The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)
While Eastwood has recently gained attention as the director of two profoundly antiwar masterpieces, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, his first true antiwar movie came much earlier in The Outlaw Josey Wales.1 The film makes a powerful statement about the lasting trauma of war for people on both sides of the battle lines, regardless of which side wins. It was released in theaters shortly after the end of the Vietnam War when our country was just starting to realize the full devastation of that war not only in Vietnam but also one in the profound traumas of the young American soldiers who fought for the United States.
The movie opens quietly with Josey Wales (Eastwood) peacefully plowing a field with his son (Kyle Eastwood). His wife (Cissie Wellman) calls them both to dinner, and he sends his son ahead while he completes their chores. But he hears an unusual sound and looks up to see men on horses pounding through the trees near his farm—then he notices thick smoke rising from the direction of his family’s home.
Frantically Wales runs to the burning house only to watch helplessly as Union soldiers drag his wife from the building; his son must still be inside. Wales struggles with the soldiers to protect his wife, but he is overpowered and hit in the face with a sword hilt, knocking him unconscious. Chaotic violence engulfs him as he falls. Everything is turned upside down in a rapid series of disorienting camera angles, a technique Eastwood frequently employs to undermine the steady viewpoint of the audience, bringing viewers directly into the shattered world of human violence.
When Wales wakes, his wife and son are dead. After he tenderly buries their bodies, he falls to pieces as while erecting a cross where he can pray at his wife’s fresh grave. He bursts into tears, literally falling over from the weighty reality of all he has lost. Enraged, he recovers a rifle from the ashes of his home and he desperately practices his aim.
Shortly thereafter a group of Confederate soldiers approaches Wales, asking him to join them in the war against the Union. Like him, they have had their lands destroyed, their wives raped, and their children killed, and they have taken up the rebellion more as a quest for revenge than out of any particular loyalty to the aims and ideals of the Confederacy. Though poorly armed, they manage successfully to surprise several Union camps; indeed, their attacks become almost repetitive, routine—even boring. This is a reality of war: the same violent acts repeated over and over, men shooting and being shot, writhing on the ground in pain trying to save themselves, sometimes punching and shooting at the wind as much as at each other. In the blur of bodies, it becomes uncertain who is fighting whom—or why. Indeed, by this time the Confederacy is not only losing, but the war is essentially over. These battles continue only through a kind of mechanical inertia that has not yet slowed to the beat of history.
Wales has joined up with these men purely to revenge himself on the soldiers who committed the atrocities he witnessed on his farm, not because he aligns himself politically with the South. Thus, when the de facto leader of Wales’s band, Fletcher (John Vernon), offers to negotiate a deal with the Union troops, only Wales refuses the possibility of surrender, which would be a meaningless gesture for him. He hardly cares to save his own life, and he has yet to find the men who destroyed his life and his family. But his comrades have tired of war, and they agree to surrender their weapons and swear their allegiance to the United States on the condition that they will be allowed to return to their homes safely. Wales watches the surrender from some distance, and he only learns of the treachery behind it when it is too late: Fletcher had been paid by Union officers to turn over his unit, and no sooner have the men finished their oath of loyalty than a Gatling gun opens fire. Rushing into the slaughter, Wales manages to save only one terribly wounded boy who survived the initial onslaught.
For his attempt to save the men who only sought peace, Wales becomes the Outlaw: Fletcher and the Union officers put a steep price on his head. Realizing that he will not be safe in any “civilized” area, Wales flees toward territories controlled by Indian nations, believing that he may find help and respite among people who also have no reason to trust either of the warring governments. The boy soon dies of his wounds—yet another loss for Wales—and he buys precious time by sending the boy’s body off on his horse to confuse the Unionists, who at first think it is the slumped-over form of Wales riding past them.
Nearby, a Cherokee Indian attempts to shoot at the dead man, falling for the trap and thinking that it if it is Wales, he can collect the bounty. Wales stealthily approaches the Cherokee man, surprising him and then joking that he thought Indians were the only ones who could so successfully sneak up on a man. Introducing himself as Lone Watie (Chief Dan George), the man provides a sad commentary on the so-called civilizing process of his own life. Thoughtfully, he tells Wales,
Here in the nation we are called the “civilized tribe.” They call us civilized because we are easy to sneak up on. White men have been sneaking up on us for years. They were sneaking up on us and telling us that we wouldn’t be happy here on our own land. So they took away our land and sent us here. I had a family—a fine woman and two sons. But they all died on the Trail of Tears. And now a white man is sneaking up on me again.
Watie is happy enough to give up on the bounty for Wales, and Wales in turn holds no grudge against him for trying in the first place. They camp together that night.
Wales wakes the next morning to find that the Cherokee chief has burned his civilized clothes, the suit and tall hat of the white man. Having decided to start a new life, he convinces Wales that they should head for Mexico, where they both might have a chance for a more peaceful existence. Wales is uncertain, but he agrees at least to escort Watie to a trading post so he can procure a horse. As Wales prepares to broker a deal at the trading post, however, he finds two men raping a young Cheyenne woman, one of the trader’s employees; they have told the trader that she is among the goods they wish to buy. Wales shoots the men, and the young woman, Little Moonlight (Geraldine Kearns), joins his growing entourage to which he has become somewhat bemusedly resigned.
After they continue on their way to Mexico, they encounter Grandma Sarah (Paula Trueman) and her granddaughter; they are surrounded by bandits who have robbed them and killed Granny’s husband. The bandits also capture Watie when he accidentally reveals his position, and they tie him up along with the women to be led across the desert—leading, of course, to a classic cowboy-style rescue in which Wales single-handedly takes out the bandits and adopts the women into his party. As it turns out, Granny is a committed Unionist who believes that her soldiering son died for a noble purpose, but Wales makes it clear that her stance should cause no quarrel between them. He fights not for the Confederacy but for vengeance in the name of his slaughtered family.
Granny’s son had a ranch in Texas, and the group decides to make that their new home. The nearby town has more ghosts than residents, most people having left when the silver mines dried up. Wales manages to procure some whiskey, and with liberal handouts he befriends the handful of people remaining in the town. But his troubles have followed him, and shortly several bounty hunters come looking for Wales, leading to another gun battle. Still, eventually everyone begins to settle in to their new home. Wales, however, remains tortured by the traumatic memories of his burning farm and his dead family; he is still too eaten up by such psychological torments to believe that it is possible to begin again, to call a new place home.
Two men from town, who had worked on the ranch for Granny’s son, offer to help them get the place in running order by corralling some cattle, but in the process they are captured by the Comanche who control most of the surrounding territory. Wales instructs the party as best he can about how to defend their home should the need arise, but he also plans to ride out alone to reach a settlement with the Comanche. He finds the two workers buried up to their necks, but they are hardly relieved that he has come to their rescue. Instead, they worry how one man can possibly save them from the mighty Ten Bears (Will Sampson), who has proven himself in bitter battle against the Union army, gaining a reputation for his skills in his battle as well as his refusal to move his people again.
The exchange between Wales and Ten Bears is truly remarkable among Hollywood depictions of dialogue between white men and Native Americans. When Ten Bears tells Wales to simply “go in peace,” Wales responds, “I reckon not. I have nowhere to go.” Somewhat reluctantly the chief replies, “Then you must die.” Wales acknowledges a profound truth in his response. “I came here to die with you—dying isn’t hard for men like you and me. It’s living that’s hard, when all we really care about has been brutalized and raped. I came here to show you that my word of death is true, and my word of life is true.”
