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Dunkirk and its whitewashing of history...

Chumley said:
Exactly. It was specifically about Britain coming together in a time of crisis and British people in desperate situations, even lashing out at a Frenchman in a moment of panic and xenophobia.

It was the movie it wanted to be, but just because it wasn't what others wanted that doesn't mean it was actively trying to rewrite history or some shit.
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Implicit in this suggest is that people of color are not part of 'Britain'. Isn't that the problem in the first place?
 
Quite a few posts make me think my view on nationalism might be wrong. Yes, a lot of assholes use it to hurt people but isn't nationalism also just being patriotic and proud of one's country?

Is nationalism always a bad thing?
 
Chumley said:
Exactly. It was specifically about Britain coming together in a time of crisis and British people in desperate situations, even lashing out at a Frenchman in a moment of panic and xenophobia.

It was the movie it wanted to be, but just because it wasn't what others wanted that doesn't mean it was actively trying to rewrite history or some shit. The malicious intent some people are trying to ascribe Nolan is insane.
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You realise what you're saying here is that brown people aren't conducive to a film about Britain coming together.

edit: beaten
 
jakonovski said:
Also at its root Batman is a billionaire torturing poors in the night.
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Pretty sure a significant chunk of Batman's rogue gallery aren't poor.

Now the street-level cronies? Yeah - true fascist Batman.

Psychoward said:
which was... what?
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Maybe TDK?

Joker, the chaotic...libertarian?

jtb said:
His Dark Knight was very deliberately fascist too (the Gotham phone tap), but Nolan never had anything to say about it. The last 30 minutes of TDK could have been great, but instead it's an incoherent mess.

Nolan always gestures as these interesting ideas, but never has anything to say about them.
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At the very least, Lucius Fox recognizes its wrong. It certainly would've been an interesting part that Nolan left underdeveloped.
 
His Dark Knight was very deliberately fascist too (the Gotham phone tap), but Nolan never had anything to say about it. The last 30 minutes of TDK could have been great, but instead it's an incoherent mess.

Nolan always gestures as these interesting ideas, but never has anything to say about them.
 
jtb said:
Implicit in this suggest is that people of color are not part of 'Britain'. Isn't that the problem in the first place?
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They basically weren't? Having White people yelling at minirities to get to the back of the line has traditionally been very loaded imagery. Kind of odd how the interpretation of that scene has paradoxically become pro brexit
 
The film was specifically about British troops at Dunkirk, i.e very much white and male


if the movie featured the French army in any serious role, then i can see the point of this argument


this is very silly
 
jakonovski said:
You leave out that a huge part of the people involved in the specific events of the film were colonial troops and sailors. It's basically like Gallipoli with all the Australians cut out.
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What an absurd comparison. Something like 10-15% of the Allied troops at Gallipoli were ANZAC vs >1% of the troops at Dunkirk being Indian.
 
jtb said:
Implicit in this suggest is that people of color are not part of 'Britain'. Isn't that the problem in the first place?
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There were people of color in the movie. None of the major characters were, but it's not like every soldier there was white. While larger groups, like Indian forces in the British Army, that came to help were omitted to help focus the story, I saw a few black soldiers in the crowds while watching. I don't know what their proportion to white soldier were, but they were there.
 
Pandaman said:
They basically weren't? Having White people yelling at minirities to get to the back of the line has traditionally been very loaded imagery. Kind of odd how the interpretation of that scene has paradoxically become pro brexit
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Those weren't British soldiers, they were French and some of them were white. The movie never addresses that the British minority soldiers were last in the order of the British soldiers as well. Because the movie doesn't have a single British minority iirc.
 
I understand the criticism over how white the entire thing was, but I don't understand the Brexit stuff. I'm American though, so I am not as in tune with the current political climate.

I don't understand how this has anything to do with Brexit. They even made a point to show the scared, xenophobic soldiers in an unflattering light. They wanted to kill the french soldier because they thought he was a spy. They really wanted to kill him to ensure the boat would float and to protect their own skin from being the "other." The French solider was on the protagonist's side and shown in a sympathetic light. It was pretty transparent.

How could you make this story and have the British relationship with the rest of Europe be good? Did you want the Germans to be shown on screen smiling and sharing gifts with Brtis and French as their worlds are destroyed by fascism?

I think the point they were trying to make was that a soldier on the beaches only sees the enemy as the bombs and bullets. They don't see the person or nationality.

They are fighting for survival. It's that simple. Politics and the intricacies of nationalism are for people in England. Death is imminent.
 
I don't know, Dunkirk is a very focused movie and tells three very specific stories with a pretty limited character count. Don't know how willing I am to fault a movie that has all white speaking roles when of the 400,000 on the beach 1,800 were part of the British Indian army.
 
Hazzuh said:
What an absurd comparison. Something like 10-15% of the Allied troops at Gallipoli were ANZAC vs >1% of the troops at Dunkirk being Indian.
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As per the article one quarter of British merchant fleet crews were lascars. So maybe not that absurd after all?
 
Oh my, it's certainly tough trying to create something these days. Is there an official guide for creating a movie with an appropriate ratio of genders/races etc, to not get called racist/sexist/whatever later? Creating a story, focusing on making all the noisy people happy, instead of the story itself, surely must be tough without it.

Also, do you get bonus praise points, for going the opposite direction, like the last Beauty and the Beast did?
 
