Backwards into the Future: Melodramatic Affect and the Vicissitudes of Time in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk (2017)

Abstract

This article interrogates the reworking of melodramatic form in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk (2017), exploring how the film’s innovative structures are founded upon—and draw us toward —familiar orientations and erasures. While Dunkirk disrupts the standard rhythms of melodrama and forgoes its full range of emotional appeals, it takes inspiration from the melodramatic development of crosscutting in the service of suspense, an affect informed by visceral and moral entanglements on the part of the spectator. Investigating these entanglements illuminates the connective tissue of melodrama as it operates through affective rather than strictly linear modes of resonance and causality. In the context of Brexit and the 2015-2016 ‘migrant crisis,’ Dunkirk taps into conservative impulses of nostalgic fantasy and the imagination of national collectivity they embody, even as it draws upon contemporary images of the migrant body at sea, suggesting the complex work of melodramatic affect in blowing us backwards into the future.