退欧时代的“敦刻尔克”

The Dunkirk spirit: how cinema is shaping Britain’s identity in the Brexit era | 敦刻尔克精神：退欧时代，电影塑造英国身份

You can’t blame Christopher Nolan for Brexit. The director was halfway through making Dunkirk, his new war epic, when the EU referendum took place last June. But if the leave campaign had wanted to make a rousing propaganda movie to stir the nation, it couldn’t have picked a better subject matter. Dunkirk has got it all: Britain standing alone against the world, our manufacturing superiority prevailing, the nation coming together – all in a literal effort to get out of Europe. If he had got the film together a little earlier, perhaps Nigel Farage wouldn’t have needed to cite Independence Day in his morning-after victory speech.

你不能把退欧怪在克里斯托弗.诺兰头上。去年六月退欧公投时，这位导演还在拍摄他的新战争史诗片《敦刻尔克》。可退欧派要是真打算拍一部鼓动人心的宣传影片引发全国轰动，那倒是再好不过的题材了。敦刻尔克一样不缺：英国独自对抗世界，我们制造业水准高人一等，全国团结一心——全都证明了该从欧洲抽身而出。如果电影早点拍出来，兴许奈吉尔·法拉奇就不必在隔天早上的获胜演讲中援引影片《独立日》了。

The Dunkirk analogy has already been trotted out by leave campaigners, of course. Last February, for example, three months before she (wrongly) claimed that Britain would be powerless to prevent Turkey joining the EU, Tory minister Penny Mordaunt wrote an opinion piece for the Daily Telegraph titled “The spirit of Dunkirk will see us thrive outside the EU”. “In our long island history, there have been many times when Britain has not been well-served by alignment with Europe,” she wrote. “When Britain stood alone in 1940 after the defeat at Dunkirk, we were cut off and ridiculed. True leadership sometimes does feel isolating. Yet we have never suffered for it. We are resourceful; we are well connected; our brand is strong in the world.”

当然，类比敦刻尔克是退欧派的老梗了。比方去年二月，即保守党领袖佩妮·莫当特（错误地）扬言英国无力阻止土耳其加入欧盟的三个月前，她为《每日邮报》写了一篇题为《敦刻尔克精神将见证退欧后繁荣》的评论文章。“在悠久的岛国历史中，与欧洲结盟无益于英国，这曾多次发生，”她写道。“1940年，敦刻尔克大败，英国孤军奋战，几乎沦为笑柄。有时真正的领导者的确感到孤独，可我们从不感到痛苦。我们足智多谋，我们广结朋友；我们在世界上响当当的。”

Never mind that Britain didn’t actually stand alone at that precise point during the war. Or that Winston Churchill favoured “indissoluble” union with an as-yet undefeated France. Or that by standing together with our European neighbours over the past 40 years, we have avoided another Dunkirk. This is the Brexiter version of British identity in a nutshell: proudly isolated, independent, not European, and “strong in the world”. And to be clear, this is primarily English identity we are talking about, given that a majority in Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to remain.

在战事的这一关键时刻，事实上英国并非独自奋战，温斯顿·丘吉尔还支持此前与无往不胜的法国结成“不可分割”的联盟，且正是过去四十年中我们一直同欧洲邻居站在一起，我们才避免了另一场敦刻尔克大撤退——可这都不重要。简而言之：孑然傲立，独树一帜， 不归属欧洲和“世界强国”，这就是退欧人眼中的英国身份。考虑到多数苏格兰人和北爱尔兰人愿意留在欧盟，说白了，我们说到的主要是英格兰人的身份。

When it comes to the great “how did we get here?” reckoning over Brexit, few would discount these notions of English identity and, by extension, the narratives that have shaped them. So it is only fair that we examine what part British cinema might have played in all this.

说到“何以至此?”这个有关退欧的大话题，没人会忽视这些关于英国身份的见解，以及推而广之，忽视塑造了它们的叙事。因此，对英国电影在这其中扮演了什么角色考察一二才好。

Our film industry was almost unanimously against Brexit. Some 250 star names from across the arts signed an open letter in this paper urging Britons to vote remain, and the consensus is that homegrown cinema will suffer as a result of leaving the EU. But could it be that certain sectors of the industry have been putting out the opposite message? That is not to say that our movies were directly advocating Brexit, but just as the EU referendum split the nation into “leave” and “remain” camps, so we can view our film industry’s recent output through the same prism.

