Dunkirk · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A soldier walks down a deserted French street and paper drifts down around him like snow. Leaflets. They tell him the army is surrounded. The shooting starts, he runs, and you brace for the shot every war film has taught you to expect: the enemy, the faces, the thing he is fleeing. It never comes. The Germans are never seen in Dunkirk. Not once. They are bullets through a fence, a bomb's whistle, a shadow on the water. Nolan made a war film and withheld the war's other half.

That withholding is the whole movie, and it earns a name.

The war film is the most action-driven form cinema has. Gilles Deleuze called this the action-image: a character sizes up a situation and acts to change it, and the editing chains perception to deed. The large-form version, where a global crisis presses down until one decisive act turns it, is practically the war picture's blueprint. Dunkirk takes that machine and pulls the action out of it. The soldiers on the Mole can perceive everything: the dive-bombers, the sinking ships, the closing trap. They can do almost nothing. Deleuze's term for the moment cinema noticed this gap is the crisis of the action-image, when a character can no longer react adequately to what he sees. War, of all genres, is the last place you expect to find it. That is why it lands so hard here.

What replaces action is looking and listening. Deleuze called these pure optical and sound situations, opsigns and sonsigns, moments where a person, and we with him, can only watch and hear because nothing can be done. The enemy heard but never shown is the engine of this. Because the threat is never located in space, never a position you could fire back at, it becomes what Deleuze called the absolute out-of-field: not the room next door, which would be the relative out-of-field, but a pressure from outside the world of the frame altogether. The German army is everywhere and nowhere. You cannot aim at it. You can only endure it.

Endurance breeds a different protagonist. The classical hero acts; Deleuze's modern figure is the seer, someone who watches and survives rather than decides. Tommy (Fionn Whitehead) has no backstory and no objective beyond the water's edge. Harry Styles's Alex, Tom Hardy's Farrier behind an oxygen mask saying almost nothing, his whole performance carried in the eyes: these are not agents but witnesses to their own near-death. Come and See sits directly behind this, Klimov's boy whose face rather than his deeds carries the film, and Nolan inherits the model wholesale, casting the young and unformed precisely so no one articulates what they feel.

Then there is time, which is the film's true subject. Three stories: a week on the Mole, a day at sea, an hour in the air. They run at different speeds and converge on a single moment. This is not flashback. Deleuze had a name for time shown directly, as itself, rather than as the measure of movement: the chronosign. Dunkirk's particular form of it is what he called the series of time, or peaks of present, distinct presents that coexist and bleed into one another, so that before and after stop being a line and become something you feel happening at once. When the three timelines lock together at the climax, you are watching one instant from three temporal distances at the same time. The suspense comes not from what happens but from this architecture.

The cuts between the strands give the game away. They cannot match on continuity; a week does not flow smoothly into an hour. Deleuze called this the irrational cut, the join across a gap, the AND between two things that refuse to add up. Resnais built Hiroshima Mon Amour on exactly that, cutting between two incommensurate times with no signpost and trusting you to feel the rhyme. Dunkirk runs the technique at blockbuster scale.

Even the sound keeps time. Zimmer built the score on a Shepard tone, overlapping pitches that seem to climb forever without ever resolving, over a ticking clock recorded from Nolan's own watch. It is time you can hear: always rising, never arriving, an acoustic image of duration that never releases. Vertigo's endlessly cycling Herrmann interval is its ancestor; Apocalypse Now taught the film to dissolve score into ambient dread until you cannot tell music from threat.

What did this do to the war film? It proved you could take the genre's most expensive, IMAX-huge spectacle, honoring Lawrence of Arabia's doctrine that certain subjects need photochemical scale to become inhabitable, and aim all that machinery not at heroism but at felt time, at the pressure of an hour on people who cannot act. Das Boot had embedded the camera in steel and made war a pressure chamber. Dunkirk carries that chamber out onto an open beach under a flat grey sky and finds it just as airless.

Here is the trick the film hands your eyes: watch what it refuses to show. The empty sky where the enemy should be, the silence where the speech should be, the clock you cannot stop hearing. Dunkirk survives entirely on absence, and that absence is time itself, ticking, rising, never letting you off.