Several hours later (from previous entry) and I’m now somewhere over the atlantic. The plane is new fangled which means that the films are no longer tapes / dvds but running off a hard disk so there are lots of them and each individual can control the play rate. Clint Eastwoords Flag of our Fathers seemed the most promising of the movies on offer so I went for it fearful of some jinogistic justification for the current wry – Eastwood having a reputation as a right winger.
Several hours later (from previous entry) and I’m now somewhere over the atlantic. The plane is new fangled which means that the films are no longer tapes / dvds but running off a hard disk so there are lots of them and each individual can control the play rate. Clint Eastwoords Flag of our Fathers seemed the most promising of the movies on offer so I went for it fearful of some jinogistic justification for the current wry – Eastwood having a reputation as a right winger.
But actually its almost the opposite. It is something of a polemic about war and how the rich send workers out to die, makes heroes of them when necessary and abandoning them once that moment has passed. Maybe this is simply because he told what happened, I don’t know enough about the flag rasing on Iowa Jima to judge this.
I have seen the memorial in Arlington, a huge bronze cast on top of a rock plinth near the ‘interpretative centre’ at the main entrance of that cemerty. I didn’t plan to, in fact when K. was in Washington we took a day trip to Williamsburg(?) and returning a little earlier then planned I suggested we stop off in Arlington. It was March 15 2004 but even the significance of that date didn’t hit me until we had spent an hour there.
Arlington is strange, its obviously intended as a partiotic memorial but the stark reality of acre after acre of regimented military graves has a rather different effect. We went hunting for an ancestor of hers who had fought in the civil war and found his grave but on the way while scrambling up a steep hill we found that of a Navy Seal killed in the Afgan occupation. I think it was then that I realised that day was the anniversary of the start of the second gulf war – a day protests were happening all over the world. A few days before or after – my memory fails me on the precision – I did a meeting on the attempts to stop refueling in Shannon. Not in Washington but in Baltimore. When I flew back to Ireland via Baltimore airport my departure coincided with that of hundres of young, somewhat scared looking soldiers in desert battle dress. It wans’t hard to work out where they were going.
Flag of our Fathers questions the war in particular in its portrayal of Ira the native american characther who is alone in realising the full horror of what he is involved in and so takes the only sensible couse of getting and staying blind drunk. After the war we glimpse him as an impoverished agricultural labourer still trying to put right what cannot be fixed. Even the brief comradeship of the war is over for him as one of the other characters passes him as he hitches on the road, afraid to pick up an Indian.
I would guess that a republican might instead read the film as a portrayal of real politiak. The heros tour the country and recreate a lie because doing so is essential to raise the funds to arm those who are still in the field. They choose not to expose the lie because to do so would be to stab their comrades in the back. Clint may have intended this message, in one flashback they watch a bomber limp in to land and remark that this was the first of thousands and that taking the island has saved thousands of lives, presumably a refence to the standard justificiation for the bombing of Heroshima.
But the war in the Pacific was not like that in Europe. Just why did these young workers die in such huge numbers. Revenge for Pearl Harbour explains little, most of these battles were fought over isolated islands or over the colonial posessions of the Euopean colonial powers. It will be interesting to see Clints second movie which is to portray the Japense side of the battle. I suspect that the very decision to do so means the only justification for the sacrifice of US workers he can offer is the fact of the sacrifice itslef, the bonds of comradeship formed between soldiers at war.
This was first published Wednesday, March 14, 2007 but was locked away in a myspace account I’d forgotten the password for linked to an email account I’d also forgotten the password for. Had the bright idea of accessing them through a friends account.