what calls us to be ethical is to ask for an answer at the level of ontology; it is

105

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 105

29/5/13 13:48:37

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

already to be deaf to the other. What object, what thing, what being issues a call? What ontology of this call can be produced, what directives can be formulated in answer to the question: why should we be ethical? (Chanter 2001: 1)

As both a Jew and a prisoner of war in France during World War II, Emmanuel Levinas’s work made him a major contributor to post-Holocaust ethics. A former student of both Martin Heidegger and Edmund Husserl, Levinas formulated a theory on inter-subjective experience, responsibility and sociality in his writings, most notably in his doctoral thesis, ‘Totality and Infinity’ (1961), Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence (1974) and Humanism of the Other (2006).11 From a phenomenological approach, Levinas’s philosophy could be said to have the condition of the possibility of ethics as its most pivotal aim (Bernasconi and Keltner 2002: 250). Levinas’s ethics is not so much a discussion of virtues, codes, or rules as a description of under what conditions being an ethical human being is possible – for example, what conditions must be reached to make sacrifice, giving, pity and forgiveness possible acts (ibid.). The core of Levinas’s ethical framework, or his ‘first philosophy’ (Levinas 1969) and what Jacques Derrida termed ‘an Ethics of ethics’ (Derrida 1978, quoted from Robbins 2001: 1),12 is the encounter with another person, or the face-to-face relationship between myself and the other. Separating himself from modernity’s foregrounding of subjectivity and self-constitution, Levinas moves beyond the focus on individual needs and desires by arguing for an inter-subjectivity based on responsibility. The moral self is not constituted through self-knowledge; on the contrary, an ethical ‘I’ is formed through the vision of my other alter ego, who ‘impacts me unlike any worldly object or force’ (Bergo 2007). According to Levinas the subject could be said to be defined by acknowledging responsibility, because subjectivity is not something that exists in itself: ‘Subjectivity is not for itself: it’s one again, initially for another … I say: Here I am’ (Levinas 1981, quoted from Erdinast-Vulcan 2008: 49). The importance of the encounter with the ‘the Other’ in Levinas’s ethics cannot be overstated. Levinas argues that ‘the original meaning or impact of ethics (and accordingly the meaning of every human action) does not have its origin in myself, but in ‘the Other’. This also means that my own action should ‘not have its origin in my own needs, even though needs, impulses and language create a mask known as a person, because at its core it is “The

106

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 106

29/5/13 13:48:37

Care or Glory

Other” who constitutes “The I” as subject and as a moral human being’ (Levinas 2006: 29–31). The face-to-face encounter is the core of the inter-subjective relation that makes me into a responsible person. Throughout his writings and talks Levinas returns to the call, the command, or the demand from ‘the Other’s’ face, and how this constitutes my responsibility for him, and this is formulated as a command in itself: ‘This infinity, stronger than murder, already resists us in his face, is his face [sic], is the primordial expression, is the first word: “Thou shalt not commit murder”’ (Levinas 1969: 199).13 Levinas foregrounds the other’s mortality, in a way that seems particularly relevant in a face-to-face encounter on the battlefield. But, in its expression, in its mortality, the face before me summons me, calls for me, begs for me, as if the invisible death that must be faced by the Other, pure otherness, separated, in some way from any whole, were my business. (Levinas in Hand 1989: 83)

As these two quotes from two different sources indicate, this is central in his writing, and the significance of the naked face in Levinas’s philosophy is summed up by Bettina Bergo in her excellent introduction to Levinas: The face, in its nudity and defenselessness, signifies: ‘Do not kill me.’ This defenseless nudity is therefore a passive resistance to the desire that is my freedom. Any exemplification of the face’s expression, moreover, carries with it this combination of resistance and defenselessness: Levinas speaks of the face of the other who is ‘widow, orphan, or stranger’. (Bergo 2007)

It is important to notice the emphasis on the vulnerability of the other, and this is also important in our relations with the stranger, which again is relevant for our discussion of soldiers in battle. Neither the face, nor the call, in Levinas’s uses of the terms are as literal as in the examples I will return to shortly.14 As Bernard Waldenfels foregrounds in his discussion of the face-toface relationship: We understand that the face is not something seen, observed, registered, deciphered or understood, but rather somebody responded to. I can only and only I can respond to the injunction of a face. (Waldenfels 2002: 250)

Facing the other can to an extent be understood as a phenomenological

107

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 107

29/5/13 13:48:37

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

experience, but above all the other’s face should be understood as a metaphor, and not primarily as a specific face, as Levinas elaborated in an interview: One can first of all consider the face, le visage, as if it were something seen, although I would then say in French, it defaced, dévisagé. Defacement occurs also as a way of look, a way of knowing, for example, what colour your eyes are. No the face is not this. ‘Face’ as I have always described it, is nakedness, helplessness, perhaps an exposure to death. (Levinas 2001: 144–5)

It is in his vulnerability and mortality that ‘the Other’ calls me, and ‘I’ have to answer for ‘the Other’s’ death, and he becomes my neighbour ‘precisely through the way the face summons me, calls for me, begs for me’ (Levinas 1989: 83). The call or the command is privileged and imperative, and as we can see closely linked to the face, in fact almost synonymous.15 For Levinas, this is like a call from above (from God), in which the other person addresses me, calls to me.16 The relationship between the face and the call is intimate and close; the other does not even have to utter words in order for me to feel the summons implicit in his approach (Waldenfels 2002: 69). The face lives, it speaks, it has its place on the body, but it could have been ‘placed’ somewhere else, in the neck for instance. It would still talk. The remarkable with the face [sic] is that it talks, it says: need, vulnerability, it begs, it beseeches me for help, it places me under responsibility. (Aarnes 2004: 206)

Following Levinas, one could claim that an ethical relationship takes ‘the face’ and ‘the call’ as fundamental, but the definite site of responsibility is to be responding to that other. As Kelly Oliver shows by way of etymology: It might be helpful to note the term responsibility (responsabilité) is from Latin respondere, to respond, to answer, to answer one’s name, appear to be present, and response, to keep answering. (Oliver 1997: 156)

To be ethical is therefore to see the other’s face, to hear his call, and to respond. In the following I will discuss this call not primarily as the command not to kill the other (as understood as my enemy), but also a call that might prevent my fellow soldier from being killed.

108

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 108

29/5/13 13:48:37

Care or Glory

The Kind of Marine They Make Movies About In order to see how John Doc Bradley can be described as an extraordinary ethical hero, I will make a brief comparison between him and Sergeant Stryker in Sands of Iwo Jima, and assess the differences in what serves as responsible behaviour in the two movies.17 I will focus on one scene from Sands of Iwo Jima and a few scenes from Flags of Our Fathers that seem to be echoing each other in the importance of the call from a fellow soldier. Sands of Iwo Jima places the soldiers in Sgt Stryker’s squad in the midst of the invasion of Tarawa Atoll (which originally took place prior to the battle of Iwo Jima, in November 1943). Stryker is portrayed as a competent but extremely tough leader, who even uses violence in order to make his men understand and prepare for the dangers of war. When the battle begins his way of comforting nervous men is to make statements like ‘If you are nervous count your toes.’ His own face doesn’t give away much, even when he hears other soldiers take a bullet, and when he is instructed by his commander not to move and to hold the line during the night he has every intention of doing so. Then the call ‘Corpsman’ rings through the night, making the other soldiers whisper to each other ‘That’s a Marine’. The camera pans across the men lying in hiding, stopping on Stryker, who orders them all to stay down, and gives the instruction not to move by saying: ‘Don’t risk giving away your position or strength.’ The more compassionate Private (First John Wayne’s face does not give away Sergeant Class) Peter Conway (John Agar), Stryker’s emotions in Allan Dwan’s Sands of Iwo Jima cannot accept the order and cries out: (1949). ‘There’s somebody wounded, let’s go and get him’. But he is hushed up and pulled back by Stryker, who argues, ‘It may be an Old Jap trick. They pulled it plenty in the Canal’.18 Conway doesn’t accept the argument, claiming that it doesn’t sound like a Jap to him, which only leads Stryker to respond: ‘I don’t care what it sounds like to you. You stick your head up and you tip our position’. Then the call changes from ‘Corpsman’ to ‘Stryker’, and Conway claims that it is their fellow Marine, Bass: ‘How many Japs know your name? It’s Bass’. And the dialogue continues:

109

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 109

29/5/13 13:48:37

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

stryker: Shut up! conway: Aren’t you human at all? Don’t you realise a friend of yours may be dying? stryker: Knock it off. conway: This is what your father taught you, be a great Marine, be tough. You can sit here and be tough if you wanna, but I’m going to get that guy. And the only way you can stop me is to kill me. stryker: That’s just what I’ll do.

The sergeant puts his gun in Conway’s face. The camera closes in on Stryker’s face as he puts his finger on the trigger without moving a muscle in his face, before moving back to an equally determined Conway, who finally resigns himself to staying in the trench. Only John Wayne’s blink signals that this is actually an emotional decision for the sergeant, and his expression barely changes throughout the scene. As the call continues, changing between his name and his title (‘Sarge’), he finally looks down, hiding his face. Later on we learn that the wounded soldier, Bass, survived and was sent to hospital. Although Stryker softens during the second half of the movie (a development that could be seen as a delayed response to the call), this leaves the impression that he made the right choice in not responding to the call.19 This impression is strengthened by another incident: the more sympathetically portrayed Thomas (Forrest Tucker) turns out to be the one who fails his comrades, because he fails to return with more ammunition in time, due to a prolonged coffee break in the middle of a battle. His act of selfishness, the act of putting subjective needs first, led to the killing of a fellow soldier and the injuring of another. The depiction of Doc Bradley in a situation similar to that of Stryker shows a soldier making completely different decisions. In a scene echoing the dream sequence from the opening minutes of the film, Bradley responds to the call ‘Corpsman down’ by running onto the open battlefield. The scene is rendered as a recollection, starting in voice-over, told by one of Bradley’s fellow soldiers, who remembers the corpsman’s actions on Iwo Jima:20 Blood was spurting out of his throat and Doc was doing everything he could. And the corpsman looks up at him, and he knows what this means, shot in the neck. He knows he’s dying, you can see that. But still in his eyes … he’s pleading with Doc to save his life. And Doc can’t.

Doc turns away crying, and as a result of this distraction, he is hit by a grenade

110

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 110

29/5/13 13:48:37

Care or Glory

and badly wounded. His fellow soldier urges him to lie down as he runs for a stretcher. As he lies on the ground the call ‘Corpsman, for God’s sake corpsman’ is heard again, and in great pain and with difficulty he crawls to the other soldier in order to help.21 The voice-over continues: It took us a half hour to find your dad; he could have bled to death … Vets will tell you about being hit, but not wanting to leave their buddies. Usually they are lying. You’ll take any excuse to get out of there. But it happens. You get the feeling you are letting them down. I could see that in your dad’s face. Oh he wanted to go. He had seen enough. But he didn’t want to leave us.

But as Flags of Our Fathers shows us, Doc had seen enough, as the movie also forces the viewer to see the other picture, the picture without any glory. As photographer Joe Rosenthal says in the movie, ‘There were plenty of other photos taken that day, but none anybody wanted to see. What we see and do in war, the cruelty, is unbelievable’. Several scenes in the movie that involve Doc show the spectator exactly the kind of war pictures that force us to look away, but here Doc is forced to look. I think I know now, my father had a lot not to talk about. On Iwo Jima, if I was advancing with another Marine, and that Marine was shot, I was supposed to keep on going, I often did not see the casualties. My father was a corpsman, his job was to turn towards the casualties, was to go towards the worst, to embrace those guys whose blood was draining into the sands of Iwo Jima.22

One example of this is found in the scene immediately after the opening, when we see Doc serve as a corpsman for the first time, but when he also has to leave his friend Iggy behind (a fatal choice, since he was never again to see him alive). Again and again he keeps his eyes on the wounds and the victims, encouraging them to hold on, repeatedly saying things like ‘Keep your eyes on me’ and ‘Keep looking at me, right’. Back at the post, Iggy is gone, but instead of being careful with his own life, which he had protected just one minute earlier by killing someone, he starts calling at the top of his lungs for Iggy. His shouting scares his fellow soldier in the trench: ‘Do you want every Jap in the island to shoot at us?’ But Doc worries more about his friend than himself: once again, an act and a choice contrary to Stryker’s decision. Throughout the movie Doc is portrayed as a compassionate and caring man, pitying fellow soldiers who are wounded, and mourning death and loss.

111

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 111

29/5/13 13:48:37

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

The death of his friend Iggy, although not explicitly shown in the movie’s diegesis, is replayed again and again in Doc’s memory, and becomes the haunting scenario that never escapes Doc’s mind, and the reason why he never truly can leave the island behind. But, only once do we see the other side of Doc’s war effort, when he is forced to kill a Japanese soldier in order not to be killed himself in a surprise attack. In his fellow soldiers’ eyes, Bradley is the real hero in this story, because he put the needs of others before his own desire to get out. The other heroes in Flags of Our Fathers are ‘the guys who didn’t come back’, as James Bradley quotes his father. And as both Bradley and Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) in the movie during their flag raising tour put it: ‘The real heroes are dead on that island’ (Bradley 2004: 4). In Eastwood’s movie, the memories of these men are honoured in a short emotional sequence (less than four minutes), where Sergeant Mike Strank, Franklin Sousley, Harlon Block (and Hank)23 all are killed. The deaths are depicted through crosscutting between the celebration ceremony for the three returning flag raisers, Ira Hayes (Adam Beach), Rene Gagnon and John Bradley, and are shown as the memories of Doc and Ira, as the men die in front of their eyes. Both the book and the film serve to honour their memories, but the movie also honours a face of vulnerability and responsibility, as it continuously closes in on Ryan Phillippe’s face as he turns around, again and again, responding to the call from the battle zone.

Ethical Empathy While taking the picture of the flag raising on top of Mount Suribachi, photographer Joe Rosenthal states, ‘I wish I could see their faces’. And the leader of the war bond campaign who is trying to sell the flag raisers as celebrities and war heroes is equally irritated that the men’s faces are hidden, at one point even blurting out: ‘I think it is a crappy picture myself; you can’t even see your faces’. From my point of view one of the most important features of Clint Eastwood’s retelling of the story is how he foregrounds the face, and how this face functions both as an image of a new hero and as a tool for making the spectator capable of taking a new perspective on the implications of war herself. In film studies, the importance of the face as a tool for identification and sympathy has been emphasised by scholars such as Béla Balázs, Carl Plantinga and Murray Smith (Balázs (1992) [1952]; Plantinga 1996; Smith 1995). Foregrounding the importance of the close-up in his theory of the film,

112

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 112

29/5/13 13:48:37

Care or Glory

Balázs argues that close-ups can show us ‘the very instant in which the general is transformed into the particular’, and that this cinematic device ‘has not only widened our vision of life, it has also deepened it’ (Balázs 1992: 260). In his discussion of how the spectator can empathise with a film character, Carl Plantinga emphasises the importance of the human face in what he calls the ‘Scene of empathy’, quoting Balázs: ‘If we look at and understand each other’s faces and gestures, we not only understand, we also learn to feel each other’s emotions’ (Plantinga 1996: 243). Drawing on cognitive psychology as well as film studies, Plantinga arrives at conclusions about the relation between the close-up and the spectator’s empathic engagement that to some extent are equivalent to Levinas’s perspectives. This perspective is also important in Murray Smith’s more elaborate theory regarding the spectator’s involvement with fictional characters, which he has termed the ‘structure of sympathy’. Moving from the spectator’s construction of the character based on textual elements, such as the actor’s name, face and body, to a more intimate access to the character’s action and beliefs, Smith’s model accounts for how we can form an allegiance with a character. In order to achieve this level of commitment, the narration places the spectator in a structure of alignment, which includes a certain degree of subjective access to the character, such as knowledge of his beliefs, thoughts and emotions (Smith 1995: 143). Smith argues for the important role of the actor’s performance and the human face in creating engagement with characters (commonly termed as identification),24 borrowing director François Truffaut’s words: ‘The cinema becomes subjective when the actor’s gaze meets that of the audience’ (Smith 1995: 158). Smith points to the expressive reaction shot as an especially important device in creating sympathy with a character. The combination of a close-up on the human face and a recurring reaction shot could therefore be said to construct what I would like to term the ‘face of sympathy’. As we are drawn into Doc’s situation, the call goes out not only to him, but to me as the spectator as well. The call prompts me, and I have to respond and become responsible. My sympathy is also secured because Doc, in contradiction to Stryker, doesn’t hide his emotions behind a masculine mask, and because the movie foregrounds his emotional reactions, from the very beginning. Discussing what she calls an emotional masculinity, Sarah Fanning argues that today we can see an emergence of an ‘amalgamated figure’ who can express feelings without compromising his masculine self (Fanning 2009).25 As an aspect of the so-called ‘new masculinity’, it has become acceptable for men to cry in

113

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 113

29/5/13 13:48:37

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

public. Nevertheless, Doc’s lonely tear made way for an unexpected emotional response in this viewer. Instead of giving a traditional portrait of heroism, the movie can be said to rephrase Gagnon’s statement ‘No sense being a hero if you are not a sensible man’. In my essay I have made a direct comparison between Levinas’s metaphor of the call and the face, which are not in their original meaning concrete or visual. In fact Levinas foregrounds that the face is not visual, or content; it is discourse. Nevertheless, it is tempting to use these metaphors to illuminate the new perspectives in Eastwood’s movie. Susan Handleman has argued that the reason Levinas uses such a simple metaphor as the face, and then complicates the meaning of it, is related to terms like ‘facing relations’ and ‘turning toward the other’ (Handleman quoted from Erdinast-Vulcan 2008: 47).26 Once again this is given concrete representation in the movie, in the scenes of sympathy. Flags of Our Fathers tells the story of a hero who wins my sympathy first and foremost because he is an empathetic, caring soldier. When Ryan Phillippe, as Doc Bradley, again and again turns around to answer his call, this becomes an ethical moment for me as onlooker as well, because being close to him, seeing his face up close, enforces an ethical empathy in me. In Flags of Our Fathers Clint Eastwood forces me to hear the returning call of the other, and to meet the gaze from an ethical ‘I’, by forcing me to ‘keep my eyes on him’ and ‘keep looking at him, right’. And in doing this, the movie also tells another story about the war hero. By showing me a different face of the soldier, and accordingly a different picture of masculinity, the movie makes me see the ethical implications of war in a different, more prudent and emotional way.

Notes

1

Because Flags of Our Fathers is based on actual events and is about famous historical individuals, the filmmakers have been careful about finding actors who resemble the men they portray. However, with one exception all the actors are older than the soldiers were during the battle. Jesse Bradford, born in 1979 (26 years old), plays the 19-year-old Gagnon; Ryan Phillippe, born in 1974 (32 in 2006), plays Bradley at 23; Adam Beach, born in 1972 (34), plays Ira Hayes, who was 22; and Barry Pepper, born in 1970 (36 in 2006), plays Mike Strank, who was 23 when fighting the battle on Iwo Jima. 2 Typically in a discussion on imdb.com about which is better, Sands of Iwo Jima

114

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 114

29/5/13 13:48:37

Care or Glory

or Flags of Our Fathers, one fan argued: ‘Sands was the hollywood version of the battle, flags was the true story, its harder to make a factual movie, alot of of sands [sic] was make up by the writers, which did not sit well with the flag raisers. Plus the flag raising story was filmed as it was known at that time which turned out to be false. I also have read Flags and would recommend it to everyone.’ Available at: http://imdb.com/title/tt0041841/board/nest/57185910 (accessed 8 January 2011). 3 In his novel The Hour I First Believed (2009), author Wally Lamb comments that the reason why the soldiers from WWII were called the Greatest Generation was their characteristic silence and stoicism. 4 President Theodore Roosevelt’s (1901–1909) views are for instance expressed in ‘The Manly Virtues and Practical Politics’ (1897). 5 Directed by James White for Edison’s production company. 6 The quote is from Lawrence H. Suid’s interview with John Wayne (Suid 2007: 120). 7 See Bruzzi for more on the history of fatherhood in Hollywood cinema and Eberwein for more about ‘the buddy movie’ in the war movie genre. This is also a topic in my ongoing research on the representation of fatherhood in contemporary cinema. 8 Emphasis added. 9 Bradley also comments on this in the documentary Words on Page on the DVD version of Flags of Our Fathers: ‘Iwo Jima is still today, is America’s most decorated moment [sic], we stamped out more medals for American bravery for action on Iwo Jima than in any other action in the history of United States’. 10 Navy Cross citation from Wikipedia. Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ John_Bradley_(Navy) (accessed 8 January 2011). 11 For an introduction to Levinas’s work, see for instance Bergo (2007), Zalta (2008), or Hand (1989). 12 Levinas has on several occasions summed up his perspective in the phrase, ‘After you, Sir’. See also Aarnes (2004: 205). 13 Or as someone has rephrased his statements on Wikipedia: ‘the other as they appear, the face, gives itself priority to the self, its first demand even before I react to it, love it or kill it, is: “thou shalt not kill me”’. Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Face-to-face (accessed 4 August 2008). 14 In an interview with Asbjørn Aarnes, Levinas makes a distinction between oversimplification and making difficult things simple. I hope to be able to follow him in this respect (Aarnes 2004: 205). 15 See Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan for an excellent discussion of Levinas’s face and Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogue. 16 Here the Jewish influence – to be more precise, Judaism – is vital. His concepts should be understood in this context, but I will not elaborate on that here. 17 The heading refers to fellow soldiers’ comments about Mike Strank (Bradley 2000: 48), who also was said to be one of the inspirations for Wayne’s character Stryker. 18 This cynical tactic from the Japanese at Guadalcanal is also described in James Bradley’s book: ‘U.S. Navy medics would respond to calls for help from wounded Japanese who would cry “Corpsman! Corpsman!” in English. When the Corpsmen came to their aid, they were then either treacherously shot by the wounded Japanese

115

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 115

29/5/13 13:48:37

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

or blown up by hand grenades concealed on their bodies’ (Bradley 2000: 66). Erdinast-Vulcan (2008) for more on the metaphor of the call and the face in Levinas’s and Bakhtin’s ethical theories, respectively. 20 An interview by James Bradley during his research. This scene is found at 139.33 in the DVD version. 21 This scene serves to portray the incident that earned Doc the Navy Cross: ‘With complete disregard for his own safety, he ran through the intense fire to the side of the fallen Marine, examined his wounds and ascertained that an immediate administration of plasma was necessary to save the man’s life. Unwilling to subject any of his comrades to the danger to which he had so valiantly exposed himself, he signaled would-be assistants to remain where they were’. Available at: http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bradley_(Navy) (accessed 8 January 2011). 22 James Bradley in interview in the documentary Words on Paper (4.00–4.22), bonus material on the DVD version of Flags of Our Fathers (2006). 23 Hank Hanson was misidentified as one of the flag raisers on the photograph; the real identity of the flag raiser was Harlon Block. 24 Smith uses engagement instead of identification for a variety of reasons. 25 In her paper Fanning also draws on Tom Lutz’s (2001) Crying: A Natural and Cultural History of Tears. 19 See

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aarnes, Asbjørn (2004) ‘Emmanuel Levinas: liv og verk’, in Den annens humanisme. Oslo: Aschehoug. Balázs, Béla (1992 [1952]) ‘From the Theory of the Film’, in Mast, Gerald, Marshall Cohen and Leo Braudy (eds) Film Theory and Criticism. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 260–7. Basinger, Jeanine (2003) The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press. Bergo, Bettina (2007) ‘Emmanuel Levinas’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, spring 2007 edition. Available at: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/levinas/ (accessed 8 January 2011). Bernasconi, Robert and Stacey Keltner (2002) ‘Emmanuel Levinas: The Phenomenology of Sociality and the Ethics of Alterity’, in John J. Drummond and Lester Embree (eds), Phenomenological Approaches to Moral Philosophy. Dordrecht; Boston; London: Kluwer Academic Publisher, 249–68. Bingham, Dennis (1994) Acting Male: Masculinities in the Films of James Stewart, Jack Nicholson, and Clint Eastwood. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Bradley, James with Ron Powers (2006 [2000]) Flags of Our Fathers. London: Pimlico. Bruzzi, Stella (2006) Bringing Up Daddy: Fatherhood and Masculinity in Post-War

116

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 116

29/5/13 13:48:37

Care or Glory

Hollywood. London: BFI Publishing. Chanter, Tina (2001) Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas. Philadelphia: Penn State Press. Derrida, Jaques (1978) ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, in Writing and Difference. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 79–153. Eberwein, Robert (2007) Armed Forces: Masculinity and Sexuality in the American War Film. New Brunswick; New Jersey; London: Rutgers University Press. Erdinast-Vulcan, Daphna (2008) ‘Between the Face and the Voice: Bakhtin Meets Levinas’, Continental Philosophy Review, 41, 1, 43–58. Fanning, Sarah (2009) ‘For Crying Out Loud: Men, Emotion, and the Screen: Television Refashionings of Rochester and Heathcliff’, paper presented at the 4th Association for Adaptation Conference, London, 24–25 September. Freeman, Carl (2007) ‘Post-hetero-sexuality: John Wayne and the Construction of American Masculinity’, Film International, 25, 16–31. Hand, Seán (ed.) (1989) The Levinas Reader. Oxford; Cambridge: Blackwell. Handleman, Susan (1993) ‘Facing the Other: Levinas, Perelman, and Rosenzweig’, in E. Spolsky (ed.) Summoning: Ideas of the Covenant and Interpretive Theory. New York: State University of New York Press, 47–70. Jeffords, Susan (1994) Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel (1969) [1961] Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ____ (1981) Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence. Translated by A. Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ____ (1989) ‘Ethics as First Philosophy’, in Seán Hand (ed.) The Levinas Reader. Oxford; Cambridge: Blackwell. ____ (2001) ‘Intention, Event and the Other’, in Jill Robbins (ed.), Is It Righteous: Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 140–157. ____ (2006) Humanism of the Other. Urbana; Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Lutz, Tom (2001) Crying: A Natural and Cultural History of Tears. New York: W. W. Norton. Oliver, Kelly (1997) Family Values: Subjects between Nature and Culture. New York; London: Routledge. Plantinga, Carl (1996) ‘The Scene of Empathy and the Human Face on Film’, in Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith (eds) Passionate Views. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 239–56. Robbins, Jill (2001) ‘Introduction: “Après Vous, Monsieur!”’, in Jill Robbins (ed.) Is It Righteous: Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1–23. Slocum, J. David (2006) Hollywood and War: The Film Reader. New York: Routledge. Smith, Murray (1995) Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion and the Cinema. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Stuart, Jan (2006) ‘Flying the Flag for the Reality of War’, Newsday, 20 October 2006.

117

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 117

29/5/13 13:48:37

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

Suid, Lawrence H. (2002) Guts and Glory: The Making of the American Military Image in Film. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press. Waldenfels, Bernard (2002) ‘Levinas and the Face of the Other’, in Simon Chritchley and Robert Bernasconi (eds) The Cambridge Companion to Levinas. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press. Zalta, Edward N. (ed.) (2006) Emmanuel Levinas. Available at: http://plato.stanford. edu/archives/fall2008/entries/levinas/ (accessed 4 January 2011).

118

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 118

29/5/13 13:48:37

Beyond Mimesis War, Memory, and History in Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers ___ holger pötzsch

It is a defining feature of war stories that issues of memory and history strangely intersect. War stories are often the stories of individual soldiers. However, due to the peculiar nature of their content relating to major collective endeavours, suffering and sacrifice, these stories quickly adopt major significance for the self-perception and self-legitimisation of collectives. Initially published as memoires, or historical novels written by men directly involved in the events under consideration, many of the tales are subsequently adapted to screen. As movies ‘based on true stories’, they reach far greater audiences and become important instruments for the social construction of any given collective’s commonly accepted imaginaries of shared pasts. Individual histories of war are thus turned into inherently prescriptive war history, ‘a collective sense of war [that] becomes a pattern of thought, a hard-wired set of expectations and desires that constrain the very ways we think about war’, as Guy Westwell (2006: 5) puts it. What – to use Astrid Erll’s terminology – turns a film about war memories into a memory-making film with relevance for individual and collective historical self-perception? (Erll 2008) How are individual war memories transposed into what Jan and Aleida Assmann (2008) term cultural memory? And what role does historical truth play when eruptive and erratic traumatic memories meet memory politics? This chapter approaches these questions with reference

119

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 119

29/5/13 13:48:37

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

to Clint Eastwood’s two movies about the battle for the Japanese island of Iwo Jima during World War II – Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima (both 2006). It argues that besides functioning as a clear articulation within US historical discourse concerning the events, Flags of Our Fathers in particular resembles a contemplation over memories and representations of war in general. Before approaching this subject, however, some preliminary theoretical and methodological clarifications are necessary.

Mediamemory/Memorymedia How do societies remember their pasts? What are the interrelations between individual and collective memories? What role does film play in commemorations of events long gone? Is the past a construct or can it be revealed as it actually was? In the following essay, I approach such questions and prepare the discussion of Eastwood’s movies with reference to Jan and Aleida Assmann’s theory of cultural memory and Astrid Erll’s methodological considerations regarding the potential impacts of film on memory cultures. Jan and Aleida Assmann distinguish between two forms of collective memory – cultural and communicative memory. Cultural memory refers to an institutionalised, ‘external dimension of human memory’ that consists of collectively sanctioned representations of past events (Assmann 2002: 19).1 It is inherently prescriptive, ‘stable and situation-transcendent’ and functions as a discursive frame impacting processes of individual and collective identity formation (Assmann 2008: 11). Communicative memory, on the other hand, is ‘non-institutional’ and ‘lives in everyday interaction and communication’ (ibid.). It is the memory of small groups and shows a low degree of institutionalisation. Cultural memory is formed through processes of archiving and canonising2 and heavily depends on mediation, while communicative memory entirely relies upon direct contact with witnesses who have been involved in what is to be remembered.3 As such, the war stories circulating amongst groups of veterans originate and reproduce a form of communicative memory, while a war memorial, a war museum, or a war film insert an additional layer of mediation disrupting the direct contact to witnesses. Through these processes of archiving and canonising, the mediated content acquires a stable character – it becomes inherently prescriptive cultural memory establishing the discursive frames for individual as well as collective memory practices. I perceive communicative and cultural memory not as clearly divided, but as coexistent and frequently overlapping. Both are medial externalisations of

120

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 120

29/5/13 13:48:37

Beyond Mimesis

human memory, distinguished merely due to their varying degrees of mediation and institutionalisation. Both forms of memory are interconnected through processes of translation and negotiation, which constantly redraw the boundary between them. Aleida Assmann speaks about a ‘politics of memorizing and forgetting’ and points out that ‘the transition between lived individual memory and artificial cultural memory is … problematic as it entails the danger of distortion, reduction, and instrumentalisation’ (Assmann 2003: 15).4 Eastwood’s two movies under consideration in this chapter constitute thorough comments on precisely such memory politics connecting individual, communicative, and cultural forms of memory concerning the battle on Iwo Jima. How, then, can the role of film in memory processes be conceptualised? Ever since the publication of Bordwell and Carroll’s edited volume PostTheory (Bordwell and Carroll 1996), it has become something of a truism to state that a movie analyst cannot simply unearth the effect of a particular film. Varying forms of spectatorship and divergent contexts of reception have to be taken into account to avoid the impression of assuming a determinant impact of, for instance, a cinematic gaze or apparatus on audiences. Naturally, this also applies to studies aiming at investigating the intricate relations between film, memory, and history. Not every film conveying historical material has an impact on historical discourse and not every fictitious invention of past, present, or even future events remains without such effects. It is, in other words, more than the content of a particular film, its representational strategies, or the stated intentions of its director and production team that make for its ‘constitutive impact’ on political discourse and practice (Neumann and Nexon 2006: 14). What then constitutes a memory-making movie? What transforms a historical narrative into cultural memory? Astrid Erll suggests two methodological moves concerning an analysis of memory media. She suggests a shift of focus ‘from high culture to popular culture and … from time-bound media of storage … to space-bound media of circulation’ (Erll 2008: 389–98). In other words, attention is redirected towards representations which are not necessarily elevated and stored over a long period of time, but which are massively conveyed to, and consumed by, mass audiences over a rather short period of time. Consequently, the impact of these representations follows from continual processes of actualisation of particular contents and their continuous activation in and through particular socio-cultural contexts. Drawing on the well-established distinction between text, intertext, and context (Stam 2002: 203), Erll proposes three different levels of analysis to approach the discursive impact of films about historical events: intra-medial, inter-medial, and pluri-medial (Erll 2008: 390–6).

121

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 121

29/5/13 13:48:37

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

The intra-medial level of analysis invites close readings of a film’s text and asks for instance for the technical and narrative means applied to create plot structures, limit perspective, or achieve authenticity and truth effects. For instance, how do Flags and Letters employ montage techniques? How do the films focalise events? What role does voice-over play? At an inter-medial level the intertextual dimension of a film becomes the object of scrutiny; that is, focus is directed towards how a particular work ‘dynamically orchestrate[s] pre-existing texts and discourses’ within and across medial confinements (Stam 200: 203). Do Flags and Letters remediate competing accounts of the battle? Do they employ original historical footage and to what effect? How do Eastwood’s films relate to the war genre? The intra- and inter-medial levels discussed above do not by themselves transform a film’s historical content into cultural memory. To achieve such memory effects a third, contextual level has to discursively activate this content. Astrid Erll argues that a movie’s intra-medial and inter-medial characteristics merely entail ‘a potential for memory-making’ (Erll 2008: 395). These inherent potentials have to be actualised through a film’s embedding in plurimedial constellations – ‘tight network[s] of other medial representations (and medially represented actions) [that] prepare the ground … lead reception … open up and channel discussion, and thus endow the films with their memorial meaning’ (Erll 2008: 396). How have Flags and Letters been received at the box office and by critics? Are the movies read as articulations relevant to the historical discourse surrounding the events on Iwo Jima? Is there continued public and scholarly interest in their content? Are the films continuously screened, or put to educational purposes? Focus on the contextual, plurimedial dimension of films about history brings to light processes of archiving and canonisation, which make for the film’s discursive impact. This impact transforms a film about history into a medium of cultural memory. At this point, the question arises why focus should be directed towards feature films rather than towards documentaries when assessing the impact of movies on historical discourse. Sturken asserts with reference to Hollywood docudramas that ‘films … retain a powerful cultural currency; they provide popular narratives … that supersede and overshadow documentary images and written texts’ (Sturken 1997: 23). Also Erll makes explicit that fictional media such as novels and feature films have an impact on cultural memory, as they ‘possess the potential to generate and mold images of the past which will be retained by whole generations’ (Erll 2008: 389). According to her, these effects arise independently of the factual accuracy of the depicted events. Jan Assmann provides an argument in a similar direction when asserting that

122

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 122

29/5/13 13:48:37

Beyond Mimesis

historical material stored and conveyed as cultural memory is ‘not of interest due to the objectivity of its account … but due to its foundational significance’ (Assmann 2002: 76).5 In correspondence with Erll and Sturken, he perceives the impact of historical narratives as less dependent on factual accuracy than other factors. However, in contrast to them, Jan Assmann dedicates considerable attention to the mythological elements in collective images of shared pasts, rather than to their mediation and integration into societal contexts, ensuring their continuous circulation and discursive impact. For the present chapter, this mystical element inherent in cultural memory becomes of interest. The heroism of the men presented in Eastwood’s movies is not due to the actual endeavours in battle of the depicted individuals, but emerges as bereft of its historical basis – a mystification, a mere spectacle, but with significant influence on collective attitudes and self-perception. To achieve truth effects and assert a significance for historical discourse, memory-making feature films often employ paratextual markers. Opening statements or tag lines, such as ‘based on an actual event’ or ‘based on a true story’ constitute claims to the authenticity and truthfulness of the depicted incidents. At the same time, however, they enable a solemn dismissal of any critique questioning their historical accuracy. ‘Based on’ as such functions as a disclaimer repudiating scholarly critique with reference to the fictitious character of the account, while ‘true story’/‘actual event’ effectively reasserts its significance and constructs an inherent connection to a preceding real. Consequently, as McCrisken and Pepper put it, ‘historical films should not be seen as transparent windows onto the past but as ideologically contradictory, textual mediations whose forms and representational strategies produce, and are produced by, ever shifting power relations’ (McCrisken and Pepper 2005: 8). Through claims to authenticity and through their integration into plurimedial networks memory-making films give rise to what Landsberg refers to as ‘prosthetic memories’ – second-order memories of events one has not experienced oneself, but which nevertheless assert a significant influence on historical discourse and self-perceptions (Landsberg 2002: 144).6 Flags and Letters provide precisely such prosthetic memories in relation to the battle on Iwo Jima.

War Between Memory and History Erll and Wodianka assert that ‘the memory-making film does not exist as a symbolic structure in itself, but has to be constituted in, and through, social

123

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 123

29/5/13 13:48:38

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

systems’ (Erll and Wodianka 2008: 5). This section asks whether Eastwood’s movies about the Iwo Jima battle are memory-making films and, if so, what constitutes them as such. Are Flags and Letters received as more than fictionalised accounts of a battle long gone? How can their discursive impact as memory-making films be conceptualised? Eastwood’s Flags sets out to retell the story behind the famous photograph taken by Joe Rosenthal showing six US servicemen raising a flag on the Japanese island of Iwo Jima on 23 February 1945. The film is based on a book of the same title written by James Bradley (Bradley and Powers 2000), the son of one of the flag raisers. He compiled interviews with veterans and other material to reconstruct the event and its political aftermath. Eastwood’s Letters tells the story of the battle on the island from the perspective of the defending Japanese soldiers. This second film predominantly focuses on the battle and is inspired by the book Picture Letters from the Commander In Chief (Kuribayashi 2006), a collection of illustrated letters to his family by the Japanese general Kuribayashi, who was in charge of the defence of the island. At an intra-medial and inter-medial level, Eastwood’s screen adaptations reveal their inherent potential to acquire the function of memory-making films. Their theme, narrative strategy, and reliance upon historical documents such as eyewitness accounts or original footage as sources make Flags and Letters relevant to contemporary US historical discourse. Eastwood remediates historical documents and the preceding books to create convincing images of the battle for the tiny volcanic island and its political aftermath. In Flags, for instance, the precise filmic re-enactment of historical footage – such as a photograph of President Truman in his office looking at a painting depicting the raising of the flag together with the involved soldiers, original documentaries covering the landing operation on Iwo Jima, or the image of the flag raising on Mount Suribachi itself – has the effect of creating historical relevance and maintaining an impression of authenticity. These potentials inherent in the intra- and inter-medial dimensions of Flags and Letters to function as memory-making films are activated through their embedding in pluri-medial networks ensuring the continued circulation, availability, and discursive impact of Eastwood’s work. Viable sources to assess these impacts are, for instance, performance at the box office and reception by critics. Flags and Letters performed reasonably well at the box office. At a combined cost of $74 million the two movies brought in roughly $174 million worldwide. Due to its low production costs of $19 million, Letters stood for the lion’s share of these revenues.7 The presented numbers indicate that

124

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 124

29/5/13 13:48:38

Beyond Mimesis

the movies reached a considerable audience both in the US and abroad, in particular Japan. Their contents have been widely accessible to audiences over a considerable period of time and continue to be available. Both movies were enthusiastically received by critics. Many reviewers favourably distinguished Flags and Letters from previous films about World War II. Morris, for instance, sets them up against the Hollywood war genre when distinguishing them from the ‘World War II-glorification industry … [springing] up from the likes of Spielberg, Hampton Sides and the late Stephen Ambrose’ (Morris 2007: 99). Clearly situating Flags and Letters within a plurimedial constellation implying the movies’ relevance as memory-making films, Morris goes on to assert that they form ‘a sort of revisionist diptych, a radical re-imagining of the Second World War and repudiation of the Spielbergized version of the war that has dominated the American imagination ever since the release of Saving Private Ryan’ (Morris 2007: 97). Also, Hunter in the Washington Post compares Flags to other contemporary Hollywood reenactments of major World War II battles and praises Eastwood’s film for its soberness in dealing with a potentially aggrandising moment of US war history. He states that The movie [Flags of Our Fathers] shows the same high degree of technical accuracy in terms of weapons and uniforms as ‘Saving Private Ryan’ and ‘Band of Brothers’ … But Eastwood has a different agenda: While ‘Private Ryan’ gave us battle as narrative – defining us and them, taking us through tactical maneuver and the search for fire superiority, then climaxing in battle’s victory – Eastwood conjures battle as weather … There’s no coherence or satisfying wind-up … his set-piece battle starts and then it stops; there’s no ‘climax’ where a gallant major leads troops up a draw and flanks the enemy. (Hunter 2006)

This quote indicates a reception of the battle scenes in Flags as more realistic than in competing movies. It is interesting to note that precisely the lack of narrative elements providing battles with a certain plot structure is here acclaimed as improving a realism, which significantly increases the weight of Eastwood’s representations on historical discourse. Foundas provides an argument in the same direction and considers Eastwood’s movies on Iwo Jima a ‘stripping-away of mythology’ and calls them a ‘morally complex deconstruction of the Greatest Generation’ (Foundas 2006). Directly relating Flags and Letters to US historical discourse and issues of memory, he further states that ‘what Eastwood really does is [to] call

125

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 125

29/5/13 13:48:38

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

into question an entire way of reading history’, thus emphasising the same revisionist potentials regarding remediated imageries concerning World War II as does Morris (Morris 2009) or Rozen, when he remarks in relation to Letters: ‘It took Eastwood, a bona fide American icon, to break through years of Hollywood war-movie clichés and build a bridge to the other side’ (Rozen 2009). More than one reviewer connected Eastwood’s Iwo Jima movies to present day political issues. They attested to the timeliness of Flags and Letters in commenting upon implicit propaganda in the US concerning the war in Iraq,8 and in raising ‘pointed questions about how war heroes, and wars, are packaged and sold’ (Ansen 2006). As Corliss observes in Time Magazine, ‘the movie [Flags] is about the real theater of war: how a battle campaign morphed into a public relations campaign and, implicitly, how later generations of politicians have used symbols to sell a war’ (Corliss 2006). This theme, Turan suggests in a piece in the Los Angeles Times, ‘resonates most pointedly today’ (Turan 2006). One scene in particular clearly reveals how pluri-medial networks constitute a socio-political context that determines the reception of Flags. When the US fleet leaves for Iwo Jima, soldiers mass on deck to witness the low passing of fighter planes between their vessels. One of the soldiers falls over board and a group of young men is depicted laughing and joking at him, obviously assuming him to be in no peril. Until one of their comrades suddenly comprehends the situation and brings it to the point by stating the obvious: ‘They won’t stop. They can’t.’ A sobering expression spreads on the faces of the young men as they watch their fellow soldier drift out of sight, while the huge armada uninterruptedly continues on its way. ‘So much for “no man left behind”’, is the final disenchanting remark of a young man before a cut ends the sequence. This last sentence is interesting precisely because is does not make sense in an isolated World War II discourse. In this war the question of leaving anyone on the battlefield, or not, was not a prominent issue – in today’s wars, however, it is. As Wong points out, after September 11, 2001 ‘[a]n increased emphasis on bringing back KIAs [killed in action] seems to have swept over the US military’ (Wong 2005). The commitment to ‘leave no man behind’ is part of the warrior ethos – four principles guiding US soldiers’ behaviour in battle (Burlas 2004). In 2003, under the aegis of Donald Rumsfeld, the ethos was incorporated into the Army’s official soldier’s creed – a set of beliefs and codes of conduct included in all military training, and important for all US military personnel. The process culminated in the issue of a ‘warrior ethos dog tag’9 to

126

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 126

29/5/13 13:48:38

Beyond Mimesis

be worn together with a soldier’s identification tag (Wong 2005: 613–614). As a consequence, even though the commitment to leave no man behind has been present to a varying degree throughout all wars conducted by the US, after 2003 it ‘change[d] from an unwritten norm to a codified statement’ known and binding to every single soldier (Wong 2005: 614). It is remarkable that the young World War II soldier in Flags critically quotes a phrase he cannot be particularly familiar with in this context. In addition, as pointed out in many discussion forums concerning the scene in Eastwood’s film, the statement is not entirely true.10 In each armada, the US navy deployed special vessels to pick up personnel and equipment that had fallen overboard. Taking this into consideration, it becomes apparent that the meaningfulness of this scene cannot be assessed on the basis of what Erll terms an intra-medial level – the discourse constituted by the movie itself. However, when taking the socio-political context within which Eastwood’s movies operate into account, the sequence makes sense. When received by today’s war movie audiences, who have been primed on genre movies such as Behind Enemy Lines (John Moore, 2001), Black Hawk Down (Ridley Scott, 2001), and We Were Soldiers (Randall Wallace, 2002), which all invoke the warrior ethos and explicitly emphasise the intrinsic commitment of military leaders to bring all their boys home – dead or alive – this recontextualised remark unfolds its disruptive potentials. Flags critically targets a Hollywood movie discourse that became a factor even in news broadcasts concerning the present-day war in Iraq. In a chapter with the telling header Saving Private Lynch, Andersen for instance illustrates some of the intertextual connections between the news story constructed around the faked rescue of Private Jessica Lynch and the widely received military mantra to ‘leave no one behind’ emanating from parts of contemporary Hollywood (Andersen 2006: 237–8). Flags and Letters matter as articulations within US historical and political discourse. The potentials inherent in their contents, representational strategies and intertextual references concerning a major World War II battle are subsequently activated through the movies’ embedding into pluri-medial networks, which effectuate their impact as memory-making films. Flags and Letters have been extensively and positively reviewed. They are widely read as providing a sober and historically correct image of the battle on Iwo Jima, convincingly debunking myth and propaganda. This makes them objects of growing scholarly interest, too. The present anthology, for instance, can be read as both confirming evidence of, and as a means to actively reproduce, the function of Flags and Letters as memory-making films.

