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Another day may shine with brighter light
Reading that Lauren Schmidt and Greta Gerwig credit Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk (2017) with inspiring the temporal structures of The Witcher (2019–) and Little Women (2019) reminded me that I never wrote about one of my favorite moments in Nolan's movie, which exists only because of the cross-cutting of time.
I mentioned it in my original review: how the interplay of the three timelines that run in tandem on different scales "almost seems to recall a character from the dead." I should perhaps have said conjures. Someone we hadn't even known existed seems suddenly and hauntingly present, as miraculous and undeniable as the little ships themselves. The Moonstone is returning to England with a cargo of soldiers rescued from a bombed destroyer and a sinking trawler, men oil-soaked, sardine-packed everywhere from the hold to the gunwales. She's captained by Dawson, the middle-aged "weekend sailor" who earlier clocked a passing wing of Spitfires by ear: "Rolls-Royce Merlin engines. Sweetest sound you could hear out here." Now he orders his son to take the wheel and break their course on his mark: the new sound vibrating over the water belongs to a Messerschmitt Bf 109 coming in low. "Before he fires," Dawson cautions, "he's got to dip his nose." They have to stare down their incoming enemy, a raptor's dive whining louder and louder toward the fragile, overburdened chug of the motor yacht. At the last minute Dawson shouts, Peter throws the Moonstone hard to port, the Me 109 strafes the water and, cheated of its sitting duck, wheels off toward the French side of the Channel instead of coming around for a second run. Collins, the Spitfire pilot they saved from drowning in his ditched, damaged plane, asks frankly where Dawson learned that trick. "My son's one of you lot," comes the calm answer. "I knew he'd see us through." Quizzically, Collins looks at the tall blond boy in his fisherman's sweater: "You're RAF?" Peter shakes his head: "My brother. He flew Hurricanes. Died third week into the war." He uses the past tense, as most people do of the dead, where his father still speaks in the present. But Dawson is not within earshot of the correction: the shivering soldier pulled men from the sea bravely enough, but the clatter of the Messerschmitt's guns shocked him all over again and now he's crouched white-knuckled against the wheelhouse, shuddering for breath until Dawson takes him by the shoulders and gently guides him inside. Earlier he wouldn't let the shivering soldier near the wheel and with good reason, this volatile stranger so terrified of returning to Dunkirk that he blundered into violence trying to get the Moonstone turned around. Now he settles the younger man in place with a care that would not be sentimental to describe as paternal. And across the late afternoon beach of Dunkirk glides Farrier in his fuel-less Spitfire, the last of the air cover still aloft, as clean and soundless as a ghost. Between these two figures Dawson's dead son seems to hover, a spectral pilot, a wounded boy. When Collins crashed in the Channel, it startled the audience as much as it did Peter that his father lost his temper over the question of investigating a plane that went down without sign of a parachute. He might even have startled himself, as he tried to explain and faltered, even his gestures dissolving helplessly: "He may be alive—maybe—we may be able to help him—" It didn't seem to fit the dry, quiet, practical man we watched on the docks at Weymouth, carefully doffing his hat and jacket before taking a pleasure craft into a war zone. Now it is impossible not to imagine that he saw his son falling out of the sky in Collins' place, trapped burning or drowning, vanished into cloud. (Do not despair / For Johnny-head-in-air; / He sleeps as sound / As Johnny underground.) Speaking of him as if he were still out there somewhere on patrol, looking after his own. He's not, not in the sense that Dawson means or believes it—Dunkirk is not a ghost story, we're not talking the Angels of Mons. But for the grace of a few seconds, he's there all the same. Farrier with his Spitfire dying still took out a Stuka before it could bomb the mole on which the last of the evacuees of the BEF waited for their rescue. The shivering soldier returned to himself for long enough to help save the lives of men he failed once before. Sometimes the lost—or the given up for lost—are not so completely. No wonder I associated the film almost subliminally with the Archers. That is, after all, the entire point of A Canterbury Tale (1944).
