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Daniel Clarkson Fisher<\/strong> reviews Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, and discusses the moral obligations of the artist, the WW2 combat genre, and the potential for a ‘truly radical flowering’ of progressive film culture.<\/em><\/p>\n In keeping with his penchant for enormity, Christopher Nolan\u2019s new film Dunkirk <\/em>arrives at the intersection of two large and complicated questions: \u201cDo movies about combat ever end up coming across as anything but pro-war?\u201d and \u201cWhen should issues of form precede those of content in film criticism?\u201d A big-budget dramatization of the harrowing, real-life evacuation of over 300,000 Allied troops from the beaches of the eponymous French village, the director\u2019s latest fits squarely within the World War II combat genre. But does it escape the warmongering trappings of such films?<\/p>\n In addition, as a significant technical achievement, Dunkirk<\/em> has garnered not only boffo box office and awards buzz, but also near-universal critical acclaim \u2013 all without having to endure very much in the way of substantive conversation about its meaning and message, or the aforementioned problems of the genre in general. But how necessary are these conversations? And to whose way of thinking?<\/p>\n Searching for moral perfection<\/strong><\/p>\n We should start by stating the obvious: while there might be some overlap, the priorities of professional film critics are very different from those of us contributing to Culture Matters<\/strong> who are engaged in \u201ca \u2018broad left cultural struggle for a better society.\u201d While offering a political dissection of Dunkirk<\/em> might be our department, it\u2019s not, as a rule, theirs.<\/p>\n By way of illustration, in his widely-read piece \u201cIntolerance,\u201d written for Film Comment <\/em>in 2013, the New York Film Festival\u2019s Kent Jones suggests that \u201cholding an artist working in a popular form to the standards of an activist or a statesman and condemning him for failing to escape the boundaries of his own moment is a fool\u2019s game.\u201d<\/p>\n Now, obviously this perspective isn\u2019t shared by every single critic and publication: The Nation<\/em>\u2019s Stuart Klawans is one example of a notable critic firmly rooted in leftist politics, and then there\u2019s the magazine Cineaste<\/em>, which offers what it calls \u201ca social, political, and aesthetic perspective on the cinema.\u201d However, I think it would be accurate to say that a fairly large cross section of film critics share Jones\u2019s view that politically-minded criticism amounts to little more than \u201csearching for moral perfection in artists.\u201d<\/p>\n Zero Dark Thirty<\/strong><\/p>\n Consider the critical response to Zero Dark Thirty<\/em>, Kathryn Bigelow\u2019s 2012 dramatization of the hunt for Osama bin Laden. In most critics\u2019 eyes, neither the CIA\u2019s deeply dubious involvement in the production nor the film\u2019s deleterious suggestion that torture might have been helpful in locating bin Laden were enough to detract from the high level of its craft: the film appeared on dozens and dozens of \u201cbest of the year\u201d lists, often in the #1 spot.<\/p>\n Even critics who were sufficiently sober about its very real issues still allowed form to reign over content in their evaluations. \u201cAs a moral statement, Zero Dark Thirty<\/em> is borderline fascistic…barely distinct from a boneheaded right-wing revenge picture,” writes critic David Edelstein in his review for Vulture<\/em>. “[But as] a piece of cinema, it\u2019s phenomenally gripping–an unholy masterwork.\u201d It\u2019s not that Edelstein is wrong exactly, but reviews like this (and there are many other examples) demonstrate a tendency within popular film criticism to give far more weight to a film\u2019s artistry than any serious political and\/or social concerns it might raise.<\/p>\n John Ford\u2019s racism and paternalism<\/strong><\/p>\n Worse still, attempts to flip this tendency, or even level the playing field, are usually met with resistance. Jones\u2019s Film Comment<\/em> piece, for instance, came in response to remarks made by Quentin Tarantino, in which he dismissed John Ford and his work as racist. While Jones challenges Tarantino\u2019s reading of Ford and his films in constructive ways, and cautions well against throwing babies out with bathwater, he also says:<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s curious that American culture and history are still so commonly viewed through a New Left prism, by means of which 1964 or thereabouts has become a Year Zero of political enlightenment; as a consequence, the preferred stance remains that of the outsider looking in, or in this case back, at a supposedly gullible and delusional pre-Sixties America.\u201d <\/em><\/p>\n The implication here is that if we hold Ford to a higher standard than he held himself, we\u2019re being ahistorical. As if that weren\u2019t a shaky enough assertion, Jones goes farther, painting the period with a rather broad brush. \u201cIs Ford\u2019s vision \u2018paternalistic?\u2019\u201d he asks. \u201cI suppose it is…but the culture was paternalistic.