127

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 127

29/5/13 13:48:38

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

Beyond Mimesis: War, Memory, and History in Flags of Our Fathers Having established Flags and Letters as memory-making films with relevance to US historical discourse regarding the battle for Iwo Jima, I will now turn my attention to the role memory plays in the first of the two movies. In other words, the primary concern of this section is not the way Flags itself constitutes cultural memory, but how translation processes interconnecting individual, communicative, and cultural forms of memory are staged in the movie. Do memories provide access to factual preceding pasts? Are the communicative memories of witnesses more reliable than politically sanctioned and massively mediated cultural versions of an event? What roles do uncontrollably erupting traumatic memories play? Can past wars (and the past in general) adequately be represented at all? Already in the opening sequence Flags establishes the fleeting boundaries between past and present as one of its major themes. A nightmarish dream sequence shows a US soldier in World War II uniform stumbling through a barren volcanic landscape. He hears distant voices of wounded comrades crying for help and desperately attempts to locate them, but to no avail. The camera zooms in on the young soldier’s face and a cut leads the audience to an old man awakening from a nightmare in today’s USA. This sequence, which can be read as a prologue, establishes the varied and intricate interconnections between past and present as a pivotal point of Eastwood’s first movie on the Iwo Jima battle. It asserts the significance of often uncontrollable and haunting individual memories of past experiences and introduces what Schubart in this volume refers to as ‘traumatic time’ as a contrast to commonly accepted and culturally sanctioned imageries of a shared past. This opening scene makes apparent that Eastwood’s Flags not only critically comments on generic Hollywood re-enactments of World War II but also offers a contemplation of what it means to commemorate and represent the past in more general terms. It can be argued that the movie consistently ponders the relation between individual, communicative, and cultural memory, and that it can be read as a testament to the impossibility of accurately representing past events. Essentially, Flags is about the social life of an image. The movie sets out to tell the tale(s) behind the making of the famous photograph by Joe Rosenthal showing six Marines raising ‘Old Glory’ on Mount Suribachi on 23 February 1945. This image became an icon of US victory. Its various remediations and re-enactments as, for instance, paintings or monuments played a major role

128

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 128

29/5/13 13:48:38

Beyond Mimesis

in the Seventh War Bond Drive to ensure the financial assets necessary to continue the war effort. In spite of the fact that it was later accused of being a set-up, the image continues to assert its powerful presence even today (for instance in the form of the official Marine Corps War Memorial). The raising of the flag on the fifth day of the battle was, and on some occasions still is, perceived as the moment of US victory on Iwo Jima. However, the fighting went on for another thirty days, and as the voice-over by Severance, a US captain, remarks in Flags: ‘Within a few weeks from when that picture was taken half of the men in it were dead.’ The remaining three men were shipped off to the United States and came to serve on the Seventh War Bond Drive. Touring the country, holding speeches and again and again re-enacting the flag raising event, they became celebrated war heroes and living icons of what was widely perceived as victory. The men themselves, however, retained different memories of the events on the tiny volcanic island and had an image of themselves and their deeds distinct from the official version. In many ways, Flags sets out to provide the story behind the story of the flag raising. It questions and challenges established historical truths and directs attention towards the discrepancies and tensions between individual memories and their political instrumentalisation. Flags exemplifies processes of translation and negotiation where the flag raisers’ individual and communicative memories are transferred into inherently foundational cultural memory serving the political purpose of raising funds for a continued war effort. In the process of storing, remediating, and circulating the photograph, historical facts as well as individually varying accounts of what actually happened became of minor significance. This is nicely illustrated in Flags when Bud Gerber from the treasury department, who is responsible for organising the Seventh War Bond Drive, first meets John ‘Doc’ Bradley, Ira Hayes, and Rene Gagnon – the three surviving flag raisers. During the ensuing conversation, he is informed that one person in the picture had been misnamed, that the flag raised by the three men was a replacement flag, and that the event happened on day 5 of a 35-day campaign. Bud Gerber’s reaction is indicative of the decreasing influence communicative group memory exerts on the emergent memory politics surrounding the picture: ‘I don’t give a shit! You raised the flag and that’s the story we are selling boys.’ Some time later he explains the intrinsic logic behind the instrumentalisation of memories for political purposes: People in the streets, they took a look at that picture and it gave them hope … It said we can win … we are winning this war … we just need you to dig a

129

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 129

29/5/13 13:48:38

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

little deeper … But you [John, Ira, and Rene] don’t want to take that money. You want to explain about this person and that flag ... If we admit we made a mistake that will be all everyone will talk about and that will be that.

In other words, historical facts and the individual memories of the three men retain little significance. The image matters as myth. Not its objectivity or historical accuracy but its capacity to simplify complicated issues, to engage and motivate is presented as crucial. As Severance puts it in a voice-over: ‘Everyone who saw that picture believed it meant victory. That’s all they wanted to know. Victory!’ Eastwood crystallises these processes into the idea of the three surviving soldiers as heroes. Their individual recollections of traumatic experiences are drowned in the publicly reproduced spectacles of heroism and victory. Flags illustrates how their communicative memories of sufferings, pain, and death are dissected, mediated, and selectively archived to become cultural memory. With their iconised hero-selves turning into the medium of a message utterly foreign to them, the individuals behind the façade constantly struggle to bring their own experiences into correspondence with the officially represented historico-mythical idea of the events on Iwo Jima. ‘I can’t take them calling me a hero’, Ira Hayes at one point says during the bond tour and bursts out in tears. His statement clearly reveals the vast discrepancy between public representation and individual recollections of war experiences. Hayes is celebrated as a hero, but at the same time retains his own memories of less heroic incidents. ‘All I did’, he continues, ‘was try not to get shot. Some of the things I saw done … Some of the things I did. They weren’t things to be proud of.’ To drive home these inherent contradictions between communicative and cultural forms of memory, Eastwood employs a peculiar form of montage to interconnect three different time lines in the movie:11 the first is a frame story set in today’s USA; the second is the narrative of events immediately before and after the flag raising, stretching from training in Camp Tawara in 1944 to Ira’s return to the battlefield during the war bond drive; and the third is the sudden disparate flashbacks of Doc Bradley and Ira Hayes. The frame story is about John Bradley’s son, James Bradley, who begins to retrace his father’s wartime experiences after the latter had died from a heart attack. It is largely composed of interviews with veterans12 and scenes showing James Bradley writing. The frame story repeatedly interrupts and intersects the realistic re-enactments of battle and bond tour, constantly commenting upon and annotating the presented images. These disruptions of a linear

130

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 130

29/5/13 13:48:38

Beyond Mimesis

storyline work against a complete immersion of audiences into the universe of the movie. A typical sequence starts with a dwelling medium shot on James Bradley and an interview partner. A cut then leads the audience back in time to a re-enactment of the story told. The comments of the veteran, however, are not interrupted through the cut but repeatedly continue as a voice-over. By these means, Eastwood provides the veterans who had been involved in the battle with the privileged position of a quasi-omniscient narrator of, and commentator on, the events depicted in the movie. This technique allows their voices to guide audience perception and can be read as an efficient strategy to reinstitute a form of communicative memory – the voices of direct witnesses – as determinant of historical narratives. This is nicely illustrated in a scene where Ira, Doc, and Rene inspect the papier mâché mountain they are supposed to climb at the Soldier Field celebratory event, while a voice-over by veteran Severance ponders the feelings of the individual soldiers: ‘Your [James Bradley’s] dad and the others knew what they had done and what they had not done … It was hard enough being called a hero for saving someone’s life. But being called a hero for putting up a pole?’ Through the frame story, the idea of heroes and heroism as constructs of cultural memory in opposition to communicative recollections is established as the core of Eastwood’s first film on the Iwo Jima events. James Bradley is put into a position to assert this in the end of the movie through his comments on a scene where his father and other young American soldiers swim in the sea at Iwo Jima after the flag raising event: ‘Maybe there are no heroes … Heroes are something we create, we need. A way for us to understand the incomprehensible … If we truly wish to honor these men, we should remember them the way they really were.’ This sentence seems to imply that the communicative memory of the veterans might retain a true image of the events and the persons involved in them. The assertions made so far open up the question as to whether Eastwood’s work rests on the implicit assumption that individual recollections of past events stand in a closer relationship to historical truths than the mediated cultural version of it. Is his movie an attempt to renegotiate and retranslate a defining moment of US war history by setting communicative memories up against a cultural one to construct a new master narrative of the events based on different sources? Two arguments can be provided against such a reading: firstly, Eastwood presents individual memories as inherently traumatic and uncontrollable and, secondly, he consistently raises doubts concerning the reliability of

131

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 131

29/5/13 13:48:38

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

communicative group memories as alternative historical sources. Firstly, the re-enactments of the battle and bond tour are interrupted not only by a constantly recurring frame story but also by sudden, disparate and chaotic flashback scenes which provide access to what Schubart in this volume terms ‘traumatic time’. These scenes are focalised through either Ira Hayes or John ‘Doc’ Bradley and provide access to the horrible things they had experienced on Iwo Jima. In contrast to communicative recollections, these suppressed memories cannot be actively brought to emerge, but break forth uncontrollably when triggered by external events. Therefore, they acquire a fleeting and haunting character that defies representation as cultural memory. In Flags, Eastwood brings forth these traumatic pasts to disrupt the perfect spectacle of the bond tour. The camera eye might, for instance, zoom in on Doc Bradley watching red hot strawberry sauce melt away an ice-cream remake of the flag raising, or on Ira’s face while he is climbing a papier mâché remake of Mount Suribachi, before a subsequent cut brings the audience back to the traumatic time of battle and shows some terrifying incident the soldiers had to witness. By these means intrinsically haunting and suppressed individual memories are brought to question and counter both communicative and cultural memories concerning the events on Iwo Jima and, indeed, concerning war in general. The unrepresentability of trauma becomes indicative of the unrepresentability of war. Secondly, the internal logic of Flags also deconstructs the reliability of communicative group memories as valid sources for historical accounts in showing their deep engraining in various forms of mystification and selfdeception. The associative combination of the story told by a veteran, Gust, concerning the overarching strategic significance of the battle on Iwo Jima with the life stories of Ira Hayes and Rene Gagnon can be read as indicative of this intention. In an interview with James Bradley, Gust tells the audience that ‘this island [Iwo Jima] saved a lot of lives’. The actor then lowers his gaze seemingly to avoid the eyes of the enquiring Bradley and repeats with a lower voice, as if attempting to reassure himself, ‘a lot of lives’. Subsequent sequences then show, firstly, Ira Hayes speaking at the Congress of American Indians, where he claims that ‘because of the war white men will understand Indians a lot better and it’s going to be a better world’, and, secondly, Rene Gagnon, who tries to take advantage of the job offers he had received during his time as hero of the bond tour. All three scenes can be read as examples of individual attempts to provide meaningfulness to the sacrifices and sufferings endured

132

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 132

29/5/13 13:48:38

Beyond Mimesis

on Iwo Jima, and become indicative of the impact of war myths on individuals. As such, Ira’s conviction and Rene’s hopes mirror the belief of Gust in the military necessity of the attack. Eastwood then goes on to tell the further life stories of Ira Hayes and Rene Gagnon. Ira is depicted as continually suffering under the same racism against Native Americans as before the war, and Rene is ultimately forced to accept the truth of him being ‘yesterday’s hero’, as the voice-over comment by James Bradley puts it. Ira dies poor and wretched while Rene ‘spends the rest of his life as a janitor’. This crushing of the hopes Ira had voiced at the Congress of American Indians and the consistent failure of Rene to cash in on his status as a hero of Iwo Jima directly comment upon the assumption by veteran Gust that ‘this island saved a lot of lives’, effectively revealing it as just another layer of mystification. As, for instance, Morris points out, the military significance and strategic importance of the Iwo Jima battle is a debated issue (Morris 2005: 107). Eastwood’s associative combination of Gust’s belief in the historical importance of the battle with the failed life stories and frustrated expectations of Hayes and Gagnon can be read as a conscious undermining of the historical discourse providing the sacrifice and sufferings endured by the men throughout the battle on Iwo Jima with retrospective justification. Instead, and in particular through the presentation of the Japanese perspective on the events in Letters, the battle is made to emerge as meaningless slaughter where good and evil, heroes and villains, truth and myth, and memory and trauma are all meshed together to create an indistinguishable whole. ‘We like things straight and simple: good and evil, heroes and villains’, Severance proclaims in a voice-over. Viewed together Flags and Letters consistently deny us this certainty. In the end, it appears that neither individual nor communicative nor cultural forms of memory are about historical truth. Flags lets all forms of memory emerge as equally mystified and unreliable reconstructions of the past. Taking this idea into consideration, it can be argued that what is up for debate in Eastwood’s movies is not only a particularly aggrandising version of an important moment in US World War II history but also the issue of representing wars in general. This said, the question emerges of whether the battle on Iwo Jima, or indeed any battle, ever can be represented as it actually took place. I argue against this position. It is impossible to represent past wars as they actually took place – to overcome and nullify the gap between event and its later representation – precisely because there is no univocal event any such master narrative could ever be based on. The only thing there is are multifarious and often

133

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 133

29/5/13 13:48:38

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

competing individual and collective recollections and reconstructions of it, which are all based on different perspectives, selection processes and determinant implicit assumptions. As Bleiker points out, representation is inherently aesthetic (Bleiker 2001: 509–33). Rather than achieving a complete mimesis of a preceding real it is about making productive the necessary discrepancy between represented and representation. Eastwood’s Iwo Jima project constitutes precisely such an aesthetic approach to representing the past. Instead of privileging and objectifying one particular perspective, Eastwood undermines and disrupts any narrative constructed around the event. As such, the communicative memory of involved soldiers is made to counter official culturally mediated versions of the battle and is itself challenged by traumatic revenant memories, a US perspective is destabilised and questioned through the introduction of a competing Japanese point of view, and historical footage is unveiled as framed and deeply engrained in politics and mystification. Instead of replacing cultural memory with a supposedly more accurate or authentic communicative memory, Eastwood’s Flags (in combination with Letters) plays out the various forms of memory against each other. This deliberate unwillingness to align to one particular historical narrative, to privilege one particular account, reinstitutes audiences as active producers of meanings in response to texts that appear deliberately open and composed of many different voices. Instead of immersing the viewer in a mere spectacle of sight and sound claiming ‘to give you the real thing’, Eastwood deliberately challenges the spectator and precludes any settling on one particular master narrative. This conscious problematising of historical representation is beautifully illustrated in the end of Flags. Accompanying the end credits are black-andwhite photographs taken during the battle in 1945. Although this form of remediation is seemingly merely applied to create an ‘ultimate authentication effect’13 (Erll 2008: 150) – to ultimately confirm the closeness of the filmic re-enactment to the proceeding original – the thoughts presented in this chapter invite a different reading of why Eastwood chose to include this historical footage. In the context presented above, rather than underlining the successful mimicry of Flags, this material serves to raise awareness of the movie as a re-enactment. The original photographs in the end remind the viewer of the fact that the movie itself is a construction, a re-enactment engrained in perspective and consciously composed. At the same time, the story told regarding the doubtful truth value of Rosenthal’s flag raising image casts significant doubts over the validity of photographs as historical sources. As such, instead of reconfirming each other’s proximity to preceding historical

134

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 134

29/5/13 13:48:38

Beyond Mimesis

events, the re-enacted images of the movie and the original war footage challenge, question and comment upon each other. In the end it remains up to the audience to combine them into one of various possible meaningful wholes.

Conclusion In war movies, issues such as the inherent constructedness of the past, the unreliability of individual as well as collective memories, and the inaccessibility of traumatic pasts often remain undercommunicated and tend to be drowned in mind-blowing attempts to exactly recreate the carnage of battles long gone. Applying Bleiker’s terminology to an analysis of film, it can be claimed that, in traditional war movies such as Black Hawk Down, a mimetic approach to representation claims precedence over an aesthetic one (Bleiker 2001: 511–514). In other words, it is not the inevitable gap between representation and represented that becomes the focal point of war films, but the conflation of the two and the eradication of the gap that becomes the unstated aim. More often than not, war movies are commended for representing past battles as they actually took place, for retaining complete memories of the event and revealing and conveying history as it actually happened. Flags and Letters reveal a different perspective on this issue. In spite of the fact that both movies effectively function as memory-making films with documentable impact on US historical discourse, in particular Flags also contemplates the question of memory and commemoration in general. Representations of the past emerge as unreliable and deeply engrained in mystification and perspective. As such, instead of simply providing audiences with an allegedly more accurate representation of the battle on Iwo Jima, Eastwood productively plays out different versions of the event against each other. This strategy of contrasting individual with cultural forms of memory, and of contrasting a US and a Japanese point of view, serves to activate audiences and to incite critical thinking. Instead of passively receiving a ready-made and objectified version of the past, spectators must struggle in a landscape littered with different and competing fragments of a past that more resembles a shattered mirror refracting strangely deformed and disparate images. In Eastwood’s two Iwo Jima movies the war and the past in general acquire a fleeting character. They appear multi-vocal, polyphonous and, ultimately, dependent on the eye that sees.

135

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 135

29/5/13 13:48:39

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

Notes

1

All translations from German are by the author. The German original reads: ‘Außendimension des menschlichen Gedächtnisses.’ 2 See for instance Aleida Assmann (2008: 97). 3 Erll and Rigney point out that all memory is dependent on some form of mediation. They postulate a shift of focus in memory studies from ‘sites’ to ‘dynamics’, implying a remediated character of all forms of memorising. See Erll and Rigney (2009: 3). In my understanding communicative memory is distinguished from cultural memory through its degree of mediation and availability to wider audiences. 4 The German original reads: ‘Der Übergang vom lebendigen individuellen zum künstlichen kulturellen Gedächtnis ist … problematisch, weil er die Gefahr der Verzerrung, der Reduktion, der Instrumentalisierung von Erinnerung mit sich bringt.’ 5 The German original reads: ‘Ihr Interesse verdankt sie nicht der Objektivität der Darstellung … sondern ihrer fundierenden Bedeutung.’ 6 See also Rikke Schubart, ‘Eastwood and the Enemy’, in this volume. 7 Numbers accessed at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0418689/business (Flags) and http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0498380/business (Letters), 6 May 2009. 8 See Morris (2007) or Brian D. Johnson (2006). 9 Critics pointed towards the increased aggressiveness of the warrior’s ethos compared to the post-Vietnam soldier’s creed. See for instance Fisk (2006) and Baxter (2006). 10 See for instance: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0418689/faq#.2.1.3. 11 Glenn Man in the article ‘Clint Eastwood’s Postclassical Multiple Narratives of Iwo Jima’ (in this volume) identifies six intersecting time frames in Flags. Only the three mentioned here are of direct relevance to my enquiry. 12 All the interviewed veterans are played by actors. 13 The German original reads ‘einen “ultimativen Authentisierungseffekt”’.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Andersen, Robin (2006) A Century of Media, A Century of War. New York: Peter Lang Publishers. Ansen, David (2006) ‘Inside the Hero Factory’, Newsweek, 23 October 2006, 70. Assmann, Aleida (2003) Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses. Munich: C. H. Beck. ____ (2008) ‘Canon and Archive’, in Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (eds) Cultural Memory Studies: An Interdisciplinary Handbook. Berlin; New York: Walter de Gruyter, 97–108.

136

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 136

29/5/13 13:48:39

Beyond Mimesis

Assmann, Jan (2002) Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen. Munich: C. H. Beck. ____ (2008) ‘Communicative and Cultural Memory’, in Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (eds) Cultural Memory Studies: An Interdisciplinary Handbook. Berlin; New York: Walter de Gruyter, 109–118. Baxter, Sarah (2006) ‘US Army’s Kill-Kill Ethos Under Fire’, Times online, 24 September 2006, available at: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0924-02.htm (accessed 9 April 2013). Bleiker, Roland (2001) ‘The Aesthetic Turn in International Political Theory’, Millennium Journal of International Studies, 30 (autumn 2001), 509–33. Bordwell, David and Noël Carroll (1996) (eds) Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Bradley, James and Ron Powers (2000) Flags of Our Fathers. New York: Bantam Books. Burlas, Joe (2004) ‘Warrior Ethos, Not Just for Combat Soldiers’, Army News Service, 13 January 2004, available at: http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/ news/2004/01/mil-040113-usa05.htm (accessed 10 July 2009). Corliss, Richard (2006) ‘On Duty, Honor and Celebrity’, Time.Com, 15 October, available at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1546332,00.html (accessed 6 May 2009). Erll, Astrid (2008) ‘Literature, Film and the Mediality of Cultural Memory’, in Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (eds) Cultural Memory Studies: An Interdisciplinary Handbook. Berlin; New York: Walter de Gruyter, 389–98. Erll, Astrid and Ann Rigney (2009) ‘Introduction: Cultural Memory and Its Dynamics’, in Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney (eds) Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory. Berlin; New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1–13. Erll, Astrid and Stephanie Wodianka (2008) ‘Einleitung: Phänomenologie und Methodologie des Erinnerungsfilms’, in Astrid Erll and Stephanie Wodianka (eds) Film und kulturelle Erinnerung: Plurimediale Konstellationen. Berlin; New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1–20. Fisk, Robert, (2006) ‘The US Military and Its Cult of Cruelty’, The Independent, commentators section, 16 September, available at: http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/ commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-the-us-military-and-its-cult-of-cruelty-416202.html (accessed 9 April 2013). Foundas, Scott (2006) ‘Print the Legend’, Village Voice, 10 October, available at: http:// www.villagevoice.com/2006-10-10/film/print-the-legend/full/ (accessed 9 April 2013). Hunter, Stephen (2006) ‘“Flags of Our Fathers” Salutes the Men Behind the Moment’, Washington Post, 10 October, available at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2006/10/19/AR2006101901968.html (accessed 6 May 2009). Johnson, Brian D. (2006) ‘So Guys, Let’s Count Up the Oscars’, Maclean’s, 30 October, available at ProQuest (accessed 6 May 2009). Kuribayashi, Tadamichi (2006) Picture Letters from the Commander in Chief. San Francisco: VIZ Media. Landsberg, Alison (2002) ‘Prosthetic Memory: The Ethics and Politics of Memory in an

137

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 137

29/5/13 13:48:39

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

Age of Mass Culture’, in Paul Grainge (ed.), Memory and Popular Film. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 144–62. McCrisken, Trevor and Andrew Pepper (2005) American History and Contemporary Hollywood Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Morris, David J. (2007) ‘The Image as History: Clint Eastwood’s Unmaking of an American Myth’, Virginia Quarterly Review, 8, 95–107. Neumann, Iver B. and Daniel H. Nexon (2006) ‘Introduction: Harry Potter and the Study of World Politics’, in Iver B. Neumann and Daniel H. Nexon (eds) Harry Potter and International Relations. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2–25. Rozen, Leah (2006) ‘Movies’, People, 8 January, available at: ProQuest (accessed 6 May 2009). Stam, Robert (2000) Film Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Sturken, Marita (1997) Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering. Berkeley: University of California Press. Turan, Kenneth (2006) ‘Flags of Our Fathers’, Los Angeles Times, 20 October, available at: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/cl-et-flags20oct20,1,879684.story (accessed 9 April 2013). Westwell, Guy (2006) War Cinema: Hollywood on the Front Line. London; New York: Wallflower Press. Wong, Leonard (2005) ‘Leave No Man Behind: Recovering America’s Fallen Warriors’, Armed Forces & Society, 31 (summer 2005), 599–622.

138

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 138

29/5/13 13:48:39

Clint Eastwood’s Postclassical Multiple Narratives of Iwo Jima ___ glenn man

Clint Eastwood’s two-pronged cinematic treatment of the battle for Iwo Jima during World War II stirringly illustrates his flexibility and progressiveness as a classical Hollywood filmmaker as he engages certain postclassical and postmodern elements of the multiple narrative film, plying them uncompromisingly in Flags of Our Fathers (2006), while assimilating them into the classical mode in Letters from Iwo Jima (2006). This should come as no surprise to Eastwood fans, since as early as 1992 his western Unforgiven not only challenged genre expectations, but also spectacularly displayed such seemingly postmodern elements as parody, reflexivity, intertextuality, ambiguity, and gender and racial issues. Eastwood continues to challenge the parameters of the classical narrative tradition through the multi-protagonist narratives of his more recent films, not only in the diptych on the battle for Iwo Jima, but also in Mystic River (2003), which immediately preceded the World War II films. The term ‘postclassical’, like ‘postmodern’, to which it is closely aligned, describes both a period and the characteristics associated with that period. In film history, the postclassical encompasses the time since 1960, following the breakup of the Hollywood studios, which had developed a mode of cinematic narrative that focuses on one or two protagonists and employs a linear progression based on a cause-and-effect process, strongly motivated

139

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 139

29/5/13 13:48:39

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

by the psychology of character, reaching a more or less satisfying resolution, and presented by the continuity style that is minimally self-reflexive and that enables temporal and spatial coherence. Postclassical developments after 1960 would challenge this classical mode either as an alternative to it or as an assimilation of new ways of storytelling within the classical framework. These developments include the Hollywood Renaissance auteur-driven films of the late 1960s and 1970s, which drew on the styles and themes of the European art film, revised traditional genres, and challenged ideology; the rise of the blockbuster in the late 1970s and 1980s that emphasised spectacle, special effects, and a fragmentation of narrative; and the recent phenomenon of the multiple/complex narrative film that owes its impetus to the early 1990s twin influences of Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (1993) and Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994) and has become a global movement in cinematic narration.1 Eastwood’s Iwo Jima films follow in the wake of this surge in multiple narratives, whose characteristics are as varied as the numerous ways one can construct, manipulate, and complicate stories that have several central characters and complex time schemes. But a number of distinct characteristics have emerged with varying degrees of emphasis in individual films: multiple narrative lines aligned with multiple protagonists; a pliable ordered structure that can generate jumbled chronologies, forking paths, parallel worlds, or alternative pasts and futures; the blurring of the divide between past, present, and future times; chance and coincidences that play a part in the intersections or non-intersections of the characters that may or may not have fateful consequences; the role of destiny in human lives; an environment or ‘reality’ that is unstable and contingent; the repetition of events from different points of view; thematic clusters of imagery and details; the connect or disconnect among the characters, setting up situations and motifs of separation/alienation or bonding/community; an ending that may be ambiguous, open-ended, enigmatic, or even mysterious; and a reflexivity that may include pastiche or parody. These characteristics and their variations link such disparate contemporary films as Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Trois couleurs (Three Colours trilogy, 1993–1994); Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express (Chung Hing sam lam, 1994); and the Alejandro González Iñárritu trilogy Amores Perros (2000), 21 Grams (2003), and Babel (2006).2 Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima both exhibit several characteristics of the multiple narrative film. Flags of Our Fathers employs a fractured chronology, repetition of events, and the collapse of time into an ever-present moment, which are signature marks of several multiple narrative films; and it shares with Letters from Iwo Jima a deep sense of contingency,

140

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 140

29/5/13 13:48:39

Clint Eastwood’s Postclassical Multiple Narratives of Iwo Jima

the fateful consequences of intersecting lives, the paradoxical connect/disconnect among characters, and an ending more sobering and reflective than the typical upbeat Hollywood finale. However, earlier in Eastwood’s career, Mystic River’s (2003) own multiple narrative characteristics had prepared the way for their full-blown treatment in the Iwo Jima films.

Eastwood’s Multiple Narratives: Mystic River as Prelude Mystic River presents its multiple stories within a linear framework that doubles back on itself through flashbacks and character memory to suggest a circularity that subverts progression and prepares for the full-blown jumbled chronology of Flags of Our Fathers. Meanwhile, it shares with both Iwo Jima films the characteristics of contingency and the fatefulness of intersecting lives that are central to the contemporary multiple narrative film. Mystic River’s three central characters, Jimmy Markham (Sean Penn), Sean Devine (Kevin Bacon), and Dave Boyle (Tim Robbins), are former childhood friends in an Irish neighbourhood in Boston who have gone their separate ways as adults, but are forever haunted by Dave’s abduction by two paedophiles posing as police officers when the three boys were playing a game of street hockey. Dave was molested repeatedly over four days in a cellar before he escaped. Twenty-five years later, another crime, the murder of Jimmy’s nineteen-year-old daughter Katie, fatefully reunites the three former friends. Jimmy owns a grocery store, but is also a small-time hood, who had served two years in prison after one of his men, ‘Just’ Ray Harris, ratted on him. After he got out of prison, he executed ‘Just’ Ray in revenge. Dave, now a handyman with a son of his own, had been in the same bar with Katie the night she was killed and had come home later that night covered with blood and with bruises and cuts on his right hand. He becomes one of the prime suspects in the murder investigation. Sean, now a homicide detective, is the one who investigates the case. Mystic River employs the classical narrative strategy of the crime-detective genre: it utilises flashforwards to create gaps (what were Dave’s actions after he left the bar; how did Katie die and who really killed her?), and then fills in those gaps with flashbacks. However, though the narrative of Mystic River is linear in the sense of solving the mystery of who killed Katie, it is also circular in design, ultimately conveying an experience of simultaneity, of the confluence of past, present, and future both in the lives of the characters and in the

141

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 141

29/5/13 13:48:39

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

way the narration plots the flashbacks and flashforwards. This simultaneity, or blurring of the distinction between past, present, and future, resists a progressive linearity and is a major characteristic of several multiple narrative films. For example, the jumbled chronology of Pulp Fiction jumps backwards from the time frame at the beginning to a previous one, then jumps forwards, and ultimately loops back, ending with the time frame in which the movie began. The result of this fragmentation is, famously, the continual reappearance and ultimate resurrection of the John Travolta character, Vincent, who is shot and killed in one of the time frames. The indestructibleness and forever ‘present’ of John Travolta belies whatever linear development one could assemble from Pulp Fiction’s fragmented storylines, which exist more as parallel worlds, among which the narration crosscuts to suggest simultaneity.3 Mystic River’s own fragmented narrative begins with the fateful day of Dave’s abduction in the street, then flashforwards to the day of Katie’s murder years later. The older Dave suffers from memory and nightmare flashbacks of his abduction and rape, which are symptomatic of his stunted nature, the real Dave having died inside along with his violated innocence during that fateful day in the street. The trauma of his past motivates Dave’s actions the night of Katie’s murder, when he beats and kills a paedophile he caught with a young boy, which explains the blood on his clothes and the bruises on his hand. Dave’s fate is to forever live the past within the present and into the future. His two former friends, Jimmy and Sean, are not immune to this same fate. Towards the movie’s end, Sean says to Jimmy, ‘Sometimes I think all three of us got into that car, and all of this is just a dream … In reality, we’re all still eleven-year-old boys locked in a cellar.’ Jimmy’s own stunted nature can be explained by the vicious pattern of revenge followed by deep feelings of guilt (he sends $500 a month to ‘Just’ Ray’s widow) that he is caught in, a cycle that he repeats by vengefully killing Dave, whom he suspects killed Katie. After he finds out from Sean who the real killers were, he tells his wife, Annabeth (Laura Linney), ‘I killed Dave; I killed him and threw him in the Mystic. I killed the wrong man, that’s what I’ve done. I can’t undo it.’ The plot of the narrative reinforces the fact that Jimmy’s fate is to be frozen in this pattern of revenge and guilt when the killers of Katie turn out to be ‘Just’ Ray’s younger teenage son ‘Silent’ Ray Harris and his friend John O’Shea, who had pointed ‘Just’ Ray’s gun at Katie to scare her when it accidentally fired and hit her in the shoulder; but then they chased her when she ran from her car, beat her with a hockey stick, shot her a second time, and threw her into a ditch, unwittingly enacting a brutal revenge for the brutal execution of ‘Silent’ Ray’s father by Katie’s father. Jimmy cannot escape

142

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 142

29/5/13 13:48:39

Clint Eastwood’s Postclassical Multiple Narratives of Iwo Jima

the past, and he is doomed to be stuck in a guilt-like state reinforced by his unjustified killing of Dave – Sean, who suspects that Jimmy killed Dave, asks him, ‘Are you gonna send Celeste Boyle [Dave’s wife] $500 also?’ Like Dave, Jimmy is forever fated to live the past in the present and into the future, an experience further enhanced when Sean asks Jimmy when he last saw the missing Dave. After a pause, Jimmy replies, ‘That was 25 years ago, going up this street in the back of that car.’ Unlike Dave and Jimmy, Sean may seem the one of the three to move beyond the past. His own personal demon is his estrangement from his wife and new-born daughter. During the investigation of Katie’s murder, he receives silent phone calls from his wife; she never talks until he tells her he is sorry for having pushed her away. At the end, he is reconciled with his wife and daughter, but the past lingers in the present as he seems to compromise his role as homicide investigator by not pursuing his suspicion of Jimmy’s role in Dave’s disappearance. As such, Sean may still be stuck in the past of a childhood friendship, unable to move beyond that fateful day on which all three boys experienced a deep loss of innocence and its attendant guilt – Dave for being victimised, Jimmy and Sean for being spared. The seed of this beginning has only grown into a vicious circle of crime and culpability. Mystic River’s resistance of linearity in its circular patterns of time and in its collapse of past, present, and future aligns it with other postclassical multiple narrative films. It also shares other characteristics with them as well, namely the fateful convergences of characters and circumstances; the ultimate separation and alienation of characters; and a conclusion that is open-ended, ambiguous, and in this particular case, morally disturbing. To soothe Jimmy’s feelings of guilt over Dave’s death, his wife, Annabeth, tells him that his love for Katie and his two other daughters is ‘so big’ that he would do whatever he had to do for the ones he loved, and ‘that is never wrong. That could never be wrong, no matter what their Daddy had to do.’ To Annabeth’s chilling Lady Macbeth-like counsel, Mystic River offers no Shakespearean poetic justice.

Flags of Our Fathers The extended discussion of Mystic River sheds light on Eastwood’s postmodern sensibility and his ability to blend postclassical elements of the multiple narrative within the framework of a traditional genre like the crime-detective film. In Flags of Our Fathers, however, he raises the stakes and utilises the postclassical to undercut and transform the classical myths associated with

143

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 143

29/5/13 13:48:39

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

Hollywood’s World War II combat film genre: the myth of patriotism as the basis for the fighting men’s esprit de corps; the myth of a glorified heroism; and the myth of a naturalism that would disguise the American war machine and its production of propaganda. Flags of Our Fathers also extends the exposure of the shattered lives of combat veterans that films of the Vietnam War such as Hal Ashby’s Coming Home (1978) and Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978) offered in the 1970s. The basic narrative of Flags of Our Fathers may be simple when outlined, but its themes and the ways of its telling are complex and resistant to the classical system of continuity. The film tells the story behind the famous photograph of the flag raising on the island of Iwo Jima during World War II. It focuses on three of the men in the photo, two Marines, Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) and Ira Hayes (Adam Beach), and a Navy corpsman, John ‘Doc’ Bradley (Ryan Phillippe), the remaining survivors of the six men who raised the flag. The three were plucked from the battle before it ended so that they could, along with the mothers of the three dead flag raisers, be part of a bond tour in the states to raise much-needed money for the war effort to take advantage of the popularity and inspiration of the iconic photo. The way the movie depicts these events is to expose the lies perpetuated by the American war machine during the bond tour and to emphasise the lifelong trauma of the war for those who fought it. Along the way, it questions the nature of heroism, patriotism, and the reasons for solidarity among the soldiers. The bare facts of the flag raising in the photo were that it was the second of two flag raisings on Mount Suribachi after just the fifth of thirty-five days of fighting on Iwo Jima. A naval officer claimed the first flag as a souvenir for the Secretary of Defence, which necessitated the second raising with a different group of men. The photographer Joe Rosenthal took a picture of the second raising. The bond tour glossed over these circumstances; it also glossed over the fact that one of the Marines in the photo was misidentified. In the film, the tour’s organisers turn a deaf ear to Ira Hayes’s attempts to correct the misidentification of Hank Hansen for Harlon Block. Hansen had been involved in the first flag raising, not the second one in the photo. Block’s erasure meant that he was denied the ‘hero’ status that the tour bestowed on the six men in the photo; his mother, who recognised him in the photo even with his back turned to the viewer, was not acknowledged as one of the ‘gold star mothers’, who formed part of the tour ceremony and gave poignant speeches to raise money for the war effort. Furthermore, both Ira Hayes and Doc Bradley balked at being called heroes; they consistently deflected attention from themselves and towards their comrades either dead

144

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 144

29/5/13 13:48:39

Clint Eastwood’s Postclassical Multiple Narratives of Iwo Jima

or still fighting, whom they claimed were the real heroes. In fact, that motif became the conclusion to Bradley’s speeches at all the tour rallies. And lastly, the accolades showered upon the three men could not wash over the fears and anxieties that they lived with day to day, motivated in the film by Ira Hayes’s anguished memories of the death by friendly fire of Mike Strank (Barry Pepper), the leader of his platoon and one of the flag raisers in the photo, and by Doc Bradley’s nightmarish flashbacks to the horrors he witnessed as a Navy corpsman tending the wounded and dying. One particular nightmare haunts Doc Bradley throughout the film – the time he left a comrade, Ralph ‘Iggy’ Ignatowski, in a foxhole to tend to someone else, only to find him gone when he returned. The refrain of Doc’s constant nightmare about ‘Iggy’ is his asking apprehensively and with a deep sense of confusion and deprivation, ‘Where is he? Where is he? Where did he go?’ John ‘Doc’ Bradley and Ira Hayes’s disillusionment took them down different paths after the war. Bradley internalised the trauma into a stoicism that isolated the war experience from his family. Meanwhile, Hayes’s disillusionment was compounded by his low social standing as a Native American and the tragedy of his being continually recognised as a hero of World War II while having to take on menial jobs and live in poverty. Hayes’s alcoholism and deep depression resulted in an ignominious death from exposure on an Indian reservation. Of the three survivors, it was Rene Gagnon who welcomed the adulation from the bond tour; but he too faced disillusionment when he discovered that the businessmen who promised him a job during the tour later expressed no interest in furthering his career. He ended up working as a janitor. And finally, Flags of Our Fathers further dampens the patriotic fervour of the World War II combat films by its emphasis on the men’s primary motivation in battle and out of it – to look out for one another, to survive, and to credit their comrades for their sacrifice lest they be forgotten. In the thick of battle, the men’s psyches are attuned to the personal and not to any sense of idealism. James Bradley, Doc’s son, says in a voiceover towards the end of the film, ‘my dad and these men, the risks they took, the wounds they suffered, they did that for their buddies. They may have fought for their country, but they died for their friends, for the man in front, for the man beside them.’ The theme of men doomed to forever live the past in the present and into the future in Flags of Our Fathers echoes the central idea that motivates the multiple narratives of Mystic River. Ira Hayes and Doc Bradley are haunted by their horrific experiences in battle during the bond tour and in their postwar lives. And all three of the protagonists are forever fated to be associated with the iconic image of triumph. Also, like Mystic River, Flags of Our

145

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 145

29/5/13 13:48:39

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

Fathers incorporates other postclassical characteristics of the multiple narrative film, namely the fateful convergence of characters with circumstances and the alienation of the characters within themselves, but with this caveat for the latter – that the protagonists also bond together with their comrades in a brotherhood of solidarity, survival, and sacrifice for each other in battle. But the ultimate postclassical characteristic of Flags of Our Fathers and one which constructs and reinforces the theme of the past-in-the-present is its way of telling the story through a fragmented structure dotted by a repetition of events that is much more complicated than Mystic River’s, its fragmentation of form mirroring its protagonists’ dislocated states during the bond tour and after the war. At its beginning, Flags of Our Fathers presents a montage of six different time frames, fragmented to the point that an anchor moment of a ‘present’ frame is difficult to discern even after repeated viewings. Trying to choose a ‘present’ time from which to trace flashbacks and flashforwards becomes, in the end, meaningless and unnecessary. The first of the six time frames takes place in the midst of battle on Iwo Jima, with Doc Bradley in a blackened landscape looking for someone with shouts of ‘Corpsman!’ in the background, the camera circling around him, then slowly zooming in to an extreme close-up of his eyes; a cut leads to the second time frame of a much older Bradley waking up suddenly in the middle of the night from this nightmare of looking for someone in battle, one which will be a recurring memory of his throughout the narrative. In the next scene, the older Bradley walks through his house and collapses on the stairs, asking ‘Where is he? Where is he? Where did he go?’ The narration then cuts to the third time frame, in which Doc’s son James Bradley is interviewing the photographer Joe Rosenthal; then a cut to the fourth time frame, which consists of the processing of Rosenthal’s famous photograph, its distribution in newspapers across the country, and its reception by Harlon Block’s mother and by President Roosevelt. Then follows the fifth time frame – a cut from the newspaper print of the photograph on Roosevelt’s desk takes us to three soldiers climbing a mountain with flashes and sounds of explosions. This turns out to be the bond tour rally in Soldier Field, Chicago. Doc Bradley, Ira Hayes, and Rene Gagnon are climbing a small scale papier mâché reproduction of Mount Suribachi, on which they plant the American flag and wave to cheers of the crowd, the camera tracking to a close-up of Doc Bradley’s face as he turns on the sound of ‘Corpsman!’ The narration then cuts to the first time frame of the montage – Bradley’s memory of the time he lost Iggy, before cutting back to the event in Soldier Field. This brilliant montage sequence ends with a cut to the announcement of the sixth

146

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 146

29/5/13 13:48:39

Clint Eastwood’s Postclassical Multiple Narratives of Iwo Jima

time frame, an intertitle of ‘Camp Tarawa December 1944’, the camp where the soldiers trained for the 19 February 1945 invasion of Iwo Jima. Sorting the chronological relationship among the six time frames at the beginning of Flags of Our Fathers reveals its radically fragmented stylisation. Time frame one, Doc Bradley in battle on Iwo Jima, flashforwards to time frame two, old man Bradley near the end of his life; this is followed by a flashforward to the third time period, the interview of Joe Rosenthal by James Bradley. From this, the narration flashbacks to time period four, the newspaper distribution of the iconic image across America; then flashforwards to the fifth time frame, the bond tour rally in Soldier Field; then backwards to the first time frame of the ‘Iggy’ battle sequence in Bradley’s memory; followed by a flashforward to the fifth time frame in Soldier Field; and then backwards to the sixth time frame, the training in Camp Tarawa before the invasion of Iwo Jima. This exercise of flashbacks and flashforwards does not hinge on a ‘present’ moment within the montage, however. And I have deliberately assigned a number to each time frame based on when it occurs in the montage sequence, not on when it happens in chronological order, so as to emphasise not only the integrity of the achronological structure, but also the status of the time frames as parallel to one another rather than linear. In this way, the distinctions between past, present, and future are blurred precisely because none of the time frames can claim to be a present base in relation to the others. The rest of the achronological structure of Flags of Our Fathers is consistent with the postclassical design of its opening montage, perhaps not as radical, but still a collage of mixed time frames that suggests a parallelism of events to subvert linear progression and to reinforce the experience of the ever-recurring past as present. For example, the last section of Flags of Our Fathers contains six fragmented time frames. The first is of James Bradley at his typewriter after his interview with Rosenthal. His voice-over provides the motivation for the next time frame, one that encompasses the post-war lives of Doc, Ira, and Rene, illustrated by crosscutting among the activities of the three men. The time frame that follows this montage sequence is of James Bradley discovering his father’s war and bond tour memorabilia in a box in the attic after his father’s death, followed by the time of his father’s hospitalisation and his last conversation with his father, who leaves him one last memory: ‘What I wanted to tell you, they took us swimming after we planted the flag. We come down off the mountain, and we had a swim. It was the funniest thing, all this fighting and we were jumping around like kids playing. That’s the way I’ll remember Iggy now.’ The next shot is of the

147

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 147

29/5/13 13:48:39

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

Bradley family in the hospital corridor mourning the passing of Doc Bradley. From this, there is a cut to the time frame of the swimming scene on the beach of Iwo Jima after the flag raising, ending with a high-angle long shot of Doc running into the water to join his fellow soldiers; as the end credits run over this shot, the narration constructs a series of dissolves to longer shots of the beach from further up, until a final extreme long shot of the beach from the top of the mountain with the flag in the foreground pans up beyond the beach to the ship-filled ocean in the distance, and then further up to the cloudy sky before fading out. However, that is not the last shot of the film. After the end credits, a final shot appears of yet another time frame, that of the audience watching the film. The shot is of the present-day American memorial on Iwo Jima which commemorates the flag raisings; the camera pans left to right as it moves over the memorial to a high-angle extreme long shot of the empty beach and sea below. The movie ends with a cut to the famous photograph. An overview of the narrative structure of Flags of Our Fathers reveals, in general, that while the film’s omniscient narration motivates the first montage of time frames and the final shot of the present-day American war memorial on Iwo Jima, the other time frames in between are motivated by the firstperson voice-overs from the Rosenthal interview and from James Bradley as he ‘writes’ the final chapters in the story of Doc, Ira, and Rene. Even given this overview, the location of a stable ‘present’ time frame is still obscured; the apparent ‘present’ of the Rosenthal interview is overtaken by the ‘present’ of James Bradley at his typewriter, which is then undercut by the final presentday shot on Iwo Jima. The film’s anchored present, it could be argued, is a subjective one, cued by the centrepiece of the Soldier Field event, which depicts the protagonists’ powerful recollection of their experiences in battle, relived again and again as nightmare and as testimonial to their fallen comrades, the past internalised as an ever-present moment.

