Eastwood captures the essence of a war - nothing about heroes, nothing about justice, and nothing but national interests. In it, the so-called hero is nothing but a tool used by the official government to guide the people in a direction that suits their own needs. Politically, they need the flags that the heroes planted to proclaim America's victory in the war and to demonstrate the correctness of their decisions. Financially speaking, they need heroes to inspire people's sensibilities under patriotism to subscribe for war bonds, thereby alleviating the pressure on the government's fiscal deficit. To a certain extent, the hero becomes a means for the government to fool the people.
At the beginning of the film, Eastwood used several shots to show the state of the people when they got the photos of the flags on the newspapers - as the newspapers were thrown into thousands of households by the delivery workers, this picture The photos, as well as the patriotic feelings and heroism behind the photos, spread throughout the United States with praise. And with the psychological identity of the masses to the hero, Eastwood did not stay too much at the mass level, but immediately turned to his core theme: turning the spear of the government—the newspaper appeared immediately In the hands of military officials, and began to hand over to the White House to discuss the next step to maximize the benefits of hero resources.
In fact, the government's treatment of the hero and the hero's treatment of themselves are deliberately formed by Eastwood in the film into a high degree of equivalence, and this equivalence continues throughout the film, using this set of relationships to criticize the attitude of the White House towards the military and war. In order to strengthen the sense of existence of this confrontational relationship, Eastwood did not narrate according to the positive direction of the timeline, but interspersed the part of Iwo Jima with the part of the native land, and carried it through. This constitutes a continuous intersection of "the White House's use of the military" and "the self-substance that the military feels in war."
First of all, standing surrounded by flowers, applause, and spotlights that sing praises, soldiers will feel the hero's self-cognition in an instant, but such self-awareness will be destroyed in an instant, and the spotlight will become a flare. The red strawberry jam sprinkled on the cake with the flag turns into the blood of soldiers. These things will make the huge fear and shock of the soldiers in their hearts surface immediately, and lead the soldiers back to the battlefield, to be forced to face their actual positioning in this war: in the midst of the raging war, throw away The limbs, the broken head, the corpse that can't see the edge, the hand-to-hand hand-in-hand with the enemy and the fire and the water. This kind of intersection reveals the deepest hearts of the soldiers: they do not feel like heroes, nor do they have too many feelings of "fighting for the country" or national righteousness in the fighting on the battlefield, and some are more pure fear and The idea of survival. And all this, through the intersection with the native part, naturally contrasts with the government's packaging of their heroes - the flag-raising hero in the propaganda beautification, and the hero's own great fear of war in his heart. In fact, this kind of fear was already obvious when the team was about to land on the island-accompanied by the sound of the announcement announcing the battle, the soldiers who were still frolic just fell into a dead silence, in the dark tone of Eastwood Under the lighting and moving cameras, they stood still like dead people in hell.
The second level of comparison occurs between the different attitudes of the government and the military towards the identity of the "individual soldier". In the war part, the soldiers were laughing and fighting, like a group of brothers, and even the non-commissioned officers who could have left the battlefield voluntarily stayed, hoping to lead the soldiers out of the battle alive. This lays the foundation for mutual identification between soldiers and soldiers. In the battle, the comrades who lived with him day and night and called each other's names every day lost their lives. In the battle part, Eastwood frequently switches the camera to the protagonist's first point of view, allowing the audience to follow their eyes to see the broken bodies of their comrades, and thus feel the pain of witnessing the departure of their comrades. For them, what is lost in a battle is not a general number, but specific names one after the other. Correspondingly, in the local part, the government does not pay attention to the identity of individual soldiers, but regards them as a simple tool.
For this, Eastwood used the identity of Harlan, a dead soldier, in the film, so that the military and the government had conflicts and comparisons over the issue of "whether to recognize Harlan as the person in the photo", so as to express The attitudes of the two sides are diametrically opposed. First, Harlan's mother, who accurately recognized her son in that photo. And Harlan's two comrades always insisted that "the photo is Harlan", and even had many conflicts with the messengers who wanted to return to China and accept the glory of heroes from before returning to China and during the activities.
On the other hand, the exact identity of the person in the photo is clearly not important in the government's view - in the paragraph discussing the promotion of national debt with the Treasury Secretary, when the Treasury Secretary learned that the identity of the person in the photo was wrong, he clearly stated that He answered the question of "Are you going to let the treasury bonds be purchased by no one in order to disclose this matter", and expressed the decision to "cover up the correct identity of the person in the photo and continue the heroic parade". And the messenger, who is tireless in being a hero and expecting to exchange this identity for a happy life, the most calmly accepting flattery and cheers among the three, also made an oolong when accepting the identity of the person in the photo. Obviously, for the government and messengers who want to take advantage of their heroic status, the person in this photo is worthless as an individual. People guide" role, all they need is to find the surviving soldiers who can keep the hero's parade going, not the correct soldier who has died in the photo with the correct identity.
