th<\/sup>.<\/p>\nI do not have interesting thoughts on Charlottesville and the following outcry, only thoughts that can be described as \u201cfrom the mind of somebody who enjoyed the film Detroit and who also does not hate minorities.\u201d It did, however, make me think about how this period in history will be reflected in future films. Perhaps there will be a Bigelow-ian film about the Charlottesville riots one day, presumably shot by Barry Ackroyd if he is still working. I would imagine this event or some other from the past couple of years will be made into some sort of a historical film one day, and I can only imagine it will be boring. This hypothetical film will have characters yelling about civil rights, hypothetical characters who are preaching to a choir of Netflixers who already agreed with the idea anyway. And some people watching that film will voice what it got wrong, because that\u2019s what will always happen.<\/p>\n
As my screening of Detroit ended, a couple five or so seats away from me started talking about how they couldn\u2019t believe something like that could happen. Again, this is a phrase that one day (and already has) been used to describe the events of the past couple of years repeatedly. But what these films can never capture is the visceral feeling of watching a real event unfold in real time, even if you\u2019re only watching the unfolding on Twitter. Somehow, viewing Charlottesville from the lobby of a movie theatre on my phone was more intense than Detroit\u2019s privileged angles of a well-constructed, thoughtful suspense film. If a filmmaker as immensely talented as Kathryn Bigelow can\u2019t make a pointed docudrama work, perhaps nobody can.<\/p>\n
And this, again, is the greatest success of Dunkirk. It is a film that realizes rhapsodizing is for naught, and that saving your commentary for the last scene and the last scene only is a better way to make it felt. Dunkirk beats us around with loudness and intensity, as is Nolan\u2019s wont, but it ends up making a more visceral statement by doing so. Does it teach us much? Not really, and I think it will settle as a mid-tier Nolan film when enough time passes to look at his filmography from a distance. But it does make us feel something, even if it\u2019s just \u201choly shit that was intense\u201d which is a stronger statement than anything Jim Halpert ever yelled at me about civil rights.<\/p>\n
It is impossible to tell people what to think with words alone. Filmmakers have been trying for a long time to figure this out with little success, but it seems mild improvements have been made. That\u2019s little hope, I suppose, but for once it\u2019s the kind of something instead of nothing I can actually support.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Alex writes about Dunkirk and Detroit, with a focus on Christopher Nolan and Kathryn Bigelow’s approach to presenting history.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5897,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[1426,1422],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5895"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5895"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5895\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5899,"href":"https:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5895\/revisions\/5899"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5895"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5895"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5895"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}