Fading Into History: Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers
by Daniel Smith
Note: This is a sketchy first draft of what I hope to expand into a longer piece, so take that into consideration when thinking about how ungracefully this flows from one subject to another.
“The real heroes are dead on that island”.
A few characters use that line in speeches. It’s followed by a petition for the audience members to buy war bonds in the memory of those who died. Eastwood isn’t so cynical to suggest that the characters who use The Line don’t mean it, but he also is aware of what The Line is designed for. He understands the manipulative value of The Line. The Line leaves the audiences at bond drives feeling bad about all the boys who died and feeling good about themselves for supporting the war effort, but the audiences don’t really think about The Line. They’re fired up in the patriotic furor, and The Line doesn’t go beyond a surface-deep emotional reaction.
The Line is also what many critics of the film insist is the only point of the film, hammered home repeatedly by Eastwood & co. But saying that the movie has nothing to offer other than The Line is too easy of a way to dismiss the film, and is as reductive as using The Photograph to sum up the lives of the men involved, and the battle in which it was taken. And yet, Flags was dismissed as a repetitive war film, with little new to offer, and as just a shameless Oscar ploy by Eastwood and Spielberg (co-prod
ucer). Flags of Our Fathers was another in a long line of films that includes Munich and The Thin Red Line that was hyped for months before its release as a clear Oscar frontrunner, only to be met with disappointment and indifference when it turned out to something different than the Oscar movie is was expected to be. I get the impression that in the wake of Eastwood’s defeat of Scorsese at the 2004 Oscars—and the possibility of another showdown between the two this year—as well as Haggis’s (co-writer of Flags of Our Fathers) Crash winning Best Picture over Brokeback Mountain, Flags of Our Fathers was asking for it. The Crash debacle left a bitter taste in many mouths, and I feel that Flags of Our Fathers is the whipping child. Many critics seemed to be reviewing Crash (or, more specifically, Paul Haggis) again rather than Flags of Our Fathers. Slant Magazine’s Ed Gonzalez—a critic I generally like—writing about it at The House Next Door, sums this up nicely in the very first sentence of his review:
- "The stink of Crash hovers over Flags of Our Fathers"
He goes on:
- "If Eastwood's personality barely shines through, it's because Haggis's cartoon politics strongarm the director's vision."
- "Haggis, whose roots are in the small screen (his resume includes The Love Boat, The Facts of Life, and Diff’rent Strokes), writes character for short attention spans..."
I’m perfectly fine with the idea of someone not liking this movie, but I’d like to come away with the impression that they actually considered the film, rather than looking at it as another chance to grind an axe with Haggis. Here though, Haggis’s TV career is used (once again) as an easy sucker punch, a chance to get a quick blow in. Haggis is not, by any stretch of the imagination, one of the great screenwriters working today, but to see him constantly singled out as one of the worst things to hit mainstream movies in the past decade is odd. At the same time, Haggis does have the bad habit as a screenwriter to underline things that have already been well established. We all know from Crash that subtlety is not his strong suit, and those weaknesses show up in Flags. And yet, I think that it was Pauline Kael—a critic I generally don’t like—who was dead-on when she said that “great movies are rarely perfect movies”.
Other than winning a few more Oscars, what might Eastwood be trying to do in Flags of Our Fathers? Is this just another war movie, something akin to those anonymous propaganda pieces that were regularly churned out for years during and after World War II? Is it a commentary on the Iraq War? Is it some kind of a meta-statement on Eastwood’s career? Is there any connection—visually or thematically—to Eastwood’s previous films? Does it offer a commentary on either Contemporary or Classic Hollywood War Films?
What is Flags of Our Fathers really about?
It’s almost impossible to give a single, definitive answer. Scan most reviews, and most will say that it has something to do with the way Governments often manipulate and use people for PR purposes, or that it has something to do with the nature of heroism. But Eastwood films are almost always impossible to toss off in just a few sentences, and this one is no different. For whatever reason, there seems to have been reluctance on the part of most critics and audience members to scratch beneath the surface of Flags. Partially, it’s about the steady, inevitable flow of history, about the way it sweeps people in at random and then shuffles them aside as quickly as it swept them in, and about the collective struggle of individuals (and generalized, entire nations) to understand their past by piecing together not only their memories but what they can gather from the memories of others. The editing, and the non-linear structure, underlines this theme of memory, in the way it often suggests still fresh memories—the past is never truly gone, we’re reminded.