Letters from Iwo Jima The final shot of the present-day American war memorial in Flags of Our Fathers acts as a neat transition to Letters from Iwo Jima and its perspective from the Japanese side of the conflict. The second film begins with a long shot of Iwo Jima looking towards Mount Suribachi, with the subtitle ‘Iwo Jima 2005’. The next shot parallels the one at the end of the first film, a moving low-angle shot of the present-day Japanese memorial on Suribachi, which tracks up and over the memorial to a high-angle extreme long shot

148

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 148

29/5/13 13:48:39

Clint Eastwood’s Postclassical Multiple Narratives of Iwo Jima

of the empty beach and sea below. The camera picks up a team of Japanese archaeologists digging for artefacts in a cave in Suribachi; a medium close-up of their digging with shovels dissolves to two Japanese soldiers digging on the beach, with the subtitle ‘Iwo Jima 1944’. Though the beginning of Letters from Iwo Jima links seamlessly with the end of Flags of Our Fathers through the parallel shots of the two war memorials on Suribachi, the narration of Eastwood’s second film is very different from that of the first. If Flags of Our Fathers is a bold postclassical/postmodern experiment in its construction of a fragmented, jumbled narrative with no discernible and stable ‘present’ time frame, then Letters from Iwo Jima is, by contrast, a more traditional classical exercise. Once the present of 2005 dissolves to the past of 1944, the narration employs a chronological development, crosscutting between several characters, with a few flashbacks of their pre-war lives clearly cued by the narration. Even the present-day archaeological dig on the island is given a classical function, providing a conventional frame to the linear stories of the two major protagonists, Private Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya) and Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe), from the preparation for the American invasion to the Japanese defeat on Iwo Jima. The classical narrative of Letters from Iwo Jima doesn’t mean that it lacks the characteristics of the postclassical multiple narrative film. It does mean, however, that these characteristics are constructed in the more traditional form of the Hollywood continuity system. Letters from Iwo Jima contains four major aspects of the multiple narrative film: multiple protagonists, fateful convergences, a contingent reality, and multiple points of view. The latter is especially noteworthy, as it transforms the faceless anonymity of Japanese soldiers in American war films into individuals with distinct personalities for an American audience weaned on a one-dimensional view of the Japanese. One of the primary effects of the postclassical multi-protagonist film is its emphasis on individual differences within groups or communities and the inevitable clashes among people. In Flags of Our Fathers, for example, though the characters are united in a brotherhood of support in battle, individual differences surface at home in America during the bond tour. The multiple points of view provide glimpses into the minds of the three survivors, each motivated by his own demons and by an uneasy relationship with a government that exploits and twists the actual details of the flag raising. Rene welcomes the mythification of the flag raising so he can benefit from his celebrity status, Ira openly resents the government for this exploitation at the expense of the forgotten heroes of the battle and Doc measures his own resentment stoically, in contrast to Ira’s disillusionment and substance abuse. In Flags of Our Fathers,

149

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 149

29/5/13 13:48:39

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

Eastwood shifts the emphasis from the moulding of individual characters into the solidified fighting unit of the traditional World War II combat film to the disparate, conflicted, and alienated soldier on the home front and after the war. We see the same disparateness among characters through the presentation of multiple viewpoints in Letters from Iwo Jima, but not on the home front and after the war, only in the battle for Iwo Jima itself. Letters from Iwo Jima sports two identifiable major protagonists, Saigo and Kuribayashi, but three other characters also figure significantly in putting human faces on Japanese soldiers and contributing to their distinctiveness and diversification: Baron Nishi (Tsuyoshi Ihara), Private Shimizu (Ryo Kase), and Lieutenant Ito (Shidou Nakamura). Baron Nishi is an equestrian gold medallist from the 1932 Los Angeles Olympic Games, who counts Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks as his friends. After his men capture a wounded American GI from Oklahoma, Nishi bonds with the GI, whose name is Sam, and later, after the American dies from his wounds, Nishi reads aloud a letter from Sam’s mother found on his dead body. In the mother’s sentiments to her son, the Japanese soldiers recognise their common humanity with the Americans that they are fighting against. The words are especially poignant as read over the dead body of the mother’s son: ‘take care of yourself and come back safely. Remember what I said to you: always do what is right because it is right. I pray for a speedy end to the war and your safe return.’ One of the men who is touched by the letter and by Nishi’s bonding with Sam is Private Shimizu. Shimizu had been a member of the military police, the Kampetai, and as he tells Saigo his story, the film flashes back to the incident for which he was discharged from the Kampetai for insubordination. His superior had ordered him to shoot the dog of a Japanese family for no other reason than that it disrupted their conversation in the street. Shimizu, out of pity for the family, had pretended to shoot the dog in the back yard, but was exposed when his superior heard the dog bark as they were walking away. Shimizu’s disgrace had been the result of his empathy and sense of decency, the qualities that he observes in Nishi and Sam’s respectful conversation and in the words of the letter from Sam’s mother, which awaken his faith in a common humanity. Shimizu tells Saigo that the American soldier Sam had shown him that the Americans were not savages as he had been taught and that Sam’s ‘mother’s words were the same as my mother’s’. In contrast to the majority of his fellow soldiers, who commit suicide without question in the face of inevitable defeat, Shimizu resists dying ‘for nothing’. He chooses instead to surrender to the Americans, whom he now trusts ‘will do what is right’. However, one of the American soldiers assigned to guard him shoots

150

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 150

29/5/13 13:48:39

Clint Eastwood’s Postclassical Multiple Narratives of Iwo Jima

and kills him, an action which may seem ironic given Shimizu’s trust; however, the tone of this sudden turn of events is aligned more with a deep sense of contingency which pervades the world of the film. An American troop had taken Shimizu prisoner and given him water; it was just his misfortune that one of the soldiers assigned to guard him and another Japanese prisoner found it more expedient to kill them, saying, ‘We’re sitting ducks with those two.’ Several further events that involve the other three significant characters, Ito, Saigo, and Kuribayashi, also illustrate the above-mentioned atmosphere of contingency in the film while continuing to put a human face on the Japanese soldier. One of these events is Lieutenant Ito’s failure to die honourably by committing suicide. Unlike Nishi and Shimizu, Ito is inflexible in his blind adherence to custom and the rigid warrior code to commit suicide rather than be taken prisoner or be killed by the Americans. At one point in the battle, he rigs himself with grenades and lies down among dead Japanese soldiers to wait for an American tank to plough over him. He will kill himself but cause damage at the same time, a typical kamikaze action. The narration crosscuts to him three times, at the beginning of his plan, then at night, during which he shouts, ‘Come and get me!’, and lastly to the next day of his ordeal, when he is still prone among the bodies in wait for the never-approaching tanks. In this third shot, he looks around sheepishly, gets up, sheds the grenades, and walks out of the frame. Here, as in the episode where Shimizu is shot as a prisoner, the tone is not anything other than ‘this is the way things are’. Ito’s best laid plans go awry, buffeted by the winds of war. It is to Eastwood’s credit that he does not treat Ito as a comic and pathetic figure, but as one brought to a sober realisation about the unexpected in life. Certainly, Saigo and Kuribayashi, the two major characters, experience the contingent nature of life as well, and the film expresses this through the treatment of their intersections as fateful convergences. Saigo and Kuribayashi differ in their rank and attitude towards the war and the military. Saigo’s extended flashback reveals him to be a common baker with a young wife, conscripted by the government against his will and just before the birth of his first child. His motivation is to survive Iwo Jima and return to his family. On the other hand, Kuribayashi is a career soldier, a lieutenant general loyal to his country and to the military code to die honourably in the face of inevitable defeat. His own extended flashback to a farewell party given in his honour in New Mexico, where he studied with the US army as a captain of the Imperial Army of Japan, reveals his commitment to his Emperor and country. When asked what he would do if the United States and Japan ever were to go to war against each other, he replies, ‘I would have to follow my convictions.’

151

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 151

29/5/13 13:48:39

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

Although Kuribayashi and Saigo differ in their commitment to the military and the war, they are similar as characters who go against the grain, further contributing to the film’s view of the Japanese as disparate and not herd-like. For example, Saigo is unafraid to voice his ‘unpatriotic’ feelings about the war: ‘We should just give the island to the Americans and then we can go home’; he befriends the isolated and disgraced former Kampetai Shimizu and helps him to desert; and he resists orders to commit suicide, watching in horror as other soldiers explode grenades against their chests. Kuribayashi illustrates his individuality by his enlightened methods of warfare and treatment of soldiers. On his arrival on Iwo Jima, he countermands the order of his fellow officers to dig fortifications on the beaches and issues a new order to dig caves inland, where it would be harder for the enemy to attack; later, he overrides his generals’ command to the men to stand their ground wherever they are and orders a retreat from Mount Suribachi to the north caves, so that resistance can be more concentrated. He complains to Nishi that there is no coordination between the Japanese navy and the army on Iwo Jima, or between him and General Hayashi on the island. When he receives word that reinforcements have been withdrawn from the battle plan, Kuribayashi feels betrayed by his superiors. While the high command compromises the situation on Iwo Jima because of the odds against winning, Kuribayashi remains committed to the integrity of his training as an officer, and he is disappointed at the lack of the same professionalism among his peers. Furthermore, Kuribayashi’s treatment of the men strikes a balance between discipline, practicality, and understanding, in contrast to the thoughtless and inflexible attitude of the other officers. His intersections with Saigo illustrate this aspect of his personality. After Saigo is overheard saying, ‘We should just give the island to the Americans; and then we can go home’, his captain begins whipping him. Kuribayashi interferes as he comes upon the scene: ‘And Captain, do you have such an excess of soldiers that you could put two of them out of commission?’ He advises the captain to ‘Deny them rations instead. A good captain uses his brain, not just his whip.’ Later, the same captain picks on Saigo for his poor shooting at the practice range and orders him to clean the boots of his entire troops as a punishment. Kuribayashi observes this episode and says to himself, ‘They should learn to clean their guns properly rather than their boots.’ And still later, when Lieutenant Ito decides heedlessly and impulsively to execute Saigo and Shimizu for abandoning their post on Mount Suribachi, Kuribayashi intervenes: ‘I don’t want you to kill my soldiers needlessly … I gave the order that all survivors retreat to the north caves.’

152

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 152

29/5/13 13:48:39

Clint Eastwood’s Postclassical Multiple Narratives of Iwo Jima

The intersections between Saigo and Kuribayashi take on the mantle of fateful convergences during the third meeting between the two, when Kuribayashi saves Saigo again, this time not from a mere whipping but from execution at the hands of Lieutenant Ito. The fourth, penultimate meeting between the two confirms the fateful nature of their intersections, when Kuribayashi orders Saigo to stay back in the command cave to burn his documents and military chest, sparing Saigo from the doomed last attack against the Americans led by Kuribayashi himself. Kuribayashi’s decision to spare Saigo followed the latter’s disclosure that he is just a simple baker with a young wife and newborn daughter whom he has never seen. Kuribayashi had responded, ‘Strange, I promised to fight until death for my family, but the thought of my family makes it difficult to keep that promise.’ When Kuribayashi orders Saigo to remain in the cave to burn his possessions, he says, ‘Everything happens in threes.’ The intersections between Kuribayashi and Saigo, however, are ‘fated’ not only towards Saigo as lifesaving events, but also towards Kuribayashi because of Saigo’s singular act of disobedience, when he buries his general’s letters home instead of burning them. When the Japanese archaeologists unearth the bag of letters in the present-day frame of the narrative at the end of the film, the letters pour to the ground in slow motion as the workers lift the bag containing them, accompanied on the soundtrack by Kuribayashi’s faint overlapping voice-over mimicking the words and thoughts of the missives, preserved forever by Saigo’s insubordinate but reciprocal generous act. During the four intersections between Saigo and Kuribayashi, the narration clearly delineates the fateful nature of their relationship. The mechanical plotting of their meetings and their very deliberate significance may dull to some extent the contingency their convergences possess. However, their fifth and final intersection prepares for a powerful sense of contingency, paralleling and capping the events that had involved Shimizu and Ito earlier. After the failed Japanese attack, a wounded Kuribayashi instructs his assistant Fujita to behead him before the Americans can take him prisoner, but Fujita is shot as he raises the sword. Saigo witnesses this from the mouth of the cave and runs down the hill to Kuribayashi, who upon seeing him says, ‘You again.’ And so they meet a last time, the one determined to die with honour, the other clinging to a desire to return home to his family. Kuribayashi asks of Saigo one last favour, to ‘bury me so that no one will find me’, a request that resonates with Saigo’s previous act of burying the general’s letters and the discovery of them at the end of the film. With Saigo by his side, Kuribayashi kills himself with the Colt .45 given to him as a gift from the Americans at his farewell party in New Mexico. After burying Kuribayashi, Saigo finds himself surrounded

153

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 153

29/5/13 13:48:39

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

by American soldiers. When he sees one of them with Kuribayashi’s Colt .45, he throws caution to the wind and madly lashes out at the soldiers with his shovel, risking his life to join Kuribayashi in death instead of surrendering. Marvellously, the Americans refrain from shooting Saigo, who lethally swings the shovel at them: american soldier: Shall we bring him down? second american soldier: Should I shoot him, Lieutenant? third american soldier: No, don’t shoot him.

Instead, one of the soldiers bashes Saigo’s head after he stumbles. The next shot is on the beach where all the wounded lie; Saigo’s body is brought on a stretcher and laid next to an American soldier. He turns his head and looks soberly towards the camera, all passion spent after unexpectedly surviving his own invitation to be killed. As with both Shimizu and Ito, there is no irony here, just a sense of the fortunes and misfortunes of the war and of life. Saigo will return home, yes, but ultimately thanks neither to his previous discretion nor to Kuribayashi’s interventions, but to being extremely lucky, as Shimizu, who had surrendered, had not been.

Conclusion When Eastwood’s project of filming a diptych on the battle for Iwo Jima was announced, one may have expected a dovetailing of the two parts, whereby the two films would truly be one. However, this is not the case. Except for a few repeated shots of the initial battle after the American landing – those looking out from the bunkers and caves of the Japanese as the Americans advance, for example – the intersections between the two films are practically nonexistent. Perhaps this is because the emphasis on the battle for Iwo Jima itself differs from one film to the other. In Flags of Our Fathers, the battle and the flag raising on Suribachi are really backgrounds to the film’s primary focus on Doc Bradley’s, Rene Gagnon’s, and Ira Hayes’s experiences during the bond tour and the post-war period. The film begins, after all, with Doc’s nightmare of having lost Iggy in battle years after the war and just before Doc’s death. In contrast, Letters from Iwo Jima focuses its attention on the Japanese experience during the battle of Iwo Jima. The two films are also different in their presentation of their multiple narratives. The narration of Flags of Our Fathers is postclassical and postmodern in its extravagant jumbled time

154

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 154

29/5/13 13:48:39

Clint Eastwood’s Postclassical Multiple Narratives of Iwo Jima

scheme, seemingly unanchored in any stable ‘present’, while that of Letters from Iwo Jima is classically linear with clearly cued flashbacks. Overall, the two films incorporate several postclassical elements of the multiple narrative film: multiple protagonists, divergent perspectives on the same event, repetition of events, the disparateness of characters, fated convergences, and the sense of life’s contingencies. While the two films together represent a considerable achievement, the comprehensiveness of Flags of Our Fathers as a multiple narrative film, in both its themes and its complex jumbled narration, distinguishes it as Eastwood’s boldest postclassical experiment to date and a high-water mark in the postmodern cinema of war.

Notes

1

For the Hollywood Renaissance see Lev (2000) and Man (1994). For the blockbuster film, see Wyatt (1994); for both the Hollywood Renaissance and the blockbuster film, see King (2002). For the multiple narrative film, see Azcona (2006), Berg (2006: 5–61), and Tröhler (2000: 85–102). 2 Other examples of the multiple narrative film include Michael Haneke’s Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys (Code inconnu: Récit incomplet de divers voyages, 2000), Julio Medem’s Sex and Lucia (Lucía y el sexo, 2001), Robert Altman’s Gosford Park (2001), Robert Guédiguian’s The Town Is Quiet (La ville est tranquille, 2001), Paul Haggis’s Crash (2004), Rodrigo Garcia’s Nine Lives (2005), Fatih Akin’s The Edge of Heaven (Auf der anderen Seite, 2007), Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale (2008), Kyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata (Tôkyô sonata, 2008), and Olivier Assayas’s Summer Hours (L’heure d’été, 2008). 3 Other examples of multiple narrative films that construct a simultaneity that blurs distinctions of past, present, and future are Babel (2006), The Edge of Heaven (Auf der anderen Seite, 2007), and Sex and Lucia (Lucía y el sexo, 2001). Sex and Lucia does this by a reflexive narration that doubles back on itself to begin its storylines over and over again, The Edge of Heaven by presenting fractured storylines among different generations framed by present time, and Babel by alternating modules of four fragmented storylines six times in its narration.

155

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 155

29/5/13 13:48:39

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Azcona, Maria de Mar (2006) ‘All Together Now: The Rise of U.S. Multi-Protagonist Films in the 1990s’. PhD dissertation, Zaragoza: Universidad de Zaragoza. Berg, Charles Ramirez (2006) ‘A Taxonomy of Alternative Plots in Recent Films: Classifying the “Tarantino Effect”’, Film Criticism, 31, 5–61. King, Geoff (2002) New Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction. New York: Columbia University Press. Lev, Peter (2000) American Films of the 70s: Conflicting Visions. Austin: University of Texas Press. Man, Glenn (1994) Radical Visions: American Film Renaissance, 1967–1976. Westport: Greenwood Press. Tröhler, Margirt (2000) ‘Films with Multiple Protagonists and the Logic of Possibilities’, Iris, 29, 85–102. Wyatt, Justin (1994) High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood. Austin: University of Texas Press.

156

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 156

29/5/13 13:48:39

Haunting in the War Film Flags of Our Fathers ___ robert burgoyne

Shortly after the introductory logo of Flags of Our Fathers (Clint Eastwood, 2006) appears, a faint voice emerges from the darkness of the screen, a voice that has an old-fashioned texture and grain, singing a song that sounds like a fragment of a half-heard radio broadcast. The lyrics, which are barely audible, come through as ‘Dreams we fashion in the night. Dreams I must gather’, and set a mood of solitude, loss, and regret. The source of the song is ambiguous; it seems to float between the opening Dreamworks logo, crafted in antique black and white, and the beginnings of the diegesis, to be in both places at once, ‘haunting the borderlands’. The song is neither on-screen nor clearly offscreen, neither part of the credits nor part of the fictional world. It suggests the ghostly off-screen voice that Michel Chion describes as the ‘acousmetre’ (Chion 1994). As the narrative begins, another unlocalised voice is heard, but this time in a completely different register. As the film opens with shots of a lone character running on the dark surface of Iwo Jima, we hear another voice shouting ‘Corpsman! Corpsman!’ It echoes and recedes as the character looks around and desperately tries to find its source. It then repeats. Disequilibrium and anxiety permeate these opening moments, as the voice seems to wander in and around the visual field, in the world of the story and outside it. Finally,

157

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 157

29/5/13 13:48:40

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

‘Corpsman!’ – John Bradley (Ryan Phillippe) hears dying soldiers calling for him in Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers.

the character, Doc, fixes the camera with a direct stare, as if the voice calling ‘Corpsman!’ could only come from one place, the space of the spectator. The uncanny effect of this opening scene conveys a powerful sense of unease, a mood that pervades the whole of the film. Partly this is due to the voice; as Michel Chion says in his The Voice in Cinema, ‘The sense of hearing is as subtle as it is archaic. We most often relegate it to the limbo of the unnamed; something you hear causes you to feel X, but you can’t put exact words to it’ (Chion 1999: 17). Here I would like to emphasise the words ‘archaic’ and ‘unnamed’, for these are the words that Sigmund Freud associates with the uncanny (Freud 1963). In this essay, I argue that the motif of the uncanny, of the haunting of the present by the past, is a key to the powerful affect that both Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima (Clint Eastwood, 2006) convey, a motif that can also be found in a number of other war films. The unlocated voice that opens Flags of Our Fathers provides a kind of signature moment of this device, a haunting voice that seems to be everywhere and nowhere, a voice that can ‘see everything’, that ‘no creature can hide from’, and that creates a powerful opening impression of a fictional world haunted by ghosts, of a film and a character possessed by the past.1 In a different but equally powerful way, Letters from Iwo Jima draws on the potent symbolism of the voice that ‘sees’ and the voice that causes you to ‘feel’. The film takes its title from a cache of letters buried in an Iwo Jima cave during the battle and discovered in 1994, nearly fifty years later. The intimate history contained in these lost letters, a history of excruciating hardship, familial love, and courage in the face of certain death forms the subject of the film. With the discovery of the letters serving as a framing device, the film cuts directly from 2005 to the preparations for the defence of the island in 1945. The film unfolds as an extended flashback, comprising almost the

158

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 158

29/5/13 13:48:40

Haunting in the War Film

entire running time, as if the shades of the past were brought to life by the correspondence that had been secreted in the cave. In the film’s final scene, the buried letters are finally unearthed, and are vocalised on the soundtrack as they tumble to the cave floor in a rushing, overlapping sound collage, as the thoughts embodied in the letters are suddenly made audible. The voices crowd the sonic space, giving an uncanny impression of the souls of the characters finally being released to tell their stories, to find their audience, and to seek their final destination. Both films convey an intense, spectral quality, placing in relief the unsettling and uncanny characteristics of the war film, a quality that pervades the genre. Despite its long-standing reputation for realism and authenticity, the war film frequently departs from the conventions of verisimilitude to convey the nightmarish effects of a historical past that exceeds the representational range of realist forms. Although realism and verisimilitude have provided touchstones for the genre’s development and an indexical sign of its goodfaith contract with the past, films such as All Quiet on the Western Front (Lewis Milestone, 1930), Hell’s Angels (Howard Hughes, 1930), The Longest Day (Darryl F. Zanuck, 1962), and Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979) are defined as much by their ghostly, spectral encounters as by their faithful reproduction, their close adherence to the experience of the generation that had gone before. Sonic and visual realism has been celebrated as the war film’s particular contribution to the history of the cinema and a key to its historical legitimacy, but the cultural trauma that the war film conveys goes beyond the frame of even the grimmest forms of verisimilitude. The past asserts itself in these films in ways that cannot be accounted for through codes of realism and authenticity. Rather, the presence and persistence

The buried letters by Japanese soldiers who fought and died on Iwo Jima are brought to life in Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima, the second of his two war films about Iwo Jima.

159

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 159

29/5/13 13:48:40

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

of the past is found in the way it seems to ‘possess’ the present in the war film, seeming to haunt it and to shadow it at every turn. Many of the most important films of the genre include literal scenes of spectral haunting, the reappearance of the dead in memory and hallucination, or independently of the subjectivity of the characters, with images and the voices of the dead addressed directly to the viewer. Like a screen memory, the ‘reality effect’ of the war film – the graphic impact of its battle scenes, the accuracy of its military manoeuvres, the authenticity of its portrayal of the platoon or small unit – camouflages the deeper source of these films’ affect, their way of conveying the spectral presence of the past, the reality of a past ‘that hurts’. Rather than verisimilitude, the recurring motifs of disembodied voices, premonitions, uncanny encounters, and traumatic memories suggest that the defining and distinguishing feature of the genre is the haunting of the present by the past, the past trying to possess the present. These motifs manifest themselves throughout the war film: half-heard fragments of voices and songs, ghostly encounters, a powerful sense of debt and obligation, of a legacy that must be repaid – a shadow world of invisible presence pushes through the realist surface of these texts. Barely acknowledged in the critical literature, the theme of haunting provides a new way of looking at the war film, illuminating the presence of the past in film in ways that suggest the war film’s power to evoke not just the tangible world but its uncanny double, a subject that shifts the discourse of the war film from ideals of authenticity and verisimilitude to that which is invisible but still present. I Accuse (J’accuse!, Abel Gance, 1919), All Quiet on the Western Front, and Flags of Our Fathers, for example, all convey the return of the past in a literal, concrete way in the form of conversations with the dead, traumatic memories and dreams, unmotivated flashbacks, and the collapse of realist space into a zone of uncanny manifestations. Other films, such as Rome, Open City (Roma, città aperta, Roberto Rossellini, 1945), Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998), and Letters from Iwo Jima are dominated by a sense of debt and obligation, by an explicit recognition that the dead make claims upon the living. A film such as Patton (Franklin J. Shaffner, 1970), in another variant of haunting, depicts the main character as possessed by the ghostly memory of the past. In one scene, Patton visits the site of an ancient battlefield, and describes to General Omar Bradley in graphic detail the struggle there 2000 years before – the bloated corpses, the heroic last stand, the stripping of the bodies. He ends by saying simply, ‘I was there.’ The explicit theme of haunting is interwoven with codes of realism in the war film to create a potent figure of the genre and a key to its symbolic meaning.

160

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 160

29/5/13 13:48:40

Haunting in the War Film

In All Quiet on the Western Front, for example, the opening scene focuses on a German professor giving a lengthy, impassioned pro-war speech, trying to bully his young male students, who look to be about sixteen years old, into enlisting in the Army to fight for the Fatherland in World War I. As he speaks, the blackboard behind him displays two inscriptions, one in Greek and one in Latin, which seem to support the professor’s argument. In the middle of his speech, however, the ‘writing on the wall’ changes: now a different Latin inscription appears, as if some invisible agent had erased and rewritten the original text. The new writing on the wall offers a very different message: ‘Whatever you do, do it wisely and keep in mind your purpose’, undercutting the professor’s emotional claim of how ‘sweet it is to die for the Fatherland’ (Dauer and Kramer 2007).2 The motif of haunting is also connected to place. The war film, with its iconographic combat zones of trenches, foxholes, embattled beaches, jungles, and ruined villages, possesses a special resonance as a zone of spectral encounters. This is especially evident in films set during World War I. In All Quiet on the Western Front, the trenches are portrayed as tombs for the living and the dead alike, mixed together in one space. The main character Paul, for example, is shown spending a day and a night in a shell crater with the corpse of the man he has just killed, apologising to him, promising to contact his family, claiming an identity with him. The grim setting is compounded by the scene that immediately precedes it: the shelling of a church graveyard, with caskets heaving from the ground. As Pierre Sorlin writes about the iconography of the World War I battlefield, the trenches, barbed wire, the night patrol, the flares and searchlights, and the zone between the trenches known as No Man’s Land, defines these films in terms of an unspecified, confusing spatial geography, a space that is devoid of familiar landmarks (Sorlin 1999). Like the wandering Freud, seemingly compelled to return to the same streets and squares of a provincial red light district, the locational machinery of the characters in these films – and by extension the spectator – is thrown off, suspended in zones of mist, confusion, spatial disturbance (Freud 1963).

Concealed in the Folds of the Visible In Flags of Our Fathers, the island of Iwo Jima, with its tunnels, its underground blockhouses, its concealed trapdoors and hidden gun emplacements, is a fascinatingly uncanny zone of sudden appearances and disappearances, a confusing space of unlocatable sounds, invisible enemies, and secret passages.

161

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 161

29/5/13 13:48:40

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

Underground bunkers and tunnels honeycomb the island. During the day, the Japanese are all but invisible. At night, they suddenly appear through hidden trapdoors and spider traps, materialising from below ground. Japanese troops moved freely just beneath the feet of the American soldiers. As one writer says, ‘This was surely one of the strangest battlefields in history, with one side fighting wholly above ground and the other operating almost wholly within it … The strangest thing of all was that the two contestants sometimes made troop movements simultaneously in the same territory, one maneuvering on the surface and the other using tunnels beneath’ (Wheeler 1994: 188).3 The most powerful impression of haunting in the film, however, comes from the famous photograph itself, a photograph whose effect on the lives of the main characters forms the subject of the film. Far from recording a searing moment of surpassing heroism, the photograph itself is a kind of double, almost an afterimage or an afterthought, a ‘second take’. The original flag raising on 23 March 1945 was a celebrated event, cheered by all the soldiers within eyesight and on board the battleships anchored near the shore. A photograph was taken, but never received much attention. A couple of hours later, the first flag was replaced by a second, larger flag after one of the officers on the beach had heard that the Secretary of the Navy had requested the original flag as a souvenir. Wanting to keep the first flag for the Marines, the officer had a second flag sent up the mountain. The famous photograph by Joe Rosenthal of the Associated Press was taken on the spur of the moment, without framing or set-up, and captured a purely workmanlike effort by the soldiers to raise the heavy pole. Although the replacement flag raising was considered an insignificant event in comparison with the first, the photograph it produced became one of the most famous photographs in history (Bradley and Powers 2006: 325–44). And it is with the publication of the second photograph that the aura of the uncanny, the destabilising of a concrete instance in time, begins to manifest itself.4 Flags of Our Fathers, with ambivalence and doubling built into the title, delineates the effects of constructed celebrity on soldiers whose actual experiences on Iwo Jima – of loss, tragedy, and guilt – have been supplanted by an image that now defines them (See Bradley and Powers 2006, especially chapter 12, ‘Myths’). The photograph, as in ancient superstition, has somehow stolen the soul of the original event. Moreover, one of the participants in the second flag raising has been misidentified. As Doc, the Navy corpsman, says to the Treasury Secretary organising a re-enactment of the event in the United States, ‘where do we imagine Hank was standing? Seen as how he wasn’t there it’ll be pretty hard to leave a space for him.’

162

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 162

29/5/13 13:48:40

Haunting in the War Film

Joe Rosenthal’s photograph of the flag raising on Iwo Jima immediately gained mythic status, here appearing on the front of newspapers in Flags of Our Fathers.

The strange doubleness that issues from the photograph – two flags, two images, two different teams of flag raisers – pushes the phantasmatic quality of photography to the surface of the text. The photograph of the second flag raising, apparently grounded in the real and taken under combat conditions, is nevertheless riddled with uncertainty and doubt; it immediately takes on the unreal aspect of the replica: rather than a recording of a punctual moment in time, it becomes a kind of hollow monument. Its aura of singularity almost immediately gives way to the logic of seriality, as the photograph is reproduced in newspapers, posters, postage stamps, paintings, sculptures, and even in ice cream moulds. As the image proliferates, its connection to reality, to the actual event, disappears. Its ‘realism’ begins to be questioned, as a rumour begins to circulate shortly thereafter that it was a staged event, a re-enactment. And the three participating soldiers who survived Iwo Jima are subjected to the same hollowing out of the real. Just as the photograph quickly becomes a monument to official nationalism rather than a recording of an instant in time, the corporeal bodies of the soldiers, both the living and the dead, are also claimed, taken over, ‘possessed’ by nationalism. They are vested with an honorific ‘heroes of Iwo Jima’ that follows them everywhere. The aura of singularity – and the film stresses the individuality of the characters – is lost as the soldiers themselves become part of a series, part of a bank of images exploited for nationalist purposes, to be reproduced in whatever medium, and to be replaced when something or someone newly compelling comes along. Ira and Doc especially are aware of the fact that they have become symbols, grafted into a national narrative that has little to do with the grim work they performed on Iwo Jima. They are even more concerned about the loss of the real in relation to their dead comrades, underscored by the substitution of one soldier for another in the

163

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 163

29/5/13 13:48:40

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

official accounts. Throughout the film, they attempt to reclaim the meaning of their colleagues’ sacrifice, to reframe the photograph in the actual experience of loss, returning, again and again in memory, nightmares, and in the case of Ira, traumatised behaviour, to the scenes that have been erased from the story. Flags of Our Fathers juxtaposes three different time periods, cutting back and forth from the present period of James Bradley’s researches into his father’s wartime experiences, specifically, into the question of why he never talked about Iwo Jima; to the narrative of the soldiers’ training and the battle for the island in 1945; to the public relations campaign that followed the publication of the photograph, the Seventh War Bond Drive.5 The cutting from one temporal frame to another is sudden, jagged, and disorienting, creating an almost Eisensteinian impression of shock as the sensations of battle give way to scenes of celebrity photo ops with the three main characters during the bond drive. Rapidly edited close-ups of mortars exploding on the beach, followed by scenes of hand-to-hand combat and night-time guerrilla attacks in darkness and fog are juxtaposed with the staged re-enactments and celebrity appearances in America during the bond drive, as if the frenzy of battle and what Leo Braudy calls the ‘frenzy of renown’ were at the same time radically dissonant and at some level oddly comparable (Braudy 2007). The amplified, physical intensity of these scenes is occasionally relaxed in sequences that feature the mothers of the dead soldiers, who were also enlisted in the bond drive effort. These quiet scenes, some set in the rustic and humble byways of mid-century America, speak to a culture that is now remote. Although the film is titled Flags of Our Fathers, the quiet suffering of the mothers who have lost their young sons provides a counterweight to the crushing intensity of the battle and the crushing publicity of the bond campaign staged around the flag raising.

Replica, Effigy, and Aura The film’s counter-narrative of the flag raising revolves around a particularly over-the-top staged re-enactment in Soldier Field in Chicago. The three surviving soldiers, Doc, Ira, and Rene, have been recruited to tour the US to raise money for the war effort by re-enacting the event, speaking to groups of donors and participating in staged meetings with the mothers of the soldiers from the photograph who were killed on Iwo Jima. At the centre of the war bond drive is the re-enactment in Soldier Field. The three men must scale a

164

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 164

29/5/13 13:48:40

Haunting in the War Film

fabricated papier mâché structure made to look like a volcanic hill, and then plant a flag at the top. Two of the soldiers, Doc and Ira, are drawn back to Iwo Jima in memory sequences that detail the deaths of their comrades as they scale the structure. The deaths of the four other flag raisers – Mike, Hank (a member of the original flag raising team but not the second one), Harlan, and Franklin – are rendered as subjective flashbacks in the course of raising the flag. The transition between the present and the past is marked at times by Doc’s direct gaze into the camera, at other times by close-ups of hands and feet. Sounds of rocket fire, grenade explosions, scenes of mortal wounding and death, are intercut with fireworks, smoke and amplified sound effects, illuminated by stadium lighting. The son et lumiere effect of the spectacle at Soldier Field, witnessed and cheered by more than 50,000 people, provokes an involuntary ‘witnessing again’ for Ira and Doc. Far from honouring the soldiers, living and dead, who fought at Iwo Jima, the re-enactment raises the ghosts of the past. The papier mâché mountain becomes a haunted zone, an in-between place in which the manufactured heroism and pasteboard setting commemorating the dead are unhappily populated by the presence of their spectral doubles. To a certain extent, the surviving soldiers are traumatised as much by the image that follows them as by their actual experiences on Iwo Jima. The image becomes a repository of a false history that haunts their daily lives, that hollows out their actual history, sapping its reality from within. The photograph appears in different forms throughout the film, like a traumatic memory whose themes are repeated and varied throughout waking life. The image appears in huge murals as a backdrop to the three men’s celebrity appearances in the US. It pops up on posters throughout the cities they visit, including the outside wall of the bar that will not serve Ira because he is an American Indian.

The three surviving flag raisers re-enact raising the American flag on Iwo Jima at Soldier Field, Chicago, on the War Bond Drive in 1945 in Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers.

165

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 165

29/5/13 13:48:40

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

It appears as an enormous sculpture in Times Square, as a small serving of sculpted ice cream at a State Dinner, in paintings copied from the photograph, in postage stamps, in the Marine Corps War Memorial, and in sad recreations of various kinds, such as the one at Soldier Field. The re-enactments turn the soldiers into living effigies as they traverse the country. At the end of the film, Ira, working in the dusty Arizona fields as a labourer, is approached by a suburban family on vacation, and asked to pose for a photograph. Ira dutifully takes out a tiny American flag, holds it up for the camera’s viewfinder, and re-enacts, in a dignified but still degrading way, what has become, unwittingly, the signature moment of his life.

A Machine for Raising Ghosts The memories of Doc and Ira revolve around two events that rise to the level of traumatic memories over the course of the film. Doc has ‘lost’ Iggy when he set out from their foxhole alone to help another soldier. When he returns, Iggy is gone. Doc reacts frantically, certain that he has returned to the right foxhole, and finally discovers a hidden trapdoor built into the base of the foxhole. Doc later finds Iggy’s corpse, grossly mutilated in a tunnel. Iggy has been pulled into the earth from this secret trapdoor, tortured, and killed. It seems the memory haunts Doc throughout his life, for the film opens with the elderly Doc, collapsing on the stairs, and crying out ‘Where is he? Where is he?’ For his part, Ira circles back, again and again, to memories of Mike, his sergeant and a man that he calls a ‘real hero’. One of these memories, however, features Mike savagely bayoneting, over and over again, a Japanese soldier who he has already killed. But the repeated memory that brings Ira to the brink is the memory of his own bayoneting of a Japanese soldier in hand-to-hand combat, an event he cannot leave behind. The heartbreak, loss, and guilt conveyed in these scenes demystifies the triumphalism of the official photograph. Benedict Anderson has written of the logic of official nationalism’s monuments, the repeatable, substitutable logic of images, of heroes, of national figures. Describing the ‘nonchalant substitutability of effigies’ at the Washington Mall and Mount Rushmore, for example, he writes, ‘It is here that one starts to realize the singularity of late official nationalism’s human images, which is that they can never, as such, be singular … this means that heroic national monuments do not have auras, such as one senses in the originality of Las Meninas – under any, even unnatural lighting – the Wailing Wall, or Angkor Wat … the fact that national hero monuments are auraless also means that

166

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 166

29/5/13 13:48:40

Haunting in the War Film

they circulate extremely easily through different media – stamps, t-shirts, postcards, wallpapers, posters, videotapes, place mats, and so on – without anyone feeling profaned’ (Anderson 1988: 49). ‘Film does not capture and reproduce the real, so much as it already haunts reality, sapping its apparent solidity from within’ (Shaviro 2008). The cinema, as Steve Shaviro continues, is ‘a machine for raising ghosts’ (Shaviro 2008). Flags of Our Fathers raises the ghosts enclosed and displaced in the photograph, bringing them back to momentary visibility, staging their presence, and marking the way they haunt the corporeal world. Photography here reveals itself as a medium in the occult sense, a medium that saps the reality of the event while uncannily calling it forth, calling out to the living to witness again and again the ghostly remnant of an occurrence that has been detached from the real and grafted onto another kind of narrative. By employing the medium of photography to restore the singularity of events on Iwo Jima, this Eastwood film creates a paradox: it uses the image to break the spell of the image. Here, the idea of film as a haunted medium, imprinted and shaped by events and figures from the past, is vividly expressed in a text that frames the moment when the dead are ‘simultaneously forgotten, replicated, sequestered, serialized, and unknowned’ (Anderson 1998: 56). Letters from Iwo Jima, which I consider in the essay ‘Suicide in Letters from Iwo Jima’ also in this volume, forms a dramatic mirror reversal of the story narrated in Flags of Our Fathers, portraying events detached both from the heroic narrative celebrated by the victors and from the narrative of victimisation that has dominated Japanese wartime memory. Counterposing the largely forgotten story of the Japanese soldiers defending the island to the constructed celebrity of the Americans in the first film, Letters from Iwo Jima illuminates a past that has been relegated to an almost complete cultural oblivion, bringing to light events – the abandonment of the troops by the Imperial Command and the mass ‘honour’ suicides that occurred despite the explicit orders of the commanding general – that have been cloaked in official obscurity. While Flags of Our Fathers details a history haunted by myths of heroism and media celebrity, Letters from Iwo Jima focuses on a past haunted by myths of ‘honourable death’, portraying in three key scenes the practice of honour suicide among the Japanese troops defending the island. Depicting an act that has long been regarded as radically alien – incomprehensible to Western culture – Letters from Iwo Jima expands the symbolic vocabulary of the war film to include consideration of self-sacrifice, a practice that has become more and more prominent in contemporary warfare. Like Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, twisting around to gaze upon the catastrophes

167

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 167

29/5/13 13:48:40

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

of the past, both films ‘listen to the dead’ in order to hear the voices of those whose cause has not yet been named in dominant historical accounts (Benjamin 1968: 257).6

Notes

1

2

3

4 5 6

Michel Chion uses these phrases in his discussion of the ‘acousmetre’ in both The Voice in Cinema and Audio-Vision. Anne Gjelsvik has pointed out to me that these are in fact biblical references, deriving from Genesis. I thank her for the insight. The translations of these three texts are explained in detail in this essay. The first quotation in Greek comes from The Odyssey and describes Odysseus: ‘Tell me Muse, of the man of many ways, who was driven far …’ The second, from Ovid’s Remedies of Love, reads: ‘Fight the disease at the start, for once the symptoms develop / Medicine comes too late.’ See also Mette Mortensen’s article ‘The Making and Remakings of an American Icon: “Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima” from Photojournalism to Global, Digital Media’ on the history of the photograph in this volume. During the bond drive and for many years after, sceptics would claim that the Rosenthal photograph was staged, that it was a ‘re-enactment’. See Glenn Man’s article ‘Clint Eastwood’s Postclassical Multiple Narratives of Iwo Jima’ in this volume for his reading of six different time frames in the film. Benjamin, in Thesis IX, describes a painting by Paul Klee, ‘Angelus Novus’: ‘This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise …’

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, Benedict (1998) The Spectre of Comparisons. London; New York: Verso. Benjamin, Walter (1968) ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Harcourt Brace. Bradley, James and Ron Powers (2006) Flags of Our Fathers. New York: Bantam Books. Braudy, Leo (2007) ‘Review of Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima’, Film Quarterly, 60, 4, 16–23.

