A single shot to win a war

 
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Buy Flags Of Our Fathers / Letters From Iwo Jima from Amazon.co.uk or from Amazon.com

It seems difficult to believe that there is anything left to say about World War II that has not already been stated and restated for our consideration – or our entertainment. However, Flags of our Fathers succeeds in using familiar themes to say something new and vital about the war, the uses of war, and its impact upon those fight.

Flags of Our Fathers is an examination of heroism in war in all of its subtle and understated glory, but it is also a poignant reminder that heroism has a dark side. It depicts the battle of Iwo Jima as viewed from the American perspective (the companion film, Letters From Iwo Jima, is told from the Japanese view). This battle produced great heroism and sacrifice, and also produced one of the iconic images of World War II: that of soldiers raising the American flag on top of Mt. Suribachi on 23 February 1945. The photograph created heroes out of those who raised that flag, and their subsequent celebrity helped inject badly needed momentum and support for the war effort. At the same time, this photo inadvertently wreaked havoc upon the lives of the men in it. The film traces the lives of these men, and what happens to them when they are thrust into the public spotlight as heroes promoting the sale of war bonds, which were needed to continue funding the war in the Pacific.

Flags of our Fathers may be set sixty years ago, but its themes are startlingly relevant today. It weaves, and often contrasts, gallantry and deception, idealism and disillusion, war and propaganda, truth and the protection of national interests. This sad, true story is an emotionally intense experience because it is concerned both with the deaths of young men in battle and with what happens when the needs of those who survive are at odds with the needs and expectations of the society at home.

A nuanced and complex story like this requires a storyteller who knows how to tell it in an engaging and compelling way without being punitive or manipulative. It couldn’t have found a better director than Clint Eastwood. After making 26 films behind the camera and more than fifty years as an actor, winning numerous awards, Eastwood has become a master at his craft. He bases the film on James Bradley’s book about the celebrated flag-raising on Iwo Jima, which spent nearly a year on the New York Times bestseller list and has three million copies in print.

Bradley (who co-wrote the book with Ron Powers) is the son of Navy corpsman John ‘Doc’ Bradley, who was the only non-Marine of the six men who raised the flag and figured in Joe Rosenthal’s iconic photograph. It was the second flag planted on that day, the fifth day of the month-long American offensive. Doc Bradley was also one of the three flag-raisers who survived the battle, only to be brought back to America and paraded as celebrity heroes in a crucial war bonds tour. Nicknamed the Mighty Seventh, the tour saw the raising of an unprecedented and much-needed $26.3 billion for the war effort. The author’s quest to understand how this strange combination of experiences caused such confusion and angst within his father and his comrades is the driving force behind the book and this deeply compelling and emotional film.

Flags of Our Fathers begins with a young Bradley (Ryan Phillippe) alone in the barren, rocky landscape that was Iwo Jima during combat. This scene, we learn moments later, is a recurring dream of the elderly Bradley. He sees himself back on the island, desperately looking for a close buddy, Ralph ‘Iggy’ Ignatowski (Jamie Bell), who has inexplicably gone missing.

In addition to seeing Bradley in combat and in retirement, we witness the fuss surrounding Rosenthal’s photo (thought to be the most reproduced shot in history) from the moment it was first seen. And we also get our first taste of the surreal nature of the ensuing bond tour; the first flag-raising we see in the film is not the real thing, but a gaudy re-creation before 100,000 spectators at Chicago’s Soldier Field.

We also hear Rosenthal, in a voiceover, explaining in very honest terms why his picture touched a national nerve: ‘What we do in war – the cruelty is almost incomprehensible. But somehow we need to make sense of it. The right picture can win or lose a war. I took a lot of other pictures that day, but none of them made a difference. Looking it at, you could believe the sacrifice was not a waste.’ It is at this point that the men who raised the flag are introduced softly, not really differentiated from the others in their units. Though the film eventually shows us all six, it concentrates on Sgt. Mike Strank (Barry Pepper) and the three men who made it back alive.

The three survivors are Bradley, a calm yet conflicted undertaker-in-training; Ira Hayes (Adam Beach), a Native American who experienced constant condescension and racism and survived the most brutal hand-to-hand combat; and the opportunistic Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford), who literally joined the Marines because he liked the uniform and is most awkward as a soldier. Collectively hailed as heroes from sea to shining sea, Rene embraced the spotlight, Doc settled into stoic unhappiness, while Ira, shattered by the horror of his experiences, sobbed and drank himself into a self-destructive oblivion. James Bradley’s efforts to tell his father’s story years later give the film its scaffolding, but it is Ira, with his raw emotions and vulnerability, who provides the film’s emotional core. This beaten-down soldier serves as a subtle rebuke to myth-enforcing films like Sands of Iwo Jima, a 1949 exercise in patriotism in which John Wayne hands an American flag to the real Ira, Doc and Rene so they can raise it once more, this time over the sands of Southern California.

