A critical scene from Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-nominated film “Letters from Iwo Jima” resonates in the zeitgeist: As a group of Japanese troops in a cave prepare to dispatch a captured U.S. soldier, an officer stops them and demands that the prisoner receive medical attention. Later, the same officer finds a letter from the U.S. soldier’s pocket and reads it to his countrymen. The letter contains the concerns of the soldier’s mother, emphasizing her wish that her son return home safely. As one Japanese soldier later reflects, “(his) mother sounded like mine”, a profound realization of the commonality obscured by the toils of combat. And for a brief moment, the soldiers reassess the wounded American and glumly realize the folly of the madness surrounding them.
Eastwood’s film documents the last days the of ill-equipped and malnourished defenders against the impending onslaught on Iwo Jima. The film does not depict a Japanese version of the Battle of Iwo Jima, but rather the Japanese experience. It was not meant to be the contradiction to the American side, but a complement to express unrealized but inherent similarities.
I’m not ruining the movie because you already know how it ends: Of the 20,000 Japanese defenders on Iwo Jima, about 1,000 would survive. The film portrayed soldiers who do not struggle for victory, but come to terms with impending death. Eastwood depicts the brutality of these final days in harrowing fashion, using drained color and barren landscapes to portray those bleak final days. This is not a movie of personal glory on the battlefield, but the stark reality of war.
Eastwood’s characters, although speaking a foreign tongue, express the same cynicism we currently display towards our own war. There is no discussion of whether the war was just—the men are not fortunate enough to possess such insight. Their discussions revolve around a language universally understood: the longing for loved ones, the fear of death, and of a future beyond their control.
Primary studies of World War II, as seen in most high school texts, depict the Japanese as suicidal fanatics who preferred death over defeat. Eastwood’s film reassesses this overly simplistic definition to highlight the conflict between the human struggle to survive and the Japanese cultural obligation to honor. And ultimately, the Japanese are not depicted as robotic zealots, but emotion-filled beings that quiver in fear under the rattle of enemy fire and deafening explosions, just as we would expect.
Eastwood boldly challenges the status quo, where our Manichean thinking has reduced the near-infinite variety of humankind to “with us” or “against us.” Our current war on terror has created a faceless fanatical enemy who similarly lurks in caves and speaks in foreign tongues. Paranoia and hatred have helped focus our propensity to dichotomize, which has become endemic to this new millennium. Ignoring the millions of innocent denizens that reside in North Korea, Iran, Iraq and Syria, we have promoted the simplicity of this mindset and grouped them all into the convenient “against us” category.
The timing of this movie’s release, whether deliberate or not, is significant. Like this column, the film is not a condemnation of the war in Iraq per se, but rather a condemnation of war itself. It is not my place to justify who is right or wrong, for in the end I believe that war is caused by the oversight of impatient men on all sides. In Washington, politicians are discussing the virtues of exit strategies versus the current “surge”. As a counter to this, Eastwood’s film reinforces the apolitical view that policy is somehow lost in translation on the battlefield, and that the common soldier, above all, simply wants to return home.
The unfortunate tragedy of war is that the decisions of a select few, guided or misguided, affect the destinies of millions. Through Eastwood’s film we share our grief with a once-maligned enemy we thought too barbaric to deserve sympathy, forgetting for a moment that the ones causing their misery are our own countrymen. We then realize that the greatest lesson from “Letters from Iwo Jima” is one of semantics: that the term “enemy” is both self-propagating and politically self-serving. Only when we refer to combatants within the ubiquitous context of humanity are we able to come to terms with war, as the Japanese soldiers in the cave did, and realize the folly of our ways.
(This is my weekly column that appeared in the Daily Californian. You can also read it here)