Wales assures the Comanche chief that if they allow him and his friends to stay, they will live by the basic tenets of life as understood by the Comanches: they will hunt only for their own subsistence, not to profit by trading pelts. “They all live here, the antelope and the Comanche, and so will we,” says Wales. They will share their cattle and they will provide whatever assistance they can, since they are asking for the Comanche’s hospitality. Wales seals his terms with a promise: “The sign of the Comanche will be on our lodge. That’s my word of life.”
Ten Bears explains to Wales that he can only offer things that they already have, and Wales agrees that he cannot offer a proper contract or an exchange—that is indeed asking for hospitality. Wales responds, “That’s true. I ain’t promising you nothing extra. I’m just giving you life and you’re giving me life. And I’m saying that men can live together without butchering one another.” He makes it clear that if they do fight, it will be a fair fight according to rules acceptable to both; if a conflict is unavoidable, then he will fight with honor. Indeed, in a sense, honor is all Wales can promise. He will not behave as the governments of the states and the Union have done, promising treaty lines only to push them back farther and farther; surrounding the Comanche in the night when they are unaware and unable to defend themselves; outnumbering them by amassing armies that no Comanche war party could meet—certainly not after so many have been murdered already.
Ten Bears is impressed. “There’s iron in your word of death for all of the Comanche to see, and there is iron in your words of life. No signed paper can hold the iron. It must come from men. The words of Ten Bears carries the same iron of life and death. It is good that warriors such as we meet in the struggle of life . . . or death.” Finally, quietly, he adds, “It shall be life.” Cutting his hand, Ten Bears extends it to Wales in a sign of friendship. Wales cuts his own hand to grasp the Comanche’s extended palm, making them blood brothers between whom there can be no thought of war.
In many ways Josey Wales echoes the John Wayne film The Searchers (1956), directed by John Ford, but it presents several important ethical reversals on the themes of that film. Let me be clear that I am not attempting to offer here a full cinematic discussion of The Searchers as a film, nor am I attempting to give an overall interpretation of the complex and brilliant directorial work of John Ford. I want to emphasize instead how Eastwood, as we have seen throughout this book, works within traditional genres so that the imaginary that gives the films its seeming sense of shared meaning is both challenged and made explicit. In The Searchers John Wayne plays a Confederate general who, deeply committed to the politics and commitments of the Southern states, has returned after several years of war to what remains of his family. Ethan Edwards (Wayne) too lives in Comanche territory, but his hatred of the Native Americans (he contemptuously calls them “Comanch”) is intensely palpable. In a classic cowboy-and-Indian story line—and I insist that it is one—members of Edwards’s extended family are brutally murdered in a Comanche raid, and the Native Americans also kidnap one child. The family searches for year after futile year to recover the child, and Edwards faces off repeatedly with a menacing Comanche warrior known as Scar (Henry Brandon). Of course, eventually he kills Scar and rescues the kidnapped child, who has grown into a young woman.2 Wayne himself often spoke of Scar as a symbol of the “red man”—and thus, in his twisted right-wing ideology, of the Communist “new reds” who represented, for him, precisely the same threats to civilization as the Native Americans portrayed in his film.
Scar in The Searchers is notably portrayed in full masculine bravado with many wives and with scalps of white women hanging proudly in his teepee. His attire is that of the half-dressed Indian who is presented as a frightening phallic other man. For Eastwood, however, it was important to portray Comanche attire and dialogue with historical accuracy, to be respectful of the land and to be representative of a different mode of life, which was hostile to “White Man civilization” only as a response to the latter’s cultural and territorial aggression. In Josey Wales we see two men confirming a bond that extends beyond the reach of race or tribe, a fraternity that honors a blood brotherhood that transcends cultures. It is Wales’s directness, honesty, and courage that allow Ten Bears to recognize in him certain universal ideals of masculinity, of which the worst forms of narcissistic manhood, machismo, and overblown bravado are but pale, twisted images. In The Searchers the Comanche are nothing but ruthless barbarians who cannot be met man-to-man because there are no reasonable ideals that they will accept. Of course, The Searchers also includes an Indian buffoon, a comic character who wants nothing more than to sit passively in his rocking chair. To an extent at least, Lone Watie echoes this role in his interpretation of his own ironic position with respect to his native heritage, but unlike the caricature portrayed in The Searchers, Watie is completely committed to supporting Wales and his new family. While his commentary on the results of the “civilizing” process provides some enjoyable comic relief, he is much more than the butt of a joke. Indeed, as the film progresses Watie increasingly returns to himself, first by burning his clothes and ultimately by standing up for himself as a proficient gunman defending Wales against bounty hunters. After a particularly bloody gunfight, Wales remarks that he never worried about the opponents on his right, because he trusted Lone Watie to take care of them.
When Wales returns with the two kidnapped workers and shares his news of the treaty with the Comanche, the townspeople join them in the celebration, delighted at the prospect of peace with the Indians. Unfortunately, Wales knows that he can have no peace for himself, because the Union soldiers and many bounty hunters will still be after him—the price on his head makes him an attractive target for the many men who remain unemployed after the war. As he tells his friend Lone Watie, “Sometimes trouble just follows a man.” Refusing to bring more violence on what has become a peaceful home, he sets out to settle the score on his own. Yet he hardly sets out before he is challenged on the road by the very Union soldiers responsible for the treachery leading to the price on his head. “You’re alone now, Wales,” they taunt him. But they are mistaken: Wales’s friends have taken up positions with their guns and open fire on the soldiers, killing almost all of them. The captain who ordered the execution of the surrendering militia lives, however, though wounded. Helplessly the captain pulls the trigger of his gun, but it clicks away because its ammunition is already spent. Wales lets him keep trying, unwilling to kill a wounded, unarmed man. Finally, the captain desperately takes up his sword and lunges at Wales, but Wales manages to turn the sword back on him—killing him through his own unwavering aggression.
There is neither joy nor indifference in Wales’s expression as he approaches the final confrontation with his foe, but rather profound sorrow. He is eaten up by traumatic flashbacks of his burning farm, of his wife’s screams, of his son’s scorched flesh. Yet even under this intense psychological pressure, he does not submit to rage this time; he simply approaches his rival calmly—guns in hand, but without firing. Trauma has not so destroyed him that he has lost contact with the ideals that make him a very different kind of man from the murderous officer before him. The scene brilliantly captures his refusal to become the perpetrator of dishonorable violence.
Meanwhile, the Texas Rangers question the townspeople about the fugitive outlaw Josey Wales—and Wales’s new friends happily sign an affidavit asserting that they saw Wales killed in the gunfight earlier that day. Wales stands among the crowd, but there is no indication on anyone’s part that gives away what they all know: Wales is standing right in front of Fletcher. As they leave, one Ranger hangs back: Fletcher, the weak or corrupt Confederate officer who brokered the deal to have his men slaughtered. He is certain that the people are lying to him, that Wales is still alive—but he pretends not to recognize Wales himself, whom the people address as “Mr. Wilson.” “Mr. Wilson” asks Fletcher what he would do with Wales if he found him, and Fletcher responds, “I think I’d try to tell him, the war is over.” As Fletcher turns to leave, Wales comments, “I guess we all died a little in that damn war.”
In the closing scene, Josey Wales rides off alone. This is not the traditional, triumphant final ride of the cowboy, but rather the lonely ride of a man so psychically wounded that he cannot return to any place that would be called “home.” Such a return, perhaps, would be impossible for him, as it would be too difficult to connect with the ideas associated with “normalcy” after enduring the intense trauma of losing everything and everyone he loved in life. But we do not actually know what happens to him; we only know that he rides off alone.
