Social Critique of Dunkirk (2017)

Dunkirk depicts war not as heroic epic but as an experience of anxiety, waiting, and mere survival. Soldiers wait in long lines on the beach, the sea and air bring death at every moment, and the enemy is almost invisible. This formal choice abandons military glorification and shows that in war, people are less actors of history than powerless victims of military machines. The British soldier who assumes a dead Frenchman's identity to escape, or the soldier who abandons himself to the sea instead of being saved, reveal the moral ambiguity of war. At the same time, the film draws on the myth of the "Dunkirk spirit"—the myth in which small civilian boats come to rescue the soldiers and the nation recovers its unity through defeat. But this narrative celebrates citizens' participation in the war machine as a moral virtue and forgets that these same civilian boats were part of the logistics of an imperial war. The death of the teenage boy George on Dawson's boat ties grief to national sacrifice and turns him into a local newspaper hero—an image that shows how propaganda uses the deaths of citizens to reproduce the national epic. The absence of colonial soldiers and minorities in Dunkirk is one of its most controversial social dimensions. In the actual evacuation of Dunkirk, thousands of Indian soldiers and French colonial forces were present, but the film is almost entirely white and British, showing only a single French soldier as a passing sign. This erasure removes the participation of non-white people from national memory and reduces the story of the war to the rescue of "us" against "them." Thus, while anti-war, Dunkirk reproduces Britain's national and racial myth.