OK. So I went to see Dunkirk, because the reviews have been almost universally excellent, and because (a) it was endorsed by Nigel Farage, and (b) everyone pointed out that Farage had missed the point. Farage missing the point is hardly news; but I wanted to see how he'd missed it.
(In what follows, there may be spoilers. But since what actually happened at Dunkirk is a matter of record, and since there're no twists, I'm not too fussed about that. I'll say a little about a couple of characters, but nothing that'll mar the film.)
Now, I can see why Brexiteers are getting all excited about the film. Dunkirk is part of the British national story, and anything that tells a story about plucky British fortitude in the face of a threat from Ze Hun is going automatically to have them wanking themselves square then round again. In other words, it matters little what the content of the film actually was: it'd've been coopted into the Brexit narrative somehow. No contortion would have been too wild, because if you've got a fixed idea about that threat and a need for the British to retreat back to the safety of Blighty in the face of a threat from the Continent... well, you get the picture.
And I know I have an idée fixe about Brexit from the other side, too. But this is my blog, so you'll have to lump it.
Anyway: back to the point I was going to make, which is that those Brexiteers have missed the point entirely. Dunkirk's an avowedly anti-nationalist film. And that's apparent from the first minute - from before any character appears on the screen.
The first thing we see is a one-sentence preamble telling us about how the British and French armies have been forced into retreat by "the enemy". Note that Christopher Nolan doesn't talk about the Allied forces being forced into retreat by "the Germans" or "the German Army" or anything like that. "The enemy" is in a way more menacing - but it's hard to see how it's anything other than a deliberate move so as not to name the Germans. One might go a bit further, and infer that Nolan is indicating that Nazism was not German, or at least that there's a clear distinction to be made between what might have been done in the name of Germany and what was done in the name of the Third Reich. There might be mileage in that - lots of contemporary Germanophiles thought so - but it's not a rabbit I want to chase here. It's enough to point out that, in the most obvious way, Nolan has deliberately avoided making this a story about Germans and Englishmen.
Thus primed, I would encourage anyone who's not seen the film to count how many times the word "German" or its cognates is used. I did: I think it's four. In all cases (which appear over about 3 minutes in total), it's used as an accusation of untrustworthiness. So far, so standard war-movie. But it's always from the same character. And that character is a terrified, paranoid, dangerous idiot, who is looking for someone to blame, and someone to shoot.
That is: the only person who makes a direct reference to Germans is someone with whom you wouldn't want to be in a confined space. Other British characters are, by turns, doughty, brave, or - in a couple of cases - cowards. In other words, they're exactly like most people. They are not made saintly by dint of being British.
Now, there are atrocities committed by the enemy. A ship that's clearly marked with a red cross is bombed. I don't know if that happened in reality. But even there, the bomb is from a machine. We don't see the face of the pilot. By and large, the enemy is unseen. There is a brief moment when we see actual members of the Wehrmacht; but in that moment, when it would be very easy for them to kill a defenceless man, they don't. They are not made evil by dint of being German.
In other words, the enemy can't be identified with a particular nation. We know the origin of the enemy, but Nolan doesn't labour the point. Nation doesn't really matter to the film he's made, which is about people in a situation behaving as people do. He could have made appreciably the same film about any conflict, real or fictional. Hell, he didn't even really need a conflict. Except that, by making a film set in the second world war and not talking about nations or national character, he gives quite a clear message about nations and national character.
Quite clear, but not clear enough for some. Farage doesn't really do nuance, and he can't really see beyond the nation. It's little wonder he misunderstood what he saw.
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