168

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 168

29/5/13 13:48:40

Haunting in the War Film

Chion, Michel (1994) Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press. ____ (1999) The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press. Dauer, Tysen D. and Nadja Kramer (2007) ‘Classical Philology Gone Wild: The Use of Classical Texts in the Film All Quiet on the Western Front’, Graduate Studies and Research Journal, 7, Minnesota State University Mankato. Available at: grad.mnsu. ed/research/urc/Journal/URC2007journal/Dauer.pdf (accessed 1 November 2009). Freud, Sigmund (1963) ‘The Uncanny’, in Studies in Parapsychology. New York: Collier Books, 19–62. Shaviro, Steven (2008) ‘Response to “Untimely Bodies: Toward a Comparative Film Theory of Human Figures, Temporalities, and Visibilities”, Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference paper, Philadelphia, PA, delivered 9 March. Sorlin, Pierre (1999) ‘Cinema and the Memory of the Great War’, in Michael Paris (ed.) The First World War and Popular Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 5–28. Wheeler, Richard (1994) Iwo. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press.

169

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 169

29/5/13 13:48:40

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 170

29/5/13 13:48:40

PA RT T H R E E

___

LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 171

29/5/13 13:48:40

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 172

29/5/13 13:48:40

Eastwood and the Enemy ___ rikke schubart

In most war pictures I grew up with, there were the good guys and the bad guys. Life is not like that and war is not like that. These movies are not about winning or losing. They are about this war’s effects on human beings and those who lose their lives much before their time. Clint Eastwood1 It all comes from the fact that the Other, like Evil, is unimaginable. It all comes from the impossibility of conceiving of the Other – friend or enemy – in its radical otherness, in its irreconcilable foreignness. A refusal rooted in the total identification with oneself around moral values and technical power. That is the America that takes itself for America and which, bereft of Otherness, eyes itself with the wildest compassion. Jean Baudrillard (2002: 62)

I must admit I was a little disappointed when I saw Flags of Our Fathers (Clint Eastwood, 2006) about the battle of Iwo Jima in 1945. It resembled Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998) too much in its desaturated colour and flashback-structured narration. But then Letters from Iwo Jima

173

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 173

29/5/13 13:48:40

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

(Clint Eastwood, 2006) swept me from my feet. I sat in awe as the enemy came alive and stretched out his hands towards me to share his stomach ache from diarrhea, his burning thirst due to water rations, his worries about his family, his regret in fighting this war. Letters filled me with such sadness and afterthought that I could not get the film out of my mind and finally decided to write this study of Eastwood’s diptych.2 Because I had never seen two films about the same event filmed back-to-back by the same director. I had never seen an American director make a film in Japanese. And I had never seen such a compassionate portrayal of war told from the perspective of the enemy. Originally Eastwood set out to make one film about Iwo Jima, an adaptation of James Bradley’s book Flags of Our Fathers (2000), about the six American soldiers raising the flag on Mount Suribachi, Iwo Jima, one of whom was the author’s father, John Bradley.3 However, when Eastwood worked on Flags of Our Fathers, his researchers discovered General Tadamichi Kuribayashi’s letters, which had been published posthumously in Japanese in 2002. Picture Letters from the Commander In Chief contained a selection of the General’s letters to his family, including nine of his forty-one letters from Iwo Jima. Many of the letters had drawings made by the General, who was un-Japanese in several respects. He prohibited the then-common physical punishment of soldiers, he walked unarmed on Iwo Jima, and he led his men in the final battle (Japanese officers were to stay behind and commit hara-kiri while their men fought in gyokusai, honourable death).4 Kuribayashi loved America, where he had worked as an attaché when he was a young officer, yet he fought to the death as ordered by the Emperor. In the letters Eastwood found a Japanese voice. He first considered adding a Japanese point of view to Flags but then decided on making a second film instead. A film entirely dedicated to the Japanese point of view. And so, while doing post-production on Flags, Eastwood shot Letters from Iwo Jima in 32 days. This article has in mind two questions, which I set out here and return to in my conclusion. First, what happens to our understanding of the enemy when we see not one, but two films? And second, does Eastwood’s portrayal of the enemy make him a minor utopian? I am borrowing the expression ‘minor utopian’ from Dreams of Peace and Freedom: Utopian Moments in the 20th Century (2006). In this book historian Jay Winter puts forward the idea that where major utopians like Hitler, Stalin, and Osama Bin Laden try to change the world, minor utopians are people who seek to realise smaller moments which can benefit mankind. One of Winter’s examples is the French lawyer René Cassin, who worked more than 30 years on what would become the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Thus,

174

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 174

29/5/13 13:48:40

Eastwood and the Enemy

minor utopians have ‘visions of partial transformations, of pathways out of the ravages of war, or away from the indignities of the abuse of human rights. Such imaginings are powerful and sketch out a world very different from the one we live in, but from which not all social conflict or all oppression has been eliminated’ (Winter 2006: 5). A minor utopia is a vision of a better world that locates problems, that suggests or searches for action, that is born out of faith in mankind, that wants to inspire hope, and that transcends nation, culture, and religion. Such a vision is minor in the sense that it has no illusion of being able to change the world, yet it insists on trying. Winter calls minor utopias ‘spaces in which the contradictions of a period are embodied and performed, and new possibilities are imagined’ (Winter 2006: 205). So, let us see if Eastwood’s two war films make him a ‘minor utopian’.

I. Flags of Our Fathers This essay is divided into two parts: first a reading of Flags of Our Fathers, then a reading of Letters from Iwo Jima. Eastwood’s original project was to deconstruct the heroism of the American flag raising. However, as Letters came into being the project took on a new direction and three themes emerged as central for both films: the question of time and the past; the question of emotion and our identification with characters; and the question of heroism. Flags and Letters both engage with these themes but, as we shall see, in different ways. Traumatic Time

Let us begin with time, since Flags of Our Fathers in its opening immerses the spectator in a traumatic experience of time. Corpsman John Bradley (Ryan Phillippe) is running alone in a bleak landscape. The camera mimics his movements as if we were running right behind him. Around him voices plead, ‘Corpsman, Corpsman!’ The camera pans the empty landscape, then zooms slowly into an unfocused ultra close-up of his bewildered and crying eyes. There is a sudden loud sound of a grenade landing close by and an anguished shout: ‘Corpsman!’ The image then cuts to an old John Bradley awakening from a nightmare. Throughout Flags, Eastwood in this fashion weaves back and forth between plural timelines: the soldiers’ training and their voyage to Iwo Jima; the fierce battle on Iwo Jima; the propaganda of the War Bond Tour; the

175

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 175

29/5/13 13:48:40

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

three survivors’ lives after the War Bond Tour, where Ira becomes a destitute and a drunk and Rene Gagnon ends as a bitter man; John Bradley’s stroke at the age of 70 and his death in hospital, surrounded by his children; and finally the son’s research for the book.5 This mosaic plot structure in the film deviates from the book’s chronological story about the flag raisers. Adding further temporal confusion is Eastwood’s use of 12 flashback scenes that are often seamlessly inserted into the narrative, making the leap in time and place almost invisible to the viewer.6 A second example of traumatic time can be seen towards the end, when John Bradley, Ira Hayes (Adam Beach), and Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) ascend a papier mâché mountain in Soldier Field, Chicago, and are greeted by the audience’s yelling, blitz from cameras everywhere, fireworks in the dark sky above them. Cutting between Soldier Field and Iwo Jima, the spectator sees with John’s and Ira’s eyes the deaths of their friends and fellow Marines, while the sound of fireworks is replaced by gunfire on the soundtrack, thus confusing and combining the two locations. Describing the Omaha combat scene of Saving Private Ryan, film scholar Robert Burgoyne writes that ‘The rapid panning, jarring cutting, and extreme alternation of angles are joined to a soundtrack that engulfs the sonic space in confusion’, a description which also fits the battle scenes of Flags of Our Fathers (Burgoyne 2008: 54). With a desaturation of colours to nearly blackand-white, handheld camera, jump-cuts between events, and a temporal, spatial, and sonic loss of overview due to the spectator sharing the subjective point of view of the characters, our senses are bombarded. We are in the battle of Iwo Jima, sharing the men’s fear. The intention is to create immediacy, authenticity, and empathy. Visual effects supervisor Michael Owens explains the choice of aesthetics: ‘the less the audience was aware that they were watching a movie, the more successful it’d be … the visual effects had to be completely seamless and perfect, relative to the audience being completely unaware that there were any visual effects at all’.7 Just as Soldier Field is confused with Iwo Jima, the spectator is meant to not be able to tell the difference between the Icelandic location and the CGI-enhanced battle. Moving from one shot to the next should not cause reflection. Indeed, here is no time for reflection, only for affect and emotion. The aesthetic strategy is to mimic the traumatic memories of John and Ira and thereby make us, the audience, feel their disorientation. Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993), Saving Private Ryan, and the television mini-series Band of Brothers (HBO, 2001) also use multiple timelines and a carefully composed chaotic aesthetic to disorient the audience; however, here the

176

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 176

29/5/13 13:48:41

Eastwood and the Enemy

major part of the narrative is chronological and relatively easy to follow. In Eastwood’s hands the storyline jumps back and forth like a paintbrush making little dots here and there on a huge canvas of time, leaving the spectator at a loss as to where we are, when we are, and whose point of view we share. The narrative breaks into fragments that we must piece together by sharing characters’ unstable visions, ontological disorientation, and painful memories. Not easy work. From Affect to Empathy

This fragmentation of time is a strategy to immerse us in emotions from the past. That is, to make us feel what people – who are now dead – felt in the past. Film scholar Alison Landsberg has recently argued that fiction films provide spectators with ‘prosthetic memory’ (See Landsberg 2003: 144–62; Landsberg 2004). That is, they give us a memory of past events we have not lived through but know from a mediated universe. She calls these memories ‘prosthetic’ because they are fabricated commodities, because we experience them with our bodies, and because they are useful. Like a well-working prosthesis, we wear them in and on our bodies and incorporate them into our minds, where they blend in with ‘real’ memories. ‘[B]ecause they feel real’, says Landsberg, ‘they help to condition how an individual thinks about the world, and might be instrumental in generating empathy and articulating an ethical relation to the other’ (Landsberg 2004: 149). In both Flags and Letters flashback scenes are crucial in transporting us back in time and into the emotions of characters. However, they do so in different ways that generate different kinds of empathy in a spectator. Now, Landsberg uses the term ‘empathy’ in the sense of sharing the emotional state of another person and cognitively feeling responsible for the other person’s well-being. ‘[A]ny ethical relationship to the other’, says Landsberg, ‘requires empathy: a recognition of the profound difference and unknowability of the other, and a simultaneous sense of commitment and responsibility toward him/her even in the face of such differences’ (Landsberg 2004: 147).8 She contrasts this to sympathy, which she sees as projecting one’s own sentiments and morals onto the other person. ‘In the act of sympathising, not only is the victimhood of the other reinforced, but hierarchies are established; sympathy implies condescension, for the sympathiser looks down on his/her object, and in the process reaffirms his/her superiority’ (ibid.). Using ‘sympathy’ and ‘empathy’ in almost reverse fashion, film scholar Murray Smith has distinguished between what he calls sympathy or acentral

177

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 177

29/5/13 13:48:41

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

imagining and empathy or central imagining. To Smith, sympathy is when a spectator imagines him- or herself to be in a situation similar to that of a character and responds to the character’s emotion/situation with a different but appropriate emotion – thus we feel anger over the racism in a politician’s question to the Native American soldier Ira: ‘I heard you used a tomahawk on those Japs, is that true?’ ‘No, sir’, Ira responds. ‘Well, say it is, it makes for a better story, don’t you think?’ And we feel sadness when the brave Mike Strank (Barry Pepper) is killed by ‘friendly fire’ on Iwo Jima. Structures of sympathy, says Smith, require a cognitive understanding of the narrative context. Empathy, on the other hand, is when ‘we simulate or experience the same affect or emotion experienced by the character’ by centrally imagining ourselves in the character’s place (Smith 1995: 102). Now, on Soldier Field, where Ira and John climb the papier mâché mountain and remember Iwo Jima, we, using the terms of Murray Smith, mimic their feelings of disorientation through their (and our) involuntary startling responses to the sudden noise of the fireworks and gunfire, and we then simulate their traumatic feelings of helplessness as they watch their fellow soldiers get shot. The simulation is voluntary and depends on our allegiance with the characters. Both feelings – disorientation and helplessness – are empathetic. A strong subjective and emotional perspective invites empathetic identification. In his analysis of Saving Private Ryan, Burgoyne points to the strong ‘mimetic discourse’ and ‘hyper-realistic representation of combat’ which serves to ‘draw’ the spectator into the Omaha scene (Burgoyne 2008: 8). Likewise in Flags, a spectator is asked to bear witness and ‘see’ with another character’s eyes and share – and mimic – his emotions. I will leave empathy and sympathy for now and at this point note that in Flags several flashback scenes are constructed to invite affective mimicry. Emotions are meant to make us, the viewers, share the soldier’s experiences in the past. The Victimised Hero

Heroism is the principal theme in Flags. When the flag raisers returned to the US they were received as heroes. But why, asks James Bradley in his book, did his father never talk about the war? Did he not consider himself a hero? Reviewers also asked about heroism in their response to the film. One Danish reviewer wrote, ‘I think he wants to say something about heroes. About creating something meaningful out of what is meaningless. [The film] depicts a group of ordinary young men who take on a mission because they

178

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 178

29/5/13 13:48:41

Eastwood and the Enemy

Back from Iwo Jima but lost in the American fields. Ira Hayes (Adam Beach) as victimised hero in Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers.

have to. Sometimes, they choose to stay and die, not for a cause or a country, but for each other. Either there are no heroes or they are all heroes’ (Green Jensen 2006).9 The review is exemplary in its irresolution – either ‘no heroes’ or ‘all heroes’. Flags portrays its heroes as unheroic in the conventional understanding of the term: Rene never fired his rifle and enjoys the public’s spotlight too much. Ira is a Native American and an alcoholic who suffers from survivor guilt.10 He does not return to Iwo Jima because he is heroic and wants to fight but because he cannot bear to be hailed as a hero. And Corpsman John Bradley is busy searching for the wounded, pushing his fingers into their flesh to grab severed veins. Reviewers even perceived Bradley as a passive character: ‘Actually, he doesn’t really do anything, other than watch the others with soulful understanding’ (La Salle 2006). In other words, the film portrays the men as not being outstanding heroes. They were as scared as anyone else would be in the same situation and rose to the occasion as best they could. While undoing our conception of the flag raisers as heroes, Flags wants to criticise the (ab)use of heroism. Thus, ironically, women greet Rene, who did not fire his gun, with the words: ‘You are such a hero, I feel honoured to be in your presence.’ After the Bond Tour, Rene is forgotten and job offers no longer apply. ‘He was yesterday’s hero’, a voice-over comments. Or, in another bitter irony, when the poor and tormented Ira is working in the field a car pulls over and a family runs out to have their picture taken with him. ‘That’s a hero, kid’, says the father and hands Ira a few coins, leaving the field as suddenly as they entered. Finally James Bradley, the son, has the film’s last words in a voice-over which raises the question of heroes: ‘Maybe there is no such thing as heroes. Maybe there are just people like my dad … Heroes are something we create. Something we need … if we wish to truly honour these men, we

179

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 179

29/5/13 13:48:41

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

should remember them the way they really were, the way my dad remembers them.’ At this time the frame shows the soldiers bathing in the ocean before the flag raising and before the loss of comrades. A picture not of men, but of innocent boys about to be traumatised by history, war, and politicians. In interview Eastwood said his films were ‘sort of a tribute to the common man’ (Weisman 2006). And Flags cannot make up its mind about whether the common man is a hero or not: in one scene the soldiers are battle-fatigued men and in the next scene they are boys. On the one hand, they are victims of war (either dead on Iwo Jima or survivors on the Tour); on the other hand, their sacrifice ‘saved a lot of lives’, as a war veteran puts it in the film. In her article ‘Care or Glory? Picturing a New War Hero’ in this anthology, film scholar Anne Gjelsvik argues that Flags constructs John Bradley as a new kind of hero, a ‘caring hero’. She compares the close-ups of John’s face as he responds to the cries of the wounded to Emmanuel Levinas’s ‘account of the “face-to-face” encounter with “the Other”’. By responding to the cries of his fellow soldiers Bradley responds to ‘the call of the Other’ and is willing to risk his life to save that of another (the actions for which he was awarded a Navy Cross). Thus, Flags redefines heroism as sacrifice rather than courage. They are heroes because they are willing to sacrifice themselves, not because they are eager to kill an enemy. This is a sacrificial heroism with an enemy who is turning invisible. The Japanese may be evil, but they are also almost absent from Eastwood’s Flags and give way to the portrayal of a cynical American government propaganda machinery: ‘You present each [flag raiser’s] mother with a flag, they say a few words, people will shit money, it’ll be so moving’, a public relations man instructs the flag raisers. This man, rather than the Japanese soldiers on Iwo Jima, is cast as the antagonist. Eastwood’s film differs from Bradley’s book in its portrayal of heroes and enemies. Written in 2000, the book presents crystal clear dichotomies: the American soldiers are ‘boys of common virtue’ fighting Japanese soldiers who are ‘wolves’, ‘predators’ (Bradley 2006: 191), and ‘skilled torturers’ (Bradley 2006: 138). And Ira did not become an alcoholic as a reaction to war traumas as Eastwood’s film hints, but, the book states, already had a record of being arrested drunk twice before he enlisted (Bradley 2006: 332). Thus, in the book American soldiers are good and Japanese soldiers are evil and the drunken Native American Ira Hayes was drunk before he joined the Army. In Eastwood’s version of the same story the portrayal of the enemy is as conflicted as the portrayal of the heroes: either they are all heroes or there are no heroes – and either the Japanese are all evil or there are no evil Japanese. Where, then, is the enemy?

180

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 180

29/5/13 13:48:41

Eastwood and the Enemy

The uneasiness about giving the enemy a face is characteristic of the American war film in a New World Order after the dissolution of the Soviet Communist Party and the Soviet Union in 1991 (See Schubart 2007). Americans are portrayed as heroes in productions like Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers, and Pearl Harbor (Michael Bay, 2001); however, the enemy is not portrayed as correspondingly ‘evil’. And even post-9/11 films like Jarhead (Sam Mendes, 2005), Redacted (Brian De Palma, 2007) and the television series Over There (FX, 2005) and Generation Kill (HBO, 2008) refuse to present the enemy as evil. What, then, is the conclusion about heroism in Flags? ‘Clint Eastwood’s film cannot be called de-heroising, rather de-mythologising’, said a reviewer (Iversen 2006). I partly agree: Flags de-mythologises war, yet it both deheroises war (in a traditional sense) and re-heroises war (presenting a sacrificial hero). Today, the hero is a victim of war and heroism has a traumatised face. Eastwood wants us to erase our memory of the old, heroic flag raising and replace it with a new, prosthetic memory. To what use shall we put this memory? Shall we use the sacrificial hero to ‘work through’ old war traumas and put them to rest, like James Bradley puts to rest the memory of his father by writing the book? Or is the last image in Flags of the soldiers bathing on Iwo Jima yet another ‘acting out’ of the familiar (Vietnam) story of sacrifice and innocence lost?

II. Letters from Iwo Jima Many reviewers felt that Flags was unsatisfactory: the aesthetic looked like Ryan and the film lacked a clear sense of heroes and enemies. It was ‘flawed yet admirable’ (Burns 2007). ‘[I]t is yet difficult to estimate just how unique Eastwood’s project is … [N]ot until we see [Letters] in January 2007 will we be able to judge if Flags of Our Fathers is more than just an excruciatingly well-executed war film’, wrote a Danish reviewer (Skotte 2006). But when Letters from Iwo Jima premiered, reviews were ecstatic: ‘Eastwood directs with the touch of a true master’ (Queitsch 2007) and ‘[i]t is exactly this humanism Eastwood wants to praise, and he does so without a single false note, without pathos, without sentimentality, without cynicism, but with the dignity that marks great art’ (Christensen 2007). Reviewers felt that Letters offered deeper and more complex emotions than Flags, and the reason for this, they agreed, was the portrayal of the enemy: ‘Eastwood makes us if not cheer for the Japanese then at least put ourselves in their shoes and

181

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 181

29/5/13 13:48:41

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

see them as human beings just like the American soldiers of the first film’ (Lassen 2007). A Painful Memory of a Happy Moment

The narrative structure is simpler than in Flags. Apart from a framing device at the beginning and the end of the film – with a cache of letters being found on Iwo Jima in the present day – the plot stays with the Japanese soldiers on Iwo Jima. Here, Lt General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe) arrives as new commander of Iwo Jima. He deviates from traditional Japanese war strategy, which dictates that an island should be defended by pillboxes on the beaches. Instead, he gives orders to build 28 kilometre tunnels and 5,000 caves under protest from the officers, a unique strategy resulting in 35 days of combat. As side characters we have the young and simple baker, Private Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya); the aristocrat, equestrian and 1932 Olympic Gold Medal winner, Lt Colonel Nishi, known as Baron Nishi (Tsuyoshi Ihara); and the former Kempetai (military police officer) and now demoted Superior Private Shimizu (Ryo Kase). The film has five flashback scenes: three belong to the commander in chief, one to Saigo, and one to Shimizu. At the end, Kuribayashi and Nishi commit suicide while a wounded Saigo is placed on the beach among wounded American soldiers. In Flags the flashbacks are mostly to distressing events of trauma and death. In Letters Eastwood puts the flashbacks to quite a different use. Here, they are memories of a past prior to the war. They are clearly distinguishable from Iwo Jima by having more colour saturation in contrast to the events on Iwo Jima, which are almost drained of colour, and by each being a rounded voluntary memory, a contemplation, not a fragment forcing its way into an unwilling mind. In contrast to Flags, with its handheld camera and jump-cuts, Letters is filmed in slow tempo with long takes, echoing the monotonous waiting of the soldiers (except for the battle scenes, which share the aesthetics of Flags). Flashbacks unfold slowly with few cuts, fading in and out with close-ups of a character. Margrethe Vaage (2009) suggests that such slowing down of time invites reflection; audience research shows that readers read slower when they engage cognitively with a text. Similarly, a slowing down of the film narrative invites spectators to engage in subjective associations, reflection, and self-reflection. In a story where the spectator is trapped with characters in dark caves, some seven storeys – seven! – under the rock surface, and where we are certain that the protagonist will die, the flashbacks offer a

182

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 182

29/5/13 13:48:41

Eastwood and the Enemy

One drawing is of a happy moment in a banquet dinner held in Kuribayashi’s honour at Fort Bliss when he was an envoy in the late 1920s (Letters from Iwo Jima).

sense of spatial and temporal relief. They also provide an intimate insight into a character’s innermost thoughts. One flashback is Kuribayashi’s memory of a banquet dinner held in his honour at Fort Bliss when he was an envoy in the late 1920s. The commander is making a pencil drawing and the camera cuts from the drawing to a close-up of his face, then fades to the past, where an American officer presents him with a 1911 Colt .45 ‘as a token of our friendship’. At the dinner, the officer’s wife asks what Kuribayashi would do if their countries were to meet in war: kuribayashi: The United States is the last country in the world Japan should fight. But, if this were to happen, I would serve my duty to my country. officer’s wife: (surprised) You mean, if Bertie were on the opposite side, you’d shoot him? kuribayashi: I’d have to follow my convictions.

An American officer gives Kuribayashi a 1911 Colt .45 ‘as a token of our friendship’ in a flashback in Letters from Iwo Jima.

183

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 183

29/5/13 13:48:41

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

the officer [bertie]: Do you mean you’d have to follow your convictions or your country’s convictions? kuribayashi: (smiles) Are they not the same? the officer: Spoken like a true soldier.

As Kuribayashi sits in the dark cave and draws a picture of the dinner, we understand this is a painful memory of a happy moment. Kuribayashi treasures the gun, which he wears in his belt and with which he will commit suicide. Now, 54 years old, time is testing him. And the commander’s conflict is obvious to us, torn as he is between his own convictions and those of his nation. Because, alas, they are not the same. Kuribayashi’s flashbacks are all to America: in the first he writes a letter home, sitting on a bench in a street bustling with cars; the second is the dinner; and in the third he drives across America with one hand on the steering wheel, the other caressing the gun in its wooden box in the passenger seat next to him. This gun is a complex symbol. Actor Ken Watanabe suggested the gun to Eastwood as a dramatic addition to his character.11 The Colt .45 – from 1911 until 1985 a standard-issue side arm for the United States armed forces – represents American violence and mythology. Because we know Eastwood is also an actor in westerns and action films, the gun invokes American mythology, at the same time integrating and questioning our collective cultural knowledge of the western, the cowboy, the open range, and the freedom of the individual. Elements that the Japanese commander knew, admired, and shared, yet elements he had to repress in himself, trapped as he was in the claustrophobic caves and in the Japanese notion of the individual and the nation. When Kuribayashi is fatally injured, he orders his lieutenant to behead him with his sword, but the man is shot before the fatal blow. Because of his injuries

While awaiting his death in the Iwo Jima caves, Kuribayashi makes drawings (Letters from Iwo Jima).

184

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 184

29/5/13 13:48:41

Eastwood and the Enemy

Kuribayashi cannot use his sword; however, the gun proves trustworthy. Ironically, the American gift of friendship leads to Japanese suicide. Recalling Landsberg’s prosthetic memories, she says they may serve ‘a progressive, even radical politics of memory’ (Landsberg 2004: 146). They may make us not only identify with a fellow person – putting oneself in another person’s place – but even identify with the Other, that is, with someone radically different from us. The Japanese is no longer an enemy. Having travelled back in time and into his thoughts, we feel that we know him and that he is now a fellow being. A review entitled ‘Know Thy Enemy’ emphasised this: ‘The people we badly wanted dead in the first film are precisely those who we are made to care deeply about here and whose bravery this film so admires. It’s not that we want the Japanese to win the war; it’s that we absolutely do not want these men we’ve come to know intimately to lose their lives’ (Turan 2006). Between Empathy and Sympathy

Let us return to empathy and sympathy. In Landsberg’s view, empathy is ethical and engaging, whereas sympathy is condescending and distancing. In Smith’s view the difference is in the appeal to the spectator: empathy is when we mimic emotions and sympathy is when we evaluate and respond with appropriate emotions. And at this point I wish to complicate things by arguing that both positions are, in fact, wrong. First, empathy and sympathy are closer to one another than Landsberg and Smith acknowledge. Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary defines empathy as ‘the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another …’ and sympathy as ‘… the act or capacity of entering into or sharing the feelings or interests of another … [and as] the feeling or mental state brought about by such sensitivity’ (Merriam-Webster Online 2008). Second, the alleged difference between empathy and sympathy is usually explained as feeling with someone (empathy) and for someone (sympathy). However, film scholar Carl Plantinga argues that neither sympathy nor empathy is identification in the sense of ‘sharing’ sensations: we cannot share a character’s fear in war if we haven’t been in a war; we can only simulate the fear. Furthermore, says Plantinga, empathy and sympathy overlap as ‘shared feeling’ and ‘concern’ for the other: ‘Both may involve a shared moral and affective stance toward another’s situation, and neither requires an identity of feeling between observer and observed’ (Plantinga 1996: 247). Finally, neither sympathy nor empathy

185

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 185

29/5/13 13:48:41

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

consists of a single emotion but is composed of several emotions according to the situation a character is in; we feel anger and shame (sympathy) when Ira is treated as an ‘Indian’ and we feel disorientation, shock, and fear (empathy) when John remembers combat fire. Plantinga suggests a definition of empathy which is broader than Landsberg’s and includes Smith’s central and acentral imagining, incorporating ‘feeling with’, ‘feeling for’, and ‘feeling responsible for’: ‘empathy is neither a simple process nor one clearly understood. Empathy may involve several varied feelings that evolve and shade into each other. Empathy incorporates both cognitive and physiological, voluntary and involuntary processes. It involves both imagining the situation of a character from the outside and, perhaps in a few cases, imagining being a character. Most important, it is dependent on a temporal process of narration, together with the stream of evaluations and inferences cued by the narration’ (Plantinga 1995: 247). For the rest of this chapter I will use Plantinga’s ‘loose definition of empathy’ (ibid.). None of Letters’ flashbacks use affective emotion to invite mimicry. We are not shocked, angered, repulsed, or confused. Instead we are drawn into a character’s situation so we may imagine ourselves in a similar situation. The evoked sentiments consist of conflicting emotions. We understand that Kuribayashi likes America. He accepts the gun as a token of friendship, a symbol of America, of honour, valour, pride, a willingness to embrace strangers. He is not an Other in Fort Bliss, but a friend and a fellow soldier. Yet, framing his flashback is Iwo Jima with bombs falling, water running short, men dying, the commander knowing he shall not return to his wife and children in Tokyo. His is a memory of complex sentiments. We are not asked to mimic his emotions; we are invited to understand his sentiments and contemplate his conflict between serving his duty to his nation and following his convictions. What would be the appropriate response? Empathy does not stipulate how we respond, only that we engage emotionally (in Landsberg’s moral sense) with characters. Unlike Flags, which says we should honour the soldiers’ sacrifice, Letters offers several possible engagements. The bonus materials on the DVDs of Flags and Letters suggest how we should engage with the films. In the documentary film of Letters’ world premiere in Tokyo, the main actors, the producer, the scriptwriter, and the director were present, and each introduced the film with some personal remarks: ‘I’ve been thinking about what this film has to offer. Is it pain, agony, pleasure, enjoyment? Or is it suffering? I didn’t know. But I do know one thing: this film is the truth’, said actor Kazunari Ninomiya, who played Saigo, the only survivor. ‘I hope you are able to experience this truth as an individual human being. Your thoughts

186

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 186

29/5/13 13:48:41

Eastwood and the Enemy

and emotions will be testament of this film.’12 Ken Watanabe, who played Kuribayashi, said: ‘We hope that this film provides an opportunity for you to reflect on a history that many are trying to forget.’13 The plea to the audience as empathetic and reflective individuals was repeated by Paul Haggis, who co-wrote the story: ‘You really have to empathize with people who would be villains in other films and tell the movie from their perspectives.’14 In contrast, co-scriptwriter William Broyles says in the bonus material on Flags: ‘Walking among us still are these old men that most people think are invisible. You know, they might be down at the cafeterias at five o’clock in the afternoon eating their carrots and peas and once, when they were young, they were heroes.’15 The difference is between pathos and ethos: in Flags we are called upon to mourn soldiers’ sacrifice (once heroes, now forgotten), but in Letters we are asked to experience and understand the sentiments of the soldiers and reflect upon their motivations and actions. The Tragic Hero

At the heart of Flags is an unreleased tension: are the boys heroes? Was the sacrifice worth it? ‘Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country’, Kennedy once said. But does a nation have the right to ask for such sacrifice? This tension disappears in Letters, where the ambiguity of heroism transcends into a question of the individual’s moral integrity. A Danish reviewer pinpointed what he called the ‘individually oriented anti-war tendency’ in Letters: ‘The traditionally heroizing war movie that portrayed action and heroism in the service of the good cause is largely replaced by films that may be efficient in picturing ‘realistic’ battle scenes in terms of action and blood, but that also have political antiwar undertones by portraying the war as the individual soldier’s absurd battle with his personal emotional and non-ideological perspective’ (Lassen 2007). Like Bradley, Kuribayashi is a caring hero who wants to alleviate suffering. This is clear from the film’s first flashback, which is when the commander sees a small boy in the village on Iwo Jima. He recalls writing a letter to his son Taro from the US and immediately orders an evacuation of all civilians from Iwo Jima. All his gestures, such as ordering equal food rations for officers and the men, forbidding punishment, and sharing his water, characterise a caring person. However, where Bradley saves lives, the commander sends 22,000 men – including himself – to their death. The difference between the two heroes is in life position, life experience, and life choice. The corpsman is a victim-hero we know from the melodrama.

187

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 187

29/5/13 13:48:41

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

He is innocent and virtuous, caught in a dialectic of pathos and action, of ‘too late’ and ‘in the nick of time’ (Vaage 2008: 1).16 Bradley is too late to rescue his friend Iggy from torture and death, and the close-ups of his face, tormented by gruesome memories, create ‘a prolongation of emotional effect’ (ibid.). We feel pity for him. Kuribayashi, on the other hand, is a tragic hero. Unlike the melodrama’s hero, the tragic hero is guilty. Like Oedipus, he unknowingly committed a crime for which there is no forgiveness. Czech author Milan Kundera defines the tragic hero thus: Two antagonists face to face, each of them inseparably bound to a truth that is partial and relative, but, considered in itself, entirely justified. Each is prepared to sacrifice his life for it, but can only make it prevail at the price of total ruin for the adversary. Thus both are at once right and guilty. Being guilty is to the credit of great tragic characters, Hegel says. A profound sense of guilt can make possible an eventual reconciliation. Freeing the great human conflicts from naive interpretation as a struggle between good and evil, understanding them in the light of tragedy, was an enormous feat of the mind; it brought forward the unavoidable relativism of human truths; it made clear the need to do justice to the enemy. (Kundera 2008: 110)

The tragic hero upholds his partial truth because he sees no other way. The Manichean conflict between good and evil gives way to opposing worldviews where both sides stand firm on their partial truth. Kuribayashi, however, is doubly guilty and doubly tragic. Because he can see another way. It is clear from his letters, read out in voice-over, that he loved his family, as it is clear from the flashbacks that he loved America. And it is clear from a scene following the dinner flashback that Baron Nishi shared the General’s disagreement with Japanese ethics. Nishi has captured a wounded American soldier, Sam, but instead of killing Sam, Nishi treats him with the last morphine. When Sam dies from his wounds, Nishi reads out a letter from Sam’s mother: ‘Remember what I said to you: always do what is right because it is right.’ The letter is read out in Japanese and translated in the subtitles. Later, Nishi orders his men not to commit suicide – arguing violently with another officer who ignored Kuribayashi’s orders and forced his men to commit suicide – but when Nishi is blinded by a bomb and unable to lead his men, he commits suicide. Why? Why do Nishi and Kuribayashi first go against the Emperor’s orders? Why do they later act in disagreement with their own beliefs? In real life, Kuribayashi and Nishi’s bodies were never found. By giving them death by

188

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 188

29/5/13 13:48:41

Eastwood and the Enemy

suicide Eastwood shows their loyalty to a national ethos they do not share, yet obey. Letters makes it crystal clear that suicide is a perverted nationalism. It is almost unbearable to watch the rows of young men holding exploding grenades to their stomachs. The tragedy of the suicides is not in their meaning, but in their meaninglessness. This is Kuribayashi’s and Nishi’s guilt and our challenge: they did not listen to their hearts but to their minds, their duty. Saigo, the simple baker, refuses to commit suicide and refuses to find honour in war. When all is done he lies wounded on the beach, turning his eyes to us. This man – no hero, no saviour, no decorated corpsman or admired general – survives. He is the future, not to honour or mourn, but to emulate. He returns to his wife and child. Eastwood: A Minor Utopian

Let us return to my opening questions: why two films, and might we call Eastwood a minor utopian? When he set out to make Flags, the project was to create a new memory of the flag raising. However, as Eastwood travels back in history he encounters the Other and sees the connection between ‘I’ and ‘the Other’. Responding to this vision – which we may say is his ‘call’ – Eastwood with Letters wants to create more than a prosthetic memory. He wants us to see the stories in ‘history’. Or, rather, instead of offering a memory he wants to enhance our ability to see. Not just put us in the shoes of the Other, but enable us to see ourselves with the Other from a third position. We might suspect Eastwood of embellishing history, but this seems to not be the case. Kumiko Kakehashi in her Letters from Iwo Jima (2005) describes how Kuribayashi gave his officer’s privileges, such as cigarettes, fruit, and alcohol, to the men (Kakehashi 2007: 70, 75, 195). She also describes how Kuribayashi’s farewell telegram from Iwo Jima to the Imperial General Headquarters was censored. ‘I humbly rejoice in the fact that they have continued to fight bravely though utterly empty-handed and ill-equipped’, Kuribayashi wrote about his men. He also wrote: ‘Unable to complete this heavy task for our country. Arrows and bullets all spent, so sad we fall …’ It was unheard of to describe Japanese soldiers as ‘empty-handed and illequipped’ and ‘sad’, and the sentences were removed before the telegram was published in Japanese newspapers (Kakehashi 2007: 186–7).17 What, then, does Eastwood’s Letters do? With Flags, Eastwood wants us to re-remember history. But in Letters, his mission is to make us recognise the enemy as an ‘Other’ whose call we must respond to. To see Iwo Jima as a

189

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 189

29/5/13 13:48:41

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

symbol of war today. To recognise Saigo as ‘the common man’, like Bradley and the flag raisers in Flags. Thus, the call is to us, asking that we empathetically and ethically engage in today’s wars, that we be moved and see the multiple perspectives. Going one step further, we may ask what Eastwood wants us to do. Landsberg underscores ‘the unique power of prosthetic memory to affect people in profound ways – both intellectually and emotionally – in ways that might ultimately change the way they think, and how they act, in the world’ (Landsberg 2004: 158). She calls this use of memory her ‘utopian dream’ (Ricoeur 2004: 95). Clearly, going back to World War II is about using a memory of the past to act in the world today. But what does it mean to act in the world today? At the end of Flags of Our Fathers, the meaning of the soldiers’ sacrifice is summed up as the protection of world peace. At the end of Letters from Iwo Jima, the meaning of Kuribayashi’s sacrifice is posed as a question: what do you, spectator, think of this suicide? Did the General ‘do what is right because it is right’? ‘The duty of memory’, says philosopher Paul Ricoeur, ‘is the duty to do justice, through memories, to an other than the self’ (Ricoeur 2004: 95). This other need not be the fellow soldier next to us, it need not be Iggy in the foxhole with John Bradley. It can be the enemy soldier waiting to kill us. If we open our eyes we see that he, too, is human. Thus, Letters is an example of the ‘working through’ of traumatic memory that Flags failed to be. Rather than remember and mourn, Letters remembers and questions. What would you do: serve your duty to your country? Or follow your own convictions? For his bold two-film vision, for his embrace of the enemy, for his call to us, the audience, to see the world from the point of view of the Other, and for his courage to question truth, I claim Eastwood as a minor utopian.

Notes

1

Clint Eastwood, press material, ‘“Flags of Our Fathers” Production Information’, 3. 2 This article is part of my ongoing study of the American war film after 1991, financed by the Danish Research Council for the Humanities. See also Schubart 2007: 267–89. 3 See the Introduction for a background on the book Flags of Our Fathers, the battle for Iwo Jima, and Clint Eastwood’s motivation for making two films instead of

190

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 190

29/5/13 13:48:41

Eastwood and the Enemy

one. It was unprecedented in Japanese military history for a division commander to lead the charge himself. See Kakehashi (2007: 195). 5 See Glenn K. Man’s article ‘Clint Eastwood’s Postclassical Multiple Narratives of Iwo Jima’ in this anthology for discussion of the six timelines in Flags. 6 Five flashbacks belong to John Bradley, four to Ira Hayes, one to a war veteran, one to a public relations man, the last to author James Bradley. The third Marine, Rene Gagnon, served as a runner and was not in battle. He has no flashbacks in the film. 7 Interview with Michael Owens, ‘Visual Effects’, bonus documentary on Flags of Our Fathers DVD. 8 In Landsberg’s view, the other may be truly Other in racial, political, or national terms, yet still command our empathy. 9 Author’s translation from Danish. All translations from Danish into English are by the author. 10 Reviewers found that ‘Beach … unquestionably takes the acting honors with it, delivering a full sense of the character’s pain and sense of entrapment in an absurd situation’ (McCarthy 2006). 11 Ken Watanabe interview in ‘The Cast of Letters from Iwo Jima’, bonus documentary material on Letters from Iwo Jima DVD. 12 Kazunari Ninomiya interview in ‘November 2006 World Premiere at Budo-kan in Tokyo’, bonus documentary material on Letters from Iwo Jima DVD. 13 Ken Watanabe interview in ‘November 2006 World Premiere at Budo-kan in Tokyo’ bonus material on Letters from Iwo Jima DVD. 14 Paul Haggis interview in ‘Red Sun, Black Sand: The Making of Letters from Iwo Jima – An Inside Look at the Creation of the Film with All Key Players’, bonus documentary material on Letters from Iwo Jima DVD. 15 William Broyles interview in ‘An Introduction by Clint Eastwood’, bonus documentary material on Flags of Our Fathers DVD. 16 I wish to thank Norwegian film scholar Margrethe Bruun Vaage for the inspiration for my reflections on the relation between drama and melodrama. 17 The censored farewell telegram appears in Kuribayashi and Searleman (2007: 233). The uncensored telegram is printed in Kakehashi (2007: 186–7). 4

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baudrillard, Jean (2002) The Spirit of Terrorism. London: Verso. Bradley, James with Ron Powers (2006 [2000]) Flags of Our Fathers. New York: Bantam. Burgoyne, Robert (2008) The Hollywood Historical Film. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Burns, Sean (2007) ‘Heartbreaking Letters’, review of Letters from Iwo Jima, The

191

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 191

29/5/13 13:48:41

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

Improper Bostonian, 56, 10–23 January. Christensen, Johs H. (2007) ‘Et homerisk epos’ [A Homeric Epos], review of Letters from Iwo Jima, Jyllandsposten, 23 February. ‘“Flags of Our Fathers” Production Information’ (2006) Press material for the film Flags of Our Fathers (Clint Eastwood, 2006), 1–41. Iversen, Ebbe (2006) ‘Heltemod og hykleri’ [Heroism and Hypocrisy], review of Flags of Our Fathers, Århus Stiftstidende, 2 January. Jensen, Bo Green (2006) ‘Noget om helte’ [Something About Heroes], review of Flags of Our Fathers, Weekendavisen, 1 December. Kakehashi, Kumiko (2007 [2005]) Letters from Iwo Jima: The Japanese Eyewitness Stories That Inspired Clint Eastwood’s Film. First published in Japanese by Shinchosha Co. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Kundera, Milan (2007 [2005]) The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts. First published in French, Le Rideau: essai en sept parties, by Éditions Gallimard. New York: Harper Perennial. Kuribayashi, Tadamichi (author) and Eric Searleman (editor) (2007) Picture Letters from the Commander In Chief. San Francisco: VIZ Media LLC. Landsberg, Alison (2003) ‘Prosthetic Memory: The Ethics and Politics of Memory in an Age of Mass Culture’, in Paul Grainge (ed.) Memory and Popular Film. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 144–62. ____ (2004) Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. LaSalle, Mike (2006) ‘They Survived the War, but Iwo Jima Marked Them for Life’, review of Flags of Our Fathers, San Francisco Chronicle, 20 October 2006, available at: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/10/20/DDGDPLRS231. DTL (accessed 20 February 2008). Lassen, Nikolaj M. (2007) ‘Fra fjendens synspunkt’ [From the Enemy’s Point of View], review of Letters from Iwo Jima, Weekendavisen, 23 February. McCarthy, Todd (2006) ‘Flags of Our Fathers’, review of Flags of Our Fathers, Variety, 10 October, available at: http://www.variety.com/awardcentral_review/ VE1117931805.html?nav=reviews07&categoryid=2352&cs=1 (accessed 1 November 2007). Merriam-Webster Online. Available at: http://www.merriam-webster.com/ (accessed 7 September 2008). Plantinga, Carl (1999) ‘The Scene of Empathy and the Human Face on Film’, in Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith (eds) Passionate Views. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 239–56. Queitsch, Henrik (2007) ‘Film: De nådesløse’ [Film: The Merciless], review of Letters from Iwo Jima, Ekstrabladet, 23 February. Ricoeur, Paul (2004) Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schubart, Rikke (2007) ‘Storytelling for a Nation: Spielberg, Memory, and the Narration of War’, in Kristina Riegert (ed.) Politicotainment: Television’s Take on the Real. New York: Peter Lang, 267–89. Skotte, Kim (2006) ‘Krigsfilm: De nødvendige helte’ [War Film: The Necessary Heroes],

192

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 192

29/5/13 13:48:41

Eastwood and the Enemy

review of Flags of Our Fathers, Politiken, 1 December. Smith, Murray (1995) Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Turan, Kenneth (2006) ‘Know Thy Enemy’, review of Letters from Iwo Jima, Los Angeles Times, 20 December. Vaage, Margrethe Bruun (2008) ‘Effect: Affect. Gladiator, Empathy, and Melodrama’, unpublished paper presented at SCMS, Philadelphia, 1–8 March. ____ (2009) ‘Self-Reflection: Beyond Conventional Fiction Film Engagement’, Nordicom Review, 30, 2, 159–178. Weisman, Jon (2006) ‘Clint Eastwood: Flags of Our Fathers, Letters from Iwo Jima’, interview with Clint Eastwood, Variety (D), 6 December. Winter, Jay (2006) Dreams of Peace and Freedom: Utopian Moments in the 20th Century. New York: Yale University Press.

