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From: Lubelski, Lance Ray <[email protected]>

Review of Rikke Schubart and Anne Gjelsvik, eds.* Eastwood=92s Iwo Jima:
Critical Engagement with Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima*.
London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2013. Pp. xii, 281.
Reviewed by Lance Lubelski, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Clint Eastwood as one of America=92s chief cinematic paragons of hegemonic
masculinity in front of the camera has been well-established in film
studies.  What has to now been insufficiently explored within academic
circles is his work from behind the camera in depicting masculinity.  The
volume on =93Eastwood=92s Iwo Jima(s)=94 attempts to tackle Eastwoodian
masculinity within the genre of the war film.  The attempt by Schubart,
Gjelsvik, and their contributors is occasionally compelling, frequently
uneven or downright confusing, often repetitive, and unfortunately plagued
by non-standard English usages, factual errors, and sloppy research methods=
.
        The inspiration for the edited collection is Eastwood=92s =93diptyc=
h=94
of films surrounding the Battle of Iwo Jima, which took place in February
and March of 1945.  The =93diptych=94 was filmed in 2005 and released in 20=
06
under the titles *Flags of Our Fathers* and *Letters from Iwo Jima*.  The
contributors make much of the fact that this is the first time that a
mainstream American filmmaker has made two films in two different languages
about the same event.  In general, the contributors appear overly sanguine
and complimentary about Eastwood=92s achievement within the two films while
not being allowed the space to dig deeply into their respective themes.
        The decision to write this volume was the result of a one-day
conference about Eastwood=92s two films at the University of Southern Denma=
rk
which took place in May of 2008.  As such, most of these scholars hail from
European, and especially Danish, institutions.  Out of this conference
emerged fourteen articles and an introduction which make up the volume.
 The book has four parts: =93History,=94 =93Flags of Our Fathers,=94 =93Let=
ters from
Iwo Jima,=94 and =93War Today.=94  In their introduction, Schubart and Gjel=
svik
contend that two overriding questions guided production of the volume: =93W=
hy
two films?=94 and =93[T]o what use can we put Eastwood=92s diptych in think=
ing
about war today?=94 (2).  The answer to the first question becomes clear ve=
ry
quickly (Eastwood needed to do two films for the sake of narrative clarity
and consistency), while, disappointingly, none of the contributors offers
anything resembling a satisfactory answer to the second question.  These
two simplistic questions are emblematic of the volume as a whole, extending
even to the banal title of the book itself: they try to do too much and
simultaneously achieve very little of any intellectual merit.  That is, the
book has not been thought through properly.
        Most of the chapters hover somewhere between the obvious and the
unnecessary.  Mette Mortensen makes some obvious comparisons between the
flag-raisings on Iwo Jima and that in New York City at Ground Zero after
the 9/11 attacks before tacking on an unnecessary analysis of a Danish
video about the war in Afghanistan that apes the imagery of Iwo Jima.
 Bjorn Sorenssen offers a piece about the cinematographer on Iwo Jima=92s
Mount Suribachi that has nothing to do with Eastwood=92s films.  Martin Edw=
in
Andersen writes about race and culture as depicted in the figure of Ira
Hayes in *Flags of Our Fathers*.
        Part Two, on *Flags of Our Fathers*, works slightly better.  Robert
Eberwein traces some uses of the American flag in various American films.
Gjelsvik presents Emmanuel Levinas=92s ideas about an ethics forged through
acknowledging the face and the call of the other but fails to make a
convincing reading of how Levinas may be applied to Eastwood=92s two films.
 Indeed, she does not even attempt to use Levinas to understand *Letters
from Iwo Jima*.  Holger P=F6tzsch delineates two types of
memory=97=93communicative=94 and =93cultural=94=97that he fails to clearly =
explain or
show how they work within the film.  Glenn Man does somewhat better,
convincingly demonstrating that *Flags* is a postclassical film while*
Letters* is a classical one.  Robert Burgoyne=92s two articles effectively
show the elements of the horror genre that are present in the two films.
        In Part Three, focusing on *Letters*, Schubart invents the term
=93minor utopian=94 to describe Eastwood=92s ethical and moral stance in ma=
king
the film, but she does not pursue the idea very far.  Lars-Martin Sorensen
describes four types of Japanese nationalism that all feel like they run in
to one form in his analysis.  Mikkel Bruun Zangenberg sets up a dualist
tension between humanism and patriotism that Eastwood is =93trapped=94 with=
in,
but the problem is that Eastwood nowhere eschews either idea in his work.
 Zangenberg illuminates another huge problem with the volume: he, like many
of the contributors, erects a straw-man argument that he can then demolish,
though the issues posed by he and many of the other authors are usually
inconsequential.
        The final part of the volume, =93War Today,=94 is the weakest and m=
ost
pointless.  Vibeke Schou Tjalve argues that (surprise!) governments use
propaganda to sell wars.  Finally, Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen makes a garbled
argument trying to connect Iwo Jima with the ongoing War on Terror.
        Frankly this reviewer was relieved to be through with the volume:
it is redundant, uneven, and riddled with errors.  Schubart and Gjelsvik
repeatedly have recourse to incomplete sentences.  They and other
contributors cite Wikipedia as a legitimate source in their endnotes.
 Sentences frequently read awkwardly in essays by authors whose first
language is not English.  Further, research is sloppy, as when Tjalve gives
the date of Machiavelli=92s The Prince as 1532 even though he wrote it in
1516.  Overall, the authors have recourse to tokenism and cursory
treatments of their subjects and analyses.  In short, the volume falls far
short of the minimum that an academic publication should achieve.
        Despite containing a few compelling articles, the book fails to
properly interrogate and analyze Eastwood=92s Iwo Jima films.  This reviewe=
r
can only hope that an adequate book on *Flags of Our Fathers* and Letters
from Iwo Jima will come along sometime soon.

Lance Lubelski, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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