Review: Dunkirk (2017)

The Lie of Dunkirk

by Kurnia Cahya Putra

Dunkirk (2017)

Directed by Christopher Nolan

Starring Fionn Whitehead, Damien Bonnard, Aneurin Barnard

Warner Bros. Pictures Production

I picked up Todd McGowan's The Fictional Christopher Nolan out of recommendation from a friend who managed to apply her deeper understanding of a certain cinematic technique (from another one of McGowan's works) into her Dunkirk review. I figured this book was the most fitting to help me achieve that same goal of elevating my own Dunkirk review as it was specifically about Nolan. In it, the main thing that I found to be discussed was that "the lie" plays a central role in every Nolan film (i.e. the audience is duped into thinking that Teddy is John G. in Memento, Batman hides behind a notion that he's a murderous criminal in The Dark Night, etc.). Unlike any other filmmakers, though, the lie in Nolan's films is not a corruption of truth, but rather a path to arrive at the truth. For instance, in Memento (spoiler alert here), the truth is that Leonard (who suffers from short-term memory loss) has killed John G. a long time ago and is now willing to kill Teddy who reveals that to him because he wants to maintain his purpose in life: finding John G. Only by believing the lie, which is that John G. is still out there, that Leonard (and the audience) is driven to look and finally finds the truth. On the other hand, in... let's say The Sixth Sense, the truth is that Malcolm is actually a ghost all along, and to get the shock value when this revelation comes, Shyamalan presented it by hiding it with the lie, so at the end of the day, the audience has no choice but to look at the lie as a separate entity as opposed to being a crucial part of the truth.

Why is this different approach from Nolan is important, you ask? According to McGowan, a fictional film in itself is a lie, because it is not reality (obviously). Therefore, it's clear now that by using this technique, Nolan is making the audience actively believes in his movies. He's immersing them, pulling them into his world by getting them completely fooled.

When we go to the cinema, we allow ourselves to be misled and thus distracted from our everyday lives. But filmic fictions, through their power to deceive, make manifest the truth of the extra-cinematic social reality. In the cinema, a society reveals its repressed desires, its hidden fears, and its implicit ideological imperatives. By highlighting the power of film to deceive and by remaining faithful to film’s fictional structure, Christopher Nolan unveils the ethical potential of the cinema. (McGowan, 2012, pg. 07)

You may argue that Dunkirk is not a fictional film as it is an account of a historical event. However, the main characters, save for a few, are fictional, which makes for what happens to them fictional as well. Therefore, it aims to reach the same goal as Nolan's other fictional films, which is why it also utilizes the lie. Story-wise, Dunkirk doesn't have a lie the way Memento or The Prestige does, but the lie takes form in another way: its construction of the plot.

Dunkirk is told in three different places with three different spans of time: the air which occurs in one hour, the sea which occurs in one day, and the land which occurs in one week. The three timelines stream alongside each other and meet at the third act. Although this is clearly stated at the beginning through chyrons (and even then, many people still missed it), this structure is unconventional enough in the way the audience is being misled one way or another, and they can only piece what happens only after they have finished the movie that it warrants to be called the lie. As McGowan put it, "Nolan gravitates toward the superhero for the same reason he is attracted to a formal structure that deviates from a forward-moving chronology and shuffles narrative time. In both cases, truth is inseparable from what misleads us..." (McGowan, 2012, pg. 07).

So, what is the truth in Dunkirk? The most obvious one: war is ugly. Plain and simple. There's nothing good about it. However, and more importantly: there is no such thing as cowardice in war. At the beginning of the film, we're shown the way in which characters save themselves that would potentially prompt the most extreme of the audience to call them selfish or cowardly: Tommy and Gibson pick up a wounded soldier so they can be on the ship that will send the wounded back to England, Gibson himself turns out to be a French lad who takes the identity of that soldier he picked up in order to blend with the Brits, Harry Styles threatens Tommy and Gibson to get out of a boat they're in so that it wouldn't drown even though the Germans are shooting outside, Cillian Murphy accidentally attacks a teenager to the point that he's fatally wounded because he's fighting with a man who will bring him back to Dunkirk, and so on. One character even asks another bluntly, "Is he a coward, Mr. Dawson?", and Harry Styles cannot even bear to look out the compartment window when he arrives back home out of fear that the people will spit at him and mock him.

At the end of the film, however, none of us arrives at that truth. Through his very detailed use of atemporality, or in this context, the lie, Nolan heightened the harrowing nature of war (for a more comprehensive elaboration of this, do read my aforementioned friend's review of Dunkirk) to the point that we can only conclude: those people do what they have to do. Yes, even Harry Styles. In the quote above, McGowan says that "Christopher Nolan unveils the ethical potential of the cinema." (McGowan, 2012, pg. 07), and he did just that with Dunkirk. During the whole film, I questioned myself, "What would I do? Is that the right thing for (a certain character) to do? Would doing this bad thing be better than this other bad thing?" and I became thankful that I will never have to answer them. Most have approved of Nolan's unmatched technical achievement in this (as well as the works of others involved (i.e. Hans Zimmer's exceptional score)), but many are disappointed and have critiqued it for having a simple story. I personally believe that that's not the point, and for that, I got a fulfilling experience (as my first IMAX experience, too) and could only hope that those with said criticism could someday see what I see: a masterpiece of an anti-war film. 9/10.

References:
McGowan, Todd. (2012). The Fictional Christopher Nolan. The University of Texas Paper: Texas.