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Opinion

Film offers a connection to the past

Michael Berryhill
Guest Columnist 

As the ending credits of Flags of Our Fathers rolled by, my wife and I sat transfixed by the simple melody Clint Eastwood wrote for his new film and by the period photographs of men at Iwo Jima. Each of us has similar, grainy, black-and-white photographs that our fathers brought home from World War II, images that haunted our childhoods. 

Mine is of my mustached young father in greasy cover-alls, wearing a belt with a knife and a pistol, standing beside the plane he flew at Guadalcanal. Lynn's is of a Japanese tomb dug into the volcanic hillside at Iwo Jima: two stone pillars topped with a stone lintel, creating a narrow black doorway. After his tent was shelled, her father, a Navy Seabee, slept in that tomb for weeks. 

We didn't have much critical objectivity about Flags of Our Fathers. It was a film made for us, the children of those World War II veterans, whose parents have mostly died, or who will be dying in the next several years. We were close to tears a lot of the time. We weren't just watching a movie. We were watching a vaguely known part of our lives. 

Some critics have too glibly called Flags of Our Fathers a war movie. Others have pointed out that it's about the mass media, how one picture of that flag raising at Iwo Jima inspired a nation and hurt the three men who unwittingly became part of a great photograph and were sent home to publicize a war-bond drive. They were briefly celebrities, but the experience seemed to make them feel forever that there was something false about themselves.

The opening weekend's box office receipts and the critical reviews are in. The reviews were good, but the box-office was bad. If Flags of Our Fathers is to succeed financially, the baby boomers will have to tell each other about it. It is not, after all, called the Flags of Our Grandfathers, or even great-grandfathers, and that's just as well. Let those generations make their films about Vietnam and Iraq.

When they do, I hope their filmmakers will delve deeply into the ambiguity we ought to feel about war as Eastwood does. World War II has been called the last good war. We were attacked, and we went out to make the world safe. What we saw in the movies of the time was men cleanly shot, clutching their chests and falling over. Now we see something closer to the real thing: the indifferent stitching of a man with machine-gun bullets, bellies laid open with the guts exposed, a helmet with a comrade's blown-off head in it. We see these horrors briefly, but what the film connects us to is not so much the horrors as the men who saw those horrors and how that changed them.

My father and my wife's father were the lucky ones. They came back. One of the men who raised the flag came from a farm in Texas. His mother didn't want him to go to war, but his father blessed his decision, and after he was killed within days of being in a famous photograph, the father's wife left him, blaming him, in a sense, for letting their son be killed. The little wooden farmhouse figures in the movie, a house much like the one my father and his brother grew up in. Both young men went to war, and there are pictures of my grandfather, a tough old man in overalls and my grandmother, looking frail and wistful, as she reads letters from her sons on a narrow wooden porch. There are photographs of the fresh grave where my uncle was buried, killed in an airplane accident in Burma, not so much a victim of the Japanese as of war itself. My grandmother was never the same after that, and my father missed his older brother to the end of his days.

We left the movie with a couple about our age, and I couldn't resist asking if they had known someone who had been at Iwo Jima. An uncle, the man said. An uncle, a father. We'll never really know what they experienced in the war. But with this movie, we have a good look at why they couldn't talk about it. 

Berryhill, a journalism professor, 
can be reached via dccampus@mail.uh.edu