193

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 193

29/5/13 13:48:41

East of Eastwood Iwo Jima and the Japanese Context ___ lars-martin sørensen

Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) is widely held to have successfully managed to show the battle of Iwo Jima from a Japanese perspective. In doing so, it has joined the ranks of a small number of war films which attempt to include the perspective of the enemy/other in their presentation of the events of a shared traumatic past. But unlike for instance Nagisa Oshima’s prison camp film Senjou no merii kurisumasu (Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, 1983), which depicts the clash of Japanese and Western cultures in the microcosm of the prison camp, and was charged by Japanese critics with reproducing the very same cultural stereotypes it set out to deconstruct, Letters has enjoyed a relatively smooth run (Miyoshi 1991: 169 ff). Most critics have been favourably inclined and some even hail the film as a masterpiece (See for instance Buruma 2009). Perhaps paradoxically, perhaps indicatively, the Japanese Film Academy granted Letters a Best Foreign Language Film award in 2008, even though it uses Japanese dialogue. Meanwhile, distributors in the US gave the film a rather limited run, most likely because of its Japanese dialogue, which in the view of most American moviegoers made Letters a foreign film. Taking the former enemy’s point of view, obviously, is a delicate task to perform, albeit not an entirely new one for makers of war films. What – to my knowledge – is new is that an American director has made two versions

194

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 194

29/5/13 13:48:41

East of Eastwood

of the same story: Flags of Our Fathers (Clint Eastwood, 2006) deals with the American side of the battle of Iwo Jima and Letters – allegedly – takes the Japanese perspective on the same events. While Flags to some degree qualifies the heroism of the American fighting men and foregrounds the superficiality and hollowness of official hero worship, Letters reconstructs the heroism of Japanese World War II soldiers to an extent hitherto unseen in American cinema. The choice of heroic commanding officers Kuribayashi and Nishi and the humane private soldier Saigo at centre stage is crucial with regard to Eastwood’s attempt to cater to the tastes of both Japanese and American audiences. The stoic willingness of commanding officers to do their duty is balanced with Private Saigo’s reluctance to die for his nation. And they all become universal heroes by being presented as victims rather than perpetrators of war. This aspect of Letters, however, coincides with a widely distributed victim discourse in post-war Japan and with the aspirations of right-wing nationalists in contemporary Japan, who have engaged in a sustained campaign to whitewash Japan’s war history for decades.1 And the film was promoted in Japan with due consideration to its potential for catering to nationalist tastes (Gerow 2009). Moreover, the film’s focus on suicide and self-sacrifice plugs into a heated controversy in Japan over the historical record. Novelist and Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe, for instance, has been taken to court by right-wingers for writing that the mass suicide of the 150,000 Okinawan civilians killed in the Battle of Okinawa in 1945 was anything but voluntary self-sacrifice (Kyodo News Agency 2007b; Maasaki 2009). At the same time, lawsuits over history textbooks dealing with Japan’s war have also taken place. In 2007, the Ministry of Education, which censors and certifies history textbooks for use in Japanese schools, demanded that all references to military coercion in the mass suicides of Okinawan residents be eliminated. The announcement triggered a wave of anger across Okinawa, leading to a mass demonstration of an estimated 110,000 Okinawans (Masaaki 2007: 1; see also Kyodo News Agency 2007b). And over the last decade, several revisionist war films, some of them big-budget productions strategically targeted at World War II commemorations, have hit Japanese screens, while documentaries with a critical stance towards Japanese war history have been subject to protests and occasionally violent sabotage by ultra-right-wingers, often with the acceptance and the vocal backing of ruling Japanese politicians (McNeill 2008b).2 Thus, war history is contested territory in Japan and there is not one but several Japanese perspectives to consider when one takes World War II as the topic in films.

195

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 195

29/5/13 13:48:41

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

The notion that Clint Eastwood presented the battle of Iwo Jima from the Japanese perspective raises a question I have not yet seen answered in detail anywhere: the question is which Japanese perspective(s) are presented in the portrayal of the battle on Iwo Jima? In order to answer this question, I propose a number of perspectives on Japanese national sentiment and historical memory against which the meaning-making processes of film will be contextualised. The key assumption behind this method is that certain traits of the film correspond to and/or may prompt certain attitudes held by adherents to different sets of beliefs about Japan’s role during World War II. In this manner, I aim to provide finer grain than working with the rather crude notion of ‘the Japanese audience’ or ‘the (one?) Japanese perspective’. The aim is to analyse whether Letters not only ‘tickled the ego’ of right-wingers in Japan, as one Japanese critic writes, but also matched the preferences of a broader range of audiences (Eikoh 2007). A first indication that this appears to be the case can be retrieved from Japanese online consumer reviews of the film.3 Professed leftists repeatedly categorise the film as ‘anti-war’, whereas their rightist counterparts consider it ‘neutral’ – which, given the context and their normal use of the term, is laudatory and practically speaking means ‘nationalist’. But first I will offer a brief outline of the process leading to the actual shooting of the film, because, as we shall see, strong Japanese attitudes to the nation’s war history exerted their influence on the making of Letters even in the preproduction stage.

Strange Bedfellows Clint Eastwood got the idea of making Letters from Iwo Jima during his research for Flags of Our Fathers, when he discovered Kumiko Kakehashi’s book Picture Letters from the Commander In Chief (2007), which is partly based on Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi’s letters to his family before and during World War II.4 The book is distinctly marked by Kakehashi’s fascination with Kuribayashi and with her gratitude to both surviving Iwo Jima veterans and members of Kuribayashi’s family who have shared their personal and traumatic memories with the author. While this is, of course, understandable, it hardly lays the foundation for an unbiased portrait of Kuribayashi. In her concluding remarks, Kakehashi writes: ‘Many other generals came up with excuses to wriggle out of being sent there [to Iwo Jima] and, in a sense, Kuribayashi was the only one foolishly honest

196

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 196

29/5/13 13:48:42

East of Eastwood

enough to say yes. Once he had accepted, he fulfilled his duty heroically, as I hope this book shows’ (Kakehashi 2007: 200–1). The notion of ‘heroism’ at work here is questionable, and so is Kakehashi’s notion of ‘courage’, as demonstrated by the following quote: ‘These close-quarter attacks on tanks traditionally involved throwing explosive charges into the tank’s caterpillar tracks and then withdrawing, but when it came to real combat many soldiers summoned up the courage to ram themselves bodily against the tanks, which was much more effective … They were doing on land what the Kamikaze Special Attack Force was doing in the air’ (Kakehashi 2007: 157). One could wonder if some, if not all, human anti-tank bombs, and kamikaze plane and suicide torpedo pilots for that matter, were ordered or at least pressured to ‘summon up the courage to ram themselves bodily against’ the enemy. At the core of Kakehashi’s description lies an uncritical acceptance of the Japanese samurai dogma that death rather than surrender is the honourable option in the face of certain defeat. This dogma undeniably determined many an action carried out by Japanese soldiers. It also made the war drag on long after the military brass in Japan knew that it was lost – resulting in hundreds of thousands of ‘unnecessary’ deaths. Are we to uncritically embrace this line of thinking even today? And ought not a Japanese researcher on this cruel battle, someone who has encountered the anguish of the bereaved at first hand, question it? Kakehashi does not question Kuribayashi’s order. Neither does Clint Eastwood. He shows the despair of some of the Japanese soldiers who are ordered to die, admittedly, but he does not critically engage Kuribayashi’s orders to die defending the island, or his heroic character for that matter. But on the whole, Eastwood’s stance is somewhat more complex and contradictory than Kakehashi’s. When, for instance, Eastwood lets the character Ito ‘summon up the courage’ to go on a suicide anti-tank mission, Ito fails

Ito (Shido Nakamura), the fanatic, summoning up the courage to ram himself against enemy tanks in Letters from Iwo Jima.

197

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 197

29/5/13 13:48:42

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

bitterly. He comes forward as a fanatic, and his attempted suicide mission is not represented as the least bit heroic; it is futile, almost pathetic – he ends up being captured in his sleep by US Marines. In spring 2005, as part of the preparation for the shooting of Letters, Eastwood had to engage in a diplomatic offensive to obtain admission to film on location on Iwo Jima. The island is under the jurisdiction of Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara, who throughout his career as a writer, filmmaker, and politician has flaunted his anti-Americanism, his ultra-nationalism, and his repeated public denials of war atrocities committed by the Imperial Army. He is, quite simply, the most high-profile ultra-nationalist in contemporary Japan. Ishihara impressed on Eastwood that Iwo Jima is a ‘sacred place’, that he wanted ‘national sentiments to be respected’ (McNeill 2008a), and permitted Eastwood to film ‘if he would absolutely not trample on Japanese sensitivities’ (McCurry 2006). Clint Eastwood promised absolutely not to and paid a visit to Kuribayashi’s grandson, Conservative MP Yoshitaka Shindo, who admonished Eastwood in much the same manner as had Ishihara (McNeill 2006: 1). In short, the process leading to the realisation of the film brought about a number of concerns and constraints, which may have curbed potential intentions to critically engage certain elements of the story, elements deemed either unworthy of mention by biographer Kakehashi or undesirable by influential right-wing politicians in Japan. And Eastwood is clearly balancing on a tightrope with Letters. To illuminate this point, we can compare his use of graphic violence in Flags and Letters. In both films, violence is sanitised as compared to the real thing. One needs only watch documentaries on the battle on Iwo Jima to realise that Eastwood’s representation of combat violence has very little to do with real combat. The macabre sight of Marines casually stepping over the charred smouldering corpses of Japanese soldiers incinerated out of their pillboxes seen in the war documentary The World at War5 has no counterpart in either of Eastwood’s films. There are no instances of the shockingly depraved humour often put to use by soldiers to dissociate themselves from the unfathomable horrors of what they have seen and done either. There are no GIs cracking the faces of dead Japanese soldiers open with their rifle butts in order to pull out gold teeth. There is no mention of this widespread practice whatsoever, which is not the case in for instance Raul Walsh’s The Naked and the Dead (1958), where Sergeant Croft (played by Aldo Ray) is constantly on the lookout for gold teeth. Also, the traumatising effects of combat are only represented in Flags – here, Eastwood to some degree tramples on the sensitivities of American national sentiment by not

198

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 198

29/5/13 13:48:42

East of Eastwood

showing war as an ennobling experience. The depiction of violence in both films owes more to Hollywood history than war history – but this, of course, is a trait of almost all violent Hollywood movies. As Stephen Prince, who has published extensively on screen violence, writes: ‘To a large extent, the cinema cannot represent violence in other than a pleasure-inducing capacity … The medium inevitably aestheticizes violence.’ And why is this? Prince again: ‘It seems likely that representations of violence on screen that are unrelentingly horrifying, nauseating, or disgusting will fail to attract viewers’, and horrifying, nauseating, and disgusting are precisely what the authentic images of combat violence are (Prince 2000: 27–8). So aestheticisation is a must for any mainstream filmmaker aiming for box-office success. And in order to meet the preferences of viewers on both sides of the Pacific, a differentiation of the exposition of violence in the two films was a must, too. War crimes committed by US Marines are emphasised in Letters and atrocities by Japanese soldiers in Flags. In the former, two Marines gun down Japanese POWs and the camera lingers on the dead body of the young soldier Shimizu, clenching his white flag of surrender while the score makes a musical comment. In the latter, Japanese soldiers torture a captured Marine to death. Additionally, the scene where Japanese soldiers commit suicide with hand grenades is remarkably free of gore. The actual blasts are rendered in glimpses so brief that the resulting carnage remains virtually unexposed or seen only in defocus from a distance. The images of torsos torn open by the explosion, of human bodies reduced to a mush, are only shown in Flags when Marines enter the cave. Likewise, the final desperate charge led by Kuribayashi takes place in the dark of night, which, obviously, puts a limit on the portrayal of explicit blood and gore. Finally, the iconic image of the Stars and Stripes hoisted on top of Mount Suribachi is avoided in Letters. The note of caution sounded by Governor Ishihara of Tokyo thus appears to have been accommodated in Letters.

Historical Awareness and Current Controversies Any audience anywhere at any time makes meaning of any film based on historical events under the influence of their own historical awareness and their own acute socio-political context. The degree to which contextual or cultural parameters influence reception obviously varies in accordance with the film’s subject matter. Given that Letters is a historical fiction that makes strong claims to authenticity and deals with a highly controversial topic (that

199

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 199

29/5/13 13:48:42

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

is, Japan at war), Japanese nationalism, the broader level of historical awareness of Japanese audiences about World War II, and the current public debate on war history in Japan are important to our understanding of how the film was received in Japan.6 Making meaning of film is a process that can be described as an interaction between the audiovisual data of the film and the interpretive mental schemata activated in the viewer (Bordwell 1985). Data and schemata interact in what has been termed bottom-up and top-down processes. Ignorance, that is, shortage of relevant schemata, shifts the weight of the meaning-making process from top-down inference to acceptance of bottom-up data.7 The film’s universal discursive power gains the upper hand as the cultural shading of reception fades. This is why it is important for us to get a bearing on the historical awareness of Japanese audiences. For if they know little, the film’s version of events and characters will be more persuasive. However, personal or collective attitudes and preferences may affect the ‘structure of sympathy’ intended by the filmmaker. As argued by the British theorist Murray Smith, films create character engagement – which is crucial to our interest – by aligning the audience with certain characters, that is, by offering more spatiotemporal access and psychological insight to some characters than others (Smith 1995). Alignment may lead to allegiance with characters. Allegiance is based on a moral evaluation of character traits, and here strong convictions on controversial subject matter may overrule or at least work against the intended allegiance structure of a given film. Viewer allegiance in Letters is divided between the pacifist Saigo and the warrior Kuribayashi. And this is part of the reason why both leftists and rightists have reportedly embraced the film (Miks 2006). The heated public debate on how the Japanese should teach, think, and talk about war history serves to narrow the interpretive horizon within which the meaning-making of Japanese audiences has taken place. It also polarises the political views held by adherents to various positions, which is why we need to operate with multiple Japanese perspectives. Essentially, the debates, lawsuits, and violent attacks by ultra-right-wingers revolve around one simple question: should the Japanese be proud or ashamed when hoisting the flags of their (grand)fathers? The complexity of this problem, that is, the myriad of mutually conflicting historical events, actions, and attitudes this issue entails, obviously does not allow for answers as simplistic as the question itself. But it seems plausible that the public awareness of these issues serves to anchor audience reception in issues pertaining to Japan’s war history then and now – just as the meaning construed by American audiences of Eastwood’s twin

200

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 200

29/5/13 13:48:42

East of Eastwood

films indubitably incorporates reflections on that nation’s past wars and the current engagement in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The interviews with the director, cast, and scriptwriter Iris Yamashita on the bonus documentary of the box set containing both Flags and Letters convey the impression that the Japanese know very little about the battle on Iwo Jima. Iris Yamashita claims that she was not taught anything on this issue at school. These views, impressionistic as they admittedly are, resound with the observations of historians (see for instance Dower 2007). Professor of History at Temple University in Tokyo Jeff Kingston writes that ‘the majority of Japanese’ have no problem ‘owning up to the atrocities and excesses of Imperial Japan’ (Kingston 2007), thus substantiating the notion that a certain level of historical literacy is part of the mental inventory of Japanese moviegoers. But Kingston also writes that the general level of awareness of Japan’s war merits in terms of singular events and aspects, such as the exploitation of wartime forced labour, is ‘sketchy’. So it is reasonable to assume that the majority of the Japanese audience has little knowledge of the battle for Iwo Jima to support their evaluation of Eastwood’s film. In fact, influential Japanese analysts of youth nationalism and historical awareness go as far as to describe at least part of the younger generation, who normally make up the bulk of moviegoers, as ‘bereft of any historical awareness’ (Honda 2007). And ignorance of historical facts influences audience evaluation of, for instance, the prominent fictive characters presented by the narrative. Consider the character of Lieutenant General Kuribayashi in Letters. If audiences knew that thousands of tunnel-digging Korean forced labourers died under the real Tadamichi Kuribayashi’s command at Iwo Jima, this would have made Eastwood’s sin of omission stand out and undermined the credibility of his portrayal of Kuribayashi as a hero (McNeill 2006; Vanneman 2007).

Fantasies of War History on Japan’s Screens Another aspect worthy of attention besides the factual is the film historical context. What is standard fare for Japanese moviegoers and how did Letters from Iwo Jima position itself in the landscape of films screened in Japan? In 2005, Assistant Professor at Yale University Aaron Gerow noted that four ‘big budget spectaculars offering particular visions of Japanese fighting wars’ were released that year (Gerow 2006a). Gerow relates this increase in the number of war films to a recent resurgence in neo-nationalist thought,8 to

201

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 201

29/5/13 13:48:42

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

the fact that competing Korean film producers had shown the way by producing a number of profitable war spectaculars, and to the fact that the Japanese Agency of Cultural Affairs is strategically targeting the creative industries of Japan, including film production, for promotion. All four films of 2005 were highly successful in terms of box-office receipts, and they were consumed in the midst of the abundance of sixtieth anniversary commemorations of Japan’s defeat.9 Two of the films followed the Japanese cinematic tradition of producing fantasies of future wars, one depicted a medieval war negotiating present problems, and the last film was a retelling of a historical event. This film, Jun’ya Sato’s Otokotachi no Yamato (English title: Yamato), dealing with the battleship Yamato’s last mission, was released in December 2005 and made most of its 50.8 billion yen in box-office revenue in 2006, when Letters hit the screens of Japan. The year 2006 saw another war film, Sea without Exit (Deguchi no nai umi, Kiyoshi Sasabe, 2006), on the ‘human torpedoes’, that is, one-man suicide submarines used during the final stages of World War II. In 2007, Taku Shinjo’s kamikaze pilot film For Those We Love (Ore wa kimi no tame ni koso shi ni iku) became a hit, making 10.8 billion yen at the Japanese box office, more than twice as much as Letters (5.1 billion yen). The scriptwriter and executive producer of this film was Governor Shintaro Ishihara. Aaron Gerow and Mark Schilling, two of the most prolific critics on contemporary Japanese film, agree that none of those films are wholesale celebrations of Japan at war, but that they all, in various ways, cater to the tastes of rightist nationalists in Japan.10 Instrumental in this respect is the recurrent theme of honourable self-sacrifice, often for a hopeless cause. ‘The dominant note’, writes Schilling on a handful of kamikaze films released over the last two decades, ‘is tragic (which is not the dominant note of, say, Independence Day [Roland Emmerich, 1996]), while the intent is to memorialize – or glorify – the fallen’ (Schilling 2006). Not unlike Letters. Yamato, the retelling of the last suicidal mission of the mythical battleship of the title, is framed by a present-day introduction in quasi-documentary style. In Letters, Japanese archaeologists unearth the hidden letters; in Yamato divers locate the wreck of the battleship on the seabed of the South China Sea. Both films clearly set out to rediscover and represent the past. Hence, at a cursory look, Letters appears to have been in keeping with the standard Japanese fare as far as war films are concerned. This is hardly surprising, when considering the process outlined above which led to the making of the film.

202

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 202

29/5/13 13:48:42

East of Eastwood

Japanese Nationalisms There is a plethora of literature on Japanese nationalism at hand, and it abounds with typologies listing various kinds, aspects, and manifestations of nationalism. One of the authorities in this field of study, cultural anthropologist Brian J. McVeigh, lists no less than 16 different types of nationalism, a few of which are relevant to the study at hand (McVeigh 2006). In his outline and discussion on the definitions, origins, and uses of Japanese nationalisms, Kevin M. Doak highlights the useful distinction between two Japanese terms for ‘nationalism’, namely kokuminshugi and minzokushugi (Doak 2007).11 The former denotes ‘civic/cultural’ nationalism, whereas the latter implies an ‘ethnic/racial’ concept of nationalism. The ethnic/racial brand of nationalism is closely aligned with State Shinto, the religious and political mythology that was the cornerstone of Japanese militarism, with its divine Emperor as both religious and political head of the national family. Membership to that family was granted to ethnic Japanese only; the longer back in the nation’s grand past one could trace one’s ancestors, the better. The distinction between civic and ethnic nationalism is a useful subdivision to the analysis of nationalism in Japanese films because themes and motifs may prompt interpretations related to a Shinto worldview, and Shinto is, as religious historian Ian Reader phrases it, an ‘explicitly Japanese religion concerned with … the land of Japan and its people’ (Reader 1993: 64). I propose to explore four main perspectives on Japan’s historical track record. These groupings are to be conceived of as interpretive landscapes, or filters through which questions of nation and history are viewed. An actual viewer may adhere to aspects and attitudes of more than one of the following perspectives, even with conflicting notions during the process of viewing, not least since Eastwood’s film attempts to cater to the preferences of opposing positions. As a heuristic tool, however, my proposition is that we can work with these divisions: peace nationalism, revisionist nationalism, ‘petit nationalism’, and ‘healthy nationalism’.12

Peace Nationalism The first perspective is held by viewers who subscribe to what McVeigh has called peace nationalism: ‘Peace nationalism is driven by a mixture of repentance and sincerity (denunciation of war), national pride (‘only Japan has a war-renouncing Constitution’), a type of self-centered nationalism expressed

203

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 203

29/5/13 13:48:42

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

as “one country pacifism” … and a naive denial of the realities of international politics (because since the war Japan has been a de facto protectorate or satellite of the U.S.)’ (McVeigh 2001). This line of nationalism emerged in the wake of defeat and the atomic bombing of Japan. It is closely connected with the victim consciousness mentioned in the introduction. The basic assumption is that the people were both the victims of deception by their own leaders, who tricked and coerced the population into war, and the victims of Allied bombings. My impression is that this group primarily consists of people who have either first- or second-hand experience of the horrors of World War II. And although, or maybe even because, a fair share of their left-leaning teachers might follow this line of thinking, not many amongst Japan’s younger generations take this position.13 Most observers agree that this grouping is on the decline in contemporary Japan, among other things because of the decreasing popularity of leftist political parties and because the number of those who survived the horrors of war is dwindling. This perspective is receptive to anti-war films, and will find their views strongly represented in the pacifism of Saigo. Saigo’s situation also resonates with victim consciousness, for he is clearly an unwilling victim of external forces. The fact that Kuribayashi’s character is constructed partly through the perspective of Saigo also contributes to making Kuribayashi more palatable to this pacifist perspective. It tempers the warrior and renders him more humane. The viciousness of the military police, Kempetai, in the young soldier Shimizu’s flashback, where he is fired from his military police unit for not following orders to shoot a dog, again plugs into victim consciousness. This scene underscores that not only were the soldiers at the front victims of external forces, but the civilian population of the homeland, too, was victimised by the military police. Here, the folly and brutality of higher-ups is exposed. Likewise when Kuribayashi is denied both adequate strategic information on the current situation of the Japanese navy and refused vital reinforcements by the High Command in Tokyo. As a consequence Kuribayashi, too, becomes a victim of the unseen warmongers back home. So, central characters and overarching themes lend themselves to the peace nationalist perspective. The peace nationalists, however, are probably the most historically literate group, so to this perspective the distortion and omission of historical facts like the already mentioned Koreans doing forced labour may have presented a problem.14 What is, perhaps, worse is that the film does not clearly foreground the futility of the defence of Iwo Jima. The rationale behind Kuribayashi’s order for everyone to die was to delay the Allied bombings of Japan. The most devastating raids on Japan’s cities, however, did not take off from Iwo Jima

204

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 204

29/5/13 13:48:42

East of Eastwood

(Dower 2007). Foregrounding this waste of human lives would have enhanced the anti-war potential of the film, but would most certainly not have pleased Shintaro Ishihara back in Tokyo. However, absences are nowhere near as important to the meaning construal as elements that are present on screen in the moment of reception, so this is a minor setback to the peace nationalists.

The Dr Feelgoods of Japanese History The second perspective is promoted by, to quote Jeff Kingston, ‘Japan’s conservative leaders and Dr. Feelgoods of history’, that is, the rightists and history revisionists who are ‘justifying, denying, minimizing, mitigating or otherwise shifting responsibility for a past they find inconvenient and shameful’ (Kingston 2007). While this group may have its share of the younger generation, its high priests are mainly elderly gentlemen with a solid knowledge of the actual historical record they strive so eagerly to distort. Important movers behind this line of thinking are a number of rightist manga artists, who proselytise amongst the younger generations with jingoistic comics,15 and the so-called ‘Tsukurukai group’ of right-wing historians, who publish revisionist history books for use in Japanese schools. As I write these lines the ‘Tsukurukai version’ of Japanese history has just been adopted by the education board of Yokohama city for use in junior high schools (Kyodo News Agency 2009). The peace nationalists mentioned above predominantly fall into the category of civic nationalism, with its emphasis on individual rights, whereas this second group may also adhere to an ethnic/racial concept of nationalism. They tend to place the nation over the individual and offer strong, occasionally violent, support for the controversial visits to the Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo by Japanese prime ministers, for example (Kyodo News Agency 2007a). Enshrined and commemorated at this Shinto shrine are the spirits of Japan’s war dead, including 14 convicted Class A war criminals, among others General Hideki Tojo. To the revisionist nationalists, the experience of Letters must have been one of ambiguity. The film focuses on individuals rather than celebrating the nation, but the initial thrill reportedly ‘tickling their egos’ – that an American director was making a film about Iwo Jima – was undoubtedly fuelled by the opening shots of a war memorial. Remembering (a certain version of) the war is crucial to this group. And the expressed admiration by the team of archaeologists at the sight of the caves dug out by their ancestors, too, must

205

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 205

29/5/13 13:48:42

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

The Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. The last Japanese stronghold of old-fashioned militarist nationalism. Photo taken by author.

have boosted expectations. The already mentioned resonance with the victim discourse presumably lends itself to this perspective, too. But, perhaps most importantly, Eastwood’s film is more about war as a force that forges bonds between men across military rank and class distinctions, that is, between Kuribayashi and Saigo, than a film about the reality of war as something that makes men discard their humanity – less a force that divides and depraves than one that unites and ennobles. The willingness to make the supreme sacrifice for the nation demonstrated by both Kuribayashi and Nishi is instrumental to this end. Nishi’s dignified suicide in particular must have struck a responsive chord with those who wish to restore the grandeur of Japan’s war dead. Just prior to his death, Nishi reads a letter from the mother of an American Marine, which brings home the message to Nishi’s soldiers that the American was just like them. In the film, this is used to negate the indoctrination Japanese soldiers had been subjected to throughout their upbringing.16 They had been told that all Americans were ‘devilish beasts’, to use the pet pejorative term of Japanese propagandists. While negation is the intended effect, it takes little imagination to see that this ‘message’ is easily construed as a substantiation of the already widely held opinion by the revisionist nationalists that Japanese soldiers were certainly no worse than American soldiers. This line of thinking is crucial to the ‘Tsukurukai version’

206

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 206

29/5/13 13:48:42

East of Eastwood

of Japanese war history. Moreover, the traumatising effects of combat are, as mentioned, absent in Letters. And war is not that dirty a business after all in Eastwood’s sanitised version of combat, where both the senninbari (the thousand-stitch belts worn for protection against bullets by the privates) and noble officer Nishi’s shirt remain impeccably white even after weeks of underground warfare. This representation is perfectly in line with the demands of Japanese wartime censorship, which forbade Yasujiro Ozu (1903–1963), who did several tours to the front in China and knew the reality of the battlefield, to make a realistic combat film where the soldiers’ senninbari were ‘crawling with lice’ (High 2001: 207). The relatively mild dose of authentic combat violence, in other words, served not only Clint Eastwood’s box-office interests but also the interests of the revisionist nationalists. Saigo’s pacifism, on the other hand, may not have been well received, and the representation of Nishi and Kuribayashi as friends of America may also have made this audience sit uncomfortably in their seats.17 But again, one senses Eastwood’s effort to balance the film. Kuribayashi’s suicide, for example, cuts both ways. He is denied the samurai death, beheading by his second, when his Lieutenant is shot standing with his sword raised. So he shoots himself with a gun presented to him by American friends – probably not the worthiest of exits in the eyes of a segment that holds untainted samurai virtues in high esteem. On the other hand, with his last breath, Kuribayashi asks Saigo to confirm that Iwo Jima is still Japanese soil, and he dies with a clear view to the sea beyond which the motherland lies. The nationalist pathos is still suitably thick to please the hardliners. Soon follows the coda, where the archaeologists lift up the bag of letters, it tears open, the letters fall to the ground in slow-motion, and voices are heard. This is easily construed as the sound of the spirits of the fallen, and we have a moment that

After weeks of underground warfare, Nishi’s (Tsuyoshi Ihara) shirt remains impeccably white.

207

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 207

29/5/13 13:48:42

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

merges nationalism with Shinto – for the fallen all have the status of gunshin – ‘soldier gods’ – or kami: Shinto spirits that are enshrined and commemorated at the Yasukuni shrine. This plugs directly into the Shinto-influenced ethnic/ racial nationalism mentioned earlier – whether Eastwood intended it or not. Not least since Iwo Jima, reportedly, is still haunted by the homesick spirits of the war dead (See Shimoyachi 2003). So, on the whole, the film to some degree lends itself to this perspective, even if there are obstacles to get over.

‘Petit Nationalism’ The third group is the ‘petit nationalists’ or ‘sneering nationalists’, to use neologisms coined by two analysts of contemporary youth nationalism: psychologist Rika Kayama and sociologist Akihiro Kitada, respectively (Kayama 2002; Kitada 2005). Kayama’s term, petit nationalism, denotes a ‘childlike make-believe patriotism bereft of any historical awareness’ (Honda 2007: 1). It is not based on political convictions as much as individual feelings of anxiety and insufficiency that are amplified by social pressures to toe the line in an increasingly competitive society with growing social disparity. The unease and dissatisfaction felt for Japan surfaces as hatred towards other nations, mainly China and Korea. As proof of the pudding, one needs only to look to the bestselling comic Kenkanryu, literally the ‘Hating “The Korean Wave”’, a strongly anti-Korean series of comics (Sakamoto and Allen 2007). The first two volumes sold more than 650,000 copies. Its readership, however, presumably by far exceeds this number, since the comic was initially released through the internet. Petit nationalism manifests itself concretely in anti-Korean and anti-Chinese discourses on the internet, fanatical support for Japan’s national soccer team, and increasing numbers of youngsters worshipping at the Yasukuni shrine. A certain degree of ethnic/racial nationalism is thus part and parcel of this trend. The petit nationalists are avid consumers of pop culture and thus susceptible to the influence of nationalist discourse transmitted by means of pop-cultural artefacts. But cinema is hardly the preferred media of this group, Americans hardly the preferred enemies, and, when the petit nationalists go to the movies, live action film hardly the preferred film form. Year after year, the box-office charts of Japanese cinema testify to the success of Japanese animation – anime – mainly, but not solely, consumed by young people. And, reportedly, Letters attracted more mature viewers in Japan than youngsters (Miks 2006: 1). However, the star casting of Kazunari Ninomiya – a famous pop singer – as Saigo is bound

208

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 208

29/5/13 13:48:42

East of Eastwood

to have attracted young viewers. But his family man pacifism cannot but have seemed somewhat dull to the petit nationalists, whose meaning making presumably to some extent parallels that of the revisionist nationalists – the eager suppliers of most of the ideological background of those youngsters. But it is crucial to this group to be in opposition to canonised narratives such as the peace nationalism or left-leaning anti-nationalism of their teachers. So Saigo’s mocking attitude to honour, duty, and nation renders him contradictory. His defiance is attractive, but his admiration for Kuribayashi resembles a loyal teacher-disciple relationship. In short, Eastwood’s film lends itself considerably less to this group than Ishihara’s kamikaze film, For Those We Love. Ishihara’s flair for provocative populist nationalism combined with his skill at manoeuvring the Japanese media and entertainment industry is hard to compete with for an American director on a tightrope between quite different American and Japanese audience preferences. The official webpage for For Those We Love, for example, puts the visitor right in the cockpit of a Zero fighter plane (on a kamikaze mission?).18 Bowing down to the consensus judgement of mainstream history is not a virtue practised by Ishihara and his fellow travellers. And this enables them to speak their agenda loud and clear.

‘Healthy Nationalism’ The fourth and probably largest grouping we can call the ‘healthy nationalists’, a term coined by prominent politician Ichiro Ozawa in his seminal vision of Japan’s proper place among the great nations of the world, titled Blueprint for a New Japan: The Rethinking of a Nation (Ozawa 1994). This group has no problem facing up to the crimes of the past. Partly because the perpetrators belong to the generation of their grandfathers. It is all in the past, compensation has been paid and lessons learnt, a few unresolved issues may remain but will be settled peacefully and pragmatically in due time. The ‘healthy’ nationalists would like to see a ‘normal’ Japan; a Japan that is on a par with other great nations; a Japan that matches its economic might with military power, shoulders international responsibility by for instance deploying troops to the world’s hot spots, and exerts international influence like any other great nation. In contrast to the other groups, isolationism or insularity is not a condition here. This group constitutes the primary audience of Letters. Their views are well represented in the film’s nuances and contradictions, which lend themselves

209

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 209

29/5/13 13:48:43

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

to mild mainstream nationalism. And the fact that an American filmmaker depicts Japanese soldiers as human beings – not savages – shows that normalisation is coming about. Old-fashioned militarist fanatics like Ito or Saigo’s brutal Captain, who orders the hand grenade suicide, are rendered unsympathetic, whereas the film’s ‘healthy nationalists’, Kuribayashi and Nishi, come forward as humane, sympathetic, and with an international outlook. Their militarism is tempered, especially by Kuribayashi’s expressed commitment to delay the enemy’s march on Tokyo. The civic nationalist endeavour of keeping American bombs away from the homeland and the families of the men at Iwo Jima is more important than fighting for the (ethnic/racist) nation as such. Kuribayashi and Nishi are the normal soldiers of a normal nation in an abnormal situation – war. A laudatory remark by many Japanese viewers is that a Japanese director should have made this film. Normality, it would appear, comes to Japan when a Japanese director makes a film like Letters from Iwo Jima. And, as we have seen, Letters resembles some of the films of the recent upsurge of Japanese war spectaculars. So, in terms of cinematic representation of past wars, Japan is ‘normalising’. The significant difference from for instance Yamato pertains to Eastwood’s choice of historical event. The battle for Iwo Jima lends itself poorly to the hitherto-preferred narrative of protection because there were no civilians to protect on Iwo Jima, only soldiers. Perhaps this explains why an American director was a step ahead of his Japanese colleagues in picking this battle, and perhaps it gives us an inkling why Eastwood emphasises the theme of protection, in the delaying of air raids on the homeland. Finally, as noted by Japanese critic Ikui Eikoh, Saigo’s character represents a turn away from the standard characterisation of Japanese war film soldiers: he is ‘exceptional less in Japanese history than in the history of Japanese film’ – because he is weak, frightened, and just wants to go home (Eikoh 2007: 2). He is – in other words – normal. Symptomatically, ‘saigo’ means ‘the last’ in Japanese. Perhaps intended as an ironic reference, it is also the name of the mythological figure Saigo Takamori, who died fighting to expel the Western barbarians when Japan was forcibly opened to the West in the eighteenth century – and the national hero that the character in Edward Zwick’s The Last Samurai (2003) was modelled on. Compared to Zwick’s questionable celebration of this anti-Western Japanese warrior, Eastwood’s Letters appears somewhat more balanced, more palatable to an audience eager not to be represented by the former enemy as xenophobic samurai warriors with a death wish, an audience eager not to be ostracised from the international community for past misdeeds. An audience eager to be considered normal.

210

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 210

29/5/13 13:48:43

East of Eastwood

Refurbishment in the Holy of Holies Summing up, we can conclude that Eastwood’s film resounds primarily with ‘healthy’ or mainstream nationalist sentiment in Japan and secondly with peace nationalism, but there are, as argued above, numerous elements in the film that cater to the revisionist nationalist and the petit nationalist perspectives, too. Aaron Gerow has coined the term ‘amorphous nationalism’ to describe the new Japanese war spectaculars which bridge ‘various contradictory [ideological] positions’, and Letters fits the category nicely (Gerow 2006b). This is unsurprising, since the mainstream makes for the best box office – and the largest electorate, we might add. In August 2009, the Japanese Prime Minister, Taro Aso, used the sixty-fourth anniversary of the end of the war to apologise for Japan’s aggression against its neighbours (Ito 2009). Aso is widely known as a hawkish conservative, someone you would not expect to show remorse for Japan’s troubled past. But like Clint Eastwood, who must make moviegoers choose his film, Aso had an election coming up, and both were targeting the mainstream – while trying to make friends within other segments, too. The election was won by a coalition led by the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). As a result, Ichiro Ozawa, who, as mentioned, promoted the ‘normalisation’ of Japan in his Blueprint for a New Japan: The Rethinking of a Nation, now holds the position of ‘shadow shogun’ in Japan’s new government. So Aso failed to make the desired political impact by expressing his remorse for Japan’s war history. Eastwood, however, appears to have made quite an unexpected impact with his film. For within the precincts of the Yasukuni shrine lies the famous and infamous museum for Japan’s war dead, the Yushukan. Here, the visitor travels through a blatantly sanitised version of the military history of modern Japan. ‘The narrative that accompanies the exhibits are actively evangelical, extolling the commitment, loyalty, bravery, and selfsacrifice of those who died in service to the nation and emperor’, writes one observer (Nelson 2009). And nowhere does this revisionist nationalist voice gain a louder voice than in the Yushukan’s exhibition room number sixteen. Until 2006, this room was devoted primarily to the memory of Japan’s suicide bombers – the walls are plastered with thousands of portrait photos of the collective of young men who ‘summoned up the courage’ to perform suicide attacks. But what first catches the eye when one enters the hall these days is an exhibition case, perhaps six to eight metres long.19 In the first vitrine, right inside the entrance, the visitor literally stands face to face with Baron Takeichi Nishi. Under the large portrait of Nishi holding his horse, Uranus,

211

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 211

29/5/13 13:48:43

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

Inside the Yushukan Museum, where the spirits of the war dead, including 14 convicted war criminals, are celebrated. Photo taken by author.

a selection of memorabilia are on display, among other things Nishi’s crop, medals, and a picture of Nishi in military uniform on horseback during a steeplechase, leaping over an obstacle – the very same photo Eastwood’s Nishi shows the fatally injured American soldier he offers both medical treatment and friendly conversation in Letters. While the use of this prop is easy to miss on a first viewing of the film, the background for the alteration of the exhibit is equally hard to miss. Public relations officers at the Yushukan are, of course, unwilling to confirm that this refurbishment of the inner sanctuary of Japanese revisionist nationalism was carried out in order to capitalise on the pop-cultural exposure of the gunshin – ‘soldier god’ – Nishi in a film made by an American director. They do confirm, however, that the exhibit case was put up in 2006, the same year Eastwood’s film opened at the Budokan Hall – just across the road from the Yasukuni shrine and the Yushukan Museum.20 So in this manner, the nationalist celebration of the self-sacrificial collective of young men in the Yushukan’s exhibition hall number sixteen gave way to the exaltation of the individual achievement and fame of a hero who counted Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford among his friends. The edifying point of this story is that not even the most hidebound promoters of the ethnic/ racial and quasi-religious version of old-fashioned Japanese nationalism are

212

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 212

29/5/13 13:48:43

East of Eastwood

impervious to the impact of modern pop culture. And that Eastwood got more than he bargained for when addressing his Letters to different Japanese perspectives.

Notes

1

The victim discourse surfaces in both popular and academic texts, for instance in the following quote from Iritani: ‘They [Japanese leaders] deceived the Japanese people and forced them to cooperate in actions which resulted in disaster and instability’ (Iritani 1991: 1). For more details on the origin of the victim discourse see Dower (1999: 490 ff). 2 Junkerman presents an update on the controversy over the documentary Yasukuni (2007), reporting among other things that Chinese documentary filmmaker Li Ying has been sued by a man who appears in the film and wants to ‘defend Japan’s honor’. 3 See http://www.jtnews.jp/cgi-bin/review.cgi?TITLE_NO=13646 for Japaneselanguage reviews. I am indebted to Associate Professor Kosuke Shimizu, Ryukoku University, for his assistance with Japanese webpages. 4 For more details on the history of Eastwood’s diptych, please see Schubart and Gjelsvik, ‘Introduction: Know Your Enemy, Know Yourself’, in this volume. 5 See Iwo Jima – Hell on Earth in The World at War, produced by Jeremy Isaac, part three, disc two. 6 This is not meant to entirely reject the possibility that some Japanese may have seen Letters from Iwo Jima as sheer entertainment. But I argue that the relatively context-free meaning (there is no such thing as entirely context-free meaning making) only pertains to the actual filmic experience. Once the film is over and the post-filmic part of the meaning making sets in, contextual factors inevitably play their part. 7 Even when we know something reflexively, ‘knowing means less than seeing’ for the arousal of emotion, writes cognitive psychologist Frijda (1988: 349–58). Strong emotional concern, however, may influence our construal of what we see and know: ‘[F]eeling means more than knowing’, according to Frijda (1988: 352). 8 A note of caution here: while societal trends may certainly, as Gerow puts it, ‘find expression in cinema’, the idea that cinema directly mirrors general societal trends is misleading. Consider for instance Danish cinema during the 1930s, where the bulk of productions were merry musicals, hardly indicative of the general mood and thought of unemployed and impoverished Danes in the decade of depression. 9 The films are Shinji Higuchi’s Lorelei (Rorerai), Junji Sakamoto’s Aegis (Bokoku no ijisu), and Masaaki Tezuka’s period film Samurai Commando: Mission 1549 (Sengoku jietai 1549). Box-office receipts are listed at www.unijapan.org. 10 See for instance Schilling (2005) on the film Yamato; Schilling’s review of Sea

213

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 213

29/5/13 13:48:43

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

Without Exit, ‘Suicide Bombers: Japanese Heroes’ (2006); or Schilling, ‘An Ishihara Weepy for the Right’ (2007), about For Those We Love. Aaron Gerow’s assessment is most clearly expressed in his ‘Fantasies of War and Nation in Recent Japanese Cinema’ (2006a). 11 McVeigh (2006) also discusses the different terms for and meanings of nationalism in Japanese. 12 The following categories are based on the observations and arguments of the prominent scholars referred to in the article rather than the myriad of available surveys that have been carried out on Japanese respondents’ attitudes to war history. 13 Teachers’ unions in Japan have traditionally been both leftist and staunch supporters of Japan’s so-called ‘Peace Constitution’ with its ‘no-war clause’ (article nine, which forbids the nation to wage war). The constitution was more or less dictated by the occupying Americans and thus targeted by rightists and conservatives in Japan. 14 There are a few questionable elements in the film. The opening sequence, for instance, where Saigo’s letter to his wife on how he is digging his own grave is rendered in voice-over, is in contradiction with consensus knowledge on wartime censorship of soldiers’ letters home. Saigo’s words would most likely have been inked out as is later shown. However, there is some uncertainty here, since sociologist Kazuko Tsurumi quotes a letter by a young Marine writing home to his family: ‘since I entered the Marine Corps, I have lost the freedom and composure necessary to have a will of my own, being enslaved physically and mentally from morning till night’ (Tsurumi 1970: 117). It is certain, however, that the use of the English loanword for ‘rifle’ (raifuru) by the Japanese soldiers is historically incorrect. The use of English phrases was campaigned against even amongst the civilian population, and soldiers were likely to receive a beating for such language. 15 See for instance Sakamoto and Allen (2007) or Sasada (2006). 16 For a detailed account on the propaganda machinery put to use in pre-war and wartime Japan see Sørensen (2009: 35–80). 17 The often stated notion that Nishi and Kuribayashi are ‘un-Japanese’ because they know and respect the US must be contested. While the emphasis placed on this trait in the film is clearly there to attract American viewers, it is problematic to equate cosmopolitanism and international outlook with ‘un-Japaneseness’. 18 http://www.chiran1945.jp/main.html (accessed 5 September 2009). 19 The exhibition case celebrates a dozen sports stars who died during World War II. Nishi’s portrait is the eye-catcher when you enter. 20 Telephone interview with the public relations section of the Yushukan Museum conducted on 25 November 2009. Again, I am indebted to the generous assistance of Associate Professor Kosuke Shimizu, Ryukoku University.