Jason's Ultimatum said:
186125-inception-inception-leo-meme-face.jpg
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Haha... literally the first words out of my mouth leaving the theater from Inception: "Exposition: The Movie."
 
hrab said:
Oh my, it's certainly tough trying to create something these days. Is there an official guide for creating a movie with an appropriate ratio of genders/races etc, to not get called racist/sexist/whatever later? Creating a story, focusing on making all the noisy people happy, instead of the story itself, surely must be tough without it.

Also, do you get bonus praise points, for going the opposite direction, like the last Beauty and the Beast did?
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I didn't care for that film a whole lot, but I liked the diversity in the casting.
 
jakonovski said:
You leave out that a huge part of the people involved in the specific events of the film were colonial troops and sailors. It's basically like Gallipoli with all the Australians cut out.
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That's being extremely generous. The number of colonial troops at Dunkirk was, like, half a percent. Maybe 2000 people out of 400,000. Remember, this was primarily an army conscripted straight from the population of the English mainland (which was very much predominantly white) in a hurry to respond to the German advance. Most of the Ghurka and other colonial troops fought primarily in the Pacific and didn't start having heavy involvement in Europe until later in the war. By comparison the Australians actually made up 10-15% of the forces as Gallipoli.

The lack of French characters is disappointing but, then again, they make it clear that most of the French forces are forming a rear guard to slow the Germans while the British escape. And there is a particular plot point later ok that relies on there not being many French on the beach to play right.
 
Principate said:
Did you read the article or even the OP? The point his about what is left out about the colonial troops and their impact on the war.
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There were close to half a million allied troops in that area, and the movies shows couple thousand at most. Not seeing every nation who had troops there represented in the movie as white washing is quite a stretch.
 
I know this is a joint-venture but Hollywood is the land of Euro-fantasies where everything, everywhere, that's worth anything is European.

Not surprised at all the film is whitewashed. That's how these things go.
 
Jeff-DSA said:
It's like you can't tell the story you want to tell anymore. Dunkirk focuses on a few individuals and how their individual stories intertwined over the course of a couple of days. It doesn't aim to tell the entire story of World War II or the entire evacuation at Dunkirk. It shows a few very small slices of a very big story. To start to throw in references to other happenings would totally dilute the film.

The run time on this is short. It's a peek at things. A 3 1/2 hour epic could have included more stories, but that wasn't the goal of this film.

People need to stop getting up in arms and making accusations of whitewashing or sexism unless the scope of the film SHOULD have included those things.

The crying out of "X, Y, and Z were missing!" is getting tiresome. They were never intended to be part of the narrative anyway.
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Last time I checked the movie got made and this criticism isn't going to erase it from existence.
 
Ordinaryundone said:
That's being extremely generous. The number of colonial troops at Dunkirk was, like, half a percent. Maybe 2000 people out of 400,000. Remember, this was primarily an army conscripted straight from the population of the English mainland (which was very much predominantly white) in a hurry to respond to the German advance. Most of the Ghurka and other colonial troops fought primarily in the Pacific and didn't start having heavy involvement in Europe until later in the war. By comparison the Australians actually made up 10-15% of the forces as Gallipoli.

The lack of French characters is disappointing but, then again, they make it clear that most of the French forces are forming a rear guard to slow the Germans while the British escape. And there is a particular plot point later ok that relies on there not being many French on the beach to play right.
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You're kinda late with that. And just like the other dude you didn't read the OP's article.
 
I'll have to see the film before making any kind of final judgement. Given Dark Knight Rises 'unfortunate' political subtext and Dunkirk's subject matter in general, I can't say I'm hugely surprised if this is the case.
 
Llyranor said:
Don't bring this up. 25% is too high and we need to only use statistics that help justify handwaving minorities' contribution away.
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So I decided ti look into this statistic. The stat quoted is that Lascars are said to have made up 25% of the British Merchant Navy not that 25% of the people on the 'little ships' were Lascars. Lascars tended to serve on British East India Company vessels that sailed the route from the sub-continent to England.

I can't find any stats on how many such ships or Lascars were present at Dunkirk but I would guess that the answer is not very many given that Dunkirk isn't on that route and a war was happening anyway. However that's just a guess and I'm happy to be corrected.
 
Lime said:
Wonder Woman was nationalistic as fuck and delusionally militant in its portrayal of war. It was really gross to sit through in how it handled its topic, especially with making Germans into evil baby-eating Nazis and celebrating the British and American forces for the millionth time.
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It was set in WW1, not 2
 
Geoff said:
So I decided ti look into this statistic. The stat quoted is that Lascars are said to have made up 25% of the British Merchant Navy not that 25% of the people on the 'little ships' were Lascars. Lascars tended to serve on British East India Company vessels that sailed the route from the sub-continent to England.

I can't find any stats on how many such ships or Lascars were present at Dunkirk but I would guess that the answer is not very many given that Dunkirk isn't on that route and a war was happening anyway. However that's just a guess and I'm happy to be corrected.
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A short googling tells of one of the most important merchant ships of Operation Dynamo, the SS Clan MacAlister, operated by a company trading between UK and India.

So once again maybe not that unlikely?

edit: and here we have a reference to the "Indian crew of the Clan Macallister". http://www.lascars.co.uk/war.html
 
Exodust said:
It was set in WW1, not 2
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Lol that's actually the problem, it's set in WW1 but it still makes the Germans into evil baby eating Nazis. Eric Ludendorf (the evil general guy) was a real person, and while I can't really attest to his personal character be certainly wasn't a coke head Nazi who cackled maniacally as he gassed his own men.
 
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