ABSTRACT
Ramsbottom-Isherwood explores Letters from Iwo Jima as a unique Hollywood deconstruction of America’s WWII ʻenemy’, the Japanese soldier. Read as a film forced to reappropriate the wartime racist image of the Japanese by altered twenty-first century political needs, the author examines Letters alongside its sister film, Flags of Our Fathers, arguing that the recounting of the Iwo Jima battle from the diptych’s overlapping angles attempts to heal past American/Japanese rifts through creating a ‘shared collective memory’. Yet, as Ramsbottom-Isherwood demonstrates, reviving the dead is costly, for Letters inadvertently not only reanimates the ghostly wounds of a Japanese past that refuses to die, but also cuts lesions between itself and Flags that contradict its own claims. Revealing the wider allegorical tension between a surface (conscious) memory (flag/Flags) and a subterranean (unconscious) one (buried letters/Letters), which pulls the films’ attempt to be a ʻshared collective memory’ apart, Ramsbottom-Isherwood argues that the excavated letters work as a negative exception to the light of memory ʻmade public’ by the film. For, positing itself as ʻexhuming’ buried memories, Letters unintentionally sheds light on what it is trying to excise from history.
