I went to see Christopher Nolan’s “Dunkirk” yesterday. Not because I was personally interested to do so. But because my last remaining relatives expressed an interest of seeing it. We as the children of those that were part of that struggle that the media at large has incessantly drilled in our heads was the greatest. World War Two. The ‘greatest‘ as in Mohammed Ali who initially proclaimed himself so, unlike my father, and because he suited the times as a spokesman of the prevailing agenda of normalizing human society was built by the media into a legend. What did Ali do? He beat people up and made an obscene amount of money doing it while strutting around trumpeting his own greatness. Again, something my father who served in the Marines landing on Okinawa at barely eighteen years old fighting to stay alive for the next four months during the most viscous fight of World War Two. I never heard him call himself the ‘greatest’ on that account?
“Dunkirk“, the big budget blockbuster movie, that its producers and investor are hoping it will be, is actively being compared to what they and their fellow industry pundits have deified as the ‘greatest’ war movie of all time, “Saving Private Ryan.” At face view, the benchmark does share a similar setting for what is always mentioned in its own hype as the most talked about. The two movies begin by recounting as story of a beach. And against the backdrop of that setting, they both share another facet that seems key to their movie industry admirers of being about the senseless slaughter of young white post adolescent men of European descent. Given the incessantly fractious nature of the times that the larger ‘WE’ live in, this is something that I personally was not desirous of seeing. Not before the viewing, nor certainly in hindsight after. In fact, having once been an excessively voracious movies goer who has turned that corner over the past decade and a half of falling out of love with Hollywood’s obsessive penchant for interweaving social justice themes within what they now term as ‘franchise‘ films. In this penchant, all the major studios have outweighed their welcome and my active viewing participation.
Christopher Nolan has been provided with the crown by both hacks and movie critics as the current reigning challenger for the ‘greatest‘ contemporary filmmaker around. His predecessor in this position among several others being Steven Spielberg who gained a similar status some decades previous directing a fanciful politically propagandized big budget film, “Schindler’s List“, once again about people being killed off. In this case, by the estimation of some, the killing of the spirit of white Europeans with the aura of guilt for incidents that to some opinions were willfully misinterpreted as being fact when in point of fact it turned out that they were not. In another sense, Spielberg had graduated to his position based upon his ability to manipulate generations of mass audiences to believe something that at face value had validity. But in the underlying inference that the movie touted as a whole had nothing to do with history but more to do with brainwashing the opinions within people’s minds. Following this tact along in a larger sense over the long haul of the history of movie industry, any director that can foster a specific lasting sentiment within the minds of an enter generation is the ‘greatest’ director of his time. And depending of course on how this influence changes the thinking of a nation, and perhaps the entire world, of all time.
Is it any wonder to find out that the first Academy Award Oscar for best picture was given to a big budget silent era production about young white men being transfixed by the horrors of loss suffered in World War One? Or that the award for best actor was given to a pre-eminent German actor of that era for his portrayal of a Russian general of a deposed white society who is ultimately humbled and crushed by his ultimate fate of being cast as a Hollywood extra reliving his greatest failure? All these films and directors, thus far mentioned, examples of the heralding of failure of the values and impetus of Western European civilization in some way. All completely different in fact to what was for its time in the post World War Two era of nineteen-sixty two, and equally grueling portrayal of young men suffering and dying. The major blockbuster big budget film that was in fact a collaboration of the directorial talent of six different well-seasoned Hollywood directors of the time. This film being set on Normandy beaches some thirty four years earlier than “Saving Private Ryan” yet equally pervasive in its on viewing generations, “The Longest Day.” The major difference being that this film celebrated the bravery and sacrifice of white Europeans not their defeat.
In light of this trend consider that the underlying messaging that one is strongly left with after viewing “Dunkirk” is one of being a defeated empire. Yet not so much so that one’s sacrifice and effort to survive goes unappreciated. The entire length of one hundred and six minutes of cinematic narrative cast not accidentally in the format of a ‘first person shooter‘ computer games point of view. The audience follows along in the guise of several avatars going through the perils of the immediate landscape. No judgment is offered in the cinematic outlay of action that suggests good or bad or even evil. It is completely ‘moral relative’. The major emotions summoned being those of intervening scenarios of horror juxtapose with an aficionado’s viewpoint of the inside terrain and implements of that historical time and incident. Any audience empathy wasted upon a series of characters that are summarily introduced and then unexpectedly killed off or deposed into the anonymity of the larger throng of those summarily ‘rescued’. Their historical adversary never shown or even really identified beyond the term, “enemy” as if everyone can fill in the blanks without he official politically correct contemporary agreed upon conclusions as to, “who“, “what“, “why“, and given the failure of our educational establishment maybe even, “where?” Consider that the equivalent corollary of our very defective modern journalism does exactly the same in ceding their responsibility through daily artful innuendoes where the reader is also expected by the journalist to answer these same questions by referring to socially sanitized online texts. The effect of the experience of this epic event being more important than any insight that can be intellectually assayed!
If this film was more in line with the current canon of comic book corporation franchise film production then “Dunkirk” might be deemed in a similar manner a historical ‘thrill ride’ by the well paid cheerleaders once know as critics. For those who, after seeing same, are left with the film’s final very esoteric image of a burning ‘bird‘ that all too clearly suggests an Illuminati phoenix in the initial stages of total meltdown, it is evidently clear that the intent of the film is to convince audiences that the legacy of that era is at a final end. Moreover those populations that treat upon that sense of ‘greatness‘ have like the films biggest name star destroyed their own heroic legacy and now are to be remanded to an uncertain fate at the hands of a shadowy hostile enemy for all his trouble. Hollywood as a vehicle to the governing mercantile powers that provide the context of our daily lives telling us is essence that any sense of elf identity outside its prevail is in the words of the current neocon mayor of the safe sanctuary of the ‘murder paradise’ of Chicago, “Dead, dead, dead!“