Timelines / Eyelines
It’s embarrassing to be writing about what a goddamn genius Christopher Nolan is, since everyone already knows that, and he’s just another white male genius film director. But I can’t help it. He made two of my favorite movies, Memento and Dunkirk, and each one experiments with time brilliantly. Not just with formal brilliance, but with a genius for using narrative time to tell a story about human time.
Lots of classic films noir (or film noirs if you prefer the American version) were about veterans suffering from amnesia. Film noir was about disorientation, among other things, and what could be more disorienting than having amnesia, i.e., not remembering what happened to you, what you did, and who you are? When you have amnesia, you can’t even tell yourself a story about yourself or your life, you just become a subject of other people’s stories. In that sense, Memento is the perfect encapsulation of film noir. Nolan’s backward time structure puts the audience in the exact, disoriented position of the amnesiac protagonist. He doesn’t know what happened before and neither do we.
In Dunkirk, Nolan zeroes in on what makes the story of that battle so compelling — it brings together three different theaters of the battle, each with its own timeline: the week of entrapment, bombing, and doom experienced by the soldiers stranded on the beach; the day of rescue experienced by the sailors; and the hour of combat experienced by the pilots. And these three timelines converge in one brief scene at the film’s climax. It’s my favorite scene in one of my favorite movies but I didn’t understand why until I started choosing the stills.
The Context
Over 300,000 British soldiers are trapped by the Germans on the beach at Dunkirk in France under the watchful eye of Commander Bolton (Branagh), waiting to be rescued by hundreds of small civilian boats.
One small boat has already picked up a load of soldiers and is turning back to England.
One of the planes, piloted by Farrier (Hardy), completes its flight across the Channel and approaches the beach.
Just then, a German plane approaches to strafe the defenseless British soldiers. It begins to fire on the boat and the beach when, unexpectedly, it careens into the ocean, trailing smoke.
Get Joshua Hirsch’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Nolan generates surprise by actually eliding the moment of Farrier’s attack on the German plane. What we get is the emotional aftermath — the elation of the men on the beach and on the boat, who are just as surprised by this rescue-out-of-nowhere as the audience is.
While the film’s temporal structure is innovative (to me, anyway), there’s nothing terribly innovative about the way he stitches this climactic scene together. You can trace this form back to that racist fuck D.W. Griffith, at least. Nolan just does it extraordinarily well here.
It’s all about eyelines and points of view. These three forces that have been isolated from one another throughout the entire film — soldiers, boat, plane — at last come together for a massive, miraculous act of rescue that, writ large, saves the Allied war effort, and in the climactic scene, each of these forces sees the other. It’s that simple, it’s communicated with tremendous efficiency, and it’s all over in a few seconds. They see one another, and they are saved. It’s the seeing — the eyelines — that make the scene more than just storytelling, they make it cinematic.
Symbolically (and literally), the British people come together on that beach. They are not forced to do so by a dictatorship (according to the myth, anyway); they do it voluntarily, because it’s in their character. That’s what makes Dunkirk a perennial story. It reinforces a key myth about the British: that during WW2, they came together, showed what they were made of, and saved the day.
I suspect one of the other reasons Nolan’s rendition of this scene attracts me is the way he makes it heroic but not overblown. In the overblown Hollywood version, we would see Farrier’s face, a toothy smile hooting away, and a fist pump. We get none of that; just a masked pilot calmly doing his job.