This film then is not only about the psychic illness caused by the trauma of war and how difficult it can be to heal from that trauma; it is also about the maintenance of ideals of humanity against traumatic pressures, so that there remains a “beyond” to the relationship between perpetrator and victim. As we saw in Sue Grand’s analysis of evil, this relationship is a profound stalemate that often results from overwhelming trauma. Both Wales and Ten Bears have seen the things they loved the most totally ravished and brutalized; they have confronted in the most horrifying ways their own finitude and the limits of their power; but neither has given up on the ideals of masculinity that they both share. The recognition between them that they both hold true to these ideals allows an alternative to traumatic repetition, and it even opens the door for Wales to the possibility that he might once again honor life rather than death. Indeed, it is only after he meets with Ten Bears that he can reach out to the young woman Laura Lee (Sondra Locke), with whom he shares a single night of lovemaking before setting out from the ranch.
As in Pale Rider the female characters are not fully developed, nor is the connection with them any more than a brief retreat from having to face the world alone. It is perhaps a somewhat simplistic portrayal of a man able to reach out to another human being because he has experienced a kind of possibility of peace that was completely belied in the destruction of his earlier life. It is brief, and there is certainly no sign that Wales will totally come out of the disassociation imposed by trauma. Finding a way out of the horrifying trauma of war is obviously an overwhelming psychic undertaking, but if it’s to be undertaken at all, it cannot be found in the deadly repetition of vengeance and violence. Even Fletcher recognizes this truth when he says that the war is over.
After The Outlaw Josey Wales, Eastwood directed two additional, but less notable, war films before creating his more recent masterworks. The first is Firefox,3 which begins with an aging Vietnam Vet, Mitchell Gant (Eastwood), peacefully running down a road in Alaska. His quiet is run interrupted by a descending helicopter, which triggers a full-blown traumatic flashback to the horrors of a war that will never cease to haunt him. Two military officers approach him as he cowers, his mind returned to the jungles of Vietnam. A pilot, Gant had been shot down and eventually rescued, but his most traumatic memory recalls the face of a young Vietnamese girl as she is consumed by napalm, an image that plagues him throughout the film. Because he is a brilliant pilot, despite his propensity for mental meltdowns, the military has tracked Gant down and ordered him back into active service to steal a secret Soviet prototype, which is reported to be the most technologically advanced fighter plane on the planet. Reluctantly, he agrees because he understands that he really has no choice in the matter.
In many ways, the film is very dated in its casual representation of the pervasive optimism associated with the early Reagan years, which were ostensibly a total recovery from the defeatism that followed the country’s experience in Vietnam. What makes the film noteworthy is not the fact that Gant, despite all odds, successfully completes his dangerous mission deep into the heart of the Soviet Union, but rather that Gant expresses genuine horror at what he is called to do, horror that is truly uncharacteristic of military heroes of the period. As he makes his way through enemy territory, he is confronted again and again with the violence of a so-called “cold war”: first, a man is beaten to death so that Gant can assume his identity; later, several dissident Russian scientists are executed for the crime of aiding his espionage in opposition to the oppressive government.
Of course, once he has taken the plane, the Russians are determined to shoot him down, both to recover what they can of the prototype and to prevent it from falling into enemy hands. The film ends with a long, daring action sequence highlighting the talents of Gant, a truly exceptional military pilot, as he outmaneuvers and outguns his Russian opponents. Indeed, the Reagan administration actually hailed Firefox as representative of the country’s new optimism in the post-Vietnam era; the plane is captured, after all, through great feats of American heroism, seeming to herald the nation’s ultimate triumph over Soviet Communism.
Yet throughout the film Gant suffers from the side effects of war, uncontrollable traumatic symptoms that nearly cost him his life on several occasions. These moments feature some of Eastwood’s most brilliant acting. It is Eastwood’s direction of himself in these meltdowns that makes the film one of his greatest and most effective portrayals of the personal devastation of war, despite the heroic optimism communicated by his ultimate success in stealing the plane. Indeed, Eastwood as director highlights throughout the film that Mitchell Gant is not the real hero of the story; rather the true heroes are the dissidents, many of whom are Jewish. They risk their lives every day in the fight against Soviet oppression, and it is their efforts that make it possible for him to capture the plane at all. One man assigned to protect Gant on his way to the plane explains that he is married to a Jewish woman who has been imprisoned; his efforts to bring down the Soviet Union are intended to make him worthy of her.
The film’s purported optimism is belied throughout by the weaknesses and demeanor of Eastwood’s hero. Far from the blank-faced “No Name” of the Spaghetti Westerns, Mitchell Gant is a tentative man, broken most unwillingly from his isolation and continually torn apart by post-traumatic symptoms. Though he is obviously a skilled pilot, his technical prowess and daring never fully overcome his personal struggle with his past or with what he needs to do to complete the mission. In this sense, the film sends a much more mixed message about war (even cold war) than the Reagan administration was prepared to see.
Eastwood’s second war film of the 1980s, Heartbreak Ridge,4 was rather more conventional. It opens with Gunnery Sergeant Tom Highway (Eastwood) in jail, boasting with loud masculine bravado about his many successes with women in Vietnam. He gets into a brawl with another prisoner, leading to yet another disciplinary hearing over his lack of self-control. Although the opening credits roll over a backdrop of tragic war scenes that concludes with a tearful picture of an orphaned child, this early note does not harmonize easily with the plot narrated by the film. While Highway has clearly lost himself—he is constantly drunk, rowdy, and out of control—the story unfolds as a conventional narrative of a dysfunctional and troubled war hero who finally makes good on his duty.
Assigned to train a very unlikely unit of young marines—including an African American rock singer who actually robs Highway on the journey to the base before they even know each other—Highway successfully transforms them into fully trained marines, just in time for them to ship out for the invasion of Grenada. There they quickly become heroes, taking an enemy stronghold on their own initiative without proper orders from higher-ups in the chain of command. Indeed, their arrival on the island is fast and easy because the initial skirmish to take the beach decimates the opposing forces, leaving bodies scattered across the sand. Highway’s attitude is cynical and cavalier as he takes a Cuban cigar from one of the enemy soldiers—implicating, by the way, that the soldiers were indeed connected to socialist Cuba.
Highway carries the cigar in his mouth, representing the classic image of daunting manhood. His unit’s first and most important mission is to rescue United States citizens who are being held prisoner in the university. They find that the group includes several very attractive female students—who are, of course, all too interested in the young marines, their affections clearly portrayed as one of the side benefits of war. Later, Highway plays the cocky maverick before his superiors in the chain of command, defending his unit’s taking an enemy position without orders, which he sees as a heroic action. His commanders point out, perhaps rightly, that one of his soldiers died before air reinforcements were avail-able—a death that might have been avoided had Highway and his men played the role assigned to them within the broader plan for the battle. But Highway refuses to concede, and it is clear with whom the audience should identify.
The film also includes a secondary narrative track, which was notably absent in Firefox: Highway was a married man but a total disaster as a husband. During his return to base, we see a very different side of Tom Highway from the tough man who trains younger marines. He attempts to reconcile with his wife and makes at least some attempt at understanding women by perusing various women’s magazines.
His clumsy attempts at conversation read, in fact, like a typical women’s magazine quiz to evaluate a relationship: “Did we mutually nurture each other?” he asks about their marriage on one occasion, and later, “Did we communicate in a meaningful way?” Aggie (Marsha Mason) rebuffs him at first, actually throwing him out of the house, because she has no desire to become involved with him again or with what he has come to represent. Finally, she explains how difficult it was for her while he was away in Vietnam. She never knew whether he was alive or dead, and she never wants to put herself through that kind of agony again. Still, when he returns from Granada, she is there to meet him with the other wives and girlfriends.