\u201d This gross universalization captures the zeitgeist, of course, but it also manages to erase any trace of the radical thinkers and movements that were present at the time, including and especially within Hollywood (among Ford\u2019s contemporaries were Paul Robeson, Dorothy Parker, and Dashiell Hammett, to name just a few). While Ford and his films reflected a lot of people\u2019s views, they certainly didn\u2019t reflect everyone\u2019s, particularly the paternalized. So who\u2019s really \u201cde-complicating history\u201d here, then?<\/p>\n Keep Calm and Carry On: The Movie<\/strong><\/p>\n It\u2019s in this bourgeois critical milieu that the Film of the Moment has been enjoying an incredibly warm reception. But Dunkirk<\/em> isn\u2019t Zero Dark Thirty<\/em>, and Christopher Nolan isn\u2019t John Ford. It\u2019s entirely possible that critics have gotten it mostly right this time. Indeed, Culture Matters<\/strong> has already published a largely positive review from Michael Roberts<\/a>, which should tell you a bit about where it falls on the scale of problematic works of art. In addition, with fascist movements currently flexing their muscles (in the U.S. and elsewhere), it\u2019s understandable that few are in the mood to nitpick a movie with a clear-sighted take on the European theatre of World War II.<\/p>\n There have been quibbles from critics and others about whether or not the film downplays the role of the French at Dunkirk, and admonishments over its failure to depict any of the Indian soldiers in the British Army, but it\u2019s also clear that Nolan (who grew up living between England and the United States) is trying to understand something about an English stereotype here: as many have previously noted, Dunkirk<\/em> is essentially Keep Calm and Carry On: The Movie<\/em>.<\/p>\n It is not a sprawling epic (at 106 minutes, it\u2019s actually the second shortest film in Nolan\u2019s oeuvre), but something much more specific and intimate: a British-American writer-director unpacking the significance of a story he was often told growing up. In doing so, Nolan has decidedly not made a film about every single group and faction that took part in \u201cOperation Dynamo,\u201d but rather one about those most personally connected to the evacuation site; for each and every character, it\u2019s not just a place of retreat that they\u2019re trying to get to, but their \u201chome.\u201d (That said, there\u2019s no reason Nolan couldn\u2019t have shown some of that historically accurate diversity in at least one of the film\u2019s many crowd shots, and he should absolutely be held to account for that.)<\/p>\n To his credit, Nolan also breaks with quite a few war film conventions here. For one thing, Dunkirk<\/em>\u2019s lead character, Tommy (played by Fionn Whitehead), as well as several supporting characters, engage in behavior that would pigeonhole them as worthless cowards in even the most hallowed entries in the World War II combat genre. Think, for example, of Steven Spielberg\u2019s Saving Private Ryan<\/em>, and how Jeremy Davies\u2019s lily-livered private is shown to be pathetically ineffectual: he can\u2019t even muster the courage to stop a death that would have been easy to prevent, and the best he\u2019s ultimately capable of is a war crime (shooting an unarmed prisoner).<\/p>\n Terrence Malick\u2019s ostensibly anti-war The Thin Red Line<\/em> does a bit better by Adrien Brody\u2019s perpetually petrified GI, but, in the final analysis, he\u2019s just as useless and even more one-dimensional. In Dunkirk<\/em>, though, every character, even the most traditionally \u201cheroic\u201d in the bunch (Tom Hardy\u2019s dashing, dog-fighting pilot), has moments of fear and trembling. For Nolan, faintheartedness isn\u2019t a defect, but a feature of anyone and everyone\u2019s experience of war.<\/p>\n Some handle the pressure with a stiffer upper lip than others, but bravery doesn\u2019t necessarily guarantee salvation or survival either. In a bout of self-loathing, a young private (played by One Direction\u2019s Harry Styles) says in response to congratulations, \u201cAll we did was survive.\u201d A civilian volunteer (played by Nolan\u2019s father Brendan) reassures him: \u201cThat\u2019s enough.\u201d Even Cillian Murphy\u2019s unnamed \u201cshivering soldier,\u201d whose jitters end up causing the most harm, is compassionately understood as badly shell-shocked, and not lacking in backbone or moral fibre.<\/p>\n In addition, Nolan\u2019s decision to completely eschew blood and guts (save for one or two drops of red in a key moment) is a wise one. Not only is the gore-heavy, quick-cut style of World War II films like David Ayer\u2019s Fury<\/em> and Mel Gibson\u2019s Hacksaw Ridge<\/em> thoroughly played out, but it\u2019s an open question whether or not that kind of sensory overload has any real value: what these filmmakers call gritty and authentic, others might call fetishistic and desensitizing.<\/p>\n The more impressionistic and brooding style of Dunkirk<\/em>, on the other hand, really puts the viewer in a place of understanding about the stomach-turning tension and dread that soldiers there faced. \u201cWar is hell,\u201d as the saying goes, and Nolan makes us feel the anxiety of it like few films have. A $100 million production shot largely with IMAX cameras, it\u2019s a sensory experience, to be sure, but, refreshingly, one genuinely aimed at offering a new understanding.