By Tom Kando
Nowhere else is political correctness more virulent than in Hollywood. The two best received movies in memory are Brokeback Mountain (2005) and Letters from Iwo-Jima (2007). This prompted me to write the following insight in February of 2007:
In many scoring systems, reviewers give four stars to the best movies, three to the next best, and so on down to zero stars for the worst films. The Sacramento Bee reproduces the scores given to movies by a sample of critics nationwide - Ebert and Roper, the New York Times, etc. Every week we can see how the latest movies have been scored by half a dozen "experts" around the country. There is hardly ever total consensus. A great movie might get four stars from half of the experts, but only three from others, etc.
In all the years that I have followed these ratings, I can only remember two movies which received a perfect score, i.e. four stars from every single reviewer: Brokeback Mountain (2005) and Letters from Iwo-Jima (2007). The first of these movies is about a gay love story between two Wyoming cowboys, filmed beautifully in the grandeur of the Rocky Mountains. The other one is about the battle of Iwo-Jima viewed from the Japanese perspective. It is spoken entirely in Japanese, with English subtitles. Its director is Clint Eastwood.
These two pictures received the greatest adulation of any movie, ever. Brokeback Mountain also swept the Golden Globes and was nominated for and won numerous Oscars, as did Letters from Iwo-Jima.The unanimity of the nation’s reviewers is astounding. Were these same experts to rate today such classics as Citizen Kane, Singing in the Rain, Casablanca, Spartacus, Gone with the Wind, foreign gems like Les Enfants du Paradis, more recent masterpieces like Schindler’s List, and spectacularly entertaining movies like Titanic or Amadeus, they would not give them a unanimously perfect score.
What could account for these two movies’ stunning popularity among the opinion leaders? I am convinced that this can only be explained politically. That is, the intelligentsia saw no alternative but to unanimously declare these two movies to be the best ever - ahead of all other films ever made. Political correctness demanded this. In the case of Brokeback Mountain, giving it a perfect score was the only way to avoid the risk of being called homophobic. In the case of Letters from Iwo-Jima, the risk was being called xenophobic. So much for free and independent thought.
As for my own rating, I give Brokeback Mountain three and a half stars. It is a beautiful movie and a courageous movie. The plot is somewhat convoluted. It is good, but not the best ever.
I give Letters from Iwo-Jima three stars. It is riveting, well acted, and it renders the gruesome and bloody battle accurately.
However, in the end, it is a fairy tale, because nearly every Japanese soldier and officer is depicted as a man of courage, honor and integrity, a hero who can do no wrong. It is possible to make a balanced movie that shows the enemy’s perspective and grants him dignity while remaining realistic. Tora Tora Tora was such a movie. So was Young Lions. And there are many more.
But as I said, Letters from Iwo-Jima is a fairy tale. It is not courageous. It is opportunistic. It rides the wave of political correctness, knowing that this will produce great rewards in ultra-liberal Hollywood.
Eastwood must know that most men are flawed and that the Japanese are no exception, to put it generously. Yet the only truly beastly deed in the entire movie is committed by two American marines, when they shoot two innocent Japanese POWs. This is a cheap shot. We know from war statistics that Americans have always treated enemy POWs far more humanely than others have: When the Russians defeated the German Third Army in Stalingrad, they captured about 100,000 German prisoners. Five percent (!) of these survived Russian captivity. The survival rate of Russian prisoners captured by Germans was about the same. And what about the Japanese? Thousands of American POWs died in the Bataan death march. The Nanking massacre was pure and simple genocide. Throughout World War Two, Japanese soldiers raped and enslaved thousands of women in China, Korea, and throughout the rest of Asia.
Unlike the Germans, the Japanese have rarely shown contrition about their war crimes, and we rarely hold them accountable. Instead, the American media often bring up the tragic internment of Japanese-Americans during the war. Could this double standard be because the Japanese are non-European, and criticizing them could be construed as an expression of Eurocentrism, which is one of the worst sins, accordint to the intelligentsia?
Should someone make a movie about World War Two from the German perspective? Should Hitler be mentioned in it with the same equanimity as Tojo is mentioned in Letters from Iwo-Jima? Clint Eastwood is now getting rave reviews, perhaps an Oscar, and universal adulation from Hollywood and from the intelligentsia. However, nothing becomes as dated as a fad. Remember Billy Jack? Popular at the time, a bad joke now. Or Easy Rider? Still revered by aging hippies, but embarrassing to the rest of us. The same fate may befall the latest faddish movies as well.
As an immigrant and therefore somewhat of an outsider, I am always puzzled by the unrelenting sense of guilt which plagues American liberals. They cannot, for a moment, stop flagellating themselves and entertaining the thought that their country is wrong. Letters from Iwo-Jima is one more manifestation of this unhealthy habit.
© Tom Kando 2014
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