The film is not as profound in its engagement with the dilemmas of heterosexuality as are some of Eastwood’s other early films, such as Tightrope, and certainly it cannot compare to his later work, such as The Bridges of Madison County. Still, it creates a similar ambivalence in its protagonist, which breaks up the narrative coherence of the film—a technique that Eastwood often uses to good effect to undermine the viewer’s easy assumptions, but which seems to fall flat in Heartbreak Ridge because the two sides of Tom Highway never find a way to believably coexist. We know that Highway’s past includes the battle of Heartbreak Ridge—a school of hard knocks that created the horrifying images with which the film opens—but we never return to this heartbreak in the main stream of the narrative. Instead, we follow Highway in his successful, relatively clean, and hardly traumatic leadership of the mission in Grenada. His only remaining heartbreak lies in the trials he endures to retrieve a broken marriage, and while these tribulations accurately highlight the destructive influence of war on family life, they hardly maintain the level of impact that the film seems to set up for itself. While Highway is certainly a man with two sides—one the swaggering braggart who cynically steals cigars from the dead in battle, the other a man who secretly reads women’s magazines hoping to connect on some level with his estranged wife—these sides never really speak to each other, and as a result neither speaks effectively to the larger themes introduced by the film. The lack of coherence between these roles cannot easily be reconciled to complete a relatable character. Whereas Firefox was notable for Eastwood’s brilliant direction and performance of a man in trauma, Heartbreak Ridge presents a more conventional portrayal of masculine bravado against which Highway’s tenderness toward his wife is never very convincing. Highway is well within the confines of Oedipal complementarity that starkly define what a man is and what a woman is supposed to do.
Still, even if we regard the film, along with Firefox, as part of a mid-eighties celebration of the worse kind of masculine hubris associated with war and empire, it is important to note that even at his most conservative and conventional Eastwood cannot avoid the kind of ambivalence in his characters that belies the ostensibly positive tone of these films. Indeed Heartbreak Ridge was severely criticized by the Reagan administration because it was not rah-rah enough. Despite Eastwood’s long association with the Republican Party, the ethical struggles he portrays in his films prevent him from making a purely positive, conservative Hollywood film; he is simply too subtle a director to draw with broad strokes characters whose masculinity is heralded and never questioned.
However, he has truly come into his own with his more recent critical work on the subject of war, producing two genuine masterpieces that openly embrace his ambivalence toward the life of a soldier. In Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, as we shall see, he simultaneously honors the courage and valor of men on both sides of the battlefield even as he questions on a truly profound level whether any political purpose was really worth their sacrifice. These films are timely indeed, for in the terms of today’s political debates they exemplify the sense in which a person can respect and support the troops—the men and women who give their lives on the battlefield—while also questioning the legitimacy of the purposes that send them there or the governments that turn them into tools of war. Indeed, Eastwood’s critique is all the more profound for the fact that he sets his films in the context of World War II—perhaps the last conflict that a majority of Americans unabashedly view as, from the American perspective, a “just war.” His material raises his film above the many valid criticisms of a given war, instead aiming his critique at the very idea of war by presenting from both perspectives—American and Japanese—showing us that the complex interplay of courage and fraternity, along with the abusive instrumental rationality of warring governments, is what produces the “heroes” amid the horror of war. Ironically, his masterful war films call upon us to imagine—however impossible it may seem—a world without war. Indeed, an aspiration for peace can hope to make sense of the sacrifices that came before. Let us turn now to consider these films in more detail.
Most of us are familiar with the famous photograph by Joseph Rosenthal that heroically frames six men as they struggle to hoist a large American flag atop Mount Suribachi on the island of Iwo Jima. Indeed, perhaps even more familiar than the photograph itself is the Marine Corps War Memorial in Washington, D.C., which reproduces the image as an enormous bronze statue. It stands as one of our most significant war memorials.
I have been privileged to become friends with a marine who as a young man fought at Iwo Jima, and his response to questions about the battle has always been very similar to the response of the veteran John “Doc” Bradley as depicted in Flags of Our Fathers5: he remains silent, simply shaking his head. Another friend who served in the army infantry during the war has also been reluctant to share his experiences; he has only remarked that of the approximately 600 men who embarked with his unit only twelve returned alive. At the time, he was only eighteen years old. Both of my friends have asked me not to mention their names in this book, largely because one of the most profound and tragic experiences of the war for each of them was the total annihilation of individuality. Therefore they want it on record that as individuals they were nothing special. War transforms men, as one of my friends has said, into nothing more than “government issue”—the term behind the familiar but seemingly cryptic abbreviation, “G.I.” Flags of Our Fathers is to my mind a truly American masterpiece. It is profoundly American in two senses: first, it deals with one of the most significant and memorable battles of World War II; and, second, it grapples with a distinctly American wartime response that has our government and media transforming men into myths of war, and glorifying them as heroes.
Flags opens to a nightmare sequence in the mind of Doc Bradley, who desperately shouts out the name “Iggy”—a friend of his who died on the island of Iwo Jima, as we later discover. The nightmare landscape is a ravaged moon, shot in black and white with startling flashes of color. Eastwood will use similar imagery throughout to communicate both the memory and the reality of war. Doc wakes still shouting the name and, as he collapses later on the stairs of his home, dying from a heart attack, he still gasps Iggy’s name as if somehow he will be reunited with his friend at last.
The film is based on a book that was written by John Bradley’s son, James, who admits that he did not begin to understand his father’s silence about the war until after he was gone. His father never shared his feelings about that day on Mount Suribachi or about his fame in the aftermath of that battle, and he refused to comment on the famous photo depicting him and his comrades as heroes. After his father’s death, however, James Bradley is determined to learn more about what had become such a significant event for his father, hoping even to learn why he was so silent about it. He began by interviewing the photographer who took the famous picture, who explained the profound impact that Doc had had on the men around him—though no one, including the photographer, had expected the photograph or the men in it to become the mythic figures that they became.
But the film flashes back to provide a visual account of the story behind Doc’s nightmare. A medic, Doc (Ryan Phillippe), is called out of his foxhole to help a wounded soldier. Though Doc had actually trained to be a barber in civilian life, he was assigned a medical position and took to it well. His companion, Iggy, who shares the foxhole with him, is terrified at Doc’s intending to leave, but Doc cannot shirk his duty to help the men on the field. Eastwood films the scene in black and white to bring to life the shadowy reality of war, which is remembered and often experienced as if it were a black-and-white photo, because in a sense war drains the color from the world only to violently thrust it back through the horrible reality of severed limbs and gushing blood, bursting flames and bombshells. Eastwood shoots all of these things in color with dramatic effect.
Tending his patient, Doc is interrupted by a confrontation with a Japanese soldier whom he must kill before he can continue to assist the wounded American soldier. By the time he returns to his foxhole, Iggy has vanished. Despite warnings from another soldier to keep quiet, Doc desperately calls his friend’s name hoping to find where he has gone. The film will return again and again to Doc’s haunted memory of Iggy’s disappearance, gradually unfolding the story of what happened to Iggy and giving the audience a feeling for why the loss of his friend haunts him so. While some critics have bemoaned the lack of narrative coherence in Flags, the thematic point here is that war itself breaks up any possibility of narrative coherence, both on the battlefield and in the memories that disrupt the lives of soldiers long after the war has passed. Thus, the film proceeds through three subjective temporal points of view: James Bradley’s contemporary encounters with the history of his father’s traumatic past, shot in color; flashbacks to war scenes, which are almost always shot in black and white; and color depictions of the publicity tour of the men who raised the replacement flag at Mount Suribachi. Even though they did not raise the first flag, the men were hailed as heroes in order to generate funds desperately needed to continue the war. Cycling between these three points of view, we are engaged in all three stories simultaneously: a son struggles to understand his father through fragments of a story, which, now that his father is gone, can never be whole. The flag-raisers, whose viewpoints we see through the eyes of the son, show us what it meant to them to be used as war heroes when they knew they were not even the ones who had raised the first flag. Finally, we as viewers attempt to understand our own complex historical relationship to war heroes and symbols of war that represent men struggling to survive. The film can have no overarching coherence because the very real themes with which it engages have no coherence of their own.