<\/p>\n But can a combat film ever really alter our perspective on war? In \u201cIs There Any Such Thing as an \u2018Anti-War Film\u2019?,\u201d one of his BBC.com columns, Tom Brook writes:<\/p>\n \u201c\u2019There\u2019s no such thing as an anti-war film,\u2019 is a quote often attributed to the late French filmmaker Fran\u00e7ois Truffaut. There are different ways to interpret this remark but it\u2019s widely agreed that Truffaut was suggesting that movies will inevitably glorify combat when they portray the adventure and thrill of conflict — and the camaraderie between soldiers.\u201d <\/em><\/p>\n On this score, Dunkirk <\/em>probably would have gotten a big thumbs-down from Truffaut. In particular, the aerial battles are designed to be unabashedly rousing, and they borrow as much from Star Wars<\/em> as Tora! Tora! Tora! <\/em>Camaraderie is also at the heart of this whole enterprise, as the film\u2019s tagline makes abundantly clear: \u201cWhen 400,000 men couldn\u2019t get home, home came for them.\u201d<\/p>\n Truffaut may have been right, but, coming full circle, I do think the filmmaker\u2019s politics matter too: whether explicitly stated or merely implied through the work, every director comes to the table with a particular point of view. It\u2019s therefore neither correct nor helpful to write off all war movies as exactly the same, even if there are problems inherent to the genre as whole. Ideologically speaking, there\u2019s a world of difference between, say, Top Gun <\/em>and Paths of Glory<\/em>, despite the fact that they are both fit into the combat genre, more or less. We should absolutely talk about the limitations and traps of the genre, but also recognize the need to parse individual filmmakers and their films carefully.<\/p>\n The centre-left politics of Dunkirk<\/strong><\/p>\n So what are Christopher Nolan\u2019s politics, and how do they show up in Dunkirk<\/em>? The director likes to suggest that he\u2019s an apolitical filmmaker, but it\u2019s very hard to take these comments at face value because…well, there\u2019s no such thing as an apolitical filmmaker. Obviously, then, the work can\u2019t and doesn\u2019t bear out his claims.<\/p>\n For example, when he insisted to Rolling Stone <\/em>that The Dark Knight Rises<\/em>, the third and final film in his Batman trilogy, wasn\u2019t \u201cintended to be political,\u201d it seemed absurd: among other things, that film depicted literal class warfare, a nakedly fascist police state, acts of terrorism, kangaroo courts, and a Gotham City-style storming of the Bastille. Not \u201cintended to be political,\u201d indeed! Similarly, Nolan has explained that Dunkirk <\/em>does not include any heads of state or scenes of \u201cwar room\u201d strategy-making because he didn\u2019t want to get \u201cbogged down in the politics of the situation.\u201d But, of course, a movie can be plenty political without characters and scenes like these.<\/p>\n All of this is not to say that Nolan is some kind of political hack. The Baffler<\/em>\u2019s Jonathan Sturgeon recently served up a poorly argued takedown of the director, in which he calls his work \u201cTory porn.\u201d It\u2019s telling, though, that Sturgeon gives Nolan\u2019s films only the most superficial of readings (even badly misrepresenting a couple of scenes), and spends an inordinate amount of space \u201cimagining\u201d what he must be like on-set.<\/p>\n This piece might work as click-bait, but it fails as fair and thoughtful criticism. Much more convincing and even-handed are Jeff Spross and Zack Beauchamp of ThinkProgress, who argue that Nolan\u2019s Batman films betray his centrist liberal worldview. The authors point out that the trilogy\u2019s story arc resonates strongly with the work of political theorist Judith N. Shklar, and demonstrates that Nolan has clearly \u201cmounted a layered defense of liberal democracy against its authoritarian opponents\u201d with his Dark Knight cycle.<\/p>\n The centre-left label certainly fits elsewhere in his body of work. Interstellar<\/em>, for example, offers a terrifyingly realistic vision of Earth\u2019s future, but is far less interested in confronting the anthropogenic roots of climate change than it is in visualizing science\u2019s possible workarounds. In this regard, it\u2019s the perfect film for a neoliberal establishment that keeps avoiding the self-reflection and large-scale changes that are going to be necessary if we want life to continue on this planet. In addition, the dapper corporate spies of Inception<\/em>, hypocritically trying to \u201cconvince the heir of a major corporation to dissolve his father\u2019s empire,\u201d would likely appreciate the anti-monopolistic sentiments expressed in the U.S. Democrats\u2019 new \u201cBetter Deal\u201d plan.<\/p>\n Dunkirk<\/em> evinces a centrist liberal outlook as well. In one suspenseful moment, the aforementioned shivering soldier demands that his civilian rescuers turn away from Dunkirk and head back to England. Trying to make a case for the futility of their efforts, he notes that the middle-aged yachtsman at the helm (played by Mark Rylance) is \u201can old man.\u201d \u201cMen my age dictate this war,\u201d he replies. \u201cWhy should we be allowed to send our children to fight it?