214

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 214

29/5/13 13:48:43

East of Eastwood

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bordwell, David (1985) Narration in the Fiction Film. London: Routledge. Buruma, Ian (2007) ‘Eastwood’s War: The Battle of Iwo Jima’, Japan Focus, online, available at: http://www.japanfocus.org/-Ian-Buruma/2360 (accessed 7 November 2009). Doak, Kevin M. (2007) A History of Nationalism in Modern Japan: Placing the People. Leiden: Brill. Dower, John (1999) Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Aftermath of World War II. London: Penguin. ____ (2007) ‘Lessons from Iwo Jima’, available at: http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2007/0709/0709med2.cfm on (accessed 10 November 2009). Eikoh, Ikui (2007) ‘Letters from Iwo Jima: Japanese Perspectives’, Japan Focus, 2, online, available at: http://www.japanfocus.org/-Ikui-Eikoh/2417 (accessed 7 November 2009). Gerow, Aaron (2006a) ‘Fantasies of War and Nation in Recent Japanese Cinema’, Japan Focus, 1, online, available at: http://www.japanfocus.org/-Aaron-Gerow/1707 (accessed 3 September 2009). ____ (2006b) ‘From Flags of Our Fathers to Letters from Iwo Jima: Clint Eastwood’s Balancing of Japanese and American Perspectives’, Japan Focus, 4, online, available at: http://www.japanfocus.org/-Aaron-Gerow/2290 (accessed 7 November 2009). High, Peter (2001) ‘Ozu’s War Movie: Haruka nari fubo no kuni’, in Aaron Gerow and Abe Mark Nornes (eds) In Praise of Film Studies: Essays in Honor of Makino Mamoru. Bloomington: Trafford Publishing. Honda, Yuki (2007) ‘Focusing in on Contemporary Japan’s “Youth” Nationalism’, Social Science Japan Journal, 10, 2, 281–6. Iritani, Toshio (1991) Group Psychology of the Japanese in Wartime. London: Kegan Paul International. Ito, Masami (2009) ‘Aso Expresses War Remorse: “never again”: Japan “caused tremendous damage”’, Japan Times, 16 August. Junkerman, John (2009) ‘Li Ying’s “Yasukuni”: The Controversy Continues’, Japan Focus, online, available at: http://www.japanfocus.org/-John-Junkerman/3198. (accessed 9 November 2009). Kakehashi, Kumiko (2007) Letters from Iwo Jima: The Japanese Eyewitness Stories That Inspired Clint Eastwood’s Film. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson. Kayama, Rika (2002) Puchi Nashonarizumu Shokogun: Wakamono-tachi no Nipponshugi [Petit Nationalism Syndrome: Young People’s Japan Doctrine]. Tokyo: Chuo Koron Shinsho. Kingston, Jeff (2007) ‘Forced Labor for Japan: Burying the Liberation Myth’, Japan Times, 21 January. Kitada, Akihiro (2005) Warau Nihon no ‘Nashonarizumu’ [A Sneering Japan’s ‘Nationalism’]. Tokyo: NHK Shuppan. Kyodo News Agency (2007a) ‘Kato Home Arson Nets Rightist Eight-Year Term’, Japan Times, 1 June.

215

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 215

29/5/13 13:48:43

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

____ (2007b) ‘Oe Testifies Military Behind Okinawa Mass Suicides’, Japan Times, 10 November. ____ (2009) ‘Yokohama Adopts Nationalistic Junior High History Textbook’, Japan Times, 5 August. McCurry, John (2006) ‘Eastwood Attacks Japan War Myths’, Guardian News & Media, online, available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/may/28/film. japan (accessed 7 November 2009). McNeill, David (2006) ‘Flags of Our Fathers: Commemorating Iwo Jima’, Japan Focus, online, available at: http://www.japanfocus.org/-David-McNeill/2048 (accessed 7 November 2009). ____ (2008a) ‘Clint Eastwood’s Iwo Jima’, History News Network, online, available at: http://hnn.us/articles/20709.html (accessed 5 September 2009). ____ (2008b) ‘Freedom Next Time. Japanese Neonationalists Seek to Silence Yasukuni Film: John Junkerman Interviews Li Ying’, Japan Focus, online, available at: http:// www.japanfocus.org/-David-McNeill/2712 (accessed 7 November 2009). McVeigh, Brian J. (2001) ‘Postwar Japan’s “Hard” and “Soft” Nationalism’, JPRI Working Paper, 73, online, available at: http://www.jpri.org/publications/workingpapers/wp73.html (accessed 5 September 2009). ____ (2006) Nationalisms of Japan: Managing and Mystifying Identity. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. Masaaki, Aniya (2007) ‘Compulsory Mass Suicide, the Battle of Okinawa, and Japan’s Textbook Controversy’, Japan Focus, 1, online, available at: http://www.japanfocus. org/-Aniya-Masaaki/2629 (accessed 7 November 2009). Miks, Jason (2006) ‘Japan Reads into “Letters from Iwo Jima”’, Christian Science Monitor, online, available at: http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1222/p11s02-almo. html (accessed 7 November 2009). Miyoshi, Masao (1991) Off Center: Power and Culture Relations Between Japan and the United States. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Nelson, John (undated) ‘Social Memory as Ritual Practice: Commemorating Spirits of the Military Dead at Yasukuni Shinto Shrine’, online, available at: http://www. pacificrim.usfca.edu/research/yasukuni_nelson.pdf (accessed 8 November 2009). Ozawa, Ichiro (1994) Blueprint for a New Japan: The Rethinking of a Nation, ed. Eric Gower, trans. Louisa Rubinfein. Tokyo: Kodansha International. Prince, Stephen (ed.) (2000) Screening Violence. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Reader, Ian (ed.) (1993) Japanese Religions: Past and Present. Folkstone: Japan Library. Sakamoto, Rumi and Matt Allen (2007) ‘Hating “The Korean Wave” Comic Books: A Sign of New Nationalism in Japan?’, Japan Focus, online, available at: http://www. japanfocus.org/-Rumi-SAKAMOTO/2535 (accessed 9 September 2009). Sasada, Hironori (2006) ‘Youth and Nationalism in Japan’, SAIS Review, 26, 2, 106–22. Schilling, Mark (2005) ‘This One’s for the Home Crowd’, Japan Times, 23 December. ____ (2006) ‘Suicide Bombers: Japanese Heroes’, Japan Times, 15 September. ____ (2007) ‘An Ishihara Weepy for the Right’, Japan Times, 25 May.

216

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 216

29/5/13 13:48:43

East of Eastwood

Shimoyachi, Nao (2003) ‘War Dead Said to Haunt Iwo Jima: Spirits, Remains, Like the Heat and Smoke, Always Underfoot’, Japan Times, 22 October. Smith, Murray (1995) Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion and the Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sørensen, Lars-Martin (2009) Censorship of Japanese Film During the American Occupation of Japan: The Cases of Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa. New York: Edwin Mellen Press. Tsurumi, Kazuko (1970) Social Change and the Individual: Japan Before and After Defeat in World War II. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Vanneman, Alan (2007) ‘In Like Clint! Letters from Iwo Jima Is Excellent’, Bright Lights Film Journal, online, available at: http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/56/letters. htm (accessed 5 September 2009).

217

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 217

29/5/13 13:48:43

Humanism Versus Patriotism? Eastwood Trapped in the Bi-polar Logic of Warfare ___ mikkel bruun zangenberg

In directing Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima (both 2006), Clint Eastwood could be seen as trying to stage a filmic version of the doublehelix structure of the DNA code, that is to say, a symmetric reversal and doubling of national perspectives deeply embedded in a cluster of linguistically, culturally, and historically codified narrations.1 While Letters from Iwo Jima is entirely in Japanese, Flags of Our Fathers is in English, and this simple linguistic duality extends to virtually all aspects of the two films’ mediations of the experience of warfare. Interestingly, though, the symmetry contains slight irregularities, and in this article I would like to dwell a bit on a few of these irregularities. Why? By way of an answer, let us briefly touch upon the German legal philosopher Carl Schmitt’s infamous claim in his classic The Concept of Politics (Der Begriff des Politischen) from 1932 (Schmitt 1996; Schmitt 2002: 59–62). Namely, that the originary and founding dualism of politics proper can be named ‘friend-and-enemy’. The conservative revolutionary Schmitt was very careful to emphasise that this dualism must not and cannot be understood in any other than a ‘moral-existential’ sense, that is, it is not to be conflated with metaphoric, aesthetic, economic, or psychological factors. Schmitt, who was in many ways close to the soldier-writer Ernst Jünger, and who wrote a

218

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 218

29/5/13 13:48:43

Humanism Versus Patriotism?

monograph on Thomas Hobbes’s state theory, never flinched from the prospect of actually going to war, with the enemy-position said to constitute the field of politics proper (Schmitt 2008).2 As is well known, the highly controversial Schmitt was a powerful critic of liberal democracy and its adjunct legacy of humanist pathos, and we are therefore in a position to suggest that his stance provides a useful background for scrutinising Eastwood’s war films. One could contend that Eastwood’s entire filmic project in 2006 concerns the attempt to negate or bypass Schmitt’s ominous dualism. In favour of what? In favour of a universalist stance firmly embedded in a humanism hostile towards all political and aesthetic dualist representations. Eastwood’s not-very-implicit suggestion is that beneath or beyond all national, ethnic, cultural, and religious distinctions, we are all alike. The central implication is that warfare is futile and gruesome, and most often – and certainly within the perimeter of Eastwood’s films – the product of cynical, unintelligent or downright mean political leaders. At this point, even the most absentminded will have grasped the present-day polemical intention directed towards the then-ruling Bush administration. My overall aim in this context is to argue for the partial structural failure of Eastwood’s benign humanist project. I contend that in part he reproduces the very dualities he is anxious to overcome, and in part he is firmly building new dualities of his own. Also, I suggest that this dualist trap, as we might term it, is an inevitable consequence of the logic inherent in warfare and the representation of warfare itself. And in what follows I intend to inspect three vital aspects pertaining to Eastwood’s attempt to abnegate dualism, namely the vagaries of memorialisation, of narration, and of moral actions in Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima.

An Ominous or Elementary Dualism? But first: on the face of it, Eastwood seems to outline an elementary, normative and morally asymmetric dichotomy between what we might loosely term ‘humanism’ as opposed to ‘patriotism’. I hasten to note the obvious, that these two terms do not denote sharply delimited fields of meaning, such as ‘Humanist ideology in Holland, 1500–1540, with a particular emphasis on the work of Erasmus’. Rather, they are derived from a huge, if fuzzy, culturally saturated terrain of ideas, notions, beliefs, norms and values, loosely gathered under the Western umbrella terms ‘humanism’ and ‘patriotism’. Thus, in the present context I consciously ignore a host of historical and analytical

219

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 219

29/5/13 13:48:43

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

differentiations and distinctions.3 The principal reason is that within the universe of Eastwood’s films, it is broad and hazy notions that are called upon, negotiated and investigated, not a restricted set of unequivocal terms and concepts; and in such a manner, notwithstanding the blurry outlines, they insistently recur as burning and contestable issues. Whereas late-modern humanism à la Eastwood entails a respect towards each and every human being, released from all exterior purposes, be they ideological or religious, patriotism asks of us to put, as the saying goes, ‘country first’. In effect this negates, erodes, or quite simply bypasses humanism, even in the concrete instances in which humanism is called upon as a legitimating source of patriotism. In both films the dramatic, not to say melodramatic,4 contrast between the regular and authentic soldiers and the cynical politicians is consistently underlined. While the soldiers are primarily concerned with survival and comradeship among themselves, they are – according to the machinations of Eastwood – trapped in a narrative of the primacy of patriotism, honour, and fate. Crudely put, over and beyond the distinction between national spheres, politicians and high-ranking officers foist the bland or even hypocritical story of patriotism upon soldiers who basically just want to survive and let live, and have no personal quarrel with their alleged enemies. In essence, Eastwood seems to suggest, we are all simple human beings endowed neither with a sadistic urge to kill nor with a fervent desire to fight for some abstract notion of ‘love of country’.5 So, in that sense, the true enemies are our politicians – the ones who are never seen in battle, but who willingly send soldiers off to die for a cause whose underlying rationale is virtually inscrutable. And this goes both ways. According to the perspective laid down by Eastwood the director, the Japanese Emperor and the Imperial Head Quarters are not a whit better than the ruthless PR agents and intolerably smug American politicians. The implicit grid rests on a distinction between, on the one hand, representatives and, on the other hand, men of action. Men of action are almost invariably, in Eastwood’s distinctive universe of Lebensphilosophie,6 real men, be they quiet heroes or heinous villains; whereas men that merely perform a representative office, such as politicians, scholars, and journalists, are far removed from the vicissitudes of real, authentic moral and physically concrete decisions. Consequently, Eastwood consistently undermines our urge to believe in heroism, described as an inauthentic ploy concocted by the media and the politicians for purely domestic reasons of strategy. In fact, the American soldiers sent home on a PR tour to sell war bonds feel physically sick when called ‘heroes’. Thus, in rejecting the distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’, Eastwood

220

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 220

29/5/13 13:48:43

Humanism Versus Patriotism?

comes to reproduce quite another transferred and in itself problematic version of it: all politicians are evil and unreal; almost all foot soldiers are good and real. The interesting thing, however, about Eastwood’s films are the slight irregularities that gradually undermine the simple, normative dichotomy between genuine and decent humanism on the one hand and phony and cynical patriotism on the other. These ‘irregularities’, or disruptions of the trivial two-tiered schema, can be said to be distributed in several distinct registers. One concerns memory, another narration, and a third moral philosophy. A promising future prospect would be to mobilise the resources of the stillemergent field of cultural memory studies in the analysis of the role played by remembrance in Eastwood’s filmic oeuvre.7 In this particular instance, it seems immediately thought-provoking that a crucial part of Eastwood’s project in the two Iwo Jima films has to do with grappling with modes and functions of culturally mediated memory on a still highly sensitive, belligerent zone between the US and Japan – and by a highly sensitive, synecdochal operation, Japan may even be said to stand for Asia (not least China) at large. The careful negotiation of memorial traces involves tangled and uneven narrative strategies. And this, finally, points towards unresolved and perhaps irreconcilable moral issues ensconced in the common and yet split terrain of what we might term belligerent or contestatory remembrance. The US and Japan obviously share a common military history in the context of Iwo Jima, but that common legacy is constantly torn asunder and marred by asymmetric irregularities, immediately visible in the differing strategies of writing the history of World War II in the US and Japan. All of these imbalances tend to weaken the dualist couplings (based on the contrast between humanism and patriotism) Eastwood attempts to establish in the films.

Remembering in Japanese and American As concerns memory, the filmic representations of the attempts to memorialise are deeply different and asymmetric. Whereas the American perspective belongs to the son of John Bradley, one of the flag raisers in Joe Rosenthal’s iconic photography, combined with the memory flashes back and forth in time and space between the US in 1945 (on the public relations tour) and 2006 respectively, the Japanese version of remembrance is based on the archaeological finding of the original letters from Iwo Jima that were not burned but buried instead. That is to say, while the US

221

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 221

29/5/13 13:48:43

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

version is immediately personalised by virtue of the still-living veteran, and the son of a dead veteran, the Japanese version is depersonalised. A team of historians and archaeologists dig in the caves of Iwo Jima and find the letters, and when removed from the satchel, they scatter to the ground like falling leaves. Thus, the endearing old American men are contrasted with the dusty, faceless letters falling to the ground in a far-off cave in the Pacific Ocean. I am fairly sure my reading goes counter to Eastwood’s directorial intentions, but on the level of narrative and iconography the asymmetry is rather striking. Also, we should notice that the American title is Flags of OUR Fathers, whereas the Japanese title’s ‘letters from’ is far more anonymous. Also, the addresser is merely ‘Iwo Jima’, not any single person on Iwo Jima. These gestures indicate that the American perspective is imbued with agency and the possibility of strong, affective identification due to the use of the personalised strategy. The viewer can easily identify with the son wanting to document the story of his father; it is far more difficult, if not impossible, to identify with the falling, nameless letters in a dark cave.8

Flags of Our Fathers: Narrative Conundrums A similar tendency can be detected when it comes to the narrative structure of the two films. Flags of Our Fathers provides us with a quadruple narrative layer. First, what we might term an edifying national narrative: the fighting taking place on Iwo Jima was purposeful, it saved the lives of countless other American soldiers, thus the sacrifices were not made in vain. Although the director is discreetly sceptical of this official version, it is shown to be of some intrinsic worth for many of the soldiers and their families themselves – at least within the local context of Eastwood’s filmic universe, they all have what we might call a strong, hermeneutical desire, the desire that warfare not be meaningless, absurd, and futile. Next to the national narrative, Eastwood launches a powerful narrative of friendship; this narrative is virtually sub-national, in the sense that the primary bond of affection and comradeship between the American buddies overrules and runs strong beneath the ideological and political story of patriotism. In fact, ‘buddies’ most often – if not always9 – ignore all distinctions between social status, ethnic identity, and religious beliefs. It is only the politicians back home that excel in arrogant and patronising attitudes towards the native Indian American soldier (Ira Hayes, played by Adam Beach) in Flags of Our Fathers.

222

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 222

29/5/13 13:48:43

Humanism Versus Patriotism?

Third, Eastwood seems to stage a pithy, humanist narrative which runs directly counter to the national narrative. According to the humanist narrative, warfare is inherently and inveterately gruesome and senseless. In this restricted context, the striking thing about both films is that there is no mention whatsoever of the deeper ideological purpose of the war between the US and Japan. One can be fairly certain that if the bi-polar conflict under treatment had been – as in countless other war films during and after World War II – between Nazi Germany and the United States, the ideological element would have been far more visible. The fact that Eastwood consistently downplays the ideological element per se seems to me to imply that the humanist narrative is given a dominant position vis-à-vis the national narrative. We immediately empathise with the grieving mothers, the soldiers slaughtered or suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, the decent old men recounting their stories, all the little men and women caught up in the infernal workings of the war machinery. Whereas Eastwood almost consistently portrays the civil servants, PR people and politicians as rather unpleasant characters. Fourthly, and in conclusion, the others – the enemy, the Japanese – are almost exclusively depicted as screaming savages trying to bayonet the American soldiers we have come to like, or (in essence the same thing) as dark and ominous shadows lodged behind a clattering machine-gun. This we might summarily baptise the anti-buddy narrative: the Japanese soldiers are depersonalised, we do not get individual impressions of them in Flags of Our Fathers; rather they come off as bloodthirsty, extremely aggressive enemy soldiers always on the prowl. To summarise: I contend that while the national narrative and the antibuddy narrative are closely allied, likewise the narrative of friendship and the humanist narrative converge. The first two narrative layers adhere to a strictly bi-polar and mutually exclusive story: ‘Either you are with us, or you are against us’; ‘Either you are a friend, or a foe.’ Note that both narratives are directly founded on the belligerent interregnum, that is, they only apply during warfare. In times of peace, there is no similar need of a tense bi-polarity. In contradistinction, the humanist and the friendship narratives are multipolar or even non-polar, to the extent that they are based on a universalist stance. They both deny the dualist tendency to erect insuperable and threatening differences; rather they insist that underneath all apparent disparities we are all more or less alike. The outcome of the combined staging of these four narrative layers is that of an unsettling and fragile stalemate. For, while at war, you can’t afford to

223

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 223

29/5/13 13:48:43

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

be a benign humanist on the battlefield. On the other hand, Eastwood quite clearly displays his lack of sympathy for politicians playing the nationalist card – as a not-overly-hidden criticism of George W. Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Japanese Narrative: The Depersonalised Letters of Iwo Jima Now, if we shift the terrain and cast a glance at the Japanese version, there are some striking resemblances as well as differences as concerns the narrative register. First of all, Letters from Iwo Jima reduplicates the humanist narrative and the narrative of friendship. What is essential is friendship among the soldiers, and the noble gestures of, for example, Baron Nishi (played by Tsuyoshi Ihara) sparing the life of the Marine Sam from Oklahoma and General Kuribayashi (played by Ken Watanabe) cherishing the 1911 Colt given to him as a gift by American officers while he studied in the US in the late 1920s. As opposed to the humanist narrative, there’s a dark and forbidding Imperial regime, backed up by the Imperial Head Quarters; this we might simply term the Imperial narrative. Representatives of the regime ruthlessly ask people to die for mainland and homeland, Emperor and country, even to the extreme point of committing suicide if they have failed the rigid standards of honour and so-called ‘fate’. In that respect, both films harbour an ambiguous statement. While, on the one hand, the Americans are pejoratively described by a Japanese officer as human and therefore ‘weak’, on the other hand two American Marines later gun down two defenceless Japanese deserters. Also, among the Japanese soldier buddies quite a few embody the almost-sadistic warrior ethos of death and honour, so the overall image delineated by Eastwood becomes blurred as compared to the almost-uniform buddy identity among the American soldiers. But the central narrative conflict in Letters from Iwo Jima is between the demands made by the inherent rationality of warfare (survival primary among them) and the ineluctable order to die for country and Emperor. The soldier Saigo (played by Kazunari Ninomiya) embodies the conflict vividly: he is constantly placed in a painful dilemma between these irreconcilable demands. One might argue that while Flags of Our Fathers carries the load of four parallel narrative strands, Letters from Iwo Jima stages an even more opaque constellation between the humanist narrative and the narrative of friendship,

224

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 224

29/5/13 13:48:43

Humanism Versus Patriotism?

pitted against the Imperial narrative, and the complicated intertwinement of all three narratives among the Japanese soldiers and officers on Iwo Jima. It is conspicuous that the only images of mutual friendship across national and cultural divides occur in the Japanese version, incidentally shot and released after the American film. Apart from the simple, practical necessity of shooting the two films one after another, one might ponder the possible implications of the temporal order of the films. A seemingly naïve, almost imbecile question (and considering that Eastwood discovered the posthumously published letters by General Kuribayashi during the making of Flags of Our Fathers): why wasn’t it the other way round? Why did Eastwood do the American version first and the Japanese second? Who should come first and what is the importance of this seemingly marginal circumstance? When read in the context of the distinction between personalisation and depersonalisation above, one might argue that even the temporal priority granted the shooting and release of the American version subtends and reinforces the irregular imbalance underlying and unsettling the overt intention of arranging a symmetric and equal relation between the two national perspectives. Obviously, one should always take care not to fall prey to absurdly paranoid and hyper-sensitive overinterpretations of trivial minutiae, but in this instance he who comes first conquers the moral and narrative agenda. And of course it was an American who had the audacity and the skill to go first, not a Japanese (director). In that context it turns out not to be entirely irrelevant that the sole portrait of a transnational friendship is firmly located on American soil, and centrally involves American generosity and hospitality, and even the giving of an iconic American symbol as a gift (the 1911 Colt). Even without venturing into the long, dense story of analysing the logic of exchanging gifts unearthed by Marcel Mauss, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Derrida,10 it is telling that in this case the gift of the Americans is never properly – to my knowledge – reciprocated by the Japanese (Mauss 1990; Lévi-Strauss 1991; Derrida 1994, 1995). Likewise, it is the generous gift by an American director which brings to life the silent and faceless stories of the Japanese soldiers inscribed on the crumpled letters found on Iwo Jima, not a Japanese director. Allow me to quote from Mauss’s conclusion to his essay ‘The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies’ (1990): ‘The unreciprocated gift still makes the person who has accepted it inferior, particularly when it has been accepted with no thought of returning it … Charity is still wounding for him who has accepted it, and the whole tendency of our morality is to strive to do away with the unconscious and injurious patronage of the rich almsgiver’ (Mauss 1990: 65). We should beware of reductive tendencies to psychoanalyse the

225

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 225

29/5/13 13:48:43

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

issues at stake here, but nonetheless we would do well not to ignore the very real twistings and turnings of generosity, hospitality, and friendship in this dense and overdetermined experiment. Not least seen in the light of postWorld War II and current historical and political tensions between Japan and the USA.

To Do Right For the Sake of Right Finally, I will touch on a few of the moral conflicts set up by Eastwood. One might claim that the most central moral statement put forth in the twin films is a quote from a letter by the anonymous mother of the dying Sam (played by Luke Eberl), from Oklahoma. Significantly, the quote is translated by Baron Nishi, so that what we get is a cross-national and linguistically mediated version of the original letter. However, Sam’s mother writes that she hopes ‘he will do right for the sake of right’. On the face of it this is a rather odd tautology. For what exactly does she mean by ‘right’? The nationalist narrative of the films suggests that during warfare all questions of morality are suspended, except for the crude, pragmatic duty to win rather than lose, and of course if necessary to die honourably for one’s home country. Undoubtedly, Eastwood mobilises the humanist narrative against the cynicism or inanity of the nationalist story – above and beyond the so-called ‘call of duty’, soldiers should try as hard as possible to behave decently, for example to avoid torture of POWs or the random killing of civilians. The problem is that the soldiers are systematically placed in a series of recalcitrant dilemmas – should they desert the Army, so that they would be able to return to their families? Or do they owe it to their ‘buddies’ not to desert them while in battle? Should they try to rescue a wounded comrade or quickly attempt to save their own lives? Is the most proper way to protect one’s family to do what the officers tell you to do? What exactly do I owe my country? All of these are by themselves rather trivial questions, but nonetheless they are put forth as painful moral conflicts in both films, albeit in contrastive versions. Now, one way of reading the translated excerpt of the letter of the American mother is humanist and Kantian. Read this way, ‘doing right for the sake of right’ entails abandoning the obscene demands of political regimes, and instead obeying an allegedly distinct inner human voice telling you ‘what is right’ (Kant 2000).11 The problem is of course that this can be said to be completely vague and unfounded. Suppose your ‘inner voice’ tells you to do two different and

226

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 226

29/5/13 13:48:43

Humanism Versus Patriotism?

opposed things at the same time?12 Nonetheless, Eastwood can and perhaps should be read as providing us with an extremely important admonishment, namely that we should be enormously wary of listening to the insidious dualism of the nationalist or imperialist narrative. And yet, it seems to me that both films harbour hints of a proud, nationalist narrative – there’s something distinctly noble about the Japanese general Kuribayashi, who insists on dying for his country, and something touching about the American soldiers sacrificing life and limbs, as opposed to the politicians back in Washington, shipping off their sons to Harvard and Princeton. Does not Eastwood suggest that he who is unpatriotic is morally inferior to the one willing to give his life for love of country? Therefore, in the final instance the overall ‘message’ of Eastwood is indistinct, spectral, and slightly unsettling.13 The delayed message we receive from the excavated letters on Iwo Jima, and the testimonies of the old American survivors, is unclear, multifaceted, uplifting, and moving, as well as grim and depressing: politics and ideology are relegated to the background, yet make themselves felt through incomprehensible and cruel, forceful demands; humanism and friendship make a strong appearance, but with a sceptical twist aimed at moral naivety, and a not-very-latent hostility towards cynicism and hypocrisy. Perhaps all these ‘irregularities’ attest to or point towards a peculiar double fate of warfare per se? On the one hand, warfare tends to produce in its wake simplistic extremes, the obliteration of nuances or vague, grey zones in between. But on the other hand, warfare spawns intractable and opaque moral and political dilemmas characterised by the virtual impossibility of being dissolved into simple dualisms.

Evading the Dualist Trap? My central claim is two-fold. First, while Eastwood attempts to demolish or bypass politically ominous dualisms in favour of more hazy versions of a universalist humanism, his twin attempts in 2006 nonetheless tend to slip back into the dualist figure he seeks to avoid. Second, we are not to blame this partial failure on Eastwood’s efforts as a director; rather, we need to take stock of the fact that apparently any attempt to represent warfare (be it in media, literature, film, or politics) either willingly produces or unwittingly reproduces heinous dualities. So Carl Schmitt’s original and ominous intuition concerning the friendenemy distinction as constitutive of politics proper needs to be extended into

227

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 227

29/5/13 13:48:43

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

all spheres enmeshed in the representation of warfare, understood along the lines of Carl von Clausewitz as a prolongation of politics: ‘We see, therefore, that war is not merely an act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, carried on with other means’ (Clausewitz 1993: 99). Falsifying the strong version of this hypothesis would thus entail coming up with examples of aesthetic representations of warfare that thoroughly evade the dualist trap in any and all of its versions. In that sense, Eastwood’s twin films and his benign humanist project should be read as a skewed, partial failure, and therefore and in that specific respect as an efficient means of bringing to light the elementary and constitutive dualist trap embedded not only in warfare itself, but also and not least in any and all attempts to represent images or forge narratives of warfare.

Notes

1

2

3

4

5

6

This is an edited version of a paper given at the Conference ‘Visions of War: Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers (2006) and Letters from Iwo Jima (2006)’, held at the University of Southern Denmark, 5 May 2008. Reinterpreting central elements in Hobbes’s political theory, Schmitt puts his own decisionist stamp on Hobbes’s use of the Latin adage ‘Autoritas non veritas facit legem’ (roughly: ‘Authority, not truth, makes the law’). It would most likely prove fruitful to read the structure of the production of power and law in the filmic universe of early Eastwood through a Schmittian lens. I believe Eastwood implicitly distinguishes between ‘patriotism’ and the more virulent forms of ‘nationalism’; for an authoritative mapping of the latter term, see Smith (2002). For a possibly rich, but hitherto untapped resource as concerns the study of melodrama and ontology in the oeuvre of Eastwood, see Cavell (1996, 1979). It would seem striking that Eastwood has never – to my knowledge – been analysed in the context of the Hollywood melodramas of the 1930s and 1940s, and that this particular ontology embedded in Eastwood’s filmic universes has been overlooked. For a thought-provoking counter-thesis see Bourke (2000). Bourke provides an unsettling, if taboo-laden, description of men fully enjoying killing, and on their return as veterans often being barred from articulating this joy, partly due to the censorial force of a humanist ethos. By Lebensphilosophie (philosophy of life), I refer to a broad, philosophical or even antiphilosophical current having deep roots in the work of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, further investigated by the likes of Henri-Louis Bergson, Georg Simmel, and Wilhelm Dilthey, and most recently articulated in the work of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Although Eastwood is most likely oblivious of 228

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 228

29/5/13 13:48:43

Humanism Versus Patriotism?

this current, it seems to me striking that he adheres to its dramatic setting up of Life (sensations, instinct, force) against Reason (abstract concepts, ratiocination, thinking). In this context, embedded in a moral territory, the good, sane instincts are set against the cynical and selfish reasonings. 7 Among a huge and burgeoning mass of excellent publications, I would like to highlight the useful and recent Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, edited by Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (2008). For a solid preliminary methodological and analytic foray into this territory, see Holger Pötzsch’s essay ‘Beyond Mimesis: War, Memory, and History in Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers’ in this anthology. 8 On this and related issues see Kragh Grodal (1999). 9 Interestingly, Ira Hayes is indeed discriminated against while on the ship, but as soon as battle commences, and within the restricted time-space of fighting, Hayes is free from being discriminated against. The unpleasant implication is that lethal activities performed against an enemy and amongst small collective groups of men would seem to abolish or annul racism in those particular settings. 10 Mauss’s essay was originally published in 1923–1924. All of these now-classic texts may still be summoned in an investigation of the logic of the giving of gifts in the work of Eastwood. 11 And later, Scheler (1973). Also, we might want to confront a Kantian and neoKantian formal ethics of obligation, with Slavoj Zizek’s stance as put forth in his The Ticklish Subject (1999), in the general discussion of the moral dilemma of acting right or doing good in these two films. 12 For a further discussion of this see Wright (1963), in particular chapter six, ‘Good and Action’. 13 For a thought-provoking and Lévinas-inspired analysis of spectral and haunting elements in Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima see the two contributions by Robert Burgoyne in this anthology, ‘Haunting in the War Film: Flags of Our Fathers’ and ‘Suicide in Letters from Iwo Jima’.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bourke, Joanna (2000) An Intimate History of Killing. New York: Basic Books. Cavell, Stanley (1979) The World Viewed. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ____ (1996) Contesting Tears. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Clausewitz, Carl von (1993) On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret. London: Everyman’s Library. Derrida, Jacques (1994) Given Time. Chicago: Chicago University Press. ____ (1995) The Gift of Death. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Erll, Astrid and Ansgar Nünning (eds) (2008) Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. New York; Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

229

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 229

29/5/13 13:48:43

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

Grodal, Torben Kragh (1999) Moving Pictures: A New Theory of Film Genres, Feelings and Cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kant, Immanuel (2002) Critique of Practical Reason. Hackett Publishing Company. Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1991) ‘Introduction à l’æuvre de Marcel Mauss’, in Marcel Mauss, Sociologie et anthropologie. Paris: PUF. Mauss, Marcel (1990) The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. London: Routledge. Scheler, Max (1973) Formalism in Ethics and Non-formal Ethics of values. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Schmitt, Carl (1996) The Concept of Politics, trans. George Schwab. Chicago: Chicago University Press. ____ (2002) Det politiskes begreb, trans. Lars Bo Larsen and Christian Borch. Copenhagen: Hans Reitzels Forlag. ____ (2008) The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Smith, Anthony D. (2002) Nationalism: Theory, Ideology, History. Cambridge: Polity Press. Wright, Georg Henrik von (1963) The Varieties of Goodness. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Zizek, Slavoj (1999) The Ticklish Subject. London: Verso.

230

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 230

29/5/13 13:48:44

Suicide in Letters from Iwo Jima ___ robert burgoyne

The second film in Clint Eastwood’s World War II diptych, Letters from Iwo Jima (2006), immediately sets itself apart from all previous war films by focusing on the question of suicide. For so long a taboo in Western culture and rarely represented in American films, suicide occupies a space in the US imagination that is deeply Other. In US war films, suicide has conventionally served to mark the enemy; the perceived fanaticism of kamikaze pilots in World War II films or the blind frenzy of suicide bombers in films about contemporary Arab and Islamic conflicts defines them as pathological agents of cultures that are essentially unknowable and incomprehensible. In the few films in which suicide is represented as occurring in the US military context, the act is portrayed as an anomaly, the lethal end product of abuse, torture, or overwhelming guilt, as in The Deer Hunter (Michael Cimino, 1978), Full Metal Jacket (Stanley Kubrick, 1987), and, in a more complex fashion, Courage Under Fire (Edward Zwick, 1996).1 The act has remained puzzling to psychoanalysis, condemned by Western religions, and repressed and denied in the Western military. As one writer says, ‘To knowingly and voluntarily sacrifice one’s life for the sake of a perceived greater good challenges the sanctity of individual choice and right to self-determination deeply cherished in liberal, Enlightenment social thought’ (Borovoy 2007: 774–5).

231

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 231

29/5/13 13:48:44

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

In Letters from Iwo Jima, however, the Japanese practice of honour suicide is the core device through which Eastwood humanises the characters, the key to the film’s tragic tone and the act that carries the strongest anti-war charge. Although Western war films typically depict suicide as a weapon, a tactic or strategy of war, the self-extinctions in Letters from Iwo Jima seem closer to the long tradition of suicide as a means of bearing witness to a cause. From ancient Rome, where it was used as a means of protest, to early Christian martyrs, who sought martyrdom with such a frenzy that third century theologians had to declare the ‘thirst for a holy death’ to be a blasphemy, to Buddhist monks protesting wars and military occupations, suicide as a self-expressive act has a long history (Bunting 2005). Seen as an instance of testimony – a speech act – the suicides depicted in Letters from Iwo Jima can be associated with the ‘letters’ of the film’s title. The film reframes the act in a way that emphasises the body of the soldier as a site of competing messages, a text that exceeds its culturally sanctioned meanings in the coded discourses of war, becoming instead a site of self-authorship. In this essay, I argue that Eastwood constructs a complex cinematic discourse around the suicide scenes, making the camera an animate organ of perception, allowing the body of the soldier to speak a language that exceeds the codes of cultural tradition or military valour. Extraordinarily intense, the three dramatised suicide scenes are exemplary studies in what Béla Balázs called the ‘micro-dramas’ of the human face and body in film (Balázs 1970). Ranging from an almost convulsive physical struggle – the agony of the self fighting against the self – to what seems like a serene sense of acceptance, Letters from Iwo Jima uses suicide as an internal frame to bring issues of history, ideology, and cultural difference into close, microscopic view. In so doing, the film quietly and sympathetically moves what is ordinarily seen as the absolute Otherness of Japanese wartime behaviour into a larger frame of reference.

‘Thou Shalt Die Like Beautiful Falling Cherry Petals’ Opening in 2005, Letters from Iwo Jima begins with a sombre tour of the relics and ruins of the island, a place riddled with tunnels, caverns, and subterranean passages, before cutting to the interior of a cave where a group of Japanese archaeologists have begun, 60 years after the fact, to catalogue the island’s artefacts and remains. A large bundle has been discovered buried in

232

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 232

29/5/13 13:48:44

Suicide in Letters from Iwo Jima

the floor of the cave. As the archaeologists begin to use their shovels to move the earth around the bundle, there is an explicit graphic match to another shovel digging in the earth, providing an invisible and seamless transition to 1944, with no use of cinematic punctuation, such as a fade or dissolve, to mark the shift in time frames. Rather than recollection or rememoration, the direct match-cut signifies a literal re-entering of the past. The camera immediately focuses on Saigo, one of the two main characters in the film, mentally composing a letter to his wife, as we hear his thoughts in voice-over: ‘We soldiers dig. We dig all day. This is the hole that we will fight and we will die in. Hanako, am I digging my own grave?’ Saigo looks up to see an aeroplane circling overhead, as we cut to the interior of the plane and are introduced to the film’s second major character, General Tadamichi Kuribayashi. Like Saigo, he is mentally composing a letter to his wife, Yoshii: ‘I am about to join my men. I am determined to serve and give my life for my country.’ One unfinished bit of business at home worries Kuribayashi: the gap in the floorboards that he did not have time to fix, a large gap that brings a cold draft into the house. He asks his wife to have their son, Taro, fix it as soon as possible. As one commentator writes, ‘The Japanese military tradition had a distinctive, almost unique element. Where German soldiers were told to kill, Japanese soldiers were told to die’ (Ohnuki-Tierney 2006: 4). This tradition, however, was not blindly followed or fanatically observed: in many cases, soldiers were opposed to the practice but seemed to reproduce it in their actions. As Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney writes about kamikaze pilots, ‘At some point these young men became patriotic, but what was their patria? Was it their homeland, Japan? … Was it the emperor for whom they sacrificed their lives? Or was it their family, lovers, friends? … some defied outright the emperor-centred ideology. Others tried to accept it without success’ (Ohnuki-Tierney 2004: 15–21, 16). The ethic of self-sacrifice was aggressively promoted by the military government, but it was rooted in traditions and distinctive symbolic codes that were intrinsic to Japanese cultural identity and community. Ohnuki-Tierney writes that the practice of self-sacrifice in the military can be traced, paradoxically, to the Japanese embrace of Confucianism, a philosophy centred on the individual and on humanistic self-cultivation. Confucianism formed the basis for ideals of loyalty, and beyond that, sacrifice, which paved the way for Japan to become ‘a modern military nation for which individual sacrifice was essential’(Ohnuki-Tierney 2004: 16). The Japanese military government appropriated a number of other traditions and distinctive symbolic codes as well, including patterns of filial devotion, the cherry blossom ritual, and the

233

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 233

29/5/13 13:48:44

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

samurai code of ‘Bushido’, converting long-standing cultural practices and social rituals to the expression of a militaristic ideology, channelling them into Emperor worship and a particularly lethal form of loyalty to the ‘ultimate family’, the nation-state. The ritual style of the first suicide scene makes these connections explicit. The officer in charge – a young man poorly equipped to lead, both intellectually and morally – decides to disobey General Kuribayashi’s orders to retreat and orders his men to ‘die with honour’. ‘Men, we are honourable soldiers of the Emperor. Don’t ever forget that. To die with honour, this is our fate, to find our place at Yasukuni Shrine.’ Each soldier draws a grenade, struggles to fight back an overwhelming sense of fear and sorrow, and then blows himself up. The cave, shown previously in the monochrome colours of pewter and charcoal, suddenly erupts into a sickening orange-red as the bodies of the soldiers burst open. The gestures, posture, and movements of the characters, the micro-drama played out on their faces, and the expressive use of closeups reveal the competing emotions of the soldiers with extraordinary power. Struggling against themselves, the bodies of each of the soldiers seems to be ‘possessed’ by some kind of diabolical force. As the camera observes each soldier’s internal agony in extended psychological close-up, the powerful sense of identification and empathy that the collective suicides elicit is countered by an equally strong sense, underscored by the characters’ behaviour, lighting and sound, of suicide as profoundly ‘Other’, as transgression, as taboo.2 The primal violence of honour suicide is conveyed as much through the figure behaviour of the characters as through the act itself. Weeping, torn by ambivalence, the soldiers physically struggle to pull the pins on the grenades, to activate the explosive and then hold the grenades to their stomachs. The scene creates the powerful impression that there is an external being moving the limbs of the characters, a being controlling their arms and hands, forcing them to activate the grenades, overpowering their will to survive. The desperate struggle that the soldiers wage as they attempt to resist the invisible double directing their limbs and insisting on their self-destruction is palpable and explicit: each character seems to wage combat, a battle of wills, against an opponent who forces their arms and moves them according to its own desires. Perhaps the most moving of the suicides is that of Saigo’s friend. As the officer intones the words of sacrifice, ‘To die with honour. This is our fate. To find our place at Yasukuni Shrine’, the camera cuts to a close-up of the man holding family photographs, clutching them as if they were a talisman. As the scene unfolds, the camera details his emotional agony, moving slowly

234

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 234

29/5/13 13:48:44

Suicide in Letters from Iwo Jima

forward, isolating him in close-up. His body seemingly unable to complete the act, he is barely able to pull the pin, activate the trigger, and force the grenade against his body. Finally, he slumps against the cave wall in a visible gesture of surrender, as the grenade explodes against his chest. The camera pans along a wisp of smoke to a close-up of his bloodied hand holding the spattered photographs of his wife and children. The physical contiguity between family photographs and grenade – one hand holds a symbol of life, the other an instrument of death – conveys a complex, seemingly paradoxical message that resonates throughout the film. Eastwood documents in chilling detail the ritual behaviour and rhetoric that frames the act of self-sacrifice – the trebled chants of ‘Banzai!’, the evocation of the cherry blossoms of the Yasukuni shrine, the verbal salute to the Emperor – offering an anatomy of the way traditional, familial and ancestral symbols are converted to emblems of heroic sacrifice for nation. Cutting against the usual treatment of mass suicide as collective dementia or robotic behaviour, however, Eastwood focuses on the resistance of the body itself; we ‘read’ the bodies of the soldiers as sites of protest, a message reinforced by the visual and acoustic design of the scene. The eerie, single note sounded on the piano, the echo effect of the cave interior as the voice of the officer intones his scripted words, the slowly moving camera and the chiaroscuro lighting painting the frightened faces of the characters – the cave scene forces the spectator to bear witness to a history that extends beyond the film. The historical past and present seem to communicate here, as we recognise the history of our present moment as it flashes up, in a striking recall of the long and continuing history of suicide for a set of beliefs. Eastwood’s singular accomplishment here is to make the extraordinary ‘Otherness’ of killing oneself for a cause both familiar and unfamiliar, both Heimlich and Unheimlich, both sympathetic and radically alien.

