Over the weekend I saw Flags of Our Fathers. Donald Sensing has a review which captures some of my sense of the film. He points out that one of its drawbacks is that the movie never quite settled on its point of view:
This movie’s technical merits are excellent beyond all praise, but good luck trying to figure out just what is the story line. I remember what Alfred Hitchcock said decades ago: Before everything else about a movie, you have to have a story. And FOOF doesn;t really have one. Instead, it has three or four, and winds up telling none of them well.
The story(ies) is (are) told almost exclusively through flashbacks. Sometimes what is really a single flashback by one of the characters is split into two scenes in the movie - one key flashback consists of two parts separated by about an hour (maybe more) of running time. And it’s not always clear who is having which flashback. I think Eastwood and the screenwriter chose to make the movie this way because they wanted to focus not so much on the battle itself as the battle’s after-effects on the three men who lived long enough after the flag raising to be pulled back to the States to make a war-bond tour. (Three marines who raised the flag were KIA before they knew they were being hailed as heroes.)
Part of Eastwood's problem is that he was trying to tell a pre-Modernist story from a post-modernist perspective. The success of post-modernist deconstruction, which has insinuated its point of view into so much of our educational system and public discourse, renders most filmmakers incapable of telling a story without radical de-mythologizing. While there is often merit in historical revisionism, it has become so extreme and so poorly recognized that it devalues everything it touches.
Yet in a more subtle way, Flags of Our Fathers succeeds in illuminating one of the underlying dynamics that has been at work in our culture since the heady days of the 1960s.
The primary cultural divide that has come into such stark relief in the last 30 plus years can be distilled as a breech between those who believe that this country is the exception, "the shining city on the hill" and those who have so thoroughly deconstructed our own history that there is nothing special about America, only now seen as a nation so flawed that there is little worth fighting for and nothing worth risking one's life and comfort for. This was the meta-communication of the anti-war youth in the 1960s. It was no coincidence that the anti-war protests lost their intensity once Congress ended the draft. Having been raised to believe that they were the center of the world, and then schooled by radical professors in elite universities to believe that the United States we grew up in was irredeemably racist, exploitative, and colonialist, the 60s generation naturally resisted supporting or fighting a war which seemed so far removed from necessity. The fact that the Vietnam war was also an insurgency that seemed unwinnable thanks to slanted press coverage and government propaganda which proved to be unsupportable, only served to reinforce the generation's natural inclination to shy away from conflict. Thus, the 60s generation became marked by an aversion to the military and to the use of American power, which in most ways was indistinguishable from pacifism. Worse, the anti-war/anti-military position, which was emotional at its core, used the "America as racist, exploitative, colonialist" to rationalize its behavior.
The greater damage was to follow. In order to justify its pacifism (which had an uncomfortable resonance with passivity and cowardice) the entire military adventure had to be subverted. After all, if we were justified in entering the Vietnam War, then to quit the fight before it was won, would be tantamount to surrender. When Congress overrode President Gerald Ford's veto and cut off all military funding to the South Vietnamese, the devaluation of America's war required that any good initial intentions had to be denied. We convinced ourselves the the entire war was an evil misadventure in order to rationalize the abandonment of entire Nations to their fate at the hands of blood thirsty and cruel ideologues. Somewhere around 2-3 million people eventually died because we abandoned them.
American media reported on the plight of the boat people but rarely was there any effort made to place their plight into context. It was as if there was a tacit agreement to maintain the justification for our betrayal. The South Vietnamese were counter-revolutionaries, capitalists, traitors and the North merely was trying to consolidate their rule. It took a long time before the true nature of the Communist brutality in Vietnam and Cambodia became unmistakable and by that time the Nation had moved on to other things. Many Americans still choose to remain ignorant of their complicity in these crimes.
Post-modernism lends itself well to the obfuscation of such unpleasant historical realities. Now that "the Greatest Generation" is slowly fading away, their offspring, the children of the 60s, are increasingly paying homage to those who created the world which has so enriched us; thus, Saving Private Ryan, and Flags of Our Fathers. The problem is how to properly give them their due while preserving our self-esteem. Our fathers did not consider themselves heroes, they were just doing their jobs and trying to stay alive. Their heroism was not sought by them but the job was accepted by them. Their sons chose to not do the job. Yet men who will not stand for anything risk feeling neutered. Thus, a heroic narrative for the 60s generation had to be developed. The protesting college students, the elite of their generation, were speaking "truth to power." What bravery, to stand against the capitalist war machine, to be faux revolutionaries in a country that was never going to turn its guns upon its own sons and daughters. Kent State was a terrible event, but it paled in comparison to the bravery of those who stood against Soviet tanks in Budapest and Prague. Unfortunately, the narrative is still adhered to today by large swaths of the liberal elites. They remain heroic resisters, speaking "truth to power", mostly Democrats "fighting" against the special interests and the evil Bushitler. This would be seen as the transparent nonsense that it is except that it is so necessary for the continued self-esteem maintenance of that cohort who abandoned the South Vietnamese (and Cambodians) to their fate because their comforts were too precious to risk.
Every war has had its summer soldiers, as the Sun pointed out today. They are once again trying to justify their betrayal in the time tested manner of the 60s "heroes": the war was unjust from the start(based on lies), perpetrated by the evil capitalists (fought for oil), colonialists, and exploiters, and on and on.... And once again it is nonsense, a way to rationalize surrender while maintaining a "heroic" posture.
In a post from last January, I wrote about the struggle with despair of a true believer whose dreams have turned to dust. Many years later he still cannot admit he was wrong:
"It is difficult to oppose, I can criticize, but can never cross the line. To criticize the whole thing, its criticizing myself."
Saving Private Ryan succeeded because Spielberg did not try to force it into a post-modern frame; he simply told the story. Clint Eastwood's movie ultimately fails because it is impossible to tell the story in a way that shows the heroism of our fathers and maintains the heroism of their sons. He must tell the story of men who walked into a hail of machine gun bullets knowing many of them would not walk out because they knew it was the right thing to do and their cause was just; our fathers belonged to a nation that was the "land of the free and the home of the brave." There is no way to reconcile their story with the "faux historical" story of America from the lofty vantage point of the of post--modernist whose America was always the land of the racist and the hypocrite. Ordinary people doing the right thing, even when it costs them everything, is heroic and mythological; ordinary people getting killed for a racist, unjust society is just a senseless tragedy. If our Fathers were heroes, we cannot be.
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