In 2017, writer-director Christopher Nolan released his much
anticipated war outing ‘Dunkirk’ which polarized audiences worldwide
right from the moment ‘go’. One group, to which I belonged, hailed it as
a work of imaginative triumph and as an instant classic, while the
other group criticized it for the lack of a human core and labelled it a
bland and pretentious by nature.
Much hate in particular was
vented towards the non-linear narrative, which the naysayers of the film
rendered needless and out-of-the-place within the subject matter of the
film. This brief write-up of mine hopes to prove the contrary.
1. Conflict
Although I am aware of the exceptions to this rule (Walden, Man With A
Movie Camera, Chelsea Girls to name a few), it goes without saying that
almost of all the movies we see thrive on the progression from the
establishment of a conflict to its resolution/non-resolution. They make
the work engrossing and act as an invisible adhesive that joins scenes
together by giving them a route of focused and logical progression. The
fracturing of time ‘is’ the conflict of Dunkirk with its incoherence
prodigiously utilizing our inherent need to juxtapose the events in
linearity so as to draw us into the work. Many have argued that Nolan
should have rather opted for a straightforward, linear narrative, but
they do so in complete ignorance of what the film hopes to accomplish in
the first place – portraying war through a collective consciousness
rather than an individual one. A conflict situation in the context of
Dunkirk would have only emanated in a linear narrative had it been
approached from an individual perspective (say The Pianist) or a
battalion perspective (like Saving Private Ryan), but doing so would be
completely at odds with the crux of the movie. The nature of the
narrative acts a syntax here doing what Rosebud does in Citizen Kane,
molding into a cohesive whole what would otherwise have been hanging
threads, full of potential but no viable means of exploring it with.
2. Nature
Dunkirk is a work epic in its scope and fittingly, so are the
antagonists at play in it – land, water, air. Less is inflicted on the
Allied forces by the ‘enemy’ compared to the hindrances the elements of
nature bring to the fore. The non-linear narrative enhances the feeling
of entrapment omnipresent in the film by creating the sense that all
events are materializing at the same time, which contributes to the
development of an aura that all the elements of nature have risen up
together at the same time, up in arms to prevent the escape of the
soldiers stranded at Dunkirk. It levels the stakes to an unparalleled
high which otherwise wouldn’t have been possible.
3. Time
As a medium, cinema lets us fracture time, elongate it and more
importantly in this case, compress it. The evacuation of Dunkirk is so
massive in its scope and so distant in its varying geographical settings
that to have to make this film with a linear narrative would have meant
risking a runtime mirroring a Tarr or Diaz film, a risk Nolan couldn’t
afford to take considering the production values riding on the film.
More importantly, the non-linear narrative helps put a clock on the
events, menacingly ticking louder and clearer with every passing scene.
Nameless these soldiers remain, but the clocks act as a connective
tissue making them human and knowable to us, causing us to care almost
beyond bearing about their fates and in process, transfixing us to the
screen, watching in fear of what might happen to them. And us.
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