DUNKIRK: Stress/Disorder

Director: Christopher Nolan
Writer: Christopher Nolan
Cast: Fionn Whitehead, Mark Rylance, Barry Keoghan, Tom Hardy, Kenneth Branagh, Cillian Murphy
Runtime: 106 mins.
2017

Dunkirk begins with a ticking clock. British soldiers pick through rubble as demoralizing fliers float down from the sky. The quietude is suddenly ripped asunder by the deafening pop of gunshots from unknown assailants. A young boy's companions fall away one by one; these shots are the starting pistol for a narrative that will not stop. Nor will the clock.

Dunkirk is everything Christopher Nolan has been working towards for the past twenty years, the magnum opus of his career. Who would have thought that a director who so adores high concept sci-fi would find his ultimate muse in World War II history? For Dunkirk is a culmination, the purest and most precise version of Nolan's creative mechanism. Accused of cold, systematic, unfeeling narratives--he has made a film about the cold, systematic, unfeeling nature of large scale military efforts. Accused (justifiably) of fridging women to motivate his protagonists--he has excised all women to create a hell of masculinity, and done away with all personal motivations beyond that of survival. Accused of hamfisted exposition and sloppy plotting--he has made a film in which the plot and dialogue only matter insofar as they allow the viewer to understand the magnitude of danger weighing on any given moment.


The evacuation of Dunkirk takes place in three distinct registers: The Air, The Sea, and The Mole (i.e. the beach). These registers also take place over different timelines: minutes, hours, and days, respectively. Far from oversystematizing the suspense, these different geo-temporal registers allow Nolan to be borderline experimental with the way he represents peril. Leaving behind the familiar war film rhythm of action and lull, Dunkirk endeavors to never relieve the viewer's tension, crosscutting between endless dire circumstance without privileging order and continuity. Lee Smith's editing is designed to disorient, placing the audience viscerally in the experience of the nameless soldiers and their trauma.

And oh, the glorious trauma. I was flabbergasted to learn after the fact that Dunkirk is rated PG-13; the subjective intensity of the violence surpasses every R-rated war film I've ever see exept for that famous stretch of Saving Private Ryan. The key word there, then, is subjective. Everything I've mentioned so far--the anonymity of the soldiers, the ticking of the clock, the disorienting editing--as well as the things I've yet to mention--the booming sound mix, the indiscernible dialogue, the tactile practical effects--all conspire to make Dunkirk an exercise in sheer subjectivity. We don't need overwhelming blood and gore to shock us into an empathetic reaction, because every cinematic tool at play transports us to this place of trauma.

The effect is even more potent for the brilliant score of Hans Zimmer. In what is surely their greatest collaboration in a series of great collaborations, Zimmer's pounding atmospheria has finally found the perfect marriage of form and content in Nolan's avant garde thriller. The purpose of a film score is to give the audience a scaffolding upon which to hang their emotions; quantitative and qualitative musical shifts are cues for viewers to gain an affective relationship with what is being represented. Musical scores establish a status quo punctuated by moments of emphasis. Zimmer's score, however, attempts something unheard of: making the status quo, the baseline, the very fabric of the film one of peak emotional intensity. This isn't supposed to work. Such excess is a surefire way to wear an audience thin, or give them too much of a good thing. It violates fundamental tenets of narrative, and yet... Nolan's entire film is meticulously, successfully designed to maintain this propulsion for the entirety of its 106 minute runtime, so Zimmer's constant barrage also retains its effectiveness for longer than it should. Dunkirk is the ultimate manifestation of Zimmer's impulses.

I have heard it said that every war film, no matter its intended theme, is in the final analysis a pro-war film due to the way that representation of action and violence in cinema is so gloriously beguiling, especially when an audience is made to see this world through the lens of a protagonist, a hero soldier. It seems to me that Dunkirk has done the improbable by short circuiting that theory. There is no glory in the film, no hero, no individual who triumphs against his enemies: only raw animal survival, anonymous bodies being smashed and shredded. Perhaps most importantly, there aren't any enemies. In one of the most subtle, crucial choices of the film, at no point do we see a single German soldier. Bombs are dropped from some nebulous altitude, gunshots crack and echo from everywhere and nowhere. It gives the impression that, rather than fighting against a demonized, politicized Other, these soldiers are combating the senseless caprices of an uncaring universe.

When the film is ending and a character with whom we are passing familiar picks up a newspaper to read Churchill's famous address, we do not feel pride, or righteousness, or a swell of jingoism. We feel empty. The soldier's toneless, washed out delivery of the speech alienates us from the patriotic celebration of British fortitude (just as such celebrations are happening outside the window of the train car in which the speech is recited). It may be the film's cruelest trick. As we sit with these soldiers wondering why we can't find pleasure in making it through the battle intact, why we still feel so wrong, we realize something: For the first time in a hundred plus minutes, the ticking has stopped.

4.5 / 5  BLOBS