The film moves back and forth in time so that we ourselves join James Bradley in trying to make sense of what happened. Thus, after reliving Doc Bradley’s nightmarish remembrance of Iggy’s disappearance, we return to the beginning when the young men head off on the boat to Iwo Jima. We meet the other two main characters from the publicity campaign based on the flag-raising photograph: Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) and Ira Hayes (Adam Beach), a man as proud of his Pima Indian heritage as he is of his enlistment in the marines. Though the other soldiers playfully refer to Ira as “the chief,” being a marine is the first time he has felt equal to those around him.
For a moment, the film seems to settle into a conventional narrative in war movies, showing the eager young soldiers bravely marching into the heat of war. The men are in good spirits as they hail the air force, which is flying ahead to bombard the shores of Iwo Jima in preparation for the landing that rapidly approaches. Shortly, however, the easy introduction to war is broken when one excited young man loses his footing and falls overboard. The others, including Doc and Ira, try to throw him a life preserver, but it is too late; the boat is going too fast. Another man comments, “Oh, they’ll pick him up,” but it is all too clear that no boat will stop for this young man, no pilot will break formation in the lead-up to the invasion to rescue one unfortunate sailor. He will be left to die, alone, far out in the ocean. Doc mutters to himself, “So much for ‘no man left behind.’”
“No man left behind” is one of the military’s favorite slogans, and it is among Hollywood’s favorite war myths. Think for instance of the blockbuster Saving Private Ryan (1998), in which an elite military force is sent to retrieve one young private from the heart of the fighting in WWII Europe because he is the only surviving brother of the four who went to war. As the story goes, Private James Ryan (Matt Damon) must be returned alive to his widowed mother because of a general’s deep concern for her grief. This particular Government Issue must survive for the sake of his mother.6 When I took my infantry friend to the film, he lasted all of forty-five minutes before asking me in disgust to never expose him to that kind of “bullshit” again. Yes, bullshit. While the film is loosely based on the sole survivor policies developed by the military during World War II—and more particularly on the story of the Niland brothers, one of whom was shipped home when his three brothers were believed dead—the United States military has never expended such resources as the film depicts to live up to the “no man left behind” ideal.7
The reality of war is that the infantry is routinely marched onto the battlefield only to be mowed down by machine gun and artillery fire, left to die an agonizing death with hardly a thought from their superiors as to who they were or how they died. The “private,” we should recall, derives from the same root as deprived and deprivation, and in the military context it means “without rank” or deprived of rank. A marine corps private wears no uniform insignia. Yet in the myth bolstered by Private Ryan, the young enlisted man is so important that the highest ranks of the military order an elite squad of eight men to risk their lives—indeed, ultimately to give their lives, all eight of them—for the sole purpose of finding and recovering him. The film opens with the aged Private Ryan visiting the grave of Captain John Miller (Tom Hanks), who led the mission to save him; Ryan wonders if he is worthy of all of the lives that were lost trying to save him. The film would like us to believe that he is, or at least that he represents the ideals of a military that would risk everything to save the life of one young man whose family has already suffered too much. But the story is, as my friend puts it, bullshit. And as a result, the film is a glorification of war even in its depiction of the horrors of hand-to-hand combat, the desperation in the faces of dying men, and the brutality of what it takes to kill a man. Though Private Ryan gives us a disturbingly graphic image of war—indeed, more graphic in many of its details than either Flags or Letters from Iwo Jima—its straightforward message that the military stands for undiluted honor and nobility without a hint of ambivalence results in a film that undermines any critique we might otherwise read into it.
Eastwood very frankly debunks the myth of Saving Private Ryan by showing what actually happens when a man falls overboard. He does not film this simple truth in order to criticize those in command—to suggest that they are at fault for not going back—but in order to show that in the business of organized killing, the human beings who fight are necessarily deprived, to a certain extent, of their humanity and individuality. They are, as if by definition, expendable. This fundamental truth is inseparable from the reality of war, and Eastwood’s honest portrayal of it forms his general indictment against the glorification of war. His relentless exposure of the effects of the trauma of war forces us to understand the circumstances into which we send our young men and women when we as a society deploy our military against an enemy. In these movies, Eastwood the director presses us very profoundly toward a policy of restraint insofar as he shows us that war is never as glamorous as many films (and certainly governments) would have us believe.
As the Japanese open fire against the American invasion, all hell breaks loose, and Eastwood brings the viewer into the confusion with the use of a scrambling hand camera, which disrupts our ability to maintain a coherent perspective outside the action on the battlefield. We hear a confused mix of heavy breathing, trampling feet, and meaningless screams, and now and then we are reunited with Doc Bradley as he begins his desperate efforts to tend the wounded around him. Unlike Saving Private Ryan, Flags of Our Fathers is filmed in a way that does not separate the audience from the action; it is part of the action, with a sense of having to duck from gunfire and dodging exploding rounds of artillery. Indeed, when I first saw the film in the theatre, a woman next to me became so disoriented and frightened by the incoherent point of view that Eastwood thrusts onto the audience that she became nauseated and I had to help her to the restroom. One can only imagine how much worse it must be for the men and women who were actually fighting in the trenches, experiencing the raw reality of what we saw.
As a director, Eastwood is well aware that he can never fully portray the horror of war, not even by denying his audience the safety of a steady perspective. His film technique is not really intended to give us an accurate idea of what the soldiers experienced, but rather to disrupt our position to the extent that as we glimpse the horror of war, we must allow our imaginations to falter before it. We must recognize the real events of war as something that we cannot know, something that cannot be understood or accepted or glamorized because it falls outside the bounds of what the human mind can sort into a coherent experience. Losing all of our reference points, as well as the capacity to interpret the information delivered by our senses, we might barely grasp for a moment the ultimate horror of living through an event that cannot be represented by words and images. We might understand why Doc Bradley and others simply fall silent before what they cannot comprehend themselves, let alone communicate to others.
Eastwood also plays with the limits of the audience’s imagination to deepen our understanding of Doc’s traumatized reaction to his friend Iggy’s death. When Iggy disappears from the foxhole, Doc is obsessed with finding him; even decades after his friend has been killed, he wants to restore his life to the moment when Iggy disappeared so that he could prevent what happened. When Iggy’s body is discovered, Doc is taken to where Iggy lies on the battlefield, down into one of the caves where the enemy had taken him. The audience never sees what was done to Iggy, and in this approach to depicting this scene Eastwood makes a strong break from cinematic realism. What we do see is Doc overwhelmed with horror, falling to his knees before what remains of his friend. His terror strikes us dramatically, because we are compelled to imagine what reality could so completely break a man who looks upon it; we are forced to imagine everything that Iggy meant to Doc; we must struggle to grasp what it means for their friendship to be brutally dissolved before our eyes. From our safe haven in the theatre, any actual image of a dismembered corpse—no matter how gruesome—would risk the possibility that we would be underwhelmed, and our reaction or lack thereof would have broken our identification with Doc’s heartbreak and agony. His expression would suddenly become dramatic, and we would recognize it as the performance it is, not empathize with his (very real) pain. By playing on our imagination, Eastwood reverses the logic of cinema, giving primacy to our identification with Doc and forcing us to imagine our own best friendship obliterated by violence, our own worst nightmare of mutilation realized. As a result, we confront not merely the dismembered body of a soldier slain in battle, but also an inscription onto Doc Bradley’s unconscious that he cannot escape.