Eastwood’s cinematic deconstruction takes a considerably darker view of the historical record. The Air Force had repeatedly bombed Iwo Jima before the American landing on 19 February 1945; by the time the army landed on the beach, barely anything on the ground survived, even though more than 20,000 Japanese soldiers remained dug in. Indeed, it seems impossible that anything living could survive long on this bleak and empty island. The landing on Iwo Jima is the film’s action centerpiece, and is shot in the Saving Private Ryan tradition. The battle is pure, pitiless chaos, an unflinchingly graphic look at the split-second randomness of who stays alive and who is killed.

In contrast to this brutality, the two flag-raisings that took place on Iwo Jima’s Mt. Suribachi (the film is careful to explain this often misunderstood situation) end up being rather mundane moments, the equivalent, as one of the survivors said, of ‘becoming a hero for putting up a pole.’ This is one of the ironies of how the truth of history can quickly become myth, which in this case happened largely because no one expected the impact the photograph would have (among other things, it ended up on 150 million postage stamps). Once the photo reaches the hands of some of America’s political and military leaders, the trio of surviving flag-raisers are air-lifted back to America (in Ira’s case against his will), and are immediately thrust into a circus-like public relations tour to help raise the much-needed money to continue the war.

The majority of the film cuts back and forth between the tour and the men’s flashbacks of their combat experiences on Iwo Jima, detailing the haunting and relentless reality of the survivors. The scenes on Iwo Jima are horrific and devastating, and even after Doc, Ira and Rene leave the island, they never fully escape it. During the bond drive, a simple pop of a camera bulb, a shout from the crowd or the bang of a backfiring car engine instantly returns the three to the island and its horrors – a blurring between past and present that becomes a kind of horrific memory loop. To make things worse, it is this reality that makes them increasingly uncomfortable with being celebrated as heroes for their role in what they consider to be a misleading picture.

This conflict between the reality of the flag-raising and the image the government insisted on projecting for its own needs (which included refusing to correct a misidentification of one of the dead flag-raisers) is a theme that resonates rather pointedly today. It is interesting to note, in this age of overblown battle hero pronouncements as a sign of success in war, that the need to create media heroes and the determination to use war for political/governmental purposes at home is still present today. Also intriguing and somewhat ironic is the fact that this thoughtful, disturbing meditation on the qualities that seem to define heroism, and on the quixotic nature of fame, comes from a man (Eastwood) who made his considerable reputation playing clean-cut heroes.

Why are we drawn to war films? What do we want from them? For some of us, we want entertainment, a few hours’ escape to other times and places as well as something excitingly different yet reassuringly familiar. Most war films, even those that claim to be anti-war, seem resigned to the idea of violence as either a political or cinematic means to an end. If Flags of our Fathers feels unlike most war films, and sounds contrary to the standard political rhetoric, it is not because it affirms the horror of war (though it does so with sometimes startling brutality), but because Eastwood insists, with a moral confidence that is all too rare in current cinema, that we exact an unspeakable cost when we ask people to kill other human beings. In addition, when we create heroes out of people who are asked to do what is inhuman, an inherent conflict is created which is difficult to sort out in the clean manner that is often portrayed. There is never any doubt in the film that this war needed to be fought; it is the horror at such necessity, and the need to create heroes to promote and continue this effort, that defines Flags of our Fathers. There are countless examples of other wars where those who saw combat not only had to deal with the trauma of their experiences, but also had to deal with the pressures and expectations (and sometimes adverse reactions) of those at home. It is no wonder, then, that so many veterans suffer from psychological dysfunction.

So who is a real hero? I would suggest that Clint Eastwood’s film seeks to transcend our typical notions of hero and moves into the realm of the metaphysical. He takes us into the nature of violence and into the human heart, seeing where they come together in surreal circumstances in which some soldiers are killed and those that survive surrender to madness. He gives us humans whose failings are evidence of their humanity and who simply want to do all they can to survive and protect their fellow soldiers. To those that survived, it is the ones who made the ultimate sacrifice that were the real heroes. And in one poignant moment in the film, Bradley’s son says to his father that being a great dad made him a hero in his eyes.

The heroes we prop up as celebrities and the real heroes of everyday life are often quite different. Yet at the end of the day, which one has more impact? Who is it that best reflects the character of what we most desire? Films like Flags of our Fathers give us the opportunity to think about our nature as humans, why we do what we do, and the impact it has upon us – which are all questions of metaphysics. To think about such things, particularly in the context of war, independently of the idea of God seems like a cruel or fruitless exercise at best. And while thinking of these issues in the context of a belief in God creates some difficult problems, it also gives us hope that these questions reflect a search that is not in vain and can, in fact, even help us understand more deeply who we are and who we are meant to become. Can a film, especially a war film, have this kind of impact? I believe it can, and if we are able to get beyond the entertainment factor and into the heart of the narrative, we might be surprised with what we find.

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