It can be said that the strength of such revealing is very sharp: as is often expressed in many films and social commentaries, for the high-level, all sacrifices are not the superposition of individual sacrifices, but only a statistical number. In fact, in the movie, Eastwood also gave a very secret method, escalating the spearhead of this layer of expression, pointing to the White House as the highest organ of the government-when the president met the three protagonists, He first accurately stated the names and origins of the three people, and then turned to the photos for identification, but the paragraph came to an abrupt end here. Obviously, what Eastwood meant was: For the three living, the president needs to honor them, to use them for his own use, to inspire the public, to promote national debt, so it is necessary to remember their names, but for the other soldiers who have died , can no longer participate in the glory parade for oneself, then there is no need to clarify the identity of each person, just a little scene.
And on the messenger, Eastwood also wore another main line. He is the only one who recognizes his heroic identity more, and the conspiracy is similar to the government, hoping to use his heroic aura to gain something. At the beginning, he did open his eyes and lied, and in order to realize the heroic parade, he obscured the identities of the people in the photos, and did not tell the truth to his superiors.
However, even he could not escape the fear of war. As the protagonist of the film, he realizes the complete evolution of clues from youth to old age. First of all, from a passive point of view, when he was young, he wanted to use his hero status, but he was mentioned by the officer on the plane returning to China that "you will go back to Iwo Jima to fight", and when he was about to be received by his superiors as a hero, He also suddenly encountered a major change in the death of Roosevelt and the interview was cancelled. In these two passive incidents, Eastwood suppressed the heroic status of the herald and emphasized his soldier status, which is undoubtedly a clever hint: even if he tried to become a hero, he could not succeed, always The soldier struggling in the purgatory of fear of war. From an active point of view, he also sometimes expressed his deep thoughts: in his speech, he said that "we are not heroes, especially me, only the dead are heroes", expressing respect for the dead comrades in arms, and In the end, a reconciliation based on "the pain of war" was reached with the Indian soldier Ira Hayes, who had always been in conflict. The fear of war is deeply present for every soldier, and no one will really consider himself a hero, even the messenger who wants it most.
Against the shadow of such a huge shadow of the soldiers, the government that tried to package them as heroes and achieve their own goals was extraordinarily despicable. In the second half of the film, Eastwood focuses primarily on direct criticism of the government. The first is the flag-raising cake on the parade. From the medic's subjective perspective, the cake topped with strawberry jam has become a symbol of the soldier's sacrifice in battle, leading him back to the dark battlefield memories.
Afterwards, Eastwood made a big fuss around the act of "planting the flag"----the soldiers planted the first flag to show the fruits of their hard work and sacrifices, but this The flag was easily taken away by the Secretary of the Navy and became an insignificant souvenir. The disregard for the results and value of the individual sacrifices of soldiers in the war is the true attitude of politicians to this war; subsequently, the "two flags" came into being. Lie, only the second flag was photographed in the photo, so the politicians only arranged for the soldiers with the second flag to return to the country for a tour and gain honor, while ignoring the participants of the first flag and even completely unaware of it, here The expression and the previous "politicians' lack of concern for the list of real soldiers with flags" constitutes the same reference - politicians who do not pay attention to real soldiers' efforts and only use "flag-planting" as a means of political propaganda to achieve their own goals. ; The same expression also appeared at the end of the film. At the Marine Corps' commemorative ceremony, the parents of the soldiers who did not participate in the flag raising and were mistakenly included were not invited by the military due to the media exposure after the war. Ceremony----It doesn't matter whether he sacrificed or not, what matters is the identity of the person in the photo. The value of a soldier is not in the contribution to the war, but in the value of being a political propaganda tool.
And, in the beginning and middle of the film, Eastwood shows the same "ceremonial flag-raising performance" twice, letting the three protagonists plant the flag twice and receive cheers from the crowd, thus forming a contrast---- - At the beginning of the first movie, they looked so glorious, and the flag-raising was extremely glorious, but as the movie progresses, when this scene reappears, the audience has deeply understood the three people's shadow of the cruelty of the war, the death of their comrades, and the hands of politicians. The political significance of "planting the flag" is also on the horizon, and this scene has become the overthrow of the beginning. With the help of the frequent flashbacks of the medical soldiers when climbing the rockery, it nakedly exposes the politicians' true thoughts on war.
Even Eastwood directly denied all the meanings of the "flag" itself. Through the mouths of the soldiers and the progress of the plot, we can see that the politicians regard flag-raising as the victory of the war, in order to publicize it to the people and achieve their purpose of selling war debts. But in fact, after the flag was planted, it was a long battle and a huge sacrifice - including several participants in the flag. Flying the flag doesn't mean anything at all. All the so-called meanings are only forcibly conferred on the basis of other motives.