As is typically found in Eastwood films and his protagonists, loneliness permeates the landscape. The loneliness at the core of Eastwood’s work is something that shows up in almost every film—this recurring theme is perhaps best summed up in that shot of Robert Kincaid standing alone in the rain near t
he end of The Bridges of Madison County. Eastwood films are often filled with these kinds of characters stuck on the outside—usually on the outside of mainstream society—looking in. This isn’t limited just to characters played by Eastwood—we see it manifest in different forms in all three protagonists of Mystic River as well as in the protagonists in Eastwood films from A Perfect World to Million Dollar Baby, and it turns up again in Flags of Our Fathers.
This loneliness is most obvious in Flags in the scenes set in America—while hailed as heroes, the men are also kept resolutely on the outside. They are never allowed to blend into the crowd; every scene of the bond drives Eastwood emphasizes the men apart from the crowd. The bond drives are designed to single these guys out, and it goes against the very nature of military training, which is all about the individuals blending collectively into one. The bond drive reverses the process—the crowd functions as a collective body, a faceless cheering section, while the soldiers are stuck on the outside. This isn’t just limited to the bond drives though: When asking Doc Bradley to be Best Man at his wedding, Rene Gagnon mentions that it is hard to even talk to the people who didn’t experience the war firsthand. Here, loneliness is created by war—The Photograph brought the nation together, but the War left the soldiers isolated in their memories.
Hayes of course is a double outsider—excluded from much of mainstream society due to his ethnicity, and further isolated by the pressures of the bond tour. Hayes, though, is haunted in more than one way. Already a loner, someone who can’t fit into “normal” society due to racism of the time, Hayes is haunted by the hero worship. Hayes is also the clearest representation of Eastwood’s career-long exploration of the soul-crushing effects of violence. One of the best dialogue exchanges in an Eastwood film comes in High Plains Drifter, his second directorial credit:
Mordecai: “What do you do when it’s over?”
The Stranger: “Then you live with it.”
Eastwood has spent much of his career as a director exploring the “live with it” part. To Eastwood, violence is soul-scorching, and in an age where most films amass double-digit body counts with little or no reflection on it at all, Eastwood has always been willing to deal with the consequences of violence—on both personal and communal levels, and Flags of Our Fathers continues that trend. Of the three protagonists, Bradford’s Rene Gagnon is not shown killing someone in battle. (It is indicated at one point that he never even fired his rifle.) The other two aren’t shown participating in typical war movie killings (i.e. shooting someone across the battlefield). Instead, they show both Bradley and Hayes killing men (with their knife and bayonet, respectively) who surprise them by jumping into their foxhole. The way Eastwood handles these scenes remind me of a quote from HBO’s Deadwood, in episode five (“A Two-Headed Beast”) of season three. Ian McShane’s character says after one of his henchmen killed someone in a fight, “"A fair fight, something Dan and I have always struggled to avoid, is different. You see the light go out of their eyes. It's just you left, and death." This is something that Eastwood manages to visualize in quick reaction shots just after Bradley and Hayes kill these men—that moment of realization upon seeing the light go out of someone’s eyes.
Literally and figura
tively, The Photograph constantly hangs over the soldiers—and not just the soldiers, but the families of deceased soldiers as well—so that they are destined to relive the battle constantly. One subtle, almost imperceptible comment on the entire “print the legend” aspect of the bond tour seems to be the way Eastwood never lets us get very close to The Photograph. He often distorts it, either in the showing it in colorized painting form, or from an off-kilter angle. (The most infamous, and perhaps least-subtle appearance is in that ice-cream dessert sculpture.) The Photograph shows up all over the place, yet in a different form almost every time. This underlines one of the more subtle themes of the film: the study in contrast. There are the contrasting perspectives: Americans were comforted by The Photograph, saw hope in it. The men in it were haunted by it, constantly reminded of what they had been through and all of the friends lost. Hayes and Gagnon are contrasting characters: Hayes is an outsider in America, due to being a racial minority, and yet fits in perfectly in the Marines, while Gagnon, the ambitious opportunist, is clearly out of his element in military life. The film is bookended by two contrasting shots: It opens on a soldier running, alone across a battlefield, seeming lost and overwhelmed, and ends with the same soldier joining his comrades at the beach.