After I'd reviewed it, I actually went back to see Dunkirk for a second time in theaters. I wanted to observe the structure now that I knew the gist of it; what I felt I ended up observing was the emotion. It's not a cold movie for all its chronological complications; in fact much of its horror and poignancy is mined not from suspense but from the clicking into place of information gathered, as if accidentally, from later moments in time. It holds up to rewatch on more than the puzzle-level. I am curious now what similar effects The Witcher and Little Women derive from their juxtapositions and revisitings. Also I want to rewatch Baccano! (2007). Anyway, I don't necessarily think in linear narrative, so I always enjoy seeing other people also not do it. This continuity brought to you by my restored backers at Patreon.
I mentioned it in my original review: how the interplay of the three timelines that run in tandem on different scales "almost seems to recall a character from the dead." I should perhaps have said conjures. Someone we hadn't even known existed seems suddenly and hauntingly present, as miraculous and undeniable as the little ships themselves. The Moonstone is returning to England with a cargo of soldiers rescued from a bombed destroyer and a sinking trawler, men oil-soaked, sardine-packed everywhere from the hold to the gunwales. She's captained by Dawson, the middle-aged "weekend sailor" who earlier clocked a passing wing of Spitfires by ear: "Rolls-Royce Merlin engines. Sweetest sound you could hear out here." Now he orders his son to take the wheel and break their course on his mark: the new sound vibrating over the water belongs to a Messerschmitt Bf 109 coming in low. "Before he fires," Dawson cautions, "he's got to dip his nose." They have to stare down their incoming enemy, a raptor's dive whining louder and louder toward the fragile, overburdened chug of the motor yacht. At the last minute Dawson shouts, Peter throws the Moonstone hard to port, the Me 109 strafes the water and, cheated of its sitting duck, wheels off toward the French side of the Channel instead of coming around for a second run. Collins, the Spitfire pilot they saved from drowning in his ditched, damaged plane, asks frankly where Dawson learned that trick. "My son's one of you lot," comes the calm answer. "I knew he'd see us through." Quizzically, Collins looks at the tall blond boy in his fisherman's sweater: "You're RAF?" Peter shakes his head: "My brother. He flew Hurricanes. Died third week into the war." He uses the past tense, as most people do of the dead, where his father still speaks in the present. But Dawson is not within earshot of the correction: the shivering soldier pulled men from the sea bravely enough, but the clatter of the Messerschmitt's guns shocked him all over again and now he's crouched white-knuckled against the wheelhouse, shuddering for breath until Dawson takes him by the shoulders and gently guides him inside. Earlier he wouldn't let the shivering soldier near the wheel and with good reason, this volatile stranger so terrified of returning to Dunkirk that he blundered into violence trying to get the Moonstone turned around. Now he settles the younger man in place with a care that would not be sentimental to describe as paternal. And across the late afternoon beach of Dunkirk glides Farrier in his fuel-less Spitfire, the last of the air cover still aloft, as clean and soundless as a ghost. Between these two figures Dawson's dead son seems to hover, a spectral pilot, a wounded boy. When Collins crashed in the Channel, it startled the audience as much as it did Peter that his father lost his temper over the question of investigating a plane that went down without sign of a parachute. He might even have startled himself, as he tried to explain and faltered, even his gestures dissolving helplessly: "He may be alive—maybe—we may be able to help him—" It didn't seem to fit the dry, quiet, practical man we watched on the docks at Weymouth, carefully doffing his hat and jacket before taking a pleasure craft into a war zone. Now it is impossible not to imagine that he saw his son falling out of the sky in Collins' place, trapped burning or drowning, vanished into cloud. (Do not despair / For Johnny-head-in-air; / He sleeps as sound / As Johnny underground.) Speaking of him as if he were still out there somewhere on patrol, looking after his own. He's not, not in the sense that Dawson means or believes it—Dunkirk is not a ghost story, we're not talking the Angels of Mons. But for the grace of a few seconds, he's there all the same. Farrier with his Spitfire dying still took out a Stuka before it could bomb the mole on which the last of the evacuees of the BEF waited for their rescue. The shivering soldier returned to himself for long enough to help save the lives of men he failed once before. Sometimes the lost—or the given up for lost—are not so completely. No wonder I associated the film almost subliminally with the Archers. That is, after all, the entire point of A Canterbury Tale (1944).
