The Patreon Letters - August 5, 2017 (Patreon)

Hey everyone, M here today. I have to admit I’m struggling to come up with a topic for the letter this week. Jackson kind of stole the idea I had for last week’s, and while I don’t begrudge them that, I’m sitting here staring at this blank screen with a sense of dread that puts me in mind of my young, fiction-writing days when blank windows were a constant source of stress.

I don’t really talk about it much anymore, but there was a good three years when my Internet Presence and free time was wrapped up in being a movie critic online. I’m not going to act like I was fantastic at it, but if you want to check out my old, long-abandoned movie site you can. It was the hustle of trying to go from hobbyist movie critic to someone who was freelancing or had a staff position that burned me out, to the point where I honestly just stopped watching movies for a good three years. Which is a very long pre-amble to say that I don’t do much with movies, but in searching for a thing to talk about, I decided to review a movie I saw recently, so 

In the immortal words of Mr. Ray Arnold, in the seminal film Jurassic Park:

Hold onto your butts.

DUNKIRK (2017)

War films are a strange subset of historical drama. They are often built for a different audience, because war history folks are a culture onto their own. They flirt with genre, be it heist or action or high adventure. They walk a strange line where the art is often seen as anti-war because war is concretely destructive and awful, but because narratives must be told and that involves individual actors and the motivations of real nations they so easily veer into propaganda. 

The totality of armed conflict is beyond the scope of any movie, and thus each one has to provide a frame of compression, driving a sense of time and import into however many fictional hours are depicted into however many minutes a film runs. Whether you consider that an inherent failure or the reality of art being only representational is down to the viewer. Personally, I go back and forth. I hate Saving Private Ryan for its narrow-minded sentimentality. I love Paths of Glory for its narrow-minded fatalism. And if you think that’s just because I’m a fatalist, I liked Spielberg’s War Horse for it’s hyper narrow sentimentality about how horses are good, actually, and make people good by existing near them. 

What I’m saying is, art is inconsistent. 

 M̶u̶c̶h̶ ̶l̶i̶k̶e̶ ̶C̶h̶r̶i̶s̶t̶o̶p̶h̶e̶r̶ ̶N̶o̶l̶a̶n̶.̶ 

Because of this impossibility of scope, then, a war film is perhaps a natural fit for Christopher Nolan. Before he got famous making Batman a dour trudge through post-9/11 justifications, he came into my awareness with a chronologically scrambled neo-noir named Memento. I don’t think Memento is obscure these days, so I won’t belabor the point, other than to say playing with time frames is how Nolan cut his teeth. Inception also uses time as a framing device, as seconds dilate into minutes or hours or years the deeper down you go into the levels of a person’s mind. The abutment of massive, disjointed narrative structures with temporal trickery is old hat for Christopher Nolan, a strange thing to be practiced at in a world where entire careers are devoted to explaining to you what it meant that Armadillo Man™ rushed into the party at the end of the movie based on a comic nobody read even tho it’s been collected on amazon for $6 for a decade. 

What this means for Dunkirk then is a movie that encompasses a week of real life with three different frames, each taking space over a different span: a week with soldiers on the beaches of Dunkirk waiting for escape, a day with a fishing boat from Weymouth conscripted into service to head across the channel to provide evacuation aid, and an hour spent with a trio of fighter pilots over the skies of the channel, on the lookout for bombers aiming to lay waste to the men on the beaches and the boats making the voyage. These three ideas of time, laid on top of each other, are windows of different magnification through which moments are reflected and repeated and given new contexts. One moment of triumph becomes a moment of danger when seen more closely. A character imperiled turns out to have suffered injury a day ago, the resolution already delivered to us before we see how it all plays out. 

This creates a sense of confusion, but confusion is accurate to war. Dunkirk is a percussive film, not in that it is action-packed but in that it is dynamic and decisive in its choices of action. A great expanse of endless ocean and endless sky competing for which can be more grey and foreboding, as the beach rapidly contracts as the enemy closes in and people grow more desperate for release. The grim faces and long, infinite silences are punctuated only by terror: bombs dropped, shots fired, ships sinking as men shout in unison as they bob in the waves. I jumped probably a dozen times in the film, clinging tighter and tighter to my arm rest, knowing only that one disaster would beget another, and that the longer things were quiet the more sudden and more fatal the fury that would break that calm. 

We are introduced to characters in this framework, but without names of note and with little characterization. They don’t have characterization anymore. It’s been stunned out of them through tense nights on the water and seconds of sheer torment as they come under fire or watch the boat they narrowly missed getting on sink the minute it left the beach. Each of the main characters becomes a suggestion of more than themselves, not just one man but ten men, a hundred men, another lens of magnification meant to allow this narrow frame of a film to represent a truth that happened to hundreds of thousands of people for more than week in a war that lasted years and scarred an entire generation.

There’s nothing fun about Dunkirk. It is unpleasant and upsetting and offers long stretches of nothing to grasp onto before assaulting you with noise. You watch people you barely know have fleeting moments where they could exercise agency as people, only for the war to chew them up and either takes their life or their will to live. At the end, Dunkirk is evacuated, because we know it must be. The war continues. Nothing is learned, and these survivors will go on to definitely suffer and potentially die in future battles. What does it matter to us? Well, perhaps it doesn’t. We’ve been at war forever. It is likely we will never not be at war again in our lifetimes. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t have a responsibility to depict it as best we can and hold it up for us to try to grasp at. 

Film can arguably be seen as technology bent to art, an imperfect science of compression to turn the incomprehensible into something for us to digest. If we view film that way, then the bigger the incomprehensible reality the more vital the act of transformation and the more forgivable the imperfections of that transmutation if it allows us more understanding. If that is the lens by which you look at Dunkirk, with it’s impersonal microscopes of time, then turning a machine of abstraction onto depicting a machine of death is very important art. Is it good? I ask, by what measure? I came out of it dazed, but with a sense of understanding more of a complex reality that is hard to understand. I think that counts as success, and when you’re dealing with a nebulous magic such as this, success is, perhaps, everything.