Dunkirk, a happy readmission to The Theatre of Cruelty

In the wake of the First World War, Parisian poet, writer and anti-fascist, André Breton, wrote the first Surrealist Manifesto and juddered the earliest automatisms of the surrealist movement…

Amidst this kinetic frenzy, an Avant-garde playwright, Antonin Artaud, began to practice a fierce, theatrical method of storytelling, which railed against the entrenched habits of tradition and logic. Artaud used this method in the ongoing agitation and disruption of the old status quo – the same rigid paradigm that conceived of two World Wars so grotesque in their magnitude that they effectively redefined the destructive capabilities of all humankind. This theatrical method become known as the Theatre of Cruelty – a way of throwing a psychological firebomb onto a mindset that thought global warfare should be tolerated by the masses, whilst also being organised, prolonged and dictated by a privileged few.

Practitioners like Artaud used this new form of surrealist theatre to explore the idea that the unconscious mind was the mine into which all artist’s must delve, if they are to have any hope of finding any kind of truth. Lurking in this strange darkness are the movements of our thoughts and it is here, if anywhere, that the nature of consciousness lives to be uncovered. The ways in which the Theatre of Cruelty brought the unconscious mind to stage were always inventive and often deeply unsettling. For example, dialogue was reinterpreted as a hindrance to the expression of raw emotion, so it was sometimes replaced by more animalistic variations of howling, wailing and grunting. Or, as in Steven Berkoff’s Metamorphosis, actors were required to mimic the intense physicality of a contortionist, divesting themselves of their human movements.

These methods were used to jolt audiences out of their relaxed, unconscious stupors, cocooned within the walls of civilised society. The Theatre of Cruelty allowed playwrights like Artaud to rattle their viewers until they were fully awake and attentive. Thrown into a state of fleeting discomfort, the viewer would often enter a state elevated awareness. Then, having arrived at this new liminal space, like Alice suddenly crashing into the earthen belly of the rabbit hole, they would be susceptible to being magnetised by whatever unfolded next. In this way, the artist could demand a new pair of eyes and throw out the old ones.

Cruelty in this regard is thereby not comparable to emotional or physical violence, or anything unkind for that matter. The opposite, I believe, is true. Cruelty, as Artaud used it, was a force of relentless agitation exercised to break the spoffish tendencies and habitual comforts of an audience. In short, it was a way of prescribing the medicine you didn’t know you needed.

I think this same method of cruelty is now manifest in Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan’s latest blockbuster, which I finally saw for the first time in London last weekend. This time, Nolan-ites are in for a much shorter experience (just 107 minutes) than the mind-bending, long-haul trips of Inception and Interstellar. You’ll probably be thankful for this. The reduced running time helps to alleviate the barrage of stress, whilst also heightening the integral element of suspense. This might sound like bad news, but make no mistake, Dunkirk hits very hard.

Cruelty, as Artaud used it, was a force of relentless agitation exercised to break the spoffish tendencies and habitual comforts of an audience.

Every bullet hurts the ears – at several different points my girlfriend even had her hands clasped over her ears, an almost direct reflection of the soldiers on screen. Every bomb seems to shake the screen and draw dust from the ceiling. And all the while we’re starved of dialogue, deprived of our usual continuity and thrown into wonderful disarray, all of which is carefully coordinated by the masterful director and his team.

This authentic, punishing journey achieves empathy through activity, discarding heavy backstory and dialogue to immediately submerge us in the film. I think it also delivers us to the frontlines of Artaudian theory, bundling us into a disrupted state of heightened awareness and introducing us to that perpetual conflict that underlies everyday life. Tapping into the tenants of kind cruelty, Dunkirk takes an intense, close-up perspective, using the sporadic, physical pulse of each moment and urging us to quickly dismantle our preconceptions.

It might sound like the consequence of some wild, mad genius taking hallucinogens and throwing flecks of ink at blank script paper, but in fact, this is the result of steady, intellectual and methodical precision – the work of a softly spoken, sharply dressed director who says that geometry and mathematics are a huge part of his writing process.

