We Shall Film On The Beaches

After a late-nite screening of Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk in Florham Park, my brother and I exited the theater, and, expectantly, felt the accompanying urge to loosen our bladders. We made for the restroom, stood in line with pocketed fists, and patiently held our opinions on what we had just seen until the opportune moment for fraternal debate. So you can imagine my discomfort when, standing before the urinal line, we overheard a conversation between two additional audience members who had surreptitiously left before the credits concluded. I had to refrain from adding an argument to their terse exchange, to which I was obviously uninvited. (I can get slightly bullish now and then, often to my own detriment, and I am still learning when to best button my lip.)

They were—as best as I can remember—plaid-shirted, silver-haired, and generally WASPish. I give you a realistic if muddy description because while I didn’t know either of these gentlemen, I perhaps shouldn’t have been so surprised when a peculiar phrase, spoken by one of the pair, caught my ear—particularly this snippet (or something equally accurate): The film was well done, but it was difficult to understand “the language” the characters were speaking.

Being privy to this confession, my brother and I shared a stifled chuckle afterwards at the sinks, that, in the adjacent mirror, likely appeared on my own face as an all-too conspicuous self-righteous smirk; last I checked, English is still the lingua franca of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland—despite the protestations of the Welsh and Irish and Scots for their endemic Gaelic tongues?

I can’t mock these gentlemen too much. It’s unfair. The Atlantic Ocean has divided two societies both in mores and geopolitical importance, yet they are connected through the umbilical cord of the English language; consequently, both the United States and Britain (like all multi-ethnic nations) have become laboratories concocting an explosive number of accents and dialects, many of which are seemingly unintelligible in conversation with each other. The typical result of putting two or more together is often hilarity, which I cannot absolve myself from enjoying now and again. Most vivid in my memory is Brad Pitt’s rendition of an Irish Traveller in Guy Ritchie’s criminally underrated Snatch (2002); all these years later and I still can’t understand what he says without subtitles (but since I’m usually suffocating from laughter, I don't deign to care while I’m watching). Nolan’s Dunkirk demonstrated a similar conundrum for others in that sheltered venue in New Jersey, even while its subject and intent are disparate in setting and scope. Unlike Snatch, Dunkirk is thankfully no caper comedy.

Taking its title from the victorious defeat—or deceitful victory, depending on your own blend of optimism and pessimism—in the early stages of the Second World War, Dunkirk dramatizes the retreat of the Allies (mostly the British) off the shores of continental Europe even as the Wehrmacht encroaches on France and the Low Countries. A feeling of mournful imminence suffuses the film, which makes a point to keep the characters—and by extension, us—contained in crisp, almost primeval paintings instead of frames: a white beach, a dark sea, a spring sky. But do not be fooled by their apparent emptiness, however exquisitely shot. These are glass cages through which we as spectators glimpse at the possibility of deliverance, before our hopes are drowned in the growing din of the swooping, predatory Luftwaffe.

At least, this is Nolan’s goal. He has repeatedly asserted that this film is his attempt to attain “virtual reality without the goggles,” which is, at minimum, ambitious. Nolan has been touted as one of his generation’s finest filmmakers, whose cinema not only tugs at heartstrings but stirs minds into contemplation. What has also grown alongside his intellectualized reputation is his outspoken preference for old-school celluloid dressed up—mainly in new-school IMAX. Nolan delivers his latest endeavor in this spirit, and to respect the man’s fidelity to his medium, I saw this film twice in different formats. I admit that this was by chance, but my reasoning afterwards was nonetheless sound: I wanted to see if the seventy millimeter presentation did anything to enhance the story or if the merits of the film were somehow separate from its presentation. (Over 75% was shot in IMAX, the most of any of Nolan’s films.)

But I give myself away, because I’d see Dunkirk a third time to revel in what Nolan has accomplished. He has crafted a war film unlike any other in mainstream cinema that I have seen, making its supposed pitfalls prominent and its effectiveness resilient upon repeat viewings. As art it’s currently incomparable; monetarily, it has become the highest grossing film set in World War II. But these are not the only dimensions in which this film exists; it’s also a history piece, subject to accuracy assessments that can damn the filmmaker for an overlooked detail. The plea for artistic license is a coded prayer for consideration in an age of instant fact-checking, the click of a mouse becoming the beat of a judge’s gavel. The war film confronts these tension-fraught issues by definition.