The Face of the Other The second suicide, that of the cavalry officer Colonel ‘Baron’ Nishi, is filmed in a style that directly contrasts with the gruesome collective suicide described above. Once again, Saigo is present, and serves as a mute witness, as he did at the first suicide scene. The scene begins when Nishi, in what can be read as a challenge to the code of the Japanese military, goes to great lengths to save the life of a wounded American soldier they have captured, treating his wounds and drawing him into conversation, essentially making him visible to

235

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 235

29/5/13 13:48:44

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

the Japanese soldiers under his command. Nishi’s compassionate act reveals the humanity of one side to another. In the course of this face-to-face encounter with the Other, the soldiers, on both sides, hear what the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas names the ‘call of the Other’ (Levinas 1969).3 Sam dies the next morning, and Nishi reads aloud the letter he had been holding in his hand. The letter from Sam’s mother contains the advice, ‘do what is right because it is right’. Soon after, Nishi’s headquarters are attacked. Rushing to the mouth of the cave with his rifle, the first to arrive, he is severely wounded, his eyes burned by explosives. Blinded, he tells his medic to ‘go help the others. I’m useless now.’ He removes a silk scarf from his neck and ties it around his eyes. After determining that his men can no longer hold the position, Nishi orders his lieutenant, Okubo, to take command of the troop and make their way north. He will stay behind: ‘I’m a one-man show from here on out.’ The camera, however, provides the view that his eyes cannot, showing his soldiers looking directly into the camera lens, a perspective from Nishi’s literal point of view that is repeated several times. When he removes a silk scarf from his neck and ties it around his eyes, the white cloth covers the camera lens. Closely synchronised to the movements of the character throughout the scene, the camera here becomes an animate organ of perception, replacing the eyes of the character, fusing the eye of the camera with the perceptions of the character and the spectator. Here, the film draws the viewer literally into the body of the character. We experience what Gilberto Perez calls ‘the anxiety of disappearance, the reassurance of return’, as our vision, and our safe distance from the character, comes back with the reverse shot (Perez 1998: 386). Eastwood uses the camera to urge the spectator into a liminal zone where distinctions between self and Other are obscured, where our mental geography is suspended. In a sense, Eastwood finds a visual, expressive analogue to Levinas’s ethical insistence concerning the ‘call of the Other’. Abolishing the spatial distance between the character and the spectator – a distance that in most films is preserved even in the most subjective moments – Eastwood draws the spectator directly into the frame of the film, placing us literally in the eyes of the Other, a deeply unsettling moment in which the boundary between self and Other, between witness and actor, between re-enactment and event, seems to be definitively crossed. His suicide takes place in private. In his farewell address, Nishi tells his soldiers to ‘Do what is right, because it is right’, quoting from the letter from Sam’s mother. Missing from the speech is any reference to the Emperor, honour, or duty. Instead, these basic, direct sentences address the soldiers at a

236

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 236

29/5/13 13:48:44

Suicide in Letters from Iwo Jima

‘Do what is right, because it is right’, says Baron Nishi (Tsuyoshi Ihara) in Letters from Iwo Jima, quoting a letter by wounded American soldier Sam’s mother.

personal level. His soldiers stand at attention and salute, as Nishi, standing erect, dressed in a gleaming white shirt with the white scarf around his eyes, claps his heels together and returns the salute. He then dismisses his men. He asks Okubo, his second in command, to hand him his rifle, and softly says, ‘I am sorry, Okubo.’ As the soldiers file outside to make their way to a new, safer position, the camera cuts back to the interior of the cave as we see in close-up Nishi’s bare foot moving slowly up the stock of the rifle to locate the trigger. The camera continues tracking upward, as he grasps the charm on his necklace, and then removes the scarf. In a continuous vertical movement, the camera looks into his damaged eyes, and continues tracking upwards, to the blue mouth of the cave. The film then cuts to the outside of the cave, and fixes on Okubo as a single shot is heard and smoke wafts from the cave entrance. Although Nishi’s suicide is depicted as an individual choice, the use of a rifle to commit suicide was one of the first lessons a soldier learned in the Japanese army. Ohnuki-Tierney writes that ‘each new conscript was trained to use his toe to pull the trigger while pointing the gun precisely at a certain point under his chin so that the bullet would kill him instantly. He was supposed to use this technique if he was captured in a cave or in a trench surrounded by the enemy … one must never be captured by the enemy’ (Ohnuki-Tierney 2006: 5). Nishi’s suicide, however, conveys a doubled meaning. Even as the cavalry officer carries out a well-rehearsed ritual of self-extinction, the scene enacts and reinforces the anti-war message that seems to spread from the conversation with Sam. By making the ‘face of the Other’ visible and rendering audible its fundamental message – which, according to Levinas, is ‘do not kill me’ – the scene dilates, expanding to call into question the basic dualism of the war film, the agonistic conflict of nations, the struggle of self versus Other (Levinas

237

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 237

29/5/13 13:48:44

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

Baron Nishi (Tsuyoshi Ihara) before committing suicide in Letters from Iwo Jima.

1969). The elevation, or transformation, of the concept of the ‘enemy’ in this intimate, powerful scene – a recollection of the biblical injunction to ‘love thine enemies’ – renders in prosaic terms the basic ethical imperative of heeding the call of the Other. Nishi drives home the point of Sam’s letter from his mother in his final address to his soldiers: ‘Do what is right because it is right’, a message emanating from the Other – a message that he takes as guidance for his own acts.4 Understood in this light, Nishi’s suicide can be read as a form of testimony, a response to a call.5

‘This is Still Japan’ The third suicide scene in Letters from Iwo Jima also conveys a complex, doubled message. In his cave headquarters as the siege of the island is coming to an end, Kuribayashi tells Saigo, ‘I promised to fight to the death for my family, but the thought of my family makes it difficult to keep that promise.’ Just after saying these words, a radio broadcast comes over the air, a broadcast featuring the children of Nagano, Kuribayashi’s home town, singing a song of thanks to him and his soldiers. Lyrics such as ‘Imperial country, Imperial land’ and ‘pride, honour at any price’ stand out as motifs, along with the refrain ‘Iwo Jima’. Despite these explicitly propagandistic words, the beauty of the children’s voices and the lilting melody carry a powerful emotional charge. The film cuts from Kuribayashi, to Saigo and to Fujita, the adjutant, as each is almost overcome with emotion. Kuribayashi immediately sets about ordering a general attack. He asks Saigo to do him a favour, to stay behind to burn his military chest and all his documents. Kuribayashi addresses his soldiers for the last time, and tells them ‘to be proud to die for your country. I will always be in front of you.’ He

238

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 238

29/5/13 13:48:44

Suicide in Letters from Iwo Jima

then draws his sword out of its scabbard, and leads the men in a night-time attack on American lines.6 Cross-cut with the final attack are scenes of Saigo burning Kuribayashi’s military documents and burying the pouch containing the thousands of letters written by the soldiers that were never delivered to the Japanese homeland. Leading the attack, Kuribayashi is severely wounded and pulled away from the battle by his lieutenant, Fujita. As night gives way to day, Fujita drags him down a dark volcanic hill, with black dust pluming up behind. The desert landscape, featureless except for the dark sand and empty sky, has an abstract Zen-like quality, unmarked by craters, trenches, or corpses. Kuribayashi orders his lieutenant to stop, saying ‘No more. No more. Thank you, Fujita.’ On the ground, barely able to move, he orders Fujita to use his samurai sword to behead him in ritual Japanese fashion. Kuribayashi pulls himself up on his hands and knees, tells Fujita that this is an order, and prepares himself for death. Just before he administers the blow, Fujita is shot from behind by a lone GI up on the ridge. With Fujita’s blood spattering his face, Kuribayashi’s expression gives an impression of being tricked by some extraordinary fate. In his written instructions to his soldiers, the historical Kuribayashi had said that ‘yours not to die a noble and heroic death; yours to live the most excruciating life’ (Kakehashi 2007: 157). It seems his words are now coming back to haunt him. Just then Saigo appears, shovel in hand. Kuribayashi asks for one final favour, to bury him where he cannot be found. Looking out to sea, he then asks if this is still Japanese soil. Saigo assures him it is. Flashing back momentarily to his road trip in the United States many years before as a young military attaché to the Japanese embassy, Kuribayashi recalls the words of a letter he had written to his son Taro, about how happy he is to be coming home, but how sad he is to be leaving his friends behind. Cutting away from the memory sequence back to the present, Kuribayashi takes the antique Colt .45 from his holster, cocks it quickly and shoots himself in the chest. Kuribayashi’s suicide is framed in a way that is abstract and almost bloodless.7 Against the traditional conventions of seppuku, with its dramatic staging and expressive, ritual visibility, Kuribayashi simply ‘disappears’ from the film, erased from the camera’s view as it focuses almost exclusively on Saigo’s face. Without the ritual suffering, self-abnegation or dismemberment of traditional samurai suicide, Kuribayashi’s death is nevertheless articulated within a recognisable Japanese idiom. The visual and acoustic design of the scene, with its abstract, poetic landscapes of black sand and empty sky, sharply angled close-ups, and ground-level camera placements, recalls the pictorial

239

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 239

29/5/13 13:48:44

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

‘This is an order!’ The Japanese general Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe) orders his lieutenant Fujita (Hiroshi Watanabe) to use his samurai sword to behead him in ritual Japanese fashion.

Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya) approaches Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe).

‘You again?’ says Kuribayashi to Saigo.

240

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 240

29/5/13 13:48:44

Suicide in Letters from Iwo Jima

style of Japanese art cinema of the 1950s, a modernist style most often associated with Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu, and Hiroshi Teshigahara. Several removes from the sound and fury of the war film, the scene recalls the modernist abstraction and haunted emptiness of films such as Living (Ikiru, Akira Kurosawa, 1952), High and Low (Tengoku to jigoku, Akira Kurosawa, 1963) and Woman in the Dunes (Suna no onna, Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1964).8 And like the protagonist of Woman in the Dunes, first trapped and then willingly absorbed into the sand pit, Kuribayashi ‘disappears’ into the black sand of Iwo Jima, becoming part of the island itself. The coda of the film returns us to the cave headquarters of Kuribayashi, where the pouch of letters concealed 60 years before has just been discovered. The close connection between the burial of Kuribayashi and the disinterring of the letters is manifest in the first shot in the cave, a close-up of the scientists’ fingers eagerly scraping the dirt from around the pouch. As the bag containing the letters is lifted from the shallow hole, the camera cuts to an extreme low-angle position. In slow motion, we see the bag being lifted again, this time from the point of view of someone buried with the letters, looking directly upwards. Shifting to a higher angle, the camera follows the handwritten letters as they spill from the bag and float to the ground. Falling to the cave floor, the letters begin to speak, the voices multiplying and blending into one another, first one voice and then a vivid stereophonic collage of spoken words, overlapping as if rushing to be heard. Buried in a secret archive for 60 years, the letters become animated, embodied, through the camerawork and sound that define the scene. With the slow-motion lifting up of the pouch covering the eye of the camera and the slow, downward fluttering of envelopes and letters – accompanied by the sounds of voices – the written texts acquire an almost uncanny physicality, moving, speaking, seeming to address simultaneously the spectator and their long-ago recipients. Corporeal and enfleshed by the textures of the voice, by the mobility of the camera and the altered speed of the film itself, the letters displace the living scientists in the cave and seem to move and signify according to their own designs.

Conclusion The final speech act of the soldiers who died on Iwo Jima is directed to us, Eastwood seems to imply, as we are inscribed as both witnesses and participants in the visual and acoustic patterning of the scene. Our empathetic

241

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 241

29/5/13 13:48:44

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

response, by the end of the film, to the radically alien act of suicide for a cause provides a measure of the film’s reach. From the look into the camera that initiates Flags of Our Fathers to the voices that compel understanding in Letters from Iwo Jima, Eastwood’s two war films stand as exceptional renderings of historical events that have been obscured by myths of heroism and fanaticism.

Notes

1

2

3

4

5 6

The shame associated with suicide in the US military is explicitly manifest in current military practice. The letters of condolence traditionally sent by the US president to the families of servicemen killed in action, a tradition that dates back at least to Abraham Lincoln, is withheld from service members who take their own lives: ‘After his son killed himself in Iraq in June, Gregg Keesling expected that his family would receive a letter from President Obama. What it got instead was a call from an Army official telling family members that they were not eligible because their son had committed suicide … the roots of that policy … are probably based in the view that suicide is not an honorable way to die’ (Dao 2009). The phrase ‘figure behaviour’ refers to the cluster of physical signs – gesture, posture, facial expression and movement – that communicate a set of messages to the spectator. Anne Gjelsvik, ‘Care or Glory? Picturing a New War Hero in Flags of Our Fathers’, paper delivered at the conference ‘Visions of War: Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers (2006) and Letters from Iwo Jima (2006)’, held at the University of Southern Denmark, 5 May 2008 (the paper reworked as an essay is included in this volume). Gjelsvik makes an illuminating reference to the work of Emmanuel Levinas in the context of Eastwood’s two war films, a connection I draw on here in reading the scene of Nishi’s encounter with the American soldier, Sam, and Nishi’s subsequent suicide. ‘The commandment to love one’s enemies remains forbidding and impressive, the most mad of commandments.’ For an illuminating discussion of the biblical injunction to ‘love your enemies’, see Anidjar (2003: 3–39). See Rikke Schubart’s nuanced reading of this scene in her essay ‘Eastwood and the Enemy’ in this volume. Here Kuribayashi broke significantly with convention. One writer suggests that Kuribayashi held off committing his troops to a final banzai charge so as not to dignify the senseless loss of life. Instead, the final all-out attack on Iwo Jima was a well-organised, stealthy operation that caused panic on the American side over three hours of intense fighting. Kuribayashi’s attack ‘was not a banzai charge, but an excellent plan aiming to cause maximum confusion and destruction’ (Kakehashi 2007: 195). Also, Kuribayashi was in the lead: ‘There is no other example in the 242

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 242

29/5/13 13:48:44

Suicide in Letters from Iwo Jima

history of the Japanese army where a division commander led the charge himself. This all-out attack is highly unusual.’ Customarily, the commanding officer would send his men on a banzai charge and commit hari-kari behind the lines. See Kakehashi (2007: 48, 157–8) and Wheeler (1994: 30–43). 7 According to Richard Wheeler the historical Kuribayashi did commit suicide in the traditional hari-kari fashion, while Nishi, in the view of his widow, probably committed suicide with a pistol while facing out to sea. On the death of Kuribayashi, Wheeler writes: ‘He went to the mouth of the cave and faced north toward the Imperial Palace. Kneeling down, he bowed three times, then plunged a knife into his abdomen. Colonel Kaneji Nakane was standing over him with a sword and brought it down hard on the back of his neck’ (Wheeler 1994: 233). Wheeler describes the suicide of Baron Nishi, on the other hand, in ways that are closely similar to the film’s treatment of Kuribayashi’s self-extinction: ‘She … concluded that he had killed himself with his pistol while facing the sea. He had once told her that harikari with a knife was slow and uncertain, and that the best way to kill oneself was by means of a bullet in the ear. Since the body was never found amid Iwo’s rubble, the baroness chose to believe it had been claimed by the clean surf’ (Wheeler 1994: 225). 8 For an interesting analysis of themes of disappearance and invisibility in post-war Japanese films, see Lippitt (2005).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anidjar, Gil (2003) The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy. Stanford University Press. Balázs, Béla (1970) Theory of Film: Character and Growth of a New Art, trans. Edith Bone. New York: Dover. Borovoy, Amy (2007) ‘Review of Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers’, American Anthropologist, 109, 4, 774–5. Bunting, Madeline (2005) ‘Honour and Martyrdom: Suicide Bombing Isn’t as New or as Alien as Westerners Imagine’, The Guardian (UK), 14 May, available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/may/14/iraq.comment (accessed 8 January 2011). Dao, James (2009) ‘Troop Suicides and the Letter Left Unwritten’, New York Times, 26 November. Kakehashi, Kumiko (2007) So Sad to Fall in Battle: An Account of War. New York: Ballantine Books. Levinas, Emmanuel (1969) Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Mizuta Lippitt, Akira (2005) Atomic Light (Shadow Optics). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

243

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 243

29/5/13 13:48:44

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko (2004) ‘Betrayal by Idealism and Aesthetics’, Anthropology Today, 20, 2, 15–21. ____ (2006) Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Perez, Gilberto (1998) The Material Ghost. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Wheeler, Richard (1994 [1994, first published by Lippincort and Crowell]) Iwo. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press.

244

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 244

29/5/13 13:48:44

PA RT F O U R

___

WAR TODAY

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 245

29/5/13 13:48:44

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 246

29/5/13 13:48:44

To Sell a War Flags, Lies, and Tragedy ___ vibeke schou tjalve

At its most elemental, war is evil. War is killing. War is destroying. It may be a necessary evil, and in that sense ‘right,’ but it is nevertheless lethally destructive. So real-world questions about war will and must always strain any theory created to justify it and invite debate. (Stout 2006: xii)

Should you happen to find yourself in America’s capital and take a stroll down the Washington Mall, then a crushing sight will besiege you: the National World War II Memorial. Dedicated in 2003 and explicitly designed to galvanise patriotic fervour, this colossal monument of victory – all eagles, columns, swagger, and bravado – boasts the merits of Western civilization. The size of a football field, flanked by balustrades of bronze, arches of blazing glory, and 70-foot poles flying American flags, the monument tells the simple story of victory and virtue. It is, to be blunt, the architecture of Hollywood heroism: ‘The Good War’ now playing at a theatre near you. Albeit also a hymn to the soldiers that fought World War II, Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers (2006) tells a very different story and in a much darker key.1 Both monument and movie came into being in the shadow of 9/11, yet their visions of war collide. The memorial, as one observer puts

247

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 247

29/5/13 13:48:44

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

it, ‘essentializes World War II as an age of victory and moral certainty, a time innocent of complexity, irony or ambiguity’ (Doss 2009: 13–31). In contrast, Flags gives us war as chaos and coincidence. Eastwood’s war is slaughter, instinct, fear – not ‘battle’, not will, not virtue. In accordance, his heroes are flawed, even failed. This departure from the idolisation of war and its perpetrators is not incidental: where the memorial celebrates perfection, Eastwood wants to pay tribute by way of honesty. Flags is very deliberately a story about the price of political propaganda – its private tragedies and moral costs – and as such it constitutes a framework for public commemoration different from the blank triumphalism of the monument at the Mall. However, if the movie takes issue with (parts of) the mythology of the Good War, it does not challenge the most fundamental dictum of modern war propaganda as such: the claim that mythmaking there must be. Telling the story of how three American soldiers were turned into instruments of a marketing machine designed to push American war bonds, Flags ultimately portrays political propaganda as an evil, but a necessary evil.2 This chapter will complicate that picture. What Eastwood abstains from contesting, but what certainly invites contestation, is the modern Western assumption that to ‘sell a war’ the public opinion must be fed flags, lies, and idealisations. This is the assumption I will challenge here. Arguably, what the public cries out for at times of war is a narrative space within which to come to terms with tragedy: death, loss, guilt, fear. Not triumph, not trumpets. It is indisputable that the interventionist ambitions of contemporary Western foreign policy have polarised public opinion severely, alienating large parts of the civil sphere from the policies of their government. If Western policymakers want to have any hope of closing those gaps, liberal democracy will have to engage an altogether more complex language of war, fundamentally rethinking how violence, myth and public deliberation interrelate. Here, I first argue why modern war propaganda reflects a deep-seated philosophy of the ‘Noble Lie’, prone to sell moral conflict in simple terms of right or wrong. Secondly, I advance an alternative – more reflexive, less confident – form of political communication, epitomised best by President Abraham Lincoln during the American Civil War. Thirdly, I argue why both the complex nature of twenty-first-century warfare and the global reach of digital information make a language of tragedy – of admittance to dilemmas and doubt – the only viable strategy of communicating war today. As I conclude, it is the great achievement of Flags to undo the myth of war without moral fault or infringement. Yet at the dawn of a century which seems to have

248

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 248

29/5/13 13:48:45

To Sell a War

turned warfare into everyday politics, might there not be cause to invite the virtues of candour and critique not only (as Eastwood’s movie does) after the battle, but also before and within it?

Good Wars and Noble Lies If a single dictum defines modern warfare, it is the political assumption that war demands unity and that unity demands certainty. Doubt is a sentiment only allowed political leaders. The masses, on their part, call out for Noble Lies about Good Wars.3 Or, as the founding theorist of International Relations, Hans J. Morgenthau, famously wrote about political leadership at times of conflict and confusion: ‘The Statesman must cross the Rubicon alone’ (Morgenthau 1945a: 121). To his public however, the doubts of that crossing must remain hidden and the course embarked upon be sold in a simplified narrative of virtue, victory, and ease. The philosophy of the Noble Lie has a long and prominent history. Originally coined by Plato, the phrase itself has, broadly put, come to refer to the idea that a political elite may, for the profit of the state and by implication for its citizenry, provide the public with an untruth. The lie, in short, is ‘noble’ because it serves a greater common purpose, which exceeds the interests of those who convey it. This is the mode of reasoning put forth in Niccolò Machiavelli’s famous manual of governance, The Prince (1532). It is also, albeit in less explicit terms, the idea which has informed the powerful political axiom that in times of exceptional danger the interests of state – raison d’etat – go well before the principles of democracy.4 That the nature of moral action is such that it does indeed demand deceptions, or, at the very least, exceptions, is indisputable. Dilemma is an inescapable part of human attempts at ethical action. Yet the fundamental assumption about human psychology which lies at the heart of the discourse of the Noble Lie would seem to reduce human nature to nothing but a search for blind certainty – a wish to be lulled into carefree sleep. Though un-articulated and most often unwittingly, the decision-makers of Western security policy have tended to assume a public demand for easy narratives that will still the noise of uncertainty. As a result, their communication of the complexities of war has been one of simplified, modified, and idealised ‘good wars’. In other words, the modern Western mindset concerning war is plagued by a set of deep contradictions. On the one hand, Western democracies have consistently advertised popular rule as a form of government that makes violence

249

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 249

29/5/13 13:48:45

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

obsolete, confronting the warmongering politicians with the cool air of public dissent. This ‘democratic peace thesis’ was first articulated by Emmanuel Kant in his Zum Ewigen Frieden (1795)5 and has more recently been voiced by such diverse figures as former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, former American President Bill Clinton, and the recent American President George W. Bush.6 However, parallel with this self-purported dedication to the values of pluralism and critique, Western democracies have at almost all actual times of war tried either to ease down or to smooth over opposition and debate, assuming public unity as a crude but necessary means to victory.7 Hence, President Woodrow Wilson had hardly launched America into World War I, and the effort to ‘end all wars’, before unanimity turned into the American popular ideal (Cappozzola 2008). Indeed, Wilson saw in the war a possibility to move beyond the pluralist principles of a division of powers, and to create a ‘moral state of national unity’ (Pestritto 2005). Likewise, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt fought Fascism arguing that only the language of a ‘united and determined America’ would be able to mobilise public support (Roosevelt quoted from Kimble 2006: 6). It is telling in this respect that the immigration laws of the US have always grown more restrictive at times of international conflict (Rockett 1983: 1–26). Along with intensified stereotypes of the American Other have gone more narrow, homogenised and essentialised definitions of the American Self (Gleason 1992; Schou Pedersen, now Schou Tjalve, 1999: 415–30). This tendency for political leadership to push for unifying narratives at times of war is true not only for the early modern period. In more recent conflicts such as the wars in Vietnam and the Balkans and the contemporary insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq the political strategies endorsed to gain and sustain public support continue – despite resistance – to put forth unifying messages of wars with ‘clear cut objectives’, ‘with us or against us’, followed by ‘easy victory’. The rhetoric of each of these periods has of course been different. But in all of them, a hesitation on the part of government to share the dilemmas of war with the public is present. To show such trust, ‘the public’ would have to be conceived of as a subject in its own right, capable of intelligent and independent reflection – not merely as an object of what Walther Lippmann in The Phantom Public (1925) sadly dubbed the ‘manufacture of consent’ (Lippmann quoted from Cappozzola 2008: 17).8 Like Lippmann’s classic, Flags of Our Fathers is a grave indictment of that manufacture and its private costs as well as moral depravations. It is true that Flags reads like a resigned Liberty Valance-esque analysis of the political demagogy exercised by the US government in the World War II effort; however,

250

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 250

29/5/13 13:48:45

To Sell a War

it is also ultimately an embrace of the modern distrust of the public capacity to deal with less than simple things. ‘When the legend becomes reality, print the legend’ is the last line of John Ford’s famous western (The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, 1962).9 Eastwood’s version could be that to come to terms with war, ‘we need an easy to understand truth, and damned few words’, as retired soldier Dave Severance (played by Harve Presnell) puts it in Flags. To arrive at that point, Flags coolly and carefully unpacks the story behind the Iwo Jima flag raising. From the outset that story was, if not made up, then certainly ‘maked’ up, and Eastwood’s narrative shows a canny eye for how both chance and opportunism came to shape that inauthenticity. Eastwood tells how the flag immortalised by photographer Joe Rosenthal on 23 February 1945 was not the real flag but a replacement – a photo of a ‘restaged’ flag raising that had taken place because the American officer in charge wanted to take the original flag home as a souvenir. Nor was the victory which the flag came to symbolise real – victory was achieved only several weeks later. As it turned out, there was even some confusion as to who one of the men in the photo really was. The initial flag raising itself was authentic enough: it did spur spontaneous and genuine outbursts of relief amongst the soldiers present at (and surprised by) its ascent. But the flag raising of the picture that came to travel the world was from the outset fake: a product of moral and political manipulation. Depicting the logic of the American war machine as one which coldly colonises genuine human experience, Eastwood’s movie is a portrait of how political salesmanship feeds on its victims like leeches on a vein, most notably, and heartbreakingly, in the case of the Native American Ira Hayes, whose haunted soul cannot hold his liquor nor stand the charade. Eastwood unpacks the shame of that enterprise with an unblinking eye for human corruption as fools and buffoons ignorant of the horrors of war ‘celebrate’ the flag raisers on a national fundraising tour for the war effort. And yet, the despair of Eastwood’s narrative does not stem from the unpacking of hypocrisy, pretence or – as in Ira’s case – betrayal. What is so dark about Flags is not its resentment of politics but its ultimate embrace of it. ‘People looked at this picture and they took hope’, Eastwood has his chief political villain scornfully tell the flag raisers when they try to point out a number of factual errors in the story sold by government and media to the public. In the nature of our villain’s rhetorical reply, we find Eastwood’s belief in the necessity of the Noble Lie too: ‘But you don’t want to give them hope, do you? You just want to tell them about this person and that flag.’ This seems to be Eastwood’s ultimate conclusion too: yes, heroes are something politicians create. They do

251

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 251

29/5/13 13:48:45

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

it in unworthy and disgraceful ways and they do it partly because they know nothing of what war is really like. But ultimately, they do it because this is what they must do. They do it because the public wants and needs a simple and heroic narrative. Or does it? Does the public want and need to be lied to? When Eastwood reaches his conclusion, it seems to be the case. On closer inspection though, doubts linger: is flat triumphalism really what human beings touched by the horrors of war call out for? Eastwood’s story is a metaphor for the modern Western experience of war in general, yet its setting is distinctly American. To judge from that setting, the answer would seem to be no. As veterans of both world wars have explained, the public knowledge of the inferno experienced was repressed: generations of shattered and shell-shocked American men returned from horrors unspeakable and were offered no language with which to come to terms with their pain but that of war as entertainment and commodity. Twenty years on, as veterans began to return from the American war in Vietnam, the response was again silence, and this time the distance between fact – confusion, depravation – and myth spurred political estrangements so deep that the very fabric of American national identity seemed threatened (Bates 1996). Indeed, in a public context bereft of a framework capable of naming terror, with no language with which to acknowledge the sense of loss and guilt shared by most in the public realm, the notion of a public as such fell apart and practices of commemoration became unconnected and individualised.10 Though the war politics after Vietnam has done a better job at welcoming veterans, its ability to come to terms with war – to mourn, reflect, and regret it – has not improved. A genuine public language of the tragic nature of all warfare remains absent. An absence which now once again results in traumatised and suicidal soldiers as they return from counter-insurgency missions in Afghanistan and Iraq. When war, as the American anthropologist Jenny Thompson puts it, becomes ‘trivialized and commodified to the point of little but a background hum’, then returning soldiers have no language within which to reflect with their fellow citizens on the horrific experiences of war (Thompson 2009). Nor does the general public have a language in which to debate the nature of war, the cost of it, the dilemmas, and the risks. The result is a pseudo-discussion between political extremes: a public divided between those who reject war altogether and those who embrace it with too ardent a passion – between villifiers and glorifiers. The grey terrain in between, which is that difficult place of guilt, fear, dilemma, and above all choice, has no voice.

252

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 252

29/5/13 13:48:45

To Sell a War

Lincoln and the Civil War The grey terrain of dilemma had a voice once, however. Before the rise of the modern propaganda machine, Americans were engulfed in another kind of war – a civil war – and while the political rhetoric of that war certainly contained its own reductionisms and demonisations, it also revealed a very different capacity for expressing both doubt and complexity. The most ardent voice of that scepticism was that of Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States during the Civil War. On 4 March 1865, Lincoln put forth his second inaugural address to the American people. As he spoke, bloody battle still gripped the nation, yet light at the end of that ‘long dark night of the soul’ was dawning (White 2002: 178). As the leader of the side which stood to win the war, one would have expected Lincoln to speak the language of triumph, of righteousness, and of retribution. He did not. Instead, he put forth a comment on human limitations and a plea for political humility, urging his fellow Northerners to abstain from the vain assumption that victory would be a sign of moral superiority or an indication of their closer proximity to moral truth. Neither party, Lincoln stressed, expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained … Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other … The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The God Almighty has his own purposes. (Lincoln 1865)

Lincoln spoke the language of tragedy and said that all human enterprise is ultimately flawed, failed, and biased.11 Both sides, as he put it, prayed to the same God, but although the North was winning, it could not claim to have a more perfect bond with God or a more direct access to absolute moral principles: ‘The God Almighty has his own purposes.’ In many ways, the speech was intended to serve the very same purpose as the photo of the Iwo Jima flag raising: to mobilise a worn and weary audience with renewed belief and resolve in the war effort.12 Yet Lincoln’s strategy of mobilisation was profoundly different from the rhetoric of World War II. He did not romanticise, did not reduce the immeasurable violence to a ‘good war’, but spoke openly of horrors so ‘fundamental and astounding’ that they could barely be fathomed. Nor did he glorify. Instead, Lincoln’s speech stressed the faults of both sides in the conflict and warned a winning North against the righteousness

253

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 253

29/5/13 13:48:45

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

of victory. Lincoln’s public was not fed easy claims about their own inherent moral superiority, but was carefully reminded that human notions of ‘justice’ are just that – human: perceptions of right only ever as ‘God gives us to see the right’ (White 2002: 19). In other words, Lincoln tried to master a delicate balance between choice and humility, to take a moral stand while abstaining from moral certainty. Most importantly, however, Lincoln painstakingly abstained from demonising the Southern opponent. Throughout the Civil War he spoke rarely of a ‘we’ and a ‘them’, but of an ‘us.’ It was the human race that was in the war – at war with itself really – and no party to it could ultimately claim moral superiority over the other: ‘Both read’, as he put it, ‘the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other.’ What Lincoln offered the public was thus a language in which to deal with dilemma and paradox: a vocabulary with which to recognise the flawed nature of human purposes and the finitude of human beings. With that vocabulary Lincoln ultimately managed to be both in the battle and above it: appealing to the resolve of the North while encouraging all ‘to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace’ (Lincoln 1865). Lincoln’s language of tragedy taps into a competing tradition to that of the Noble Lie. Parallel with the notion that human beings need ‘an easyto-understand truth’ runs a line of thought which views the human search for identity as a genuine search – a quest to deepen our understanding of existential questions, not simply an easy fix of simplified ‘answers’. Diverse in its intellectual origins, but often anchored in forms of scepticism that have both Protestant and secular roots, the labels for this line of thought are many: Augustinian Realism, Christian Realism, or, in John Patrick Diggins’s reading of how a language of tragedy has been articulated in the American context, hopeful scepticism.13 However, to borrow a term from Ned Lebow, it is possible to identify in Western political practice what may loosely be termed a ‘tragic vision of politics’ and to discern in it a set of general principles (Lebow 2003). First of all, to approach the world through the lens of tragedy means to admit to our human limitations, which are the fundamental incapacity of the human intellect to set objective or universal moral standards. Secondly, then, a tragic vision of politics is a vision of morality as fundamentally contextual, contingent with time and space. It is not a vision of politics which rejects the relevance of moral striving as such. The core of an ethics of tragedy, however, is that to act morally in the world and strive towards ethical action, we must recognise the imperfection of our moral principles and the extent to which

254

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 254

29/5/13 13:48:45

To Sell a War

all political choice entails an element of evil: a suppressing or rejection of other possible choices.14 A tragic vision of politics, in other words, rules out easy distinctions between virtue and vice, complicating questions of right and wrong, war and peace (Murray 1997). What possible comfort can such complexity bring to those in mourning? The perspective of the Noble Lie would say none – human beings are better off believing that the world of politics and morality is coded in the simple colours of black and white. From the viewpoint of tragedy however – from the viewpoint of where Lincoln stood – there is an assumption that simplification will not soothe a human soul that has, to borrow Friedrich Nietzsche’s phrase, ‘stared into the abyss’ (Petersen 1999: 83–120). Despite its overall confirmation of the ‘necessity’ of Noble Lies, a central scene in Flags ends up supporting this view. In a small but crucial scene Eastwood’s narrative unwittingly questions the value of political simplifications, hinting instead that what a suffering public yearns for may well just be honesty – the admittance of uncertainty. In a tender scene of silent heartbreak, we look at a mother as she receives the message that her son did not, as hitherto presumed, appear in the famous photograph to which she has so desperately been clinging. Her world falls apart as private loss is robbed of a grander narrative: ‘It’s silly’, she reflects in an earlier scene, ‘but seeing him in that picture somehow helps’. Later, the family of the soldier who did in fact appear in the photo is also informed of the misunderstanding and responds with similar sentiment: recontextualised, the meaningless death of their boy transforms into purpose, sacrifice, accomplishment, all because of a ‘silly’ picture. No other scene in Flags makes so credible a case for the power of myth. Yet even in the context of these private tragedies, a case for realism over escapism seems also to be made. It is telling that the mother who long believes her son is in the picture, and finds consolation in this, does not truly seem at ease: when she finds it ‘silly’ that a simple picture should relieve her of her agony, we sense that this is partly because she, too, knows the nature of pictures: they are just that – pictures. None of the parents respond with surprise or resentment when Ira Hayes, the Native American flag raiser, breaks down into tears at a dinner party with all the parents of his lost comrades present. In this scene Eastwood silently communicates to his audience that all the human beings present at the dinner, parents as well as soldiers, are painfully aware that the reality faced by young Americans on the faraway shores of Iwo Jima is not that of white and black, good and evil, heroes and cowards. As such, all present at the dinner party sense the lie of the flag raising campaign. Eastwood depicts this gap between what the audience needs and what their

255

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 255

29/5/13 13:48:45

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

politicians offer by zooming in on the painfully misplaced themed dessert that makes up the visual climax of both the dinner party and Eastwood’s analysis of the depths to which political demagogy may sink: a snow-white ice cream shaped in the contours of the six Iwo Jima flag raisers, drowned in a bloodred strawberry sauce. The colours of that dessert are ill-picked for a dinner party where some have just come from the battlefield, other have just lost a son, and others still fear to learn of a son’s death any minute. So are the rosy words of the speakers. The parents seek genuine oratory that will help them come to terms with what they know to be real. Death, destruction, loss. The menu served, however, is cheap declarations of victory and valour. It looks pretty. But it does not offer lasting consolation.

Flags, Lies, and Propaganda To be in a battle means to defend a cause against its peril … to defend justice against injustice. To be above the battle means that we understand how imperfect the cause is we defend, that we contritely acknowledge the sins of our own nations, that we recognize the common humanity which binds us to even the most terrible foes, and that we know of our common need of grace and forgiveness. (Niebuhr 1992 [1942])

To live in a state of amnesia is not healthy, not for people and not for societies. And yet, this is to a large extent what Western societies continue to do. In the aftermath of 9/11, a photo very similar to that of the Iwo Jima flag raisers was taken at Ground Zero, New York.15 The flag showed firefighters raising the Stars and Stripes, deliberately capitalising on the message of the precedent flag raising gesture of World War II: ‘we shall overcome’.16 As such, the picture and its message of resilience can hardly be lauded for selling a message of resilience and optimism, since imagery does and should be used to muster human hopes. Regardless, the photo and its overt reference to that older ‘struggle against tyranny’ reveals how we remain unable to recognise the complexity of human conflict and how prone we are to simplification and reductionism at times of moral and political confusion. This chapter has tried to challenge such reductionism. Accepting Eastwood’s critique of war propaganda as a corrupting evil, but also his ultimate affirmation of that evil as somehow ‘necessary’, as my cue, I have argued why parades of triumph are an unsatisfying way for a public to come to terms with the dilemmas of war.

256

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 256

29/5/13 13:48:45

To Sell a War

To begin with, the twenty-first century is one of technological accomplishments so advanced that any schoolchild may now access war ‘live at the trenches’: media coverage of the actual war zone is but a Google search away, as soldiers themselves bring battle to the living rooms of all who want to watch via private cell phones and blogs. While the propagandists of the twentieth century may thus have enjoyed a monopoly on information enabling them to keep the horrors of war out of the public eye, the era of digital media allows no such thing. Secondly, today the nature of those all-too-accessible horrors will most likely seem to Western publics increasingly illegitimate and unjust. War in the twenty-first century is almost always asymmetrical, taking place between parties grossly uneven. To be blunt, the wars of the West are wars waged against nations decidedly weaker – economically, militarily, and technologically. This fact adds yet another layer of complexity to war, and one now brought to the living rooms of all Western citizens. No epic movie or triumphalist memorial will in the long run soothe the public anxieties bound to result from that experience. Communicating war in the language of ‘propaganda’ is, in short, not an option any more. To some extent we already know this, of course. This is not 1945 and Western democracies do not have Ministries of Propaganda. No re-enactment of the Saddam Hussein Monument desecration has been staged to appear on American stadiums; no Uncle Sam posters of the ‘Taliban rats’ distributed; and no popular songs with the theme ‘suicide bombers must die’ aired – we have moved beyond that very literal form of demeaning lingo. If World War II represented a rhetorical highpoint in the history of Western war propaganda however – a form of nationalist propaganda so thick that even the American Congress at some point called it ‘a stench to the nostrils of a democratic people’ – it remains a fact that World War II has now itself become a central piece of propaganda (Winkler 1978: 70). As the twenty-first century grows older and the complexity of the past grows dim, history is ransacked for ‘good wars’ that will serve as prisms through which to advance war as a simple solution to complicated problems. Hanging on to historical prisms that allow us to escape the inherent paradoxes of war – the fact that no human cause is ever fully virtuous and hence that no party to a war is ever fully innocent – we try desperately to avoid the dilemmas of choice and guilt. Obviously, it is not difficult to see why World War II is a particular favourite in this respect: Holocaust museums around the world remind us that the Allies fought an indisputable evil and as such it was in a fundamental sense ‘good’. Yet World War II was not only a war fought to end a Holocaust and it was not only good. In the words of historian Eric Foner:

257

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 257

29/5/13 13:48:45

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

World War II has become a sign of a time when the United States came together around a common cause, indisputably good … But even there, even saying that leads you to forget. What about the Japanese-American experience – the internment of over 100,000 Japanese-Americans into camps, most of them U.S. citizens? What about the segregation of the U.S. army back then? We were fighting against a theory of a master-race, but the United States had its own theory of a master-race. There’s a certain element of the glorification of the Greatest Generation and World War II that is an escapism from the problems of the present. (Foner 2009)

Eastwood’s depiction of American politics at the verge of victory in World War II defies the simplicity and self-gratification which all too easily takes hold of a society at the moment of victory. And yet, Eastwood does not dispute the larger moral contradictions of the American cause in the war, nor the virtuous character of the soldiers who fought it. Ultimately affirming the deep-seated modern assumption that victory takes public will and will takes flags, lies, and propaganda, Eastwood’s movie represents an escapism of sorts too: a turning away from larger, more difficult questions of how to develop an honest public language of dilemma, commemorating loss and sacrifice without giving in to idealisation. The point is not that World War II cannot or should not be used as a narrative through which to come to terms with contemporary issues of rights, justice, or war. It can and it should. Sadly, however, it is a trivialised, simplified, and Hollywoodised version of World War II which is currently served us, stripped of its true potential as an emblem of the moral contradictions and painful political compromises that all wars contain. Like the struggle against slavery of which Lincoln spoke, the united cause against Nazism did hold some element of true moral virtue. As in any other human event, though, virtue walked hand in hand with hypocrisy, intolerance, and self-interest. If commemorated in that spirit of equal human finitude and flaw, ‘the Good War’ might have been a rich and rewarding place to begin debating the profoundly unsettling choices of war.

Conclusion The history of modern warfare is not void of such forms of commemoration. Little spaces for other kinds of public deliberation on the dilemmas not only of war but of political conflict at large exist. Just a few steps away from the

258

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 258

29/5/13 13:48:45

To Sell a War

blaze and glory of the World War II Memorial lies a site of public reflection almost opposite in its message and aesthetics: Maya Lin’s famous Vietnam Memorial. Nothing but a black, blank wall of stone engraved with the names of those who fell, the memorial invites visitors themselves to reflect upon the meaning of loss. Neither for or against war, the memorial remains the most visited on the National Mall and facilitates introspection in ways one must assume are crucial to developing a public capacity for nuanced engagement. Had the parents in search of the meaning which Flags portrays been here today, they would probably not have found it at the bombastic monument built in honour of their children’s ‘ultimate sacrifice’. To be blazed back by swaying flags and deafening fountains is not to be addressed or engaged – it is to be high-jacked, mind-blown, silenced. More likely, then, the parents of Eastwood’s narrative, who make up in some metaphorical sense the ‘public’ of his movie, would have gone to watch their own reflection blend with the names of the Vietnam Memorial or, moving just a few yards further up the National Mall, to sit in the solemn halls of the Lincoln Memorial. From all of these three places at the National Mall, they would have been able to see the towering obelisk that is the Washington Memorial – a white light supposed to symbolise the cause of freedom as it strides towards the sky in search of eternity. But from the meditative grounds of the Vietnam Memorial or from the reflexive halls of Lincoln that struggle for freedom it would look like what it is: a promise impossible for any nation to fulfil, imperfect as we humans are. From the victory fields of the World War II Memorial, Washington’s symbol of freedom would simply appear as a mission accomplished by the Greatest Generation, in the Greatest Country on Earth. Apparently, and arguably with devastating effects on the public debate over issues of war, it is this triumphalism of the World War II Memorial that informs most of the ‘media strategies’ that come from Western defence ministries these days. Such lack of courage may be fatal. A time of transformation is a time of choice: difficult, compromising, and sometimes mistaken. To deal with that complexity, to think it through and to navigate it, takes not only leaders but also citizens fluent in the language of tragedy. Is such a language feasible? Perhaps. Is it necessary? Indisputably.