Let’s turn now to the central (if somewhat divided) narrative line of the film, in which Eastwood recounts the events surrounding the famous flag-raising on Mount Suribachi. The book by James Bradley uncovers, through interviews with others, Doc’s personal sadness and ambivalence about the publicity stunt that the flag-raising ultimately became. Doc’s feelings were premised in large part on the public misconceptions of what actually happened that day, including the fate of the other three men who—with Doc, Ira Hayes, and Rene Gagnon—were sent to erect the replacement flag. Our understanding of Doc’s motivation grows along with his son’s, as he slowly puts together an account of why Doc never came to terms with the striking contrast between the battle as it was portrayed on their publicity tour and the true horror of combat on Iwo Jima.
Two flags were raised on the island that day. The first was erected by Hank Hansen, Ernest “Boots” Thomas, Harold Schrier, James Michaels, and Charles W. Lindbergh. The flag signified the Americans’ successful capture of Mount Suribachi, and it was a proud moment for all the soldiers involved; across the island and on the boats surrounding it, every soldier who could see the flag erupted in cheers at the prospect that their nightmare was coming to an end. Yet shortly after the first flag was raised, an arriving general decides that he wants the flag for a souvenir. As a result a second group is sent to remove the first flag and raise another; Ira Hayes, Franklin Sousley, Doc Bradley, Harlon Block, Michael Strank, and Rene Gagnon climb the summit of Mount Suribachi to complete their mission. While the first flag-raising had been captured on film by Staff Sergeant Louis R. Lowery, it is Joseph Rosenthal’s perfectly framed photograph of the second, more staged event that goes down in history to represent the victory at Iwo Jima.
Though the Americans have captured the mountain, turning the tide of battle in their favor and effectively winning the island, the conflict continues for many days—indeed, until almost all of the Japanese soldiers are killed, many of whom take their own lives rather than suffer the shame of surrender. Using flashbacks, the film then turns us back to what actually happened to those who raised the first flag. Hank Hansen, who helped raise the first flag, meets his end in Doc’s arms. Despite Doc’s heroic efforts to save him, the best he can ultimately do is to promise to return Hank’s prized wristwatch to his worried mother, who is waiting for news of her son. Of the men in the more famous flag-raising, three—Harlon, Mike, and Franklin—will not survive the war, and on the very day that Mike and Harlon die, Congressman Joseph Hendricks of Florida introduces the bill that will turn that famous photograph into a bronze war memorial. Franklin is shot in the back, and Harlan is, as a comrade put it, “blown into the air”—his body is sliced from his groin well into his torso, and as he dies, he lets out one strangulated scream: “They killed me!” Doc stands fast through it all as his friends are killed; he is horrified by death after death as he tries to piece together bodies and hold in crushed intestines, struggling against impossible odds to keep them alive.
It does not take long for the government to recognize the symbolic significance of Rosenthal’s brilliant shot. The three surviving flag-raisers are quickly brought home to go on a war-bonds publicity tour, even though Ira, Rene, and Doc make every effort to tell anyone who will listen that they were not the first flag-raisers and that the original flag-raisers faced much greater risks when they took Mount Suribachi: they are the ones who should be hailed as heroes. Unfortunately, no one seems interested in what actually happened, because the American imagination has become so wrapped up in the striking poses of the second flag-raising photograph. Worse, however, is the fact that the slain Harlon Block does not receive his share of fame and recognition at all, since he has been misidentified in the picture as Hank Hansen, who participated in the first flag-raising, not the second one that is depicted in Rosenthal’s photo. Harlon’s mother, however, insists that she recognizes her son, declaring that she diapered and powdered that rear end—she would know it anywhere. She even goes so far as to leave her husband because he accepts the official identifications of the soldiers in the photo, seeing this as a betrayal. While the survivors know the truth, they do not know how to handle the publicity events in which they have been entrapped. As a result they miss early opportunities to correct the record. Worse, Doc feels compelled to concede that it was Hansen rather than Harlon in the famous photograph when a tour promoter introduces him to Hansen’s heartbroken mother, who would like Doc to confirm her son’s identity. Agonizing over his participation in the deception, Doc cannot bring himself to tell Mrs. Hansen that her dead son is not famous after all and therefore his death does not have the same meaning. He points to Harlon and lies, saying that it was indeed Hansen in the photo.
As Eastwood moves back and forth between the publicity tour and the horrific images of what really happened on the battlefield, we come to understand the suffering that is imposed by the flag-raisers’ terrible silence surrounding the many truths that no one wants to hear. Ira Hayes, in particular, becomes increasingly distressed at the hypocrisy of the war-bonds tour. He never wanted to leave his military brethren in the first place; he wanted to stay on and fight by their side. Gradually unraveling beneath the weight of his guilt, he turns to alcohol. After getting into a fight when a bar refuses to admit him because he is a Native American, he is eventually dismissed from the tour and ordered to return to the front lines, which is what he wants to do anyway, but they do not even allow him to visit his mother before he goes.
As the war comes to an end, the heroes settle back into civilian life. Doc quietly takes over a funeral home and spends the rest of his life working as a mortician. Rene, rather enamored of his fifteen minutes of fame, seeks to call in the many favors offered when he was considered a celebrity, but none of the promises are kept and none of the offers come through. Working one odd job after another, he too falls into a life of relative obscurity and financial struggle. Ira, meanwhile, maintains a certain level of notoriety, not only through his constant minor arrests but because he tries to recreate himself as an activist for Native American rights. In a last redemptive gesture, he walks and hitchhikes across the country—almost fifteen hundred miles—in order to visit Mr. Block to tell him the truth: his wife was right to recognize a backside that had appeared in one of the most famous photographs in history. After walking over one thousand miles, he simply walks up to Harlan’s father, tells him the truth, and walks away. Ira dies not long after his trek, probably from exposure or alcoholism; perhaps also, we could say, from a broken heart.
At one point, James Bradley looks directly into the camera—at the audience—with a profound sadness on his face. He has been true to the memory of Doc, his now dead father, by seeking the real story behind his father’s silence about Iwo Jima. Yet even as he pieces the story together, he never completely unravels the paradox of his father’s silence. Clearly this event was not one that Doc sought to share with his son or with anyone else in his family. It was nothing for him to be proud of, and certainly not something to turn into a set of manly lessons for his son. Yet Doc, after all, did nothing of which he should be ashamed—he fought valiantly and put his life on the line many times to save the men around him. Ultimately, the author James Bradley, along with Eastwood the director, wants us to understand what Doc told his son right before he died—there were no heroes in Iwo Jima, just men trying to survive and watch out for each other. Doc played a role, however reluctantly, in one of the myths that make war appear glamorous and rewarding.