In any genre there is encased predictability, which is why I love it. I know what is going to happen but I still wait for the other proverbial shoe to drop and I am still surprised by it despite its inevitably. The clichés are certainly not limited to a last-stand Thermopylae antic, stoic acceptance of death, violence as worldly and elemental, among others. (There are numerous lists online if one cares to sift through the particulars.) Simply put, genre endures because of its time-trusted familiarity, in technique as in story; Nolan dispels that familiarity by cutting your expectations out from under you. In Dunkirk, his penchant for three-scene cutting complicates time and place into a frenetic but comprehendible montage. He also subdivides his narrative into three chapters so to speak, each focused on a setting of the battle: land, sea, and air. He further assigns to each of these chapters a specific amount of time: a week, a day, and an hour respectively. The cumulative effect is one of disorientation. Certain scenes are played from different angles in different times, creating an equivalent to a cubist artwork in motion. Nolan pulls apart the seams of traditional narratives in war films and stitches them into a different order that feels fresh and careful, a feeling that extends to the characters as well upon inspection. The hint is in the title. The real subject is a situation, temporally precise and geographically constrained; it’s not about a Private Ryan, made-up or real, much less about saving one. Expect no amusing anecdotes or tragic deaths in the family, not even from pop-star and teen idol Harry Styles (whom Nolan reportedly cast unknowingly).  All characters in this film—irrespective of being real or fictional, a random stand-in or Sir Mark Rylance—are reduced by the moment into a single infectious instinct: survival. I barely noticed the lack of blood onscreen because of the enervating suspense to which I was constantly adjusting myself, akin to Hitchcock on a battlefield.

In the theater I could not help but recall Orwell’s chilling, morbidly funny opening from his essay “England Your England," written in 1941 in the middle of the Blitz, in the direct aftermath of Dunkirk: “As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.” He then describes at length the peculiar spirit of Britons as a distinct populace, unified in defense of what Churchill called their “island home.” What ties Orwell’s essay, Churchill’s orations, and Nolan’s film together is a conscious appraisal of Britain’s role in a larger Europe that is unavoidable and somehow renewable with each successive generation.

The timing of Dunkirk was perhaps unplanned. But now that we are a year removed from the referendum to leave the European Union, it has forced a reckoning with the past that has provoked and stoked ire, particularly on the moldy memory of the Empire that persists in the public mind. It’s hard not to see the parallel between the historical Dunkirk and the present-day Brexit, the obvious similarity being that they both involve the British ostensibly retreating from a messy foreign entanglement, one with the eventual purpose of returning to fight, and the other of marching backwards. It’s difficult to ignore this parallel. Of the few lines spoken by a Frenchman (or any other non-Anglo-Saxon) in the film, the one that rings loudest is at the beginning, spoken from behind a barricade and amidst conducted cacophonies of gunfire: “Bon voyage, anglais.” Combined with imagery of boyish soldiers squatting in the sandy mud, somewhat eerily reminiscent of the refugee camp called ‘the Jungle’ near Calais (itself close to Dunkirk), you can’t help but think this is all meta-commentary.

Nolan, as an Anglo-American himself (He was born in England but spent his childhood in London and Evanston, IL), is not above any of us in examining the effect of history on the present and vice-versa, nor is he free of personal bias on behalf of the story he chooses to tell. The multitude of criticism leveled against Dunkirk takes on an equal number of volumes, a loud one being that the film whitewashes the actual history of the battle by failing to portray the Indian and North African soldiers who assisted the British and French against the Nazis (who were primarily deployed in the inner regions of the continent in contrast to the evacuation dramatized).

I do not agree with this assertion. The truth, as I see it, is that we have been spoilt by omniscient cinema. Dunkirk has impact because of Nolan’s deliberate trimming of perspective and the overall quietness of the film (Hans Zimmer constructs an atmospheric soundtrack rivaling those of Vangelis.) The only exposition is a couple of lines written onscreen after a thrumming title card. By focusing on choice characters just trying to be safe, Nolan keeps the audience on the brink of attaining security without allowing them a moment of levity. It’s a defensible decision that heightens the quality of what is shown and also what is not shown. You understand the limits of what you can see, so you doubt what you can know; World War II, arguably the most storied and routinely mined conflict for entertainment, was perfect for Nolan to create a film in which not a single Nazi appears and Hitler isn’t even name-dropped. He subverts the expectations we have of something so ingrained in our culture. Dunkirk is not an epic. All entertainment must be held to historical accountability, but it also must be contextualized in what the film itself attempts to achieve. What did Nolan wish for Dunkirk to do?

Then you see it. Or rather, you are implicitly invited to conjure an image of it. Here is mine: away from the grim future that lies ahead for Europe, you see the rolling green of Albion, and revel in its poetic, even Tolkien-esque depiction because you see it with those who treasure it beyond measure, even if they do not say it so deliberately; and even though you can close your eyes you understand that soon fire will test this 'Shire'.. But tonight, for once, the sea is calm, and the white cliffs of Dover stand as sparkling sentinels against the relentless storm of the Third Reich. I will spare you my rose-hued rambling, but this is what cinema can invoke at its best; maybe it can cloud my analysis in retrospect.

The soldiers are reminded, after all, that they just had to survive. But survive they did, a gratitude and a tired resolve expressed in the quivering voice of Tommy who reads some familiar words from a newspaper about a certain special relationship (without which, according to Nolan, this film would never have been financed ironically): 

“We shall never surrender, and if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.”