259

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 259

29/5/13 13:48:45

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

Notes

1

In Eastwood’s own account the movie is ‘about a whole generation of people who gave the ultimate sacrifice for their country and how that affects them’. Eastwood cited from interview with Walker (2006). 2 Whether selling this particular war bond was in fact pivotal is controversial. In an otherwise favourable review, Stephen Hunter of the Washington Post argues that Eastwood’s claim that had the War Bond Drive ‘failed’ the US would have had to settle for a negotiated peace with the Japanese is simply ‘bunk’ (Hunter 2006). 3 This discourse may be traced back to Niccolò Machiavelli and his famous ‘realism’, most directly treated in The Prince. 4 On the politics of the exception see Bartelson (1995) and Schmitt (1988 [1922]). 5 Contemporary proponents of the democratic peace thesis are Doyle (1983), Doyle, (1997), and Russett et. al (1995: 164–84). 6 In the case of Blair and Clinton, this mode of reasoning was most often launched with reference to the military intervention in the Balkans in the 1990s. During the administration of George W. Bush, the ‘democratic peace’ argument was most regularly made with reference to the Middle East and the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. 7 Tellingly, even critics of war propaganda ultimately seem to confirm its necessity. As John Bodnar argues, for instance, ‘The ideal of unity was articulated everywhere during World War II. The reasons were obvious: a massive military conflict on two fronts demanded that personal and group interests of any kind be minimized for the sake of the collective effort to win the war. The United States had to stand united if it was to remain standing at all’ (Bodnar 2003: 55). 8 Throughout his lifelong career as a critical journalist and public intellectual, Lippmann scorned American democracy for its inability to keep a civil public sphere alive, as in Drift and Mastery (1914), Liberty and the News (1920), and Public Opinion (1922). For a treatment of Lippmann’s analysis of American democracy see Schou Tjalve (2008: chapter 3). 9 For an examination of the parallels between Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers and John Ford’s western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), see Bradshaw (2006). 10 As Susan Owen writes: ‘Memory is a prominent subject of post Vietnam war cinema, both for the soldier and for his nation. For the cinematic war veteran, memory is often painful, and sometimes fatal … In a broader sense … personalized traumatic [memories] mark the post Vietnam crisis in collective memory of mythic American heroism’ (Owen 2002: 251). 11 For a treatment of the scepticist tradition in American political history see Diggins (1994). See also Schlesinger (1977: 82–3). 12 On the mobilising strategies of Lincoln’s speech see White (2002). 13 On Augustian Realism see Epp (1991) and Loriaux (1992); on Christian Realism see Lovin (1995); and on hopeful scepticism see John P. Diggins (1984). 14 For an explicit treatment of this point of view see Morgenthau (1945b).

260

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 260

29/5/13 13:48:45

To Sell a War

15 On

this point see Mette Mortensen’s essay ‘The Making and Remakings of an American Icon: “Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima” from Photojournalism to Global, Digital Media’ in this anthology. 16 The photo was taken by Thomas Franklin of the Bergen Record.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bartelson, Jens (1995) A Genealogy of Sovereignty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bates, Milton J. (1996) The Wars We Took to Vietnam: Cultural Conflict and Storytelling. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bodnar, John (2003) Blue-Collar Hollywood: Liberalism, Democracy, and Working People in American Film. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Bradshaw, Peter (2006) ‘Winning Ugly’, The Guardian, 22 December. Cappozzola, Christoffer (2008) Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Diggins, John P. (1984) The Lost Soul of American Politics: Virtue, Self-Interest and the Foundations of Liberalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ____ (1994) The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernism and the Crisis of Modernity. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press. Doss, Erika (2009) ‘War Porn: Spectacle and Seduction in Contemporary American War Memorials’, in Rikke Schubart et al. (eds) War Isn’t Hell, It’s Entertainment: Essays on Visual Media and the Representation of Conflict. Jefferson: McFarland, 13–31. Doyle, Michael W. (1983) ‘Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 12 (summer and fall), 205–35, 323–53. ____ (1995) Ways of War and Peace. New York: W. W. Norton. Epp, Roger (1991) ‘The “Augustinian Moment”’, in International Affairs: Niebuhr, Butterfield, Wight and the Reclaiming of a Tradition. Aberystwyth: Department of International Politics, University of Wales. Research Paper no. 10. Foner, Eric (2009) Private interview conducted by Vibeke Schou Tjalve, 15 June 2009. Gleason, Philip (1992) Speaking of Diversity: Language and Ethnicity in Twentieth Century America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Hunter, Stephen (2006) ‘Flags of Our Fathers Salutes the Men Behind the Moment’, Washington Post, 20 October. Kimble, James J. (2006) Mobilizing the Home Front: War Bonds and Domestic Propaganda. College Station: Texas A&M University Press. Lebow, Ned (2003) The Tragic Vision of Politics: Ethics, Interests and Orders. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lincoln, Abraham (1865) Second Inaugural Address, 4 March. Available at: http:// www.bartleby.com/124/pres32.html (accessed 9 January 2011).

261

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 261

29/5/13 13:48:45

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

Loriaux, Michael (1992) ‘The Realists and Saint Augustine: Skepticism, Psychology, and Moral Action in International Relations Thought’, International Studies Quarterly, 36, 4, 401–21. Lovin, Robin (1995) Reinhold Niebuhr and Christian Realism. New York: Cambridge University Press. Morgenthau, Hans J. (1945a) Scientific Man versus Power Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ____ (1945b) ‘The Evil of Politics and the Ethics of Evil’, Ethics, 56, 1, 1–18. Murray, Alastair (1997) Reconstructing Realism: Between Power Politics and Cosmopolitan Ethics. Edinburgh: Keele University Press. Niebuhr, Reinhold (1992) ‘In the Battle and Above It’, originally printed in Christianity and Society, 1942. Reprinted in Charles C. Brown, A Niebuhr Reader: Selected Essays, Articles, and Book Reviews. Philadelphia: Trinity Press International. Owen, Susan (2002) ‘Memory, War, and American Identity: Saving Private Ryan as Cinematic Jeremiad’, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 19, 3, 249–82. Pedersen, Vibeke Schou (now Vibeke Schou Tjalve) (1999) ‘The American Sound: National identitet og Sikkerhed i USA’, Politica, 31, 4, 415–30. Pestritto, Ronald J. (2005) Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Petersen, Ulrik E. (1999) ‘Breathing Nietzsche’s Air: New Reflections on Morgenthau’s Concepts of Power and Human Nature’, Alternatives, 24, 1 (January­–March), 83–120. Rockett, Ian R. H. (1983) ‘American Immigration Policy and Ethnic Selection: A Historical Overview’, Journal of Ethnic Studies, 10, 1–26. Russett, Bruce et al. (1995) ‘The Democratic Peace’, International Security, 19, 4 (spring), 164–84. Schlesinger, Arthur (1977) ‘America: Experiment or Destiny?’ American Historical Review, 82, 3, 505–22. Schmitt, Carl (1998 [1922]) Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Cambridge: MIT Press. Stout, Harry S. (2006) Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War. New York: Viking. Thompson, Jenny (2009) Private interview conducted by Vibeke Schou Tjalve, 2 July. Tjalve, Vibeke Schou (2008) Realist Strategies of Republican Peace: Niebuhr, Morgenthau and the Politics of Patriotism as Dissent. New York: Palgrave. Walker, Jo (2006) ‘Hollywood Veteran Clint Eastwood Has Captured One of America’s Bloodiest Battles in His Latest Work’, Birmingham Post, ARTS: Standards High; CULTURE in Association with the Art Lounge, 13 December. White, Ronald (2002) Lincoln’s Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural. New York: Simon and Schuster Paperbacks. Winkler, Allan M. (1978) The Politics of Propaganda: The Office of War Information 1942–1945. New Haven: Yale University Press.

262

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 262

29/5/13 13:48:45

Banzai! Letters from Iwo Jima and Choosing the Enemy in Risk Society ___ mikkel vedby rasmussen

Introduction The Allied forces called it ‘banzai attacks’ when Japanese soldiers charged their positions with the cry ‘Long live the Emperor’. A frontal assault on the firepower of US Marines was little more than a well-ordered mass suicide; and exactly that element of the Pacific War gained a new meaning in the opening decade of the twenty-first century when the West again faced an enemy more concerned with death than with victory. In Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) director Clint Eastwood tells the story of the Japanese soldiers fighting Americans (the Americans’ story is told in Flags of Our Fathers, 2006), and in trying to account for how they chose their death in a battle in which they were doomed, Eastwood offers a way for his American audience to come to grips with the enemy in the ‘War on Terror’. Though this narrative in many ways tells an American story of war, it is a story that is defined by notions of choice, identity, and risk which characterise a general Western discourse on warfare. This chapter thus sees Letters from Iwo Jima as a window into the Western construction of what constitute our enemies and what role war can play in getting to terms with these enemies. The chapter deals first with how late-modern identity is defined in terms of choice and how this makes the figure of the suicide bomber a particularly

263

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 263

29/5/13 13:48:45

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

feared enemy. Secondly, the chapter describes how Letters from Iwo Jima constructs the battle of Iwo Jima in terms that make it relevant to warfare in our time. Third, the chapter deals with how the banzai attacks of Iwo Jima and al-Qaeda’s suicide bombers represent similar ways of constituting an identity by self-sacrifice. Fourth, the argument turns to the American, and by implication Western, approach to these sacrifices, using the movie’s narrative to show how American victory is constructed as an act of emancipation. Finally, it is discussed whether such a victory as described in Letters from Iwo Jima is in fact allowed in today’s discourse on warfare. This leaves the question of who won the battle of Iwo Jima for the conclusion.

Protean Man If there is such a thing as a late-modern personality, then it is captured in the notion of ‘protean man’ – a person who is defined by his choices, which can always be remade (Lifton 1968: 13–27).1 In late modernity we construct our lives in terms of choice; and we regard choice in terms of alternate futures (if I choose X, one future will be realised; if I choose Y, I will realise another). Our present lives are defined by the future they are to realise. The sociologist Anthony Giddens describes this as a ‘colonisation of the future’ (Giddens 1991: 11) Choosing to quit smoking is to make a ‘life-plan’ on the basis of the probability that smoking will kill you (Giddens 1991: 124–8). In fact, you may live to be a hundred and happily puff your cigar all the while. Lung cancer statistics are general statements; they are not necessarily applicable to you. Still, people choose to make the statistics applicable to them by using them as a guide to what will happen to them if they do not quit smoking. Giddens terms this ‘risk profiling’. Another example of ‘risk profiling’ is the way in which social services determine whether a child should be placed in the care of foster parents rather than live with its natural parents. No one knows exactly what will happen to the child in question, but based on the life of the particular family and their own experience, social workers draw up a scenario for the child’s future. In order to prevent this scenario from becoming a reality, they decide that it should be placed in the care of someone else. Your life chances if you smoke, compared to if you don’t, and in terms of the chances a child will have if its stays with its dysfunctional parents, compared to if it does not, are thus defined in terms of risk. ‘“Risk” is defined’, according to risk management expert John Adams, ‘by most of those who seek to measure it, as the product of the probability and utility of some future event’

264

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 264

29/5/13 13:48:45

Banzai!

(Adams 1995: 30). In quitting smoking one acts on the basis that one will get cancer in the future, just as social services removes a child from its parents based on a scenario of just how bad its childhood will turn out. The German sociologist Ulrich Beck coined the term ‘risk society’, and according to him the focus on risk means that ‘future events that have not yet occurred become the object of current action’ (Adams 1995: 25). Thus Beck argues that ‘the concept of risk reverses the relationship of past, present and the future’ (Beck 1999: 137). In attempting to avoid risk, one is defining present problems by their perceived future consequences. In this way scenarios make risks a ‘real virtuality’, according to Beck (Beck 1999: 136). The very causality of political discourse is thus circumvented. It is not present actions that are to produce future results, but perceived future results that produce present actions. Present action creates the identity of protean man, and thus his ability to make these choices become pivotal to the ability to be someone; this is true of individuals, groups – and of society itself. Jonah Goldstein and Jeremy Rayner argue that ‘the idea of authenticity has become more and more central. Because identity-claims are not subject to a common measure, they cannot be negotiated away in the same way as interests; only I can shape and re-shape who I am’ (Goldstein and Rayner 1994: 368). Because there is no common standard to measure identity against, identity cannot be established with reference to established truths and widely held beliefs in proper conduct. In order to be someone you will have to act that identity out. Thus the answer to ‘Who am I?’ is given by action. Thus identity becomes a matter of choice. The way you choose to act is in fact your identity. For that reason most people are prepared to accept the most outrageous lifestyle choices of other people if these choices are believed to be based on people’s true desires. Because it is a choice itself which is defining what is right and what is ethical, people in risk society respect choice and find it hard to condemn any choice as unethical. The focus on choice does not mean that health professionals do not lecture us on the need to give up smoking or that molesting a child is accepted as a choice. Risk society is a society, and as such it has shared values and beliefs. The point is rather that the health professional seeks to give smokers the resources to give up smoking. In order for that lifestyle choice to be a valid and accepted choice is has to be perceived as a choice of free will. Forcing people to give up smoking at gun-point would devalue non-smoking. This focus on choice is why the suicide bomber places the citizens of late modernity in the uncomfortable position of being able to identify with the way he chooses to define his life by his actions and being able to somehow respect his insistence on authenticity. Still, the choice made by the suicide

265

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 265

29/5/13 13:48:45

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

bomber defines an identity which is in opposition to everything that the citizens of risk society hold dear. People in risk society can understand, and even relish, the embrace of risk. Yet, the suicide bomber is not after suspense; he wants a catastrophe. He realises the risks and in so doing, the suicide bomber challenges protean man’s fundamental belief in the inherent justice and aesthetics of choice. While late-modern persons can identify with the insistence on authenticity and choice, they cannot accept the fundamentalists’ insistence on only one authentic belief dictated by God and therefore only one right type of choice. What makes the suicide terrorist truly appalling to the citizens of risk society, however, is the way his acts rob other people of their futures. To protean man life is not something which is achieved and given meaning by one defining act. A life defined by the opportunities of choice is measured in how many opportunities you realise and how many challenges you choose to meet. Thus where the suicide bomber defines his or her life in one act of destruction, protean man measures the success of his life in terms of how many choices he makes. A protean life is thus a long life of many opportunities. A violent death puts an end to these opportunities without even making it the final choice of the victims. Thus the suicide bomber terminates the future, the future which defines late-modern identity. The bomb robs its victims of their future and of their free will to make choices, but it also becomes part of the possible futures that the citizens of risk society have to choose between. The possibility that their life will be cut short or tragically changed by the loss of a loved one because of terrorism becomes a part of their future. The nature of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington in 2001, and the subsequent terrorist attacks on Madrid and London, thus made it clear to protean man that one of the most fundamental choices he was facing by the beginning of the twenty-first century had become how to define his enemies. While the 1990s were defined by the belief that globalisation would make everyone protean, the new century began with the realisation that some people were actually defining their identity in conflict with the West. President George W. Bush asked the question on behalf of many US citizens when he posed the question: ‘Why do they hate us?’(Bush 2001). The answer to that question is not only a matter of identifying an enemy, but also – in trying to understand the authenticity of his choice – of understanding oneself. Perhaps the greatest challenge for Western societies since ‘9/11’ has been to come to terms with a world where choice can be murder and the murderer can be an enemy. Redefining and recalibrating the enemy as a concept which

266

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 266

29/5/13 13:48:45

Banzai!

gives meaning in risk society has thus been one of the most important political questions of the time. And it is this question which Clint Eastwood addresses in Letters from Iwo Jima.

Depicting the Battle If a choice is to be real, it has to be authentic; and in order to establish this authenticity Letters from Iwo Jima goes to great lengths in its attempt to establish an authentic setting for the battle for that island in the Pacific from 19 February to 26 March 1945. Thus the movie opens with a scene in which Japanese archaeologists discover the letters the story of which the movie then goes on to tell. The claim to authenticity is a claim for our attention rather than a claim to military history. Though the battle scenes are meticulously done, the meaning they give the battle tells a story of today rather than of World War II. The battle for Iwo Jima is presented in terms of the ‘War on Terror’ rather than the war in the Pacific. From the point where the movie shows the Japanese soldiers watching in amazement as the American armada approaches, American victory is never in doubt. The fact that the US forces are present in overwhelming force and that these forces enjoyed a technological superiority with their ships and their aircrafts gives one the feeling that the US forces enjoyed their crushing superiority on Iwo Jima, as US forces did in Afghanistan and Iraq. For good measure, the Japanese soldiers are hiding in caves waiting for the Marines to finish them off, thus creating an obvious parallel to Taliban warriors in their caves in Afghanistan. In real life, the battle was not that one-sided. When the battle opened, 21,000 Japanese soldiers were dug in on the island with 1,000 guns. Only 216 prisoners were taken. Western military doctrine would expect an enemy to be defeated with much lower casualties, because an army will be unable to achieve any strategic effect long before all its constituent units are defeated. Winning is about paralysing an army, not slaughtering its soldiers. Actually, slaughtering the soldiers is – in military terms – a waste of time and resources since it simply delays the inevitable. Thus when the French army had lost its ability to conduct operations in the spring of 1940, when German armoured columns broke its formation, the French high command capitulated even if only 90,000 soldiers had been killed out of an army of 2.2 million. The Japanese chose to fight to the end at Iwo Jima, and the US Marine Corps paid the price. Two Marine divisions (71,245 Marines) were put ashore. More than

267

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 267

29/5/13 13:48:46

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

18,000 were wounded and 6,000 killed in action. This number is twice the number of US servicemen and women which have died in Iraq, but also twice the number of American casualties during the D-day landing in Normandy (Bradford 2006). While the sacrifice of the American Marines on Iwo Jima is the subject of Flags of Our Fathers, in Letters Eastwood is telling a story in which the Japanese side is clearly doomed and where the Japanese soldiers merely succumb to US military might. Thus the story of the Japanese soldiers that died on Iwo Jima is framed not in terms of the approximately 24,000 Americans they took down with them, but in terms of their own annihilation. It is a story of suicide and the meaning of suicide in warfare. Thus Eastwood focuses on how they died. The movie deals mainly with how soldiers choose their death or how others choose for them. The fact that the Japanese fought on in spite of military logic and with such a terrible price makes this question even more compelling. What did the 20,000 men achieve with their death; what gave that death meaning to them? And, perhaps more importantly from our perspective, how does it give meaning to us? It is important to note that Eastwood chooses not to glorify the Japanese sacrifice. Letters from Iwo Jima is not a celebration of manhood, virtue, and honour like 300 (2006), which depicts the Spartans at Thermopylae conducting a holding action not dissimilar to what the Japanese were doing at Iwo Jima. The Japanese high command clearly regarded the stand at Iwo Jima as a way to buy time for the defence of the Japanese mainland, and this does in fact give strategic meaning to the terrible fight the Japanese army conducts on Iwo Jima. There are plenty of stories of glorious military defeats modelled on the mythical shape of the Spartans’ last stand at Thermopylae. Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down (2001) is a recent example of this genre, where the professional conduct of the US special forces in Mogadishu turns a military defeat into a moral victory. But Eastwood’s Japanese soldiers are not better than the men that defeat them. Their death is not a monument to the soldier’s code and society’s laws, the way the death of Leonidas and his men were. To Eastwood the defeat of the Japanese army proves the exact opposite. We are in fact witnessing the defeat of material culture by its own hand.

The Battle for the Japanese Soul The choice that the Japanese soldiers face as the American troops land on Iwo Jima is not how to survive, but how to die. Some are eager to die. The officers

268

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 268

29/5/13 13:48:46

Banzai!

and men who embrace the death cult that emanated from the Japanese armed forces seek out their own death in mass suicides or ‘banzai attacks’. The commander, Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, is angry with the officers and men who kill off themselves in this way. Not because he does not appreciate their sacrifice (in the end he too will seek his own death), but because he finds it wasteful in military terms. As a commander, he wants his men to be fighting rather than dying. To him, war is a means to an end. Eastwood’s narrative pairs him with the Private Saigo, who simply does not want to die and indeed ends up as one of the very few POWs. The private and the general are our point of identification; they have an instrumental understanding of war, like the Western audience in the cinema. Whether it is a way out or a way to the victory the private and the general want from warfare, they want something which can be measured in terms of interest. Their fight with the advancing Americans can be settled in terms of who actually prevails on the battlefield. In spiritual terms their fight is not with the Americans, who have the same instrumental notion of war, but with the fanatical officers and men who want to prove themselves in battle. If one has an instrumental view of warfare, then the battle is an element of one’s own survival. You might die anyway, but you fight to live. For the fanatical elements of the Iwo Jima army the purpose of battle is to die. They do not believe it possible to defeat the US Marine Corps, but they are sure that if they in their death show their distain for the material resources about to overcome them, then they will have won in a spiritual sense. As Vice Admiral Onishi Takijiro told his pilots before they set off on their kamikaze missions: ‘Even if we are defeated, the noble spirit of the kamikaze attack corps will keep our homeland from ruin. Without this spirit, ruin would certainly follow defeat’ (quoted in Buruma and Margalit 2004: 67). The kamikaze pilots and the 20,000 troops on Iwo Jima fought to the end. The war is no longer merely a contest between the armed forces of two nations; it is a fight for the Japanese soul. In their excellent study The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (2004), Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit describe how this Japanese cult of suicide grew out of a disdain for Western individualism and materialism. Industrialisation had transformed Japanese society, the argument went, and turned it into a capitalist society that had lost its authenticity (Buruma and Margalit 2004: 59–67). If military victory could no longer deliver a new, Japanese-dominated Asia, then defeat could perhaps deliver a Japan more true to itself. So reasoned Sasaki Hachiro: ‘If the power of old capitalism is something we cannot get rid of so easily but if it can be crushed by defeat in war, we are turning the disaster into a fortunate event.

269

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 269

29/5/13 13:48:46

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

We are now searching for a phoenix which rises out of the ashes’ (Buruma and Margalit 2004: 67). Hachiro wrote this before he was killed in a kamikaze attack at the age of 22. Private Saigo does not want to be killed, and that of course turns him into exactly one of those capitalist individualists which Sasaki Hachiro so despised; it also makes him part of the winning team. This is one more reason why he serves as our point of reference in the film. He represents the modern Japan which the moviegoers know emerged from World War II. We know that the United States ultimately prevails, and the Japanese will start making Toyotas and thus stop finding meaning in dying and instead find meaning in making money. Knowing the end of the story, Saigo’s struggles for survival become a struggle for laying the old-style warrior code behind this archetypical Japanese man and allowing him to become modern. The movie’s point is thus that the Japanese officers and government do not allow the Japanese to be modern. But the soldiers want to.

Face to Face With the Americans Eastwood’s point is that the Japanese soldiers do not know the United States, and therefore they do not realise the promise of modernisation. There is only one peaceful meeting between the United States and Japan in the movie. Kuribayashi has been staying in the United States, and when he is to leave for Japan his hosts (a US cavalry regiment) throw him a farewell party. The Americans have difficulties with his name (he ends up being just ‘Kuri’) and the farewell present is a handgun – so much for national stereotypes. Eastwood faithfully presents the American lack of knowledge of other cultures – a notion that has become so much part of American identity itself that one can hardly meet an American abroad without him confessing his ignorance of the outside world. This is of course no admission, but rather a point conceded because it does not really count. The point which Eastwood really wants to make is that American and Japanese officers have a professional respect for one another. That respect is lost when the fight becomes a matter of Japanese identity. In reality, America was fighting another war in 1945 than the one the film depicts. The essential battle was thus for the Japanese soul, while the material battle on the ground was between the American Marines and the Japanese army. However, America plays an important part in the battle for the Japanese soul because America functions as an Other in the nationalist narrative. When

270

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 270

29/5/13 13:48:46

Banzai!

Baron Nishi reads the letter of a captured Marine aloud to his soldiers, the indoctrinated Japanese realise that the American is a human being who, like them, receives letters from back home signed ‘love, Mom’. In Eastwood’s narrative it is this letter which removes the last reason the Japanese privates could possibly have to fight on: the belief that the Marines are lesser human beings, the mere human extension of an impersonal, modern military machine. The most important part the US plays in the battle for the Japanese soul is basically to disprove the hypothesis of racial superiority. Demonstrating that the US servicemen are boys with mothers serves to show that Japanese and Americans are alike, but it does not demonstrate that the Japanese are not superior to the Americans. Only the battle can do that. If the Japanese realise themselves in battle, then US victory demonstrates that being Japanese in Sasaki Hachino’s sense is not the only way to achieve material valour. US military victory is proof that capitalism and modernity do not make you soft. While Eastwood spends most of the movie displaying the horrors and follies of war, the driving force of the narrative is the inevitability of American victory. In the final analysis it is the force of arms which determines the outcome of the battle at large as well as the fate of the individual protagonists of the movie. That battle is not merely a battle for that small island in the Pacific, but a battle for the Japanese soul. From this perspective it is the American Marines that emancipate the Japanese and deliver Japanese national identity to modernity. In Letters from Iwo Jima the Japanese realise that the Americans are people like them, and the outcome of the battle forces Japanese society to accept that it is in fact not superior to the United States. However, Eastwood suggests that the Marines perhaps did not realise that the Japanese were people of equal value. In a scene where Japanese prisoners are shot, Eastwood more than hints that one reason why so few Japanese soldiers ended up as prisoners of war was that the American soldiers also believed in fighting to the last Japanese.

History’s Unmarked Graves In a society where identity is something you choose, then assuming the identity of war is also a choice. President Bush attempted to impose a value of warfare on the American people by arguing that the events of 9/11 had left the United States with little choice but to fight a war on terrorism. Speaking to Congress in the wake of the terrorist attacks, the president described alQaeda’s members as traitors to their faith and went on: ‘We are not deceived

271

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 271

29/5/13 13:48:46

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

by their pretenses to piety. We have seen their kind before. They are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions – by abandoning every value except the will to power – they follow in the path of fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way, to where it ends: in history’s unmarked grave of discarded lies’ (Bush 2001). To the American president, al-Qaeda was the heir of the fanatical Japanese fighting on Iwo Jima. President Bush’s description of the enemies of the United States in the twentieth century mirrors Eastwood’s portrait of ‘Japanese Totalitarianism’. And the point is the same. If the United States commits itself to the destruction of such ‘radical visions’, then they can be defeated until all that is left of them is an unmarked grave on a historical battlefield. Letters from Iwo Jima can be seen as a meditation on how it feels to be forced to fight on the wrong side of the battle – the side on which an unmarked grave is not a metaphor but a demoralising prospect. Crucially, however, Eastwood does not challenge the belief that history will prove itself to be on the side of the United States. As argued above, Letters from Iwo Jima actually confirms that World War II was a necessary, if harsh, means to deliver the Japanese to modernity. Choosing war and believing warfare to be able to deliver identity was something which was fervently rejected by many quarters during the Bush presidency. Military historians argued that one could not fight ‘terror’ any more than one could fight ‘strategic bombing’. In this instrumental view terror was a tactic, not a strategic objective (Howard 2001). This argument failed to take account of the fact that President Bush was not making a strategic argument; he was trying to establish an identity. He wanted the Americans to choose the good fight, to identify themselves with the fight for freedom and American values in the way the World War II generation had done. Those who rejected not only the war on terror in general, but the Iraq War of 2003 in particular, sensed the opportunity for redefining identity as clearly as the president had done. And they would have nothing of it. Thus the slogan worn on T-shirts and written on banners all over the world in the run-up to the Iraq war was ‘not in my name’. The protesters would not be associated with and would not gain identity from the war. In his Nobel lecture Harold Pinter eloquently captured this protest against warfare itself. While Pinter offers an analysis of the reasons why the United States and Britain went to war, what matters most to him is the rejection of war itself. This was not the wrong war; war was wrong in and of itself. The cruelty of war, which Eastwood so meticulously describes, delegitimises any justification or reasons for going to war. Pinter does not want to be part of a

272

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 272

29/5/13 13:48:46

Banzai!

history which has ‘unmarked graves’: ‘We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it “bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East”’ (Pinter 2005). In Pinter’s account it is the technologies of warfare themselves which delegitimise the purpose of war. Herman Kahn noted this with respect to the Vietnam War, and it seems to be true of the Iraq war as well: ‘There appears to be an encounter between a seemingly depersonalized technological arsenal of war and defenders who are perceived on a human scale – as individuals in a backward society compelled to endure punishment without proportionate defenses (although using terrorist methods of offence which, paradoxically, seem to some people almost legitimized by the perceived disproportion in the material means of conflict)’ (Kahn 1968: 63). We find this narrative of asymmetry in Eastwood’s movie as well. The Marines seem to be a dehumanised force of modernity when they bomb and shell their way across Iwo Jima. The Japanese soldiers are on a human scale, while the American soldiers become ‘depersonalised’ because they represent history. A history the Japanese cannot escape, but ‘the forces of history’ seem somehow less authentic than the Japanese soldiers with their commitment to honour. Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit point out that this notion of the West and its way of warfare as an unheroic, mechanised enterprise which systematically destroys anything that is authentic and of value is a typical ‘Occidentalist’ view – that is, a reified notion of the West as shallow modernity. In Buruma and Margalit’s account, Occidentalism is a discourse found in the West as well as in ‘anti-Western’ powers like post-1979 Iran or wartime Japan that blames modernity for a lack of value and meaning, and consequently wants to roll modernity back in favour of a more real and original human perspective (Buruma and Margalit 2004: 1–12). In thus emphasising the need for a more humane approach to life, the Occidentalist view is dehumanising modernity and the West, thus allowing for exactly the kind of atrocities committed by al-Qaeda or the World War II Japanese regime. Buruma and Margalit’s crucial point is that Occidentalism is about fighting modernity in one’s own society as well as fighting the modern West. When the Japanese soldiers were making their banzai attacks on Iwo Jima they fought, as argued above, for the rise of a new and better Japan in defeat, and when al-Qaeda commits its acts of terror against Western targets it is also done in order to change the values in the Middle East and delegitimise ‘Western’ modernity there. In a reverse parallel, Harold Pinter finds that the Western

273

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 273

29/5/13 13:48:46

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

way of warfare is illegitimate exactly because it is a technology of atrocity with no legitimate spiritual end. From this perspective Letters from Iwo Jima becomes a discussion about the nature of warfare and the nature of the West. Both discussions have gained a new urgency after 9/11. The movie reflects the idea that US armed force is a force of history, but it also reflects the Occidentalist view that by being a force of history the American way of warfare is technological, shallow, and dehumanised.

Who Won the Battle of Iwo Jima? Who won the battle of Iwo Jima? In Clint Eastwood’s account victory does not belong to any person or nation. People are cast as victims of historical events which unfold with a brutality that sweeps ordinary people away. The battle deprives them of their basic humanity. Some of the fanatical Japanese officers and men embrace this, while others hope for a better day. So do the American soldiers, who are as much reduced to agents of history as are the Japanese: the Americans are portrayed as victims of a vast industrial war machine which disregards basic humanity. If there is such a thing as victory in Eastwood’s account of the battle, it is the emancipation of the ordinary Japanese, because the militaristic Japanese regime is defeated in spiritual as well as military terms. If the US Marine Corps was able to emancipate the Japanese from their cult of death and deliver them to modernity, does the battle of Iwo Jima thus serve as a lesson on how to fight the war against ‘al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia’ or the Taliban in Afghanistan? Eastwood leaves that question open, which shows that the story of war no longer has an easy conclusion and a ready plot in the eyes of Western audiences. Victory is something we have to choose to believe in. And many find that making that choice is an immoral act in and of itself. Perhaps Eastwood’s main achievement in Letters from Iwo Jima, as well as in Flags of Our Fathers, is to define the conditions for that choice and show us the consequences of choosing war.

Note

1

The following section is based on my The Risk Society at War (Rasmussen 2006).

274

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 274

29/5/13 13:48:46

Banzai!

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adams, John (1995) Risk. London: Routledge. Beck, Ulrich (1999) World Risk Society. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bradford, James (2006) International Encyclopedia of Military History, volume 1. London: Routledge. Buruma, Ian and Avishai Margalit (2004) Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies. New York: Penguin. Bush, George W. (2001) Address to a joint session of Congress and the American people, 20 September 2001. Washington, DC: The White House, Office of the Press Secretary. Giddens, Anthony (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Goldstein, Jonah and Jeremy Rayner (1994) ‘The Politics of Identity in Late Modern Society’, Theory and Society, 23, 3, 367–84. Howard, Michael (2001) ‘Speech at the Conference New Policies for a New World, Royal United Services Institute’, unpublished, London. Jay Lifton, Robert (1968) ‘Protean Man’, Partisan Review, winter 1968, 13–27. Kahn, Herman, William Pfaff and Edmund Stillman (1968) War Termination: Issues and Concepts. Croton-on-Harmon, NY: The Hudson Institute. Pinter, Harold (2005) ‘Art, Truth and Politics’, Nobel lecture, 7 December 2005, Stockholm: The Nobel Foundation. Available at: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/ literature/laureates/2005/pinter-lecture.html (accessed 9 January 2011). Rasmussen, Mikkel Vedby (2006) The Risk Society at War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

275

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 275

29/5/13 13:48:46

FILMOGRAPHY

21 Grams, 2003, Alejandro González Iñárritu Bokoku no ijisu (Aegis), 2005, Junji Sakamoto All Quiet on the Western Front, 1930, Lewis Milestone American and Cuban Flag/Old Glory and the Cuban Flag, no. 1, March 1897, Thomas A. Edison, documentary, short American Flag, The, 1896 American Flag, The, 1898, Thomas A. Edison Amores Perros, 2000, Alejandro González Iñárritu O Dragão da Maldade contra o Santo Guerreiro (Antonio das Mortes), 1969, Glauber Rocha Apocalypse Now, 1979, Francis Ford Coppola Babel, 2006, Alejandro González Iñárritu Band of Brothers, 2001, HBO, television mini-series Baseball, 1994, 11 episode documentary series Battle of Midway, The, 1942, John Ford, documentary Battle of San Pietro, The, 1945, John Huston, documentary, short Bronenosets Potyomkin (Battleship Potemkin), 1925, Sergei Eisenstein Behind Enemy Lines, 2001, John Moore Between Heaven and Earth, 1993, Oliver Stone Birth of a Nation, The, 1915, David W. Griffith Black Hawk Down, 2001, Ridley Scott Born on the Fourth of July, 1989, Oliver Stone

276

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 276

29/5/13 13:48:46

FILMOGR APHY

Burial of the ‘Maine’ Victims, 1898, Edison Manufacturing Co., documentary, short Christmas Tale, A, 2008, Arnaud Desplechin Chung Hing sam lam (Chungking Express), 1994, Wong Kar-wai Civil War, The, 1990, 9 episode documentary series Code inconnu: Récit incomplet de divers voyages (Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys), 2000, Michael Haneke Coming Home, 1978, Hal Ashby Confessions of a Nazi Spy, 1939, Anatole Litvak Courage Under Fire, 1996, Edward Zwick Crash, 2004, Paul Haggis Deer Hunter, The, 1978, Michael Cimino Auf der anderen Seite (The Edge of Heaven), 2007, Fatih Akin Flag: A Story Inspired by the Tradition of Betsy Ross, The, 1927, Arthur Maude Flags of Our Fathers, 2006, Clint Eastwood Ore wa kimi no tame ni koso shi ni iku (For Those We Love), 2007, Taku Shinjo Full Metal Jacket, 1987, Stanley Kubrick Generation Kill, 2008, HBO, seven episodes mini-series Glamor Gal, 1945, documentary, short Gosford Park, 2001, Robert Altman Gran Torino, 2008, Clint Eastwood Grapes of Wrath, The, 1940, John Ford Great War, The, 1964, BBC, 26 episode documentary series Green Berets, 1968, Ray Kellogg and John Wayne Hell’s Angels, 1930, Howard Hughes Tengoku to jigoku (High and Low), 1963, Akira Kurosawa Holiday Inn, 1942, Mark Sandrich J’accuse! (I Accuse), 1919, Abel Gance Ikiru (Living), 1952, Akira Kurosawa Independence Day, 1996, Roland Emmerich Jarhead, 2005, Sam Mendes Jazz, 2001, 10 episode documentary series Letters from Iwo Jima, 2006, Clint Eastwood Longest Day, The, 1962, Darryl F. Zanuck Rorerai (Lorelei), 2005, Shinji Higuchi Love and War, 1899, James H. White M*A*S*H, 1970, Robert Altman Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The, 1961, John Ford Mystic River, 2003, Clint Eastwood Nine Lives, 2005, Rodrigo Garcia Oktyabr (October), 1928, Sergei Eisenstein Over There, 2005, FX, thirteen episode war/drama series Patton, 1970, Franklin J. Schaffner Pearl Harbor, 2001, Michael Bay Platoon, 1986, Oliver Stone Raising Old Glory Over Morro Castle, 1899, J. Stuart Blackton

277

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 277

29/5/13 13:48:46

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

Redacted, 2007, Brian De Palma Reviewing the ‘Texas’ at Grant’s Tomb, 1898, J. Stuart Blackton, documentary, short Roma, città aperta (Rome, Open City), 1945, Roberto Rossellini Sengoku jietai 1549 (Samurai Commando: Mission 1549), 2005, Masaaki Tezuka Sands of Iwo Jima, 1949, Allan Dwan Saving Private Ryan, 1998, Steven Spielberg Schindler’s List, 1993, Steven Spielberg Deguchi no nai umi (Sea without Exit), 2006, Kiyoshi Sasabe Sergeant York, 1941, Howard Hawks Lucía y el sexo (Sex and Lucia), 2001, Julio Medem L’heure d’été (Summer Hours), 2008, Olivier Assayas This Is the Army, 1943, Michael Curtiz Trois couleurs: Bleu (Three Colours: Blue), 1993, Krzysztof Kieslowski Trois couleurs: Rouge (Three Colours: Red), 1994, Krzysztof Kieslowski Trzy kolory: Bialy (Three Colours: White), 1994, Krzysztof Kieslowski To the Shores of Iwo Jima, 1945, Milton Sperling, documentary, short Tôkyô sonata (Tokyo Sonata), 2008, Kyoshi Kurosawa La ville est tranquille (The Town Is Quiet), 2001, Robert Guédiguian Unforgiven, 1992, Clint Eastwood Untouchables, The, 1959–63, ABC, 118 episode crime series U.S. Infantry Supported by Rough Riders at El Caney, 1899, Thomas A. Edison Victory at Sea, 1952–53, NBC, 26 episode documentary series Walker, 1987, Alex Cox War, The, 2007, 7 episode documentary series Way of the Warrior, 2007, Wisconsin Public Television, documentary We Were Soldiers, 2002, Randall Wallace Windtalkers, 2002, John Woo With the Marines at Tarawa, 1944, documentary Suna no onna (Woman in the Dunes), 1964, Hiroshi Teshigahara World at War, The, 1973–74, Thames Television, 26 episode documentary series Deguchi no nai umi (Yamato), 2005, Jun’ya Sato Yankee Doodle Dandy, 1942, Michael Curtiz Yasukuni, 2007, Li Ying, documentary Young Mr. Lincoln, 1939, John Ford

278

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 278

29/5/13 13:48:46

index

9/11 4–6, 25–8, 31, 247, 266, 274 Afghanistan 7, 18, 26, 29–31, 201, 224, 250, 267, 274 All Quiet on the Western Front 159–61 al-Qaeda 11, 26, 264, 272–4 Altman, Robert 89, 140 Apocalypse Now 159 Ashby, Hal 97, 144 Battle of Midway, The 38 Battleship Potemkin 51 Beck, Ulrich 11, 265 Behind Enemy Lines 127 Bell, Maurice 49 Berlin, Irving 86 Black Hawk Down 127, 135, 268 Block, Harlon 4, 23, 112, 144, 146 Born on the Fourth of July 8, 82, 91 Broyles, William 3, 96, 187, 191 Burns, Ken 48–50 Bush, George W. 11, 224, 250, 260, 266

Cagney, James 85 Capra, Frank 39 Cash, Johnny 25, 60 censorship 207, 214 Chion, Michel 157–8 Cimino, Michael 144, 231 Clinton, Bill 250, 260 close-up 42, 44, 88, 101, 146, 164, 175, 234–7 Coming Home 144 Cooper, Gary 85 Coppola, Francis Ford 89, 159 Courage Under Fire 231 Crow, Jim 68, 71–3 cultural memory 119–23, 130–1 Curtis, Tony 25, 60 Curtiz, Michael 82, 86 Deer Hunter, The 144, 231 Derrida, Jacques 106, 225 Eisenstein, Sergei 51

279

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 279

29/5/13 13:48:46

EASTWOOD’S IWO JIMA

Emmerich, Roland 202 Fonda, Henry 39, 87 For Those We Love 202, 209 Full Metal Jacket 231 Genaust, Bill 7, 35–42, 49–54, 87 Gerow, Aaron 201, 211 Giddens, Anthony 264 Grant, Ulysses S. 60 Ground Zero 7, 25–8, 256 hara-kiri 174 Hawks, Howard 84 Hayes, Ira 4, 8, 18, 23–5, 53, 68, 74, 95, 112, 129–3, 144–6, 176, 179–80, 222, 251, 255 Hell’s Angels 159 Hussein, Saddam 257 Huston, John 40 Iraq 31–2, 201, 224, 260, 272–3 Kakehashi, Kumiko 12, 189, 191, 197, 239, 242 kamikaze 151, 197, 202, 231, 269–70 Kingston, Jeff 201 Kubrick, Stanley 231 Kuribayashi, Tadamichi 2–3, 9–10, 149–54, 182, 187–9, 196, 206–7, 210, 224, 233–4, 238–42, 264 Landsberg, Alison 177, 185, 190 Last Samurai, The 210 Levinas, Emmanuel 5–6, 99, 101, 105–8, 236–7 Lincoln, Abraham 50, 242, 248, 253–60 Lippmann, Walther 250, 260 Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance, The 95, 251 Marvin, Lee 95 Mauss, Marcel 225

Milestone, Lewis 159 Mystic River 9, 139, 141–5 National Mall 259 Native Americans 59–67, 70, 133 Nishi, Takeichi 6, 150–2, 188–90, 207, 211–14, 235–8, 271 Nixon, Richard 17, 89, 93 October 51 Ozawa, Ichiro 209, 211 pacifism 204, 209 patriotism 7, 15, 85, 94, 144, 218, 220–1 Patton 8, 82, 89–90 Pearl Harbor 47 Phillippe, Ryan 8, 95, 102, 114, 144, 175 Picture Letters from the Commander in Chief 3, 5, 124 Pittman, Ray 49 Plantinga, Carl 112–13, 185–6 Pulp Fiction 142 Reagan, Ronald 86, 104 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 4, 43, 70, 85, 250 Rosenthal, Joe 2–4, 7, 15–19, 24, 29–31, 37–8. 45–9, 94, 111, 128, 134, 144–7, 221, 251 Ross, Betsy 84–5 Sands of Iwo Jima 8, 42, 51–4, 88, 102–4 Saving Private Ryan 5, 40, 56, 125, 160, 176 Schindler’s List 176 Scott, Ridley 127, 268 Sergeant York 84 Smith, Murray 112–13, 177–8, 200 Solomon, Henry 43 Sousley, Frank 4, 87, 112 Spanish-American War 60–1, 68, 81 Sperling, Milton 87

280

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 280

29/5/13 13:48:46

index

Spielberg, Steven 2–3, 40, 55, 125, 160, 176 Stewart, Jimmy 46, 95 Strank, Michael 4, 54, 87, 112, 145 suicide bomber 11, 231, 257, 263–6 Taliban 26, 31, 257, 267, 274 Tarantino, Quentin 140 This is the Army 86 To the Shores of Iwo Jima 37–9, 41–4, 87, 94 Unforgiven 102, 139 Vietnam War 28, 45, 82, 89–92, 103, 273

War on Terror 7, 18, 25–6, 263, 272 Washington, George 84 Watanabe, Ken 149, 182, 187, 224 Wayne, John 8, 19, 59, 88, 102–4, 110 Wilson, Woodrow 68, 250 Windtalkers 63 With the Marines at Tarawa 38–40 Woo, John 63 World at War, The 45–50 Yamashita, Iris 6, 201 Yankee Doodle Dandy 82, 92 Zwick, Edward 210, 231

281

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 281

29/5/13 13:48:46

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 282

29/5/13 13:48:46

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 283

29/5/13 13:48:46

Iwo_Jima_pages.indb 284

29/5/13 13:48:46