Recently the New York Times ran an op-ed from a columnist for the Times of London lamenting the timing of the release of Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk.
“Nothing could be less helpful to our collective psyche as the country blunders toward Brexit,” wrote Jenni Russell. “The essential message of the film, with its narrative of heroic retreat in order to fight another day, cannot help but feed the national pride in Britain’s capacity to triumph eventually, no matter what the odds. . . . Dunkirk is remembered so fondly only because, in the end, Britain was on the winning side. That wasn’t down to our plucky spirit. It was because America, with its overwhelming resources, entered the war.”
The revival of “the Dunkirk spirit,” Russell explains, represents is a “stunning misunderstanding” of what the country is really about at present. “We don’t have the skills, the manufacturing base, the drive or the productivity we would need to take off as an independent nation,” writes Russell. “For years, Britain’s inadequacies have been compensated for by its membership in the European Union. Now, they are about to become painfully apparent.”
Dunkirk has received a smattering of criticism for its scant character development and limited dialogue. But these complaints miss the movie’s underlying power.
For example, it is nearly impossible to hear or understand the lines of Tom Hardy’s pilot—the few lines he actually has, that is—because they’re almost all spoken through an oxygen mask. And yet the key to the character isn’t his words, but the furious chalk markings on his plane’s dashboard as he tries to calculate how much fuel he has left. Or how he wordlessly glides over the beach after his fuel is exhausted. One colleague remarked that Dunkirk is nearly a silent movie. Another way to put it is that it’s a coherent assemblage of memorable images in which character is revealed through action.
To my mind the central image of Dunkirk is of the civilian sailors—weekend boaters, fishermen, ferrymen—reaching the shoreline to rescue the troops stranded on Dunkirk’s beach. Middle-aged men, many older with wizened, sea-weathered faces setting about a job they never imagined they’d be pressed into: Rescuing their nation’s cold, wet, hungry, and terrified Army.
These sailors crossed the channel to save their boys. And the boys were children who had offered up their own lives to protect and defend their parents. It’s incredibly poignant.
This is the central fact of the Dunkirk evacuation—the retreat was not “heroic.” For the troops, as one character says late in the movie, it was enough they survived. Nor, for the civilian sailors, was rescuing the British army a heroic gesture. Rather, it is what is expected of parents. Of this kind of duteous courage, the poet Jack Gilbert wrote, “it is the normal excellence.”
The film Dunkirk is not an epic. It depicts just one chapter in a larger struggle between the forces of light and darkness—and only a few paragraphs of the chapter at that. But it’s about other things, too. Like many of Nolan’s films, Dunkirk is about a family which is broken, or on the verge of breaking, and the struggle to save this central source of individual and collective belonging, identity, and love. In this case, the family is the British nation. I’m reluctant to stake out a position on someone else’s family, mind you. But it strikes me as odd to suggest, as Russell did in her Times essay, that there aren’t “enough British workers, with the right attitudes and the right skills, to fill the country’s jobs.” That “the economy has stagnated since the economic crisis.” That the education system is a mess. And yet the solution to this British carnage is to continue on the same path.
That is, if what Russell sees around her are the fruits of E.U. membership—if this is the societal, political, and economic weaknesses that membership in the European Union has obscured—then what good is the European Union anyway? Isn’t it more important that Britain puts its own house in order?
One of the big stories of Brexit, you’ll recall, was the number of older voters who came out in favor of leaving the European Union. (Fifty-nine percent of those who came of age before the E.U. was created voted to leave it.) These are the voters more likely to tell themselves that, as Russell writes: “We are the nation of empire, whose ancestors once controlled a quarter of the globe; we are the mother of parliaments; we stood alone against Hitler; we have not been conquered for a thousand years. We feel remarkable.”
Three quarters of those between the ages of 18 and 24 voted to remain in Europe. And this swath of the electorate didn’t appreciate, as many of them put it, pensioners robbing them of their futures. “The older generation has decided upon a future that they won’t even be a part of and young people will have to deal with this,” one unhappy young voter wrote on twitter after the referendum last summer. “Thank you for making young people’s futures unclear. We’re just a terrible bunch anyway,” tweeted another. And another: “Baby boomers screwing the younger generations over YET again.”
But isn’t it possible that the rising generation angry at what they perceive as an effort to cut them off from the rest of the global community misunderstood the motivation of their elder neighbors, countrymen, and parents. These people weren’t punishing their children—they believed they were rescuing them from impending doom in Europe.
It’s hard to know yet who was right. Certainly the pensioners have a broader range of experience to draw on. But it’s also true that the greying warm themselves at night with handsome legends of their youth, their strength and glory.
Britain’s ultimate victory was, as Russell writes, dependent on America. But the country’s survival depended on something nearer at hand: The perseverance of 400,000 boys on a beach and the fathers and mothers who went to fetch them.