After I'd reviewed it, I actually went back to see Dunkirk for a second time in theaters. I wanted to observe the structure now that I knew the gist of it; what I felt I ended up observing was the emotion. It's not a cold movie for all its chronological complications; in fact much of its horror and poignancy is mined not from suspense but from the clicking into place of information gathered, as if accidentally, from later moments in time. It holds up to rewatch on more than the puzzle-level. I am curious now what similar effects The Witcher and Little Women derive from their juxtapositions and revisitings. Also I want to rewatch Baccano! (2007). Anyway, I don't necessarily think in linear narrative, so I always enjoy seeing other people also not do it. This continuity brought to you by my restored backers at Patreon.
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Extremely clever!
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Nine
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I can see how that would work, if the first time around you are learning the markers and the second time you can see them from the start. Is it as a bittersweet a film as that sentence sounds?
I cried both times, quite a lot.
You are not the first person who loved the film to tell me this.
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Does it also have a non-chronological structure?
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"Instead of foreshadowing, you get afterglow."
That sounds very good and does remind me of Dunkirk, the important things made visible in hindsight.
My hat is off to Gerwig for selling that concept to a studio, without a war to carry it.
I suspect the American classic status of its source material didn't hurt, but I take your point. The preface to the published screenplay for Dunkirk is a long interview with Christopher Nolan conducted by his brother Jonathan in which one of the points he makes is how much he didn't want Dunkirk to be a war movie, because he associates war movies, especially movies of the Second World War, with propaganda and nationalism and self-perpetuating mythology and the story of Dunkirk fascinated him, but he didn't just want to shellack the next layer onto the mythos; he thought of it as survival horror when he was writing the script because it would have been for anyone living through the evacuation. If there was heroism, he wanted it to be collective, not exceptionalist. Nobody makes it off the beach alone. Nobody knows what history looks like from inside. He scrapped the film's original closing shot because it turned out too mythological—Farrier's Spitfire burning on the beach, apocalyptic and elemental, the promise of fires to come—and pulled back to the expression on Tommy's face as he lays down the newspaper of Churchill's "We shall fight on the beaches" and just sits there on the train with the other rescued soldiers, trying to feel if these glowing, beautiful words speak to anything of what he's just lived through. When I read all of that, I figured Nolan must have been incredibly annoyed by all the thinkpieces gushing over whether Dunkirk was the best ever war movie.
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On the other hand, someone I know (who I guess has never read the book or seen any of the earlier film adaptations) actually complained about the extensive flashbacks! I cringed.
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I think I am going to have to see it: so many people I know love it for so many overlapping reasons. I happen to be one of the people who really likes the 1994 film version by Gillian Armstrong, but the structural stuff really intrigues me.
On the other hand, someone I know (who I guess has never read the book or seen any of the earlier film adaptations) actually complained about the extensive flashbacks!
I got bad news about their ability to enjoy Orson Welles.
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Nine
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I think I have a kind of a linear sort of recursive thinking; I go around and around things, picking up new stuff... but I don't slip and dance and dodge and jump, so I love it when other people take me on those journeys.
It's great to finally read this review--I've been waiting for the chance.
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To me, too. It feels crucial to me that it's part of Dunkirk and not just a trick of the timelines.
I think I have a kind of a linear sort of recursive thinking; I go around and around things, picking up new stuff... but I don't slip and dance and dodge and jump, so I love it when other people take me on those journeys.
I like the idea of your spiraling way of thinking. It sounds very Le Guin.
On some level I must think linearly because so far as we know time only goes one way, but it does not manifest that way, either in my writing or in my chains of thought when they become visible to other people. I have to do a lot of backfilling in my explanations. It happens.
It's great to finally read this review--I've been waiting for the chance.
I'm glad it was worth the wait!