我国电影业几乎一致反对退欧。文艺界约250位名人签署公开信敦促英国人投票留在欧洲，他们达成共识，认为本土影业会受到退欧影响。可该行业的某些领域会表达相反的观点吗？倒不是说我们的电影直接提倡退欧，而是鉴于退欧公投将国家分成退欧派和留欧派，我们也可如是审视电影业近期的作品。

It’s not just Dunkirk: the second world war as a whole has been co-opted as a myth of English exceptionalism and isolationism. Churchill is the Brexiters’ patron saint. They are always banging on about him, from Farage persuading Donald Trump to put a Churchill bust back in the Oval Office, to Boris Johnson writing a biography of him, before likening the EU to Hitler and claiming that Churchill would have joined him on the Brexit bus. Meanwhile, Michael Gove bemoaned the lack of emphasis on Churchill, eminent Victorians and “Britain and her empire” in the history curriculum. Or “our island story”, as he put it. “This trashing of our past has to stop,” he complained.

不仅敦刻尔克，整个第二次世界大战已被借来打造英国例外主义和孤立主义的神话。丘吉尔是退欧派的守护神。他们一直念叨着丘吉尔，法拉奇劝特朗普把丘吉尔半身像放回总统办公室，鲍里斯·约翰逊写了一部丘吉尔自传，后来还把欧盟比作希特勒， 说丘吉尔也会加入退欧大军。与此同时，迈克尔·戈夫哀叹历史课本中对丘吉尔、维 多利亚时代的英雄和“英国及其帝国”——或如他所言，对“我们的岛国故事”着墨不多。“不能再把我们的过去视为粪土了，”他抱怨说。

It certainly has in the movies. Brian Cox’s Churchill is just ending its cinema run, having raked over the D-Day landings once again. Meanwhile, John Lithgow recently received an Emmy nomination for his Churchill portrayal in The Crown, and Gary Oldman is just removing the prosthetic jowls, having wrapped Darkest

Hour, Joe Wright’s forthcoming drama focusing on the early days of the war. Inevitably, that includes Dunkirk, and another rendition of the “we will fight on the beaches” speech (in a nice touch, Nolan’s Dunkirk puts the words into the mouth of an ordinary soldier). All of this should nicely tee up Ridley Scott’s forthcoming Battle of Britain movie.

如下这些电影则浓墨重彩。布莱恩·考克斯主演的《丘吉尔》刚刚下线，影片重温了诺曼底登陆。另一边，约翰·利特高最近因在英剧《王冠》中饰演丘吉尔获得艾美奖提名; 《至暗时刻》刚刚杀青，加里·奥德曼正卸下假体下巴；乔·怀特即将上映的新剧讲述了二战初的故事。不可避免，还有《敦刻尔克》，它堪称“我们将在海滩作战”这句演讲辞的另一种演绎，诺兰巧妙地借一个普通士兵之口说出这句话。所有这些都该巧妙地放在雷德利·斯科特即将上映的电影《不列颠之战》里。

And let’s not forget Lone Scherfig’s drama Their Finest, which paid tribute to the power of propaganda movies to change hearts and minds during wartime. Working on her own story of Dunkirk heroism, the fledgling screenwriter played by Gemma Arterton has to massage the truth a little to get the message straight. Perhaps that is a fitting analogy.

别忘了罗勒·莎菲的电影《他们最好的》，影片向战时宣传电影改变人心的力量致敬。洁玛.雅特顿扮演了初出茅庐的编剧，书写自己的敦刻尔克英雄事迹，她不得不“美容”事实以更好地传达主旨。也许“美容”是个合适的比喻。

More than ever, nostalgia has become a major component of British cinema, and very little of it seriously challenges or questions our ossified English self-image. On the one hand, there is country house/royal family nostalgia fare, such as The King’s Speech, The Crown and Downton Abbey. On the other, there are postwar heroes such as James Bond, still peddling that “nobody does it better” fantasy of English exceptionalism, colonial supremacy, and overstated British virility.