A hero is a fantasy. “Heroes”—at least as they are portrayed in Hollywood—do not scream. They do not, like the flesh-and-blood human beings who go to war, struggle to make the best of a nightmare so that they and their friends might hope to come home alive. No, “heroes” stand above the anguish and heartache of war. They come through it all as if they could not die or suffer—as if the thousands of bodies strewn about them were merely the minor supporting characters in a scripted drama all their own. Hollywood, of course, is all too familiar with heroes of this sort; and in one of the most tragic ironies imaginable, Ira, Rene, and Doc are asked to participate in the filming of a feature hailing the virtues of a fictional hero at Iwo Jima. A John Wayne film, The Sands of Iwo Jima is doubly ironic in that it both imagines a “hero” unlike anyone who actually fought in the battle and deprives the three soldiers of any dignity they have left by denying them any agency or bravery of their own: Sergeant Stryker (Wayne) orders the flag-raising with the three real-life marines huddled around him; indeed their main function in the film is to take their orders from the Hollywood-contrived “hero” of the film. In Bradley’s book, he records his father’s bitterness about the whole affair. In Doc’s words, as recalled by a fellow marine:
They didn’t get us off to California to help make the picture. All that was a cheap publicity trick to get a little free advertising for 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. If you think you will see real action like Iwo Jima by seeing the picture, I really think you will be sadly disappointed. Chief Hayes says they have the picture so fucked up he isn’t even going to see the movie.8
Again, the men had been used, cheaply, to represent something they never meant to portray: “heroes,” John Wayne–style. Eastwood ends the film with an extraordinary image of the young men of Easy Company playfully jumping up and down in the water like the children they were. That was how Doc wanted his son to remember him and his friends—in the water, imagining for a moment that the war was not tearing apart their lives. War does not produce heroes, because its participants are only men—and tragically many of those men are still boys. As James Bradley reflects on what he has learned of his father’s life:
I will take my dad’s word for it. Mike, Harlon, Rene, and Doc—the men of Easy Company—they just did what anyone would have done, and they were not heroes. Not heroes. They were boys of common virtue. Called to duty. Brothers and sons. Friends and neighbors. And fathers. It’s as simple as that.
To honor their memory, perhaps we can do nothing more significant than to refuse to think of them as heroes, as images and ideals that tend to justify and glamorize what it means to go to war. By relinquishing our need for this fantasy, we can recognize the genuine honor and sacrifice of the flesh-and-blood human beings who are sent to the front lines to fight our wars for us.
In this book, we have often explored the significance of parenting, particularly of fatherhood, in many of the movies that Eastwood has directed. In the same scene in which Doc tells his son of the young men playing in the water, he apologizes to him for not being a good father. His son insists that he was the best father a man could have. Under the fiction of “Father knows best” of course, real men are supposed to be in total charge of the lessons that they teach their sons, particularly the lessons tied in with the masculine dramas of war and violence as they are supposed to be endured. But the trauma of war leaves Doc unable to provide lessons; instead he must remain silent. Obviously he cannot communicate these lessons because he does not want to create a fantasy of masculinity for his son. He does not want to play or even pretend to be the father who knows best. Here again we see the Oedipal myth of the potency of paternity, which is undermined by a man who seeks to retain his integrity by remaining silent before a false heroism that he refused to claim. We only know Doc through his son, and it is perhaps that Doc’s humility before his inability to save his friends that serves as a powerful reminder that there are no such things as phallic men who can conquer all and live up to the Hollywood version of heroism. Doc could continue to play the hero—he is asked to do so time and time again on Memorial Day—instead he always asks his son to say that he is fishing. And it is in that refusal to continue to play the role of the hero that the son takes away from his father as the ultimate lesson on the devastation of war.
Flags of Our Fathers should be considered an American masterpiece, but it has not received the critical praise that it deserves. Some critics have complained that Eastwood’s broken narration makes the film confusing. Indeed, it is rather difficult to watch, but not because the viewer has trouble following the narrative line. Rather, it is difficult on a moral level because it confronts us with the reality that heroes are produced in spite of themselves, sometimes even at great expense to their sense of themselves as real human beings with stories to tell. The film confronts us with the profoundly paradoxical truth that “heroes” are manufactured; in this case against the protests of the men who are being molded for this purpose. The brilliance of Eastwood’s film is that he runs us up against what cannot be told but can only be grasped retrospectively as a son’s love dismantles the contradictions and ambivalence of his father’s life. It is Eastwood’s ethical fidelity to Doc’s simple lesson that there are no heroes that explains his framing of the film as a series of disjointed narrative tracks—the story of Iwo Jima and the story of the “heroes” who represent it cannot be assembled into any straightforward plot line because they are not, in fact, in any way compatible scenarios, even for the men who lived through them both. Certainly Eastwood’s film is deeply respectful toward these young men who fought so bravely and who cared so deeply for one another. But it also takes us to a world without heroes because the fantasy that heroes exist at all is used to prop up the mythical glamorization of war. Flags of Our Fathers, in this sense, is an anti-war movie in the truest sense of the word: it does not oppose this or that war for being ill-planned or unjust. Rather it questions the very possibility that anything noble or honorable can come from the violence of war.
With this in mind, we turn now to the twin piece to Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers. Another masterpiece, Letters from Iwo Jima crosses the battle lines to discover the stories that animate the lives of Japanese soldiers who are hopelessly defending the island against the American invasion.
Letters from Iwo Jima9 has received more critical acclaim than Flags of our Fathers, perhaps because, on a surface level, it presents the more conventional story of a dedicated general in impossible straits. The film opens with the discovery of letters, which were left behind on the island of Iwo Jima by the Japanese soldiers who died there, among them the letters of General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe). Kuribayashi manages the defense operations of the island, ordering his men to dig into caves and holes when he realizes early on in the battle that there is no hope for air support; direct conflict on the beaches, therefore, will be entirely futile. Indeed, Kuribayashi knows that they are hopelessly outnumbered, so the best he can do is to hold the island as long as possible, stalling the American advance to the mainland. Understanding that he will not survive the battle, he prepares to die the honorable death of a Japanese soldier—and he is determined to make a respectable example for his troops.
Kuribayashi, we learn, had once traveled to the United States, and he fondly remembers his visit. Kuribayashi and his compatriate Baron Nishi (Tsuyoshi Ihara) are portrayed as cosmopolitan men who are not wrapped up in any shallow stereotypes of nationalism; yet they remain dedicated patriots who accept the Japanese code of honor that prefers a death—even suicide, if necessary—to surrender. Nishi was an equestrian Olympic medalist, who met such movie stars as Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks when he was in the Olympics. Eastwood refuses to simply stereotype the conventions of Japanese discipline and loyalty by sentimentalizing the soldiers at Iwo Jima; neither does he neglect their deep desire to survive even against the knowledge that survival would mean almost certain disgrace.
One of the things that make Letters so extraordinary is that we are returned to scenes we should recognize from Flags, this time from the standpoint of the Japanese. In Flags we saw guns peeking out from the caves occupied by the island’s defenders; in Letters we see the faces behind those guns. We get to know the men who hold them. The narrative unfolds around two young soldiers, Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya) and Shimizu (Riyo Kase). Shimizu has been deployed to Iwo Jima as a kind of death sentence after he failed to maintain the strict discipline required of his position with the dreaded Kempeitai military police—he had defied orders by refusing to shoot a dog. Saigo is a young baker with a pregnant wife, who was drafted into the war against his deep desire to remain with his wife and unborn child. He is optimistic about the outcome, but his wife does not share his optimism—after all, she has not seen anyone return from the front lines, and she knows that Japanese soldiers are sworn to die before they surrender. Indeed, Saigo’s promise to return home following the war, which he makes to his unborn baby as he lays his head on his wife’s stomach, portrays a very different view of what really matters in a man’s life over and above conventional Japanese military honor. Saigo plays a somewhat comic role in the film; he continually butts up against military regulations and social conventions, landing him in constant trouble with his superiors.
Eastwood uses this comic device to add depth to the character of General Kuribayashi, portraying him as an understanding commander who proves that discipline does not always demand harshness, nor even the strictest application of the rules. He saves Saigo from reprimand or death on three occasions, on the first of which Saigo objects to the meager rations offered to sustain him. An officer prepares to beat Saigo for his insubordination and laziness, but Kuribayashi intervenes, rebuking the officer and suggesting that he cannot so easily dispense with his soldiers.