The nature of heroism is confronted in the film, but its confrontation of it extends far beyond The Line. For one thing, we hardly see any heroic action in the film—most killings are defensive; while the protagonists are made into heroes, Eastwood keeps cutting back to Iwo to show us that it was a lot more complex than we were told . Battle is often about, as the Ira Hayes character says, just trying not to get shot. There is one hero in the film: Mike Strank, played by Barry Pepper. Strank is not a character caught up in history in the way our three protagonists are—he makes a clear choice; Early in the film, he is offered a promotion to what is indicated would be a safer position in the battle for him. But he turns it down, because of his obligation to see his soldiers through the battle. Fulfilling one’s promises, doing one’s duty is a common Eastwood theme, and Mike Strank’s choice of others over self is, for Eastwood, a heroic choice.
Symbols and Personas
For decades as an actor, Eastwood was dismissed by critics as little more than a symbol. Eastwood the Director has been conscious of this designation for decades, and has used his films to explore the nature of that Persona that he symbolizes. As a result, Eastwood has long been on of the most reflective directors working in mainstream Hollywood, routinely pulling back the layers of that Persona. Eastwood characters are generally loners, men of few words, reluctant to reveal much about their pasts, and often on the outside of mainstream society.
Eastwood movies where he doesn’t star are more ambiguous in their relationship to the Eastwood Persona. Here, Eastwood gives an interesting study of the Persona: Each of the three protagonists (Ryan Phillippe’s Doc Bradley, Adam Beach’s Ira Hayes, and Jesse Bradford’s Rene Gagnon) seems to represent different aspects of this Persona. Bradley, like so many Eastwood protagonists, is a quiet man, one of few words. Chris Durham, in a piece called Absent Heroism, says that “looking at Eastwood's characterizations, one is regularly struck by images of men who do not, because they cannot, belong…if these men cannot belong, it is because they have few measures of belonging available to them, whether in the form of nation, community, or social relationships.” We see this in the three protagonists—especially, as mentioned above, in contrasting forms in Hayes and Gagnon.
In Flags Eastwood is does not explore Eastwood Persona as much as he is explores the process by which these men are turned into symbols, and the entire idea of using people as symbols. A younger director might try use the bond drive as a way of convicting the crowd, and then the audience, for the “print the legend” mindset that they helped The Photograph perpetuate. But this is the work of a man who is at peace with himself and at peace with the fact that he’s seen as a symbol by so many. Yet at the same time, he recognizes how reductive this thinking is, and the fact that, in this case at least, it does major harm to these men. But he also understands the emotions behind the desire to manufacture heroes. It’s a complex situation, and Eastwood wisely lets us see both sides of the coin.
James Bradley wrote a good book in Flags of Our Fathers, but one flaw is in James Bradley’s portrayal of Rene Gagnon. Bradley, of course, portrays his own father as a salt-of-the-earth type saint, but is very critical of Gagnon—seeing him as a relentless opportunist, as the only one of the three surviving flagraisers who bought into the hero worship. Whether intentional or not, James Bradley is guilty of dividing the three surviving flagraisers into stereotypes: John Bradley is The Saint; Ira Hayes is The Victim; Rene Gagnon is The Opportunist. (Gagnon’s wife Pauline, is The Cow.) It’s not an unforgivable flaw, and Bradley does seem to see Gagnon as a genuinely good—but perhaps weak—man, but it is disappointing that Bradley doesn’t seem very interested in Gagnon. The biographical section for Gagnon in the first part of the book is considerably shorter than those of the other flagraisers, and Bradley emphasizes more than once that not many veterans knew Gagnon very well.
