In writing my essay of narratology, I became particularly interested in the use of time as a setting, rather than just a passive entity which allows the story to progress in chronological order from beginning, to the middle, to the end.
We have all seen time manipulated in books and film before – Back to the Future Parts I, II, and III, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and Avengers: Endgame (if you think this is a spoiler, you’ve been living under a rock) are all prominent texts which manipulate time within the story. Here it is not just a story telling device, but a part of the plot.
We have also all seen movies and read books where time only exists in terms of the chronological movement of the plot. Pride and Prejudice, New Moon, Trickster’s Choice, Lilo and Stitch – all of these texts recognise time only as something to move the story along. Perhaps there is a time skip represented by the changing of seasons, or by Keira Knightley slowly revolving on a swing as she contemplates love, family, and the inevitable screeching of her mother at dinner – but time is not a part of the plot, as it is in Back to the Future, and it is not a complex method of storytelling, as it is in Dunkirk.
Look. A lot of people have analysed time in Dunkirk. I get it. Been there, done that. But I wanted to briefly look at how Christopher Nolan manipulates time in this movie for three reasons: one, I’d get to watch the film again; two, Harry Styles was in a movie with Tom Hardy and, to quote my mother, “yes please“; and three, time is so complicated and such a major force in the telling of the story that it is unlike anything else I’ve ever seen. It is such a huge component in the movie that even the music was created with an auditory illusion to mess with our perception of time. Enter Vox:
There are three main plots in Dunkirk: The Mole which centres around the English soldiers attempting to escape from Dunkirk’s beaches; The Air, which follows Tom Hardy and his fellow Spitfire pilots as they attempt to repel the enemy; and The Sea, wherein the sailors of the ‘little boats’ from England travel across the Channel to evacuate their boys. The Mole lasts a week, The Sea lasts a day, and The Air lasts an hour. And the events of all three timelines converge right at the end.
The first time I watched this movie I had no idea it would be such a complicated viewing experience. I’m fairly sure it took me a solid hour to understand that the events unfolding on the screen were being presented to me out of order, and in a form of controlled chaos which really messed up my understanding of the story until I finally had that light bulb moment (full disclosure here, I’m fairly certain that until this point the only other Nolan film I had seen was The Dark Knight, so I wasn’t expecting this level of linear manipulation on a Friday night). I never knew where we would be going next, who I would be afraid for, or whether or not I had already seen the outcome of this scene in the back of a previous shot.
This movie was emotionally exhausting, and Nolan’s decision to disregard the usual, chronological presentation of events was a major contributor to how tight my shoulders were when I finally left the movie theatre.
This entire post is a very long winded way of saying that Nolan’s decision to completely re-write time to serve his own creative purposes was a fantastic narrative technique which contributed greatly to the film’s overall sense of desperation and suspense. The narrative switches between the viewpoints of multiple characters, most of whom are conveying their message to the audience with minimal dialogue and maximum emotion. It is, as Gerard Genette would put it, presented in a mimetic narrative mode, wherein the author is showing and dramatising the narrative rather than putting the focus on the actual telling of the story.
The most dialogue we get comes from Commander Bolton, who is far better known to the audience as Kenneth Branagh since we barely hear his character’s name. The speech in Dunkirk is so limited that after watching the movie for almost two hours, the only characters whose names I knew were Alex and George. Nolan doesn’t need dialogue to set the story up, instead choosing to use four sentences on a title card as the extent of the film’s exposition and expecting the audience to pick up the story from there. Watch this scene – the main character only says one phrase in three minutes. The entire sequence depends on the action and the response of the audience.
Nolan doesn’t need dialogue to explain the plot of his film either, as it is based around action. We are given locations and time stamps, and trusted (perhaps recklessly) to be able to put the rest of the story together by ourselves. It makes the film more interesting to the audience, as they strain to pluck out any information they can rather than having it handed to them on a platter. As I said earlier, this film is more focused on the way the story is told than the story itself.
Yes, the story is important, and this one in particular serves as both a vivid reminder of the past and a warning for the future – but this film is a film because it looks at the way this kind of story is traditionally told and says: “No, thank you”. Instead of being your usual war movie, this film becomes about survival, purely because of the decisions made by Nolan and the direction he gave to the actors, the editors, the sound mixers, Hans Zimmer, and the entire crew. And the absolute manipulation of time in this film enhances the feelings of despair and terror that all of these people have worked so hard to create as we desperately try to figure out whether the little boats will make it to the drowning soldiers in time, or if the RAF will be fast enough to intercept the Luftwaffe before they sink a hospital ship.
Time is the enemy and it’s absolutely petrifying.
References:
AfifZ 7 2018, Dunkirk (2017) – Opening Scene – HD, video, YouTube, viewed 23 August 2019, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7DHbaY54YQ>.
Barry, P 1995, Beginning Theory: An introduction to literary and cultural theory, 2nd edn, Manchester University Press, Manchester.
HavenB3 2017, [SPOILERS] I made a little Diagram depicting the flow of the film, reddit, viewed 22 August 2019, <https://www.reddit.com/r/Dunkirk/comments/6oqgl5/spoilers_i_made_a_little_diagram_depicting_the/>.
Vox 2017, The sound illusion that makes Dunkirk so intense, video, YouTube, 26 July, viewed 22 August 2019, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVWTQcZbLgY>.
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