While the story of Dunkirk develops on a grand scale, with a large ensemble, Nolan spends most of the film assaulting our senses by thrusting us into several visceral and physical journeys. Effectively he takes a direct line into the subconscious mind of the viewer, challenging us with all the adrenaline, ridiculousness and brutality of war. After putting us in this environment, wherein all conduct of violence is seemingly permissible, Nolan subtly encourages us to peer through the hellish veil, ending his heady crescendo with a final, echoing note that is distinctly pro-human.

This kind of intellectual sensitivity could only lend itself to captivating subject matter. The story of Dunkirk is certainly that. In 1940, after the Battle of France, 400,000 men from the British Expeditionary Force were stranded on the coast of France, trapped in the slow constriction of incoming enemy forces. Staring across the churned English Channel, they were just 26-miles from home. When it seemed like no help was coming, the Little Ships of Dunkirk (around 850 private civilian boats) suddenly appeared through the shroud to rescue their fellow countrymen. One man even arrived in a canoe with a single spare seat. Winston Churchill had first stated that he hoped they could rescue 30,000 men. In the end, 360,000 people were rescued from that beach. A few days after this retreat, Churchill gave his most famous speech – “we will fight them on the beaches” – followed several years later by the full-blown retaliation of the Allied Forces, including America.

When it seemed like no help was coming, the Little Ships of Dunkirk (around 850 private civilian boats) suddenly appeared through the shroud to rescue their fellow countrymen.

In his fascinating interview with Film4, Nolan talks about how he structured his script, describing his process of fragmenting the story to cover the most ground in a single, sweeping narrative. To do this, he opted to develop the story in three interwoven strands: land (for a week), sea (for a day) and air (for an hour). By giving us only a few characters to get to know he focuses our attention on intense and purely subjective experiences. With little time to adjust, we are thrown from dogfights into tilting battleships, until each nightmarish sequence seems to topple the last. In fact, Nolan intentionally wrote this gradual escalation into his script, based on a musical structure called the Shepard Tone, which is what Nolan calls a “musical illusion”.

Musically the structure seems to keep climbing the scale, evoking a feeling of rising intensity. Supported by Hans Zimmer – back with another slow-building, time-bomb soundtrack – Nolan applied this idea to his narrative, weaving cross-cutting journeys together, whilst gradually leading the separate action to a shared crescendo. The difficulty was in sustaining this rise structurally, whilst simultaneously creating a natural, rhythmic experience achieved through careful mathematical precision. In this interview, Nolan stated that he wanted to give the audience something “they’re not used to”, destabilising their usual way of watching films.

One other thing Dunkirk seems committed to is the Romantic idea of the sublime – the sublime being that which is at once both horrifying and terrible to behold, and yet also, somehow, essential and inherently beautiful. In Dunkirk, the chief obsession of Nolan is clearly authenticity and reality, regardless of the difficulties these two obsessions presented. When Nolan was shooting the film, he was adamant that they had to use real spitfires, battleships and destroyers. It didn’t matter so much that they could only get the wrong kind of destroyer or a slightly anachronistic, yellow-nosed German fighter plane. To distil that feeling of being there he needed these vehicles to be ploughing through the water or whizzing overhead.

That’s why it feels so punishing when one of the battleships bends into the rough, gunmetal ocean – why each creak and whine is so piercing too. The absence of CGI is very noticeable. You feel it as you follow the guttural spitfires as they veer and dive over the Channel. The choreography isn’t elaborate. These dog-fights are simple and often short. There’s no exchange of pithy, good vs. evil witticisms. In fact, the Nazis are entirely absent in all the on-screen drama, which is unheard of for a Second World War film. It must be so tempting to disembowel those evil ideologues and smooth the ride for the audience.

Nevertheless, the effect of this attempt at absolute authenticity is palpable and very powerful. At the UK premiere, actor Kenneth Branagh, who plays Commander Bolton, had the privilege of seeing the film with some of the veterans of Dunkirk. They said that it was nosier than the battle, but similarly exhilarating, terrifying and close to their own experiences.

The question remains: can the audience take it? Or do they want it? Again and again, big authentic films have hurtled to the top of the box office, delighting intelligent film-goers hungry for the sincerest expression of a story. Time will tell what the legacy of Nolan’s Dunkirk will be. For now, it seems blindingly obvious that audiences appreciate a crueller, ruder and more honest cinematic experience.