As Rene Gagnon, Jesse Bradford gives perhaps the best performance in a film full of terrific acting. Although Ira Hayes is traditionally viewed as the outsider (The Outsider was actually the title of an Ira Hayes biopic from the 60’s), Bradford’s performance shows us that in military life, Gagnon is even more of an outsider than Hayes. Gagnon projects confidence—“there’s no point in being a hero if you don’t look like one”—but Bradford’s performance hints at a loneliness just beneath the surface, and he’s set apart from the other soldiers in subtle ways—the clothes he wears, the way he carries himself, etc. Bradford’s performance suggests to us that the camaraderie between most of the soldiers is something that is not extended to Gagnon.
Not an Eastwood film?
That’s one thing that critics of the film have mentioned. The perception seems to be that Flags of Our Fathers is Eastwood working for-hire on a project that has very little personal meaning or resonance fo
r him, just hacking it away so he can get a few more Oscars. Even though it may not be the most logical progression for Eastwood after Million Dollar Baby, it feels like a natural progression for Eastwood as a director (auteur).
Eastwood’s fingerprints are evident in Flags of Our Fathers in the natural decency of the characters—in the way Rene Gagnon walks directly past a potential business offer in order to speak a mother who had lost her son, and in the compassion he shows to Ira as he leaves the tour; in the way Bud Gerber (the government bureaucrat on the tour, played by John Slattery) is visibly relieved that he does not have to be the one to tell Ira that he has been kicked off the tour, and then the humane way that Beech (the army bureaucrat on the tour, played by John Benjamin Hickey) gently drops the axe. Even the family who takes Ira’s picture are less evil or villainous—which is how they might be portrayed in another film—than they are simply caught up in heroic fever. After they take the picture and drive away, Eastwood gives Beach a sublime close-up moment of silence; It makes for a beautiful shot, suggesting a momentary peace for Ira Hayes. Eastwood also gives the same type of moment to several of his bit players: Judith Ivey’s Belle Block, to Myra Turley’s Madeline Evelley, and Christopher Curry’s Ed Block all get quiet moments of reflection (these are something more than simple reaction shots) after they learn the truth about The Photograph. These are the types of moments that would probably never make the final cut of most films, but Eastwood’s trademark generosity with even the incidental characters and his willingness to let the film have a bit extra time breathe a little, produces what were, for me, some of the most moving shots of the film.
This is in a similar vein as two other sequences—sequences that, like the Judith Ivey moment, would probably be throwaways somewhere else—in the film. The first is the silent sequence as the soldiers listen to the radio the night before they land on Iwo Jima, and the second is a wordless sequence (with only the score on the soundtrack) showing Bradley surveying the cost of the battle as dead and wounded soldiers are brought back down to the beach. Again, these sequences feel like vintage Eastwood, not only in the way they avoid the modern urge in filmmaking to move at full speed from scene to scene, but in the way, in these brief scenes, everyone is equal. No one actor threatens to overtake the scenes—these scenes serve as a reminder that we’re all equal in the scheme of things.
Groups and Individuals
In the early pre-battle (as well as the bond drive) scenes, groups overwhelm individuals. The battle scenes invert this—the individuals are emphasized over the group. The battle scenes emphasize the small, individual moments—mostly scenes involving a soldier (or two) bogged down in a foxhole, just trying not to get shot.
The non-linear structure leads to a curious thing for a war film, to an almost radical inversion of the normal conventions of modern war movies: Eastwood lets us know early in the film who lives and who dies. Although it’s easy to overlook, Eastwood actually separates the Living from the Dead in the first two shots at Camp Tarawa—Bradley, Gagnon, and Hayes (the Living) are in the first shot, while Sousley, Strank, and Block (the Dead) are in the second shot. The following two scenes show the same things: Sousley and Block are the only two featured, followed by a scene where Gagnon and Bradley are the only two featured. Of course, someone unfamiliar with the story wouldn’t know this on first viewing, but we’re told early on that half of the men in the photograph died within a week; It is also further indicated that Iggy and Hank Hansen died. Eastwood clearly does not seem interested in using their fates to create suspense.
