That being said at the end of the year, and coming from A. O. Scott of the New York Times, says a lot. And it's great to see old "Dirty Harry" of yesteryear become "the best American filmmaker working today." Whether or not those normative statements are "true" to you, surely you might agree that both Eastwood and the movies he makes are worth a look.
And what we get to see is so rare: an American filmmaker who takes a look and tries to deconstruct the iconic image of the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima, the man who took the picture, and those behind the scenes in the film Flags of Our Fathers:
What do we want from war films? Entertainment, mostly, a few hours’ escape to other lands and times, as well as something excitingly different, something reassuringly familiar. If “Flags of Our Fathers” feels so unlike most war movies and sounds so contrary to the usual political rhetoric, it is not because it affirms that war is hell, which it does with unblinking, graphic brutality. It’s because Mr. Eastwood insists, with a moral certitude that is all too rare in our movies, that we extract an unspeakable cost when we ask men to kill other men. There is never any doubt in the film that the country needed to fight this war, that it was necessary; it is the horror at such necessity that defines “Flags of Our Fathers,” not exultation.
From what I can tell from the trailers and reviews, the film is far more than the Spielberg-esque look at WWII in Saving Private Ryan, and is a far cry above the Koreanized "remake" of that film, Taegukki. Both of those films – the former to a lesser extent – engaged in what I call in my dissertation a "monumental style" (virtual footnote: "Picturing Japaneseness" by Darrell William Davis) in which nationalism, simply put, is argued through the aesthetic of the film itself, through its icons, symbols, music, and other filmic conventions.
Both Ryan and Taegukki bothered me because they engaged heavily in the monumental style, with the latter resorting to cheap melodrama and contrived situations on such a level that I actually felt it was an insult to my intelligence. Still, I shed a tear, but I felt angry about it, since it was cheaply earned. Ryan, minus the bookends of the cemetery scenes and the orgy of memorializing to the so-called "greatest generation" that was going on at the time, was a far more emotionally honest and complex film. Still, it was very much a film that functioned in the American nationalist mode, and a fetishized obsession with a hyper-real depiction of wartime violence, which I actually applaud given the nature of the over-sanitized WWII narrative, but which is also why the film was harder to stomach by audiences less interested in such things.
Now, Eastwood's companion treatment of the same conflict, Letters from Iwo Jima, is hitting the theaters and is a brave and curious move: showing the same battle of the war, right after the film he had just made about it, from the point of view of our former enemy. And lest anyone forget, America's military and popular memory of the Pacific conflict with the Japanese was the harshest and most emotional, which is part of the reason that the memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki remains a sacred cow in American culture – revenge over Pearl Harbor, Bataan, and all of the horrors committed in what noted historian John Dower called the "War Without Mercy."
And that guy who we thought was Raz al Gul in Batman Begins, or alternatively, the grumpy samurai whom Tom Cruise befriends in that movie with the ridiculous name – his name is Ken Watanabe – finally gets to do something other than grunt orders and stoic words and Japanese and come out of the stereotype. I haven't seen the film, but am looking forward to that talented actor getting to show his real chops for a change, at least in an American film.
I'm curious to see how the Korean audience will receive this film. Surely, many will think it to be a "too sympathethic" portrayal of "the Japanese" – whom I think would come across more palatably in a film portraying them committing some of the more savage acts of the Pacific War, e.g. abusing "comfort women", lopping off heads in Nanking, bombing Manchuria, or kamikaze piloting into American battleships. I showed the trailer to a Korean friend and she seemed none too pleased with the portrayal. I wonder if and when it'll open here.
Surely, they did all of these things. But what I am looking for as a historian and as an intellectual is something that looks deeper than "Look! See what 'they' did?!" as a means of simply arousing strong emotion and a negative, nationalistic rage – that's propaganda, in my book – but takes a look at the layer beneath the hero worship, or iconic hatred, to look at how belief, courage, and the will to kill your fellow man is put together.
I haven't seen either of these two movies, but the reviews bear out what I hope to see, and is a sign that perhaps American historical memory of the period can indeed mature. In any case, they're steps. Even Taegukki, which I hated like few other films in my life, marked a sign of progress in terms of the popular memory of the war vis a vis the north and south (although it also reflects a regression in terms of how a different Korean generation would like to remember America's presence in the war as little as possible, hence no American soldiers in Korea in that imagining of the war).
And is it my imagination, or are there some common shots between the films? Hard to tell from just the trailers, but that would be intensely interesting and cool. After all, these were two groups of men locked in the most intimate of combat – somehow it would be fascinating to have actual points of visible overlap for those who see both films. (As I re-scanned the review and proofread this post, I found a point from the Letters from Iwo Jima review I missed, and which also happened to remind me again just how far NYT writers are above my pay scale):
A few scenes serve as hinges joining this movie to “Flags of Our Fathers.” While “Letters From Iwo Jima” seems to me the more accomplished of the two films — by which I mean that it strikes me as close to perfect — the two enrich each other, and together achieve an extraordinary completeness. They show how the experience of war is both a shared and a divisive experience, separating the dead from the living and the winners from the losers, even as it binds them all together.
I applaud Eastwood for taking up such subjects that aren't easy to get past the superficial with – the veritable icon of that flag-raising and the memory of the faceless "Jap" enemy – and even encourages audiences to empathize with. Ryan goes as far as briefly humanizing a single German solider, and does complexify the narrative, but has him kill our beloved, all-American everyman – Tom Hanks – as repayment for the kindness. The wimpy, bookish character, who had symbolically wilted in the face of a more potent enemy, who simply ignored him on his way down from killing his buddies. In the final sequence, the wimp becomes a man by blowing away the man he had essentially freed, while blowing away any doubt that he had become a real soldier, or that the enemy was anything other than the enemy.
These films are far less conservative in their narrative – or so it seems and so they say – and I am waiting for it to get here. And since I don't see good films I want to see on bootleg, I'm itching. The wait is killing me, but I'm glad the films are floating out there, waiting to be seen.
And these will both be welcome additions to the film library I use as aids when I teach American history.
Damn, Letters from Iwo Jima look good!