Sherry Chandler » Letters from Iwo Jima
Letters from Iwo Jima
[This post contains spoilers, I guess. But the end is inevitable.]
This weekend my husband and I watched Letters from Iwo Jima. We have been a long time working up to the experience. After watching Flags of our Fathers, we had some idea of what we were in for, only worse, because there would be no victory at the end of this movie.
And the violence of the real world is such that I am not all that eager to experience vicarious violence whether it is “art” or “entertainment.”
Still, we were definitely not in the mood for yet another superannuated super hero. I mean Indiana Jones was fun, but come on. All good things pass. As for Rambo, never watched his movies in the first place.
And Letters from Iwo Jima really is a must-see movie.
In the end, I was able to pull back from the violence. It seemed so obviously stage blood to me — or computer animated blood — and then our television screen is tiny so the impact of exploding men and burning men is diminished. I was pulled out of the movie, too, by the panoramic shots of the U.S. army storming the beaches. It seemed so obviously computer animated. I do hate computer animation, though this too may have been more compelling on the big screen.
But I could not disassociate myself from the emotional impact of the film nor did I want to. The real power of Eastwood’s movie is not in the fx but in the characters, the human condition of these men — the general Kuribayashi, the grunt Saigo, the Olympic gold medalist Baron Nishi, the failed secret policeman Shimizu — who are being sacrificed by their country for a lost cause. This has to be the focus, because the outcome is known. Suspense, the unfolding story, has to be found in the interaction of the characters.
Chris Vognar of the Dallas Morning News sums it up like this:
If Flags of Our Fathers is about heroism – why we need it, how we create it – then Letters From Iwo Jima is about honor, its importance, and its folly. For the officers who stand in Kuribayashi’s way and sneer at his unconventional methods (including kindness to enlisted men), honor is a code to be followed blindly and by the book. For the core characters, it’s a way of life, of treating other human beings, of facing the impossible with dignity.
I would say also that it’s about the clash of the old rigid code of warrior honor with the mechanized faceless slaughter of modern warfare. My son points out that this has echoes of Europe at the beginnings of World War I, when the French and British sent cavalry charges out against barbed wire and machine guns. The result, of course, was wholesale slaughter.
That echo is made somewhat explicit fairly early in the film, when the two old cavalry men, General Kuribayashi and Baron Nishi, remember the good old days when soldiers could fight heroically and face to face. No more, they say. The machines have changed things.
Modern warfare has rendered the old style of honor impractical and a little ridiculous. When one commander fails to hold his wing, he orders his entire troop to commit suicide because they have been dishonored. They do this by means of hand grenade. Each man in turn pulls the plug and grasps the grenade to his chest and explodes himself. This is probably the most notorious scene in the movie, and while it doesn’t become as silly as it might, it is not death with dignity. What is more, it is a waste of manpower. The more honorable thing would have been for the commander to do as he was ordered, to fall back and add his force to defending the core position.
In the end, the wounded General Kuribayashi, defeated, facing capture and dishonor, orders his aide to be behead him with his sword. This is a scene worthy of high drama, of Shakespeare’s battlefield. But it cannot be in modern warfare. Kuribayashi kneels, neck extended. The aide raises his sword over his head, ready to do the deed. But before the blow can be struck, the aide himself is struck and killed by what seems to be a stray and random bullet. The General is left to shoot himself with the pearl-handled colt he carries as a souvenir of his time in the United States.
In the final scene, both the sword and the Colt are picked up as war souvenirs by anonymous GIs who don’t know the significance of what they’ve found.
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