- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
I was all set to shake my head sadly at Spike Lee too, because I absolutely love Clint Eastwood's Iwo Jima movies and have a lot of respect for him as a director. But the fact is that there *were* 900 Black troops on the ground there. They were not Stateside doing supply and munitions work (as many Black troops were made to do) but in combat, and while 900 is around 3.5 percent of the total number of troops on the ground there, it's not an insignificant number. Not 5 or 6, not 25 or 30. 900.
But what gets me is this October 2006 Guardian article:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/oct/20/usa.film
The Black marines they interviewed felt like they'd been erased from history. They described how cameras had been deliberately turned away from them--in 1945, apparently, no one, apparently, wanted Black and White soldiers to be seen working and fighting together. All these veterans wanted, apparently, was just a couple of Black extras to represent them, to provide some public acknowledgment of their existence and experience. No main characters, no multicultural re-imagining of the flag-raising frieze, although one of the veterans points out that it was his scrap metal that was used for the pole.
What makes a good war movie or book is less the story it tells than the accuracy with which it tells it. It needs to honor, respect, and above all not gloss over the soldier's experience. Anything else is propaganda. That was the whole point of "Flags of Our Fathers," wasn't it? To show the reality behind that historic, incredibly photogenic, literally too-good-to-be-true moment and how it could be distorted, mutilated, and reshaped for official purposes without regard to the people who took part and risked (or gave) their lives for it. Anything less is suspect.
I don't think Eastwood deliberately meant to perpetuate this serious inaccuracy, or omit the experience of Black veterans. But if he honestly thought, with all the research he'd presumably done for this movie, that there'd been no Black soldiers on Iwo Jima, then they effectively *have* been erased from history.
I think Spike Lee was right, and I look forward to his movie--but with a critical eye. I want to see *him* get it right and not sacrifice accuracy for ideology.
