“Flags of Our Fathers” is a confusing movie. Clint Eastwood’s latest work, it retells the story of the raising of the Stars and Stripes at Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima. The screenplay is adapted from the best-selling book of the same name by James Bradley and Ron Powers.
The film contrasts the experiences of Marines fighting on Iwo with flashbacks from two of them, and a Navy corpsman, after they’ve been hailed as heroes and sent home for a bond drive. There are moments of the brilliant technical realism we’ve come to expect from war movies.
There’s also a stand-out performance by Adam Beach, as PFC Ira Hayes, the Pima Indian who helps raise the flag; is later driven to alcoholism; and is famously the subject of one of Johnny Cash’s most popular songs, “The Ballad of Ira Hayes.” But all told, it’s a confusing work.
Marketed with the tagline, “A single shot can end the war,” one leaves the theater unsure if “Flags” is meant to prove or disprove this falsehood. On the one hand, the film is a clever bit of propaganda arrayed against government spin efforts during World War II, setting up a dichotomy between the flag raisers as they are portrayed in the bond drive, and as they remember themselves in battle.
But can a single shot end the war or not? If so, then the government is certainly to be commended for making all it can of the flag raising. If not, then why does the film keep telling us the opposite?
“The right photo can win or lose a war,” intones a grandfatherly actor meant to be Joe Rosenthal, the photographer. If only it were true. This is a pleasant fiction, peddled by the press in one form or another more often than can be recounted.
The implication is that without the right images, the U.S. would have given up on the war even in the spring of 1945. If that rings a bit hollow, it should. The difference between then and now is that the nation was sick of war in 1945, but understood the necessity of winning.
Today, we’ve tasted but a mouthful in comparison, and are as confused as can be as to whether we should even be fighting, or whether there really is a war in the first place. In such an environment, the idea that a single photograph is all it will take to put this behind us is a comfortable thought indeed.
As mentioned above, the most fervent progenitors of this nonsense are the press. In fact, it’s more than a bit creepy that Warner Brothers, one of the distributors of “Flags,” is owned by the same company as CNN, which last week saw fit to start airing insurgent home movies, filmed in the process of sniping at American soldiers in Iraq. Are these the single shots that CNN would like to end the war with? Or perhaps Reuters might prefer its doctored photos of smoke over Lebanon?
Or what about the Associated Press, with one of its Arab photographers, Bilal Hussein, currently imprisoned by the U.S. military for consorting with insurgents? All of this explains much of last week’s obsession with President Bush’s “admission” to similarities between the Tet offensive in Vietnam and Iraq today.
Why was this news? The press has been searching for its own Tet moment since March of 2003. The Tet offensive after all, was not a military victory for the Vietnamese, but a propaganda victory for the Fourth Estate.
The truth is that no single shot will end a war. Though decisive battle might do so, decisive imagery will not. Above all else, war is morally taxing. It drains the very depths of the soul, and the only thing that will end it is the possession of a greater will than one’s opponent.
No image can substitute for such moral steadfastness, even though it might reinforce it, as at Iwo Jima, or diminish it, as on network news today.
Josh Manchester is a Marine veteran of the Iraq campaign. His blog is The Adventures of Chester (www.theadventuresofchester.com).