Politicians only pay attention to the value of their own use of flag-hoisting behavior, and only the soldiers who really participated in the war who really pay attention to the death of individual soldiers and the value of many comrades in arms. In the second half of the film, Eastwood uses the trio's encounter to show this. The messenger Reni Ganning wanted to use his status as a war hero to get a job, but he had lost his popularity in the post-war society and was no longer valuable in the eyes of politicians and businessmen, so this "outdated hero" ” He could only spend the rest of his life as a cleaner, and the value of being a participant in the war was completely denied. And the Indian soldier Ella Hayes once believed in the value of his struggle in the war-through his own efforts and his comrades-in-arms, he gained recognition in the mainstream society for the Indian ethnic group, so that he could usher in a new era after the war. more equal treatment. However, this is only his fantasy -. While parading the war debt, he was turned away by bar owners and called "Damn Indians" by politicians, even though he was still a high-profile war hero. Obviously, from the beginning to the end, Hayes did not really become a hero at any moment, and really had the respect that a hero should have - in the scene of being driven out of the bar, Eastwood finally panned the camera to the background The words "Salute to Heroes" are meaningful. And after the war, Hayes also realized again and again the cheapness of his sacrifices and sacrifices---his heroic halo was just a group photo of tourists and a copper plate. As for the equal rights of the Indians, it is naturally impossible to talk about it. "War hero" Hayes, after losing the value of being used, ended up being a cheap drunk at home.
After losing the value of political use, the hero of Iwo Jima flag-carrying is still like this, not to mention the unknown victims who have never been famous or photographed? In the eyes of politicians and society, their value and significance are not recognized.
The only people who can recognize the value of individual soldiers are the individuals themselves—the soldiers, and their families. In the first half of the film, Hayes and the medics repeatedly try to clarify the identity of the soldiers in the photos. After the war, Hayes also traveled all over the United States to tell the father of the sacrificed comrade-in-arms that his son was active in the photos. The medic who became the focus of the film, his obsession with his comrade Iggy lasted for a lifetime, and he personally told Iggy's mother about his son's experience at the last moment of his life. In the eyes of politicians, the sacrifice of individual soldiers is completely unimportant, but in the eyes of soldiers themselves, it is worth a thousand dollars.
The source of this disparity is revealed by Eastwood at the end of the film. The medics looked at the shirtless comrades who were happily playing in the water, and happily participated in it. At this time, the battle has not yet entered the middle of the game, and everything has not yet begun, and the soldiers still maintain their original freshness and vividness. And right after this splash, everything will happen. And that's something politicians in offices and dance parties will never see.
This is the fundamental reason for the differentiation between politicians and soldiers - in the eyes of politicians, sacrifices are just the number of war losses in statistical briefings, but soldiers can really realize that it is not a simple number, but a fresh line live life.
This film has a certain reference significance for the creation of similar themes in later generations. Ang Lee's "Billy Lynn's Midfield War" also uses a similar battlefield + local interspersed structure, and its purpose is also to A heroic packaging that expresses the government's twisted will of the soldiers for its own purposes.
Obviously, in the eyes of Hollywood artists, the U.S. government has always been creating wars, and it has always shown the inferiority of homogeneity in its response to wars. In the films of different periods and different wars, such themes and thematic expressions appear repeatedly, as if they were some kind of metaphor and mockery for the traditional ills of the contemporary American government.
But the flag defects of the fathers are also more obvious. On the theme of Americans and war, it does not have the inspirational and inquisitive nature of "Apocalypse Now" that "restores human nature with war, and reflects the ancient to contemporary war born from human primitiveness", but It is limited to the damage caused by war to soldiers, and leads to criticism of the government by comparing the attitudes of soldiers and the government towards war. This is a habitual path of American war movies, Oliver Stone's Vietnam War trilogy, "Field Platoon", "Heaven and Earth", "Born on the Fourth of July", and so on. And it lacks the two extremes, the impact of artistic expression of the evil colonel and the little Vietnamese girl in "Full Metal Jacket". On the contrary, it is "Letter from Iwo Jima" from the Japanese perspective. The emotional logic of the characters is more solid, the perspective from the Japanese side is innovative, and the same performance theme as the US military also brings a more macro and objective review and reflection on the war. mean. So it's no surprise that letters received more attention than flags at that year's Oscars. But in any case, compared to Eastwood, who gradually pursued objective expression and gradually turned the film into a pseudo-documentary in recent years, I still prefer the softer old cowboy with design and conveying feelings through design.
The father's flag was flying high, but it was only an artificially raised illusion by the government. In the hearts of true fathers, the flag does not exist.
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