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Sovereignty, Brexit, and Dunkirk : Winston Churchill's "Fight Them on the Beaches" Speech as Nationalist Memory

2023; Volume: 53; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/flm.2023.a903046

1548-9922

Brent Yergensen,

Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration

Sovereignty, Brexit, and Dunkirk:Winston Churchill's "Fight Them on the Beaches" Speech as Nationalist Memory Brent Yergensen Introduction On Christmas Eve of 2020, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson praised Britain's exit from the European Union ("Brexit") in a speech to his country: "We have taken back control of laws and our destiny. We have taken control of every jot and tittle of our regulation in a way that is complete and unfettered" (Hughes, 2020). Yet not every United Kingdom citizen shared his enthusiasm. Over 300 public figures "wrote open letters ahead of the 2016 referendum urging a Remain vote" (Hughes). Even the two remaining Beatles were split, with Paul McCartney resistant to Brexit and Ringo Starr in support of it (Fox & Radosavljevic, 2020). Further, public responses to the controversial but successful decision to secede was also evenly split according to results from the Brexit Referendum committee, with similar results from national polls in England. Northern Ireland and Scotland had higher votes of resistance from their populations, which deepened the controversy (BBC News, n.d.). In the context of Brexit, Christopher Nolan's film Dunkirk (2017) portrays civilians assisting in rescuing the retreating British army from the French beach during World War II. The film depicts a multitude of heroes, all honored in the culminating collage of cinematography shots as Winston Churchill's famous "Fight Them on the Beaches" speech is read by one of the surviving soldiers. At the same time, the film's audience could see that neither war nor economic recession were besieging Europe at the time—a contradiction between the film's diegesis and the audience's experience that would have complicated the justification for leaving the European Union (Copilas, 2017). In this paper, I explain how Dunkirk's crescendo toward the second-hand recitation of Winston Churchill's 1940 "We Shall Fight" speech—a cinematic doubling of the voice into both low and high social registers—follows a careful escalation of patriotic nostalgia, from the individual to the collective act, culminating in a justification for the United Kingdom's sovereignty from the European Union. The film embeds broader historical efforts toward Britain's sovereignty so that nostalgia for precisely this moment of solidarity in Britain acquires the fungibility of transcendent historical consciousness: the extrication of Britain from Europe is and always has been part of its identity. The film's argument proceeds almost in spite of the director's stated intentions. Christopher Nolan has insisted that his film is not commentary in support of Brexit (Wiseman, 2017), but a film, like any other artifact, is itself embedded in history, in the prevailing styles, opportunities, and restrictions for directors and in the prevailing modes of interpretation for audiences, and thus cannot escape its own time and place—the host of pressures that also create a film, beyond intentions. In this case, Dunkirk itself, as an artifact, presented readers, especially journalists, with evidence for reading the film as pro-Brexit rhetoric. Charles Mudede (2017) describes Dunkirk as "The First Brexit Movie," and Adam Pilfold-Bagwell (2018) calls the film "The Ultimate Brexit Blockbuster." The Guardian's Steve Rose (2017) [End Page 31] describes how the film, as part of the World War II cinema sub-genre, "has been co-opted as a myth of English exceptionalism and isolationism." The connections are made even tighter as Brexit leader Boris Johnson wrote a biography of Churchill, comparing "the EU to Hitler," and claiming that "Churchill would have joined him on the Brexit bus" (Rose). Click for larger view View full resolution Newsweek.com (https://www.newsweek.com/brexit-boris-johnson-uk-remain-great-european-power-474075) Nolan's film inadvertently carries its meaning in the context of Brexit because patriotism tends to arise in moments of national identity crises, and such a crisis was afoot, allowing for "Englishness and Britishness" to be "reinvented" in 2016 (Bulger, 2012, p. 146). Lloyd Bitzer (1969) describes this as "The Rhetorical Situation," the increased weight of a rhetorical text within a specific historical context not just because the text is a "response to a situation" but because that response is set up in a way that can be coded as a public...