This leads to an unusual thing, something that may be unprecedented in mainstream war movies: Eastwood dispatches all of the secondary characters—five of the eight major characters who were introduced during training—during one disturbing montage, lasting less than ten minutes. (The more common approach—which Spielberg employed in Saving Private Ryan—is to start with the least known actor, working forward until the star dies in the climax.) Of all combat sequences, this is the only one that involves all eight soldiers (the group, rather than the individual(s) is emphasized here), and the way Eastwood eliminates them is something I’ve never seen before. It’s at this point that we should realize, if we haven’t already, that we aren’t watching a traditional war film.
This happens during the film’s centerpiece, as the survivors are planting a flag atop a papier-mâché platform at a football game in the States. (Was there a more subversive image than this in a mainstream American film in 2006?) Eastwood turns the raisng ceremony into a nightmarish sequence—keeping the frame close on the faces of Hayes, Bradley, and Gagnon, with the constant flashbulbs intentionally blurring the line between ceremony and battle. As they begin climbing atop the platform, Eastwood begins cutting back to Iwo. After the second flashback, it starts to become clear that something unusual is up. Eventually, we know what to expect. For a film where death has been kept as a fairly remote experience—with the exception of a brief sequence at the beginning, it’s mostly been limited to random bullets hitting random people during battle—suddenly death is all around, inescapable. When they finally reach the top, we hear that “Corpsman!” call coming from behind, and we realize that we are back where we started: The disappearance of Iggy.
One of the strongest aspects of the film is the fact that Iggy’s torture, death, and the subsequent discovery of his body is kept totally off screen. (The way Eastwood stages the discovery of Iggy’s corpse seems to be a reference to a similar scene in John Ford’s The Searchers.) This is also perhaps the most direct comment by Eastwood on contemporary war films. Eastwood understands that the full horror of Iggy’s death, and how it haunted John Bradley for the rest of his life, is something that anyone who’s never experienced combat can never understand, and that to show it would be gratuitous. We see the reaction, and that is enough. It makes for a heartbreaking moment as it is, and it is also an example of where so many other war films go wrong: Most war films are so hell-bent on trying to create the experience of combat so realistically and so vividly that they miss Sam Fuller’s statement that it is impossible for a film to accurately convey the combat experience to the audience unless the ushers shoot bullets at the audience members from the screen. Eastwood understands this, that some things are better left implied, rather than spelled out explicitly. This is also apparent in the battle scenes. Eastwood employs point of view shots mostly, but even though there are violent images, there seems to be a restraint to it. We see limbs, and even a decapitation, there seems to be something almost indescribably different about it, as if he isn't trying to just shock us with several horrible killings, like so many other war movies of late try to do.
In Million Dollar Baby, Eastwood’s final shot is cautiously hopeful—showing what appears to be Frankie in the diner that he and Maggie visited earlier in the film. But it is a typical Eastwood ending—leaving the audience wondering if the protagonist has really achieved closure. Shot through a smoky window, the audience can not really be sure that Frankie is the person we see in there. To the question of whether Frankie has been redeemed, the best answer we can give is “Maybe”; just as with William Munny, we wonder if Frankie Dunn can ever really be redeemed. Eastwood closes Flags of Our Fathers with as close to a happy ending as we can expect from him. The soldiers are allowed a brief respite from the battle, a swim in the ocean. Eventually, hesitantly, Phillippe’s Doc Bradley joins. At best, it’s happiness for a few minutes, but we know what follows. Iggy will soon be dead, the victim of unspeakable torture, Doc will soon be severely wounded, and the post-war rebuild looms. It makes for an overwhelmingly powerful moment, as we witness that brief moment of serenity. The final shot is classic Eastwood: a God’s-eye-view of the beach landscape of Iwo Jima. The men then fade into history—into mere symbols—as the image fades into an archival photo from the same point. The closing credits show photographs of the actual soldiers portrayed in the film, and photographs from the actual battle, and a line from Once Upon A Time In America comes to mind: “Memories are all we have left”.
