Eastwood replaces the common idea of heroism by the more tragic notion of human sacrifice, whether voluntary or involuntary, for an assumed greater good.
Eastwood’s two films on the battle for Iwo Jima, while vastly different in both style and quality, should be watched back-to-back at least once to understand their overall theme and significance.
“Flags of Our Fathers”, by far the more conventional of the two films in terms of Hollywood standards, introduces the theme by focusing on the story around a famous photograph depicting six marines raising the US flag on Mount Suribachi on February 23, 1945. The photo was doomed to become "the most reproduced photograph in the history of photography", earning its creator -- the photojournalist Joe Rosenthal -- the Pulitzer Prize in photography. It later also served as model for the Marine Corps Memorial in Arlington, Virginia.
The film deals with the chasm between the public’s idealized image of war, that is, the image promoted by media and newsreel, and the way it was really lived through by the people on the battleground. The inscription on the Iwo Jima memorial reads: "Uncommon Valor was a Common Virtue." But the men depicted in the photograph and the memorial – at least those three who managed to survive the war -- did not feel they had shown 'uncommon valor' in raising this flag on that day. They were traumatized from the war and haunted by memories of their fallen comrades.
Perhaps what is essential about a photograph depicting some men raising a flag is not the men themselves but rather the image. Perhaps it does not matter regarding the symbolic significance and the historical value of the photograph whether or not the specific men depicted had in fact shown ‘uncommon valor’. If so, it would not even have mattered who precisely was in the picture. But it did matter, so much so that President Roosevelt arranged for the three survivors from the photograph to appear in public during a tour designed to encourage the public to support the war by buying bonds. Thus, the men were exploited in order to raise the morale of the nation as well as money for the war by displaying them as ‘touchable’ war heroes to the public.
“Letters from Iwo Jima”, in turn, gives us an insight into the situation of ‘the enemy’ during that same battle for Iwo Jima and, in particular, into the various notions of honor and obedience cherished in a warrior culture that was still to a large extent rooted in the Samurai tradition. This film is outstanding in many respects. First of all, while still a film ‘from Hollywood’, so to speak -- i.e. directed by one of Hollywood’s Greats -- is not only almost entirely in Japanese with English subtitles but also manages to introduce us to a very different culture without using a white, Western character as protagonist – as was the case with nearly all earlier Hollywood attempts of this kind, from Costners “Dances with Wolves” to the recent “The Last King of Scotland”.
Second, the acting is brilliant and far exceeds the performances in the first film. Third, as a supplement to the theme begun in the first film, “Letters” succeeds in giving us a sense of the horrendous sacrifice made by the nearly 20,000 Japanese soldiers who perished on that island knowing that it was not in their power to win in the first place, most of them fighting not for honor but for their own survival, or simply because they had no choice. From their perspective, the raising of the American flag accordingly and quite literally becomes a tiny little spot on the horizon as shown in one scene of the film.