\u201d In this moment, Dunkirk<\/em>\u2019s preoccupation with personal responsibility, the political centre\u2019s favourite hobby horse, is boldly underscored.<\/p>\n Moreover, in the scene that seems most like Nolan\u2019s commentary on Brexit (the referendum took place in the middle of principal photography), Tommy sticks up for a French deserter in disguise. His fellow Brits want the outsider to vacate a civilian vessel that they\u2019re all hiding in: waiting for the tide to take them away, they need to lose some weight in order to leave sooner rather than later. \u201cBetter him than us,\u201d the groupthink goes. \u201cHe\u2019s not one of us.\u201d But Tommy says no, pointing out that the Frenchman earlier saved their lives; they\u2019re necessarily allied with each other whether they like it or not. It\u2019s not a stretch to imagine Lib Dems interpreting this \u201cwe\u2019re all in this together\u201d moment as Nolan\u2019s \u201cremain\u201d vote, rightly or wrongly.<\/p>\n Of course, when it comes to projects of this scale, determining a film\u2019s politics encompasses more than just locating the auteur on the electoral spectrum. As a big-budget, studio tentpole, Dunkirk<\/em> has promotional considerations, and some of those undermine what Nolan is doing. In particular, the partnership with the video game \u201cWorld of Warships\u201d is not only contrary to the film\u2019s spirit, but crassly commercial and jingoistic. The embrace of Dunkirk<\/em> by people like Nigel Farage also raises an evergreen question: \u201cHas a work of art sufficiently conveyed its message if it can be so easily and successfully co-opted by unsavory figures?\u201d Finally, there\u2019s the revelation that the film was one of several Warner Bros. productions that the U.S.\u2019s oligarchic Koch brothers, Charles and David, have silently invested in over the last four years. We should ask questions about their interest in helping shepherd Nolan\u2019s vision to the screen, beyond the obvious financial one.<\/p>\n In the end, though, I don\u2019t think Dunkirk<\/em> raises nearly as many alarm bells as a lot of other war films, and it rather impressively manages to subvert some of the genre\u2019s most objectionable tropes. It is by no means a radical work, but its centre-left disposition is welcome, incremental progress in a genre that more often than not tends toward frightfully conservative values. At the same time, though, maybe filmmakers like Nolan could devote their energy to more robustly progressive projects that don\u2019t come fraught with the baggage of combat pictures. In addition, film culture could stand to step up its game when it comes evaluating films like Dunkirk<\/em>: it may seem pretty innocuous when compared to something like Zero Dark Thirty<\/em>, but it has its troublesome aspects too.<\/p>\n Movies Matter<\/strong><\/p>\n Again, while the mandates of professional film critics and Culture Matters<\/strong> contributors do diverge, it\u2019s too glib by half to dismiss political readings of films as \u201csearching for moral perfection in artists\u201d and leave it at that. Movies matter, and as much as we may want to confine them to analyses that are purely abstract in nature, they have real world impacts. We\u2019ve seen them used effectively as propaganda, protest, and everything in between.<\/p>\n It\u2019s imperative, then, as Martin Scorsese writes in his New York Review of Books<\/em> essay \u201cThe Persisting Vision: Reading the Language of Cinema,\u201d that we \u201cunderstand the difference between moving images that engage [our] humanity and [our] intelligence, and moving images that are just selling [us] something.\u201d We can only do this by asking hard questions of our popular culture, as Marc Nash does in his recent article<\/a> in Culture Matters.<\/strong><\/p>\n So it\u2019s both right and important to ask (and continue asking) whether or not Dunkirk<\/em> pushes us to think critically or not about war. The more we probe films like it and demand better, the greater the likelihood of a truly radical flowering in the cinema that we can feel good about supporting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Daniel Clarkson Fisher reviews Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, and discusses the moral obligations of the artist, the WW2 combat genre, and the potential for a ‘truly radical flowering’…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":462,"featured_media":12272,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1664],"tags":[2027,2025,2035,2033,2034],"class_list":["post-12274","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-films-2","tag-christopher-nolan","tag-dunkirk","tag-john-ford","tag-scorsese","tag-tarantino"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12274","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/462"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12274"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12274\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12274"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12274"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12274"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"DCF](\"images\/culture\/CM_Misc\/DCF_Zero.jpg\")
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