Two movies

James Lileks casts a jaundiced eye over the recent movie pairing of Letters from Iwo Jima and Flags of our fathers:

"Flags of our Fathers" spent as little time as necessary on Iwo Jima, and concentrated its rambling Mobius-strip narrative on the domestic propaganda uses of the flag-raising photo. The government, for the usual devious reasons, used the photo to bolster support for the war, which was going on for some reason or another; the details weren’t entirely clear. "Letters from Iwo Jima" spends as little time as necessary on the domestic front, but a flashback does give us a hint about Japanese society during the war. An officer assigned to Iwo Jima to enforce political purity — you know, the way the Navy regularly posted officers to make sure everyone bowed to a picture of FDR every day — reveals his moment of shame, when he was forced by a superior to kill . . . a dog. A family dog. That tells us everything, I guess: these guys will kill a family dog in front of the kids. I gather the dog is supposed to stand in for Nanking.

"Flags of our Fathers" informed me that there were no great causes, that the soldiers were a complaining, fractious lot who fought for each other, and there was no such thing as heroes, just "men like our fathers." The two being mutually exclusive, I guess. "Letters from Iwo Jima" told me that the enemy was full of honor and discipline, which was Tragically Misguided, and it was all quite sad because several of the Japanese officers had been posted to the United States, and performed charmingly at official functions where they were accepted as equals before that terrible misunderstanding at Pearl Harbor.

I almost quit the movie after the Yanks shot the surrendered soldiers. The recollection of the first film, with its vapid screaming PR displays and careful elisions and gruff cynical vets recalling the BS of it all, eventually overwhelmed the respectful treatment of the Japanese. If the same traits — death-worship, the nobility of suicide, fixation on honor not as a trait but a code — had been ascribed to Allied forces, it's impossible to imagine a Hollywood movie that would not have treated the characters as absolute lunatics. I have no problem with a respectful treatment of the soldiers who fought on the other side. But the point of the first movie seems to be the unfortunate effect of the battle on Ira Hayes. Clint Eastwood gave the hero of "Letters" an honorable death. Ira Hayes ended up face down in a pig farm.

Of course, this is merely the American flavour of how history is being taught nowadays: only the warts. It's as if British history was completely and accurately summed up by Cromwell, Glencoe, Amritsar, and the concentration camps. (Sadly, some people would argue strenuously that this is the case . . .)