史无前例，怀旧成为了英国电影的主菜，几乎没有影片严肃地挑战或质问过僵化了的英国自我形象。一边是宫廷皇室等怀旧题材，如《国王的演讲》《王冠》《唐顿庄 园》，另一边是詹姆士·邦德这样的战后英雄，继续兜售着“没人比我更牛”的英国例外和殖民霸权的幻想，夸大英国的英勇气概。

Blended in with this nostalgia is a certain amount of class envy. The two go hand in hand: it is only the posher echelons of the past that we are interested in. If there is a case to answer that Brexit was about the disfranchisement of the working class, again, British cinema needs to take a look at itself.

怀旧主义中掺杂着某种阶级钦羡。这两者携手而行：我们感兴趣的只是以前的贵族阶层 。如果说退欧剥夺了工薪阶层的权利，同样，英国电影该先照照自己。

Even Britain’s new identity myths still lean heavily on our posh past. Take away the magic and Harry Potter is essentially a fantasy of an Edwardian public school, in which an ordinary kid is spirited to an opulent, centuries-old educational institution where they write with quills and never use mobile phones, and the dining tables groan with wholesome English grub. Even the class-mobility element is a bit of a con: Harry is only granted access to this elite world because of his breeding. The

genuinely “ordinary” folks in Harry Potter are his adoptive family, the Dursleys, who are portrayed as fat, greedy, ignorant and uncultured.

就算打造英国新的身份神话，还是全仗着辉煌的过去。除去魔法不说，《哈利.波特》本质上是一部以爱德华时代公学为原型的幻想作品，普通孩子向往在这所拥有数百年历史的奢华教育机构中学习，那里用鹅毛笔写字，从不用手机，餐桌上摆满了健康的英国食物，甚至阶级上升情节也带有欺骗性：只是因为出身好，哈利才获准进入精英世界。《哈利·波特》中真正的“普通”人是领养他的家庭德思礼一家人，他们被塑造成肥胖、贪婪、无知和粗俗的人。

It is the same story with James Bond’s latter-day rival, Matthew Vaughn’s Kingsman, the second instalment of which is due in cinemas soon. As with Bond, it is a secret agent myth with a fetish for Savile Row tailoring and E-type Jaguars and all things English and the upper-class. And, like Harry Potter, the twist is that it is an ordinary, council estate-dwelling teenager, named Eggsy, who has bought into this secret club. But the twist to the twist is that Eggsy’s deceased father was also a secret agent. So actually, it is where he belongs – unlike the rest of his council estate residents, who, again, the film treats with utter contempt.

近年来与《詹姆斯·邦德》同类的影片、马修·沃恩导演的《王牌特工》如出一辙，其第二部即将上线。与邦德故事一样，这是一个秘密特工神话，对塞维尔街独家定制、E型捷豹超跑和所有此类英式、上层阶级的物件有种癖好。与《哈利.波特》一样，故事转折发生在一个住政府公房的普通年经人埃格西获荐进入这一秘密组织，可故事另有倒转，其实埃格西死去的父亲也是一名秘密特工。因此事实上他就属于这里，和政府公房里的居民不同，同样，影片对后者充满鄙视。

It used to be that British cinema celebrated the working class – from British new wave classics such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Room at the Top and A Taste of Honey, right through to the 1990s and early 2000s, when we still made hits of the calibre of The Full Monty, Brassed Off, Billy Elliot and Trainspotting. Despite the commercial success of costume dramas, Richard Curtis romcoms and Bridget Jones, the likes of Ken Loach and Mike Leigh carried the torch.

英国电影过去常为工薪阶层欢呼，从英国新浪潮经典影片《年少莫轻狂》 《上流社会》和《甜言蜜语》，一直到九十年代及新世纪初早期，当时我们依然为《光猪六 壮士》《奏出新希望》《舞动人生》和《猜火车》的精彩叫好。尽管古装剧、理查德·柯蒂斯式的爱情喜剧和《BJ单身日记》取得商业成功，肯·洛奇和迈克·雷还是受到观 众喜爱。

Looking back, the 90s was a golden age for multiculturalism in British cinema, too. We had British-Asian stories such as East Is East and Gurinder Chadha’s Bhaji on the Beach and Bend It Like Beckham. We had dramas sympathetic to immigrants, such as Dirty Pretty Things (in which the hero was a Nigerian immigrant) and Last Resort (in which a Russian asylum-seeker is treated kindly in Margate). We had Michael Winterbottom’s In This World (tracking two Afghan refugees’ struggle to reach the UK). It seems like a bygone era. Where have those films gone? What changed?

