Clint Eastwood - Old Timer Takes Aim
Posted on December 11, 2006
Filed Under For Argument's Sake |
Clint Eastwood’s two new films look at either side of America’s conflict with Japan, and specifically at the Battle of Iwo Jima, the point where America established itself on Japanese territory in early 1945. It turns out that iconic moment, captured in a photo and then cast in bronze, of a half dozen American soldiers raising the Stars and Stripes on Mount Suribachi took place in a lull in fighting and was actually the second time the flag had been raised. An officer laid claim to the first flag and asked for it back.
Eastwood’s film has been called unpatriotic because it takes a sideways look at the Iwo Jima myth. Not so says Eastwood who is obviouisly unpicking some of the falsity surrounding glory. I interviewed an ex-marine general in the early 1980s, for a BBC series on the military, and there before him on the desk was the Iwo Jima statuette. To both of us it signalled American courage. In fact of the three survivors who planted the flag two met a lonley death in America and the other never talked about Iwo Jima again. Neil Ascherson in the London Observer interprets this as a normal reaction of soldiers who experience the loss of friends. They don’t see glory in it however hard politicians try to make them.
So back to the movie, sort of. Over the past decade a few pieces of infomation have surfaced about different aspects of that conflict and regular readers here will know I have a small obsession with it.
Six months before Pearl Harbour an elite group of US Army pilots quit their commissions and formed a Ranger group in China with a mission to bomb Tokyo, a mission known to Roosevelt. Planes were diverted from the British Lend-lease program to facilitate the raid. The raid proved impossible because of the distance but it suggests there is more to the American-Japanese conlict than we popularly understand and that the then President was not above provoking hostilities in the far east. Equally the discovery of British materiel in the hands of German stay behind divisions in Russia in 1944 suggests a more complex conflict and a more realistic moral tapestry waiting to be uncovered.
I hope Eastwood’s film inspires the BBC to revisit these areas. My own attempt, which becamse After the War:Conquering Germany, a title that still rankles with me, failed and a proposal I suggested to look again at Pearl Harbour was rejected by them.
Which leaves the question why does it take figures Like Eastwood and Clooney to recapture narrative morality? Those of us known as baby boomers have lived most of our lives under the myths of the 1940s and now society in general is suffering because politicians keep appropriating them to support new conflicts. We need to learn.
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3 Responses to “Clint Eastwood - Old Timer Takes Aim”
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I think what it is is like with anything else, there’s what really is/really happens, and then there’s the sales pitch. Say you’re in the business of selling washing machines. Are you really going to harp on the power requirements of the machine, or maybe the other selling points, such as ease of use, capacity and so forth?
I think history class gets deliberately ‘cleaned up’, and then you start getting into the political biases of the learning institution and so forth. Problem is, to find out what really went on, you have to ask a bunch of different people. Say you were a reporter etc…you only asked one person what they saw, say, at a car wreck scene. The guy only heard a noise, turned around, and saw the truck hit the car. That was his perspective, his perceptions of the event. You ask the lady across the street, she noticed that the signal had changed, and that the car hadn’t stopped for a red light. The guy next to her saw that the car was speeding, so forth, and so on. People are only human, and they might let their perceptions be colored by opinions and so forth, ‘unbiased reporting’ is like ‘jumbo shrimp’, an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms, because most people have some sort of bias, something that affects their perceptions etc. In the example above, let’s say that our guy that said he thought the car was speeding didn’t get it right, let’s say the car was traveling at normal speed, but it was a SPORTS car, something expensive and flashy, and we know people that drive THOSE cars are always driving too fast.
But, at the end of all this, let’s say that the real problem was that both drivers thought they had the right-of-way, because there were broken bulbs in the traffic signal lights?
I don’t know how or why or who started WWII, but I do know this: History’s far from a perfect record, because, like the Bible, it’s written BY humans. Can YOU correctly recall what you had for breakfast, 3 years ago, this day? How much did you eat, where did you eat it, who did you eat with? Did you eat by yourself, how much did you pay for your breakfast? Details, details, most of them slip right by us. Yet, history is composed of such things, and how they relate to big events is kind of important. I think we also live in the day and age of historical revisionism, where people aren’t content to let the past be the past,
and at any rate have failed to really learn much from it. Again, people aren’t perfect, nor do we tend to frankly prove ourselves to be very smart.
WWII was ended in Japan in August, of 1945, so sayeth the history books, by the dropping of 2 atomic bombs, which quickly motivated Japan to surrender. Given that there’s still survivors of those events walking around, and they’ve got radiation burns to attest to their presence, we largely assume it all to be true. Luckily, Hiroshima and Nagasaki seem to be two object lessons in the destructive power of war over civilization that no one’s really felt like repeating…yet.
Hello bert - welcome to the site. I won’t argue with anything you’ve said but I do think we have an obligation to keep digging and turn up a better record. maybe that’s starting to happen?-
I refuse to learn more as my brain is just melting. I am looking forward to the holidays ending this year. Seems outr industry has slowed a lot this year.