The full force of what it means to fight and die against impossible odds is highlighted by the dramatic fall of Mount Suribachi, the capture of which signals the beginning of the end for that Japanese at Iwo Jima. Kuribayashi has ordered his men to hold the mountain as long as they can before retreating to a less strategic position, but less senior officers on the scene do not believe the order has been received correctly. According to the honor code, they should kill themselves on the spot for the shame of losing their position. With tears in their eyes, many men follow the orders of their immediate commander, throwing themselves on hand grenades to make their last moments swift, if gruesome. Saigo, however, refuses to follow these instructions, arguing that they should follow the orders received from General Kuribayashi—orders preferable to him, as we know, because he has made a promise to return home and will do everything in his power to honor it. Shimizu also hesitates, even though he believes Saigo is wrong to disobey a direct order. Another officer decides to take matters into his own hands, intending to behead Saigo and then kill himself, but at the critical moment Kuribayashi shows up to reinforce his orders in person: it was in fact his command to retreat and continue the battle. Thus, he saves Saigo yet again.
While we have seen in Flags that the Japanese were under orders to brutally dismember slain American soldiers in order to terrify their comrades, Eastwood reminds us in Letters that brutality and coldhearted killing occur on both sides of the battlefield—likewise humanity and kindness. When a young, wounded G.I. is captured, Japanese soldiers carry him into a cave for medical treatment, even when it is clear he must be dying. Baron Nishi sits by and entertains the prisoner, cheering him with stories about the Olympics and parties with movie stars. The young man eventually dies, and Baron Nishi discovers a letter on his body. Here Eastwood focuses on the faces of the young Japanese soldiers as they listen to Baron Nishi read the American’s letter and recognize so much of themselves in what they hear. Soon the men endure a ferocious attack, which blinds the Baron so that he feels no alternative but to end his own life. Saigo and Shimizu were among the men who heard Baron Nishi read the American’s letter and they discuss how this enemy of theirs is not so different from either of them—his mother, in fact, reminds them of their own mothers. In that moment, they lose the sense of what they have been fighting for. Who is this enemy who has been portrayed to them as so brutal and terrifying, if when they finally confront him he turns out to be a young man little different from themselves? They decide at last to surrender: Shimizu goes first, but as Saigo prepares to follow him, he is interrupted by Japanese officers and cannot make his escape. As it turns out, it will be better for him: although Shimizu has peacefully surrendered, his American guards balk at the prospect of remaining through the night to watch over Japanese prisoners. In a brutal and cold-hearted violation of justice and law, they murder their charges out of no motive greater than sheer, unapologetic boredom.
Thus, we have seen brutality on both sides of the war, and Eastwood permits us no easy illusions about justice on the battlefield. The Americans are no more demonized than the Japanese, because Eastwood portrays the impersonal violence of war as simply part of what it means to engage in the business of killing.
Kuribayashi saves Saigo a third and final time when he orders Saigo back from the fighting while his comrades lead the final charge against the Americans. The assignment is honorable enough: Saigo is charged to clean up the camp, to ensure that valuable strategic information is well hidden or destroyed before the Americans take the base. Before taking his last stance against the U.S. Army, Kuribayashi jokes with Saigo that good things come in threes.
Kuribayashi salutes his men as he prepares to lead them into a hopeless charge. He assures them that they will be honored for the sacrifices that they will make as well as for the ones that they have already made. At last, proudly, he does not order the charge—he leads it. When he falls wounded, his friend and assistant drags him from the heat of battle; but Kuribayashi orders his friend to behead him. Weeping, the man prepares to follow his superior’s orders, but he is shot by an American soldier before he can do so. At that moment we discover that Saigo has survived the night. He runs desperately down the hill to be with the general, who chuckles softly and mutters, “You again.” Kuribayashi asks Saigo if he is still on Japanese soil, and when Saigo confirms that he is, Kuribayashi asks to be buried in a place where the Americans will not find his body. The general takes out his gun and shoots himself, ironically ending his life with the Colt .45 that he was given as a present in the United States.
Following the general’s instructions, Saigo buries the body where it will not be discovered. When he returns, he confronts a group of American soldiers, one of whom holds the Colt .45 that Kuribayashi used to kill himself. Enraged at the soldiers’ disrespect, Saigo blindly swings a shovel about him as the confused Americans attempt to calm him down; they finally succeed in knocking Saigo unconscious. Overwhelmed by the course of recent events, Saigo futilely lashes out at the Americans.
The film ends with Saigo on the beach, wounded and going home, smiling because he knows that he will keep his promise. Michael Kimmel, in the afterword to Manhood in America: A Cultural History, says that when the war ends, it is time for men to go home, to end their fantasy of the lone hero in the heat of battle (or just capitalist competition) and to accept the many obligations associated with the very idea of going home.10 Saigo is going home in all of these senses.
Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima are best seen back-to-back, since they often echo one another in their portrayals of a single historical event from the two very different perspectives of what were at the time mortal enemies on the battlefield. But just as Eastwood has shown us that there are no heroes in Flags, in Letters he portrays the face of the so-called enemy. Thus, we are confronted with enemies that are not, in the end, the trumped up evil monsters that we have been trained to see them as, but rather young boys and brave officers doing the best they can to succeed (or survive) the most impossible circumstances that a human being can face. The true horror of war is that our “heroes” and our “enemies” are all the same flesh-and-blood human beings; it is just as terrible to kill as to be killed.
Hero
I am a hero
I am fighting for my country—
I strut around in a bloody uniform
Look at me—a soldier
Look at me—a bloody hero
I am tough
I’ve got a rifle
I am a soldier
I am a fucking hero
So what?
Who wants to wear a uniform?
Who wants to be a bloody soldier?
Who wants to be a fucking hero?
Heroes die.11
We are returned to the image of the boys as they run to jump and play in the water. They helped each other and stood by each other, and we see the risks that they took to do so. But here there are no vestiges of the imagined Hollywood fighter who does not cares at all about his survival and is indifferent to his own ruthlessness and the horrors of war surrounding him. Instead, on both sides of the battle, we see young men who are truly horrified by the violence around them, the torn bodies and the damaged souls. We also see young men who very much want to survive; Saigo seriously tries to surrender in order to keep his promise that he will home to his wife. The sentiment of war movies often relies on the stereotype of the men who do what they have to do for “us,” and it is as the “us” that we are supposed to root for our side and get the warm feeling that we truly are safe because these great men are out there doing their duty.
But in Letters and Flags, we see the war from both perspectives—American and Japanese—so the viewer of both movies is left in the uncomfortable position of not knowing who to root for, of wondering who the good guys are and why the bad guys need to be killed. It is the dissolution of the simple identification of “We are on this side and therefore we identify with the soldiers on our team” that is broken up by the two films taken together as an interpretive unit. There are no sides anymore, only the nightmarish reality of war that leaves the viewer questioning the very idea of identifying with a side at all. Eastwood’s daring as a director is to show us a historic battle and all the traumatic effects that it has on the men that fight in it, even when they bravely accept their destiny, as in the case of Kuribayashi. The breakup of an easy identificatory standpoint effectively undermines the conventional narrative structure of war movies, in which the necessity of war is taken for granted and is often a benefit to the development and growth of the men who fight it. In Eastwood’s model, the war is no benefit to these men but only a nightmarish reality from which they can never escape and before which they fall silent: there is nothing good to say about being a produced hero in the battle of Iwo Jima. War is no longer portrayed as what makes a man “a man,” but rather as what can shatter him, leaving him in the isolation of one who can never relate to others the horrible reality of living in the chaos of the battlefield.