回顾一下，九十年代同样是英国电影多元文化的黄金时期。我们有《东就是东》、顾 伦德·查达哈的《海边的吧唧》和《我爱贝克汉姆》等英国-亚洲文化相互融合的影片;有《美丽坏东西》（男主角是尼日利亚移民）和《单身相爱的日子》（寻求庇护的俄 罗斯人在马盖特得到善待）这类对移民展现出悲悯情怀的电影；还有迈克尔·温特伯 顿的《尘世之间》（本片讲述了两个阿富汗难民试图进入英国的故事）。这宛如一个 逝去的时代，这些电影哪儿去了呢？什么发生了改变？

It is interesting that these movies tailed off at about the same time the Cool Britannia moment – a period when Britain felt modern and relevant – went cold. By the crash of 2008, and the coalition government, being cool was a frivolous luxury. The national mood swung to Keep Calm and Carry On mode. Instead of referring back to swinging 60s hedonism, the nostalgia swung back even further, to wartime austerity, union jack bunting and Bake Off.

有趣的是，这些电影热度褪去几乎发生在“酷不列颠”时代逝去的同时，那时英国接触现代、与世界紧密相连。到2008年经济危机，英国组成联合政府，“耍酷”成为轻佻的奢侈之想，国民心态转向“保持镇静，继续前行”的模式。与怀念六十年代的享乐主 义不同，怀旧主义追溯得更久远，回到了战时紧缩、英国国旗飘扬和举行家庭烘 焙大赛的时代。

Whether British cinema informed the Brexit sensibility or simply responded to a national change of sentiment is debatable, but not all attempts to deal with history and identity fall into the “leave” end of the spectrum. We have had movies such
as Pride, which told of striking miners and LGBT Londoners coming together in the 1980s. And Paddington, an open-minded children’s comedy that celebrated Britain’s history of multiculturalism, acceptance and generosity towards immigrants, be they Peruvian bears or Jewish children arriving on the Kindertransport. “Paddington, in a sense, was a refugee,” the late Michael Bond told this paper, “and I do think that there’s no sadder sight than refugees.” Britain doesn’t “stand alone” in these movies; it reaches out.

英国电影传达了退欧时期的情绪抑或只是对国民情感变化做出回应，这都未可知，但并非所有对历史和身份的处理都倒向退欧一边。我们亦有《骄傲》这样的电影，影片讲述了八十年代，罢工的煤炭工人和伦敦另类性取向群体站在一起。还有开明的儿童 喜剧《帕丁顿熊》，颂扬了英国多元文化史，对移民包容、慷慨，不论是秘鲁熊还是 儿童营救运动救来的犹太孩子。“帕丁顿在某种意义上就是一个难民，”后来迈克尔·邦德在报纸上说，“我认为没有比难民处境更悲惨的了。”在这些电影中，英国并非“孑然独立”；它向世界开放。

Another recent example, even if it was too critically panned to really register, is Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. The story is another one of those foundation stones of English identity that has been repackaged so many times we are sick of hearing it. (Boris Johnson likened dealing with Paris to Monty Python and the Holy Grail, where the French launch a dead cow at King Arthur and fart in his general direction). But Ritchie’s King Arthur did something interesting with it. His Arthur is a street-savvy Londoner whose accomplices, the future Knights of the Round Table, include two African-descent characters (Djimon Hounsou and

Kingsley Ben-Adir), one Chinese man (Tom Wu) and a Mediterranean witch (Astrid Bergès-Frisbey). What could have been a Brexit-friendly story about Britons “taking control”, Ritchie instead turned into a remainer’s fantasy: a tale of multicultural metropolitans overthrowing an entrenched aristocracy. This King Arthur even makes peace with his European foes, and ends the film by re-establishingdiplomatic relations with the Vikings.

最近还有一个例子，虽然被批太烂不值得给分，那就是盖·里奇执导的《亚瑟王:斗兽争霸》。故事的主角是另一个英国形象的基石，可因为翻拍次数太多，观众都审美疲劳了。（鲍里斯.约翰逊把应对法国比作《巨蟒与圣杯》，法国人将死牛投向亚瑟 王,，朝他那个方向放屁）。但里奇对亚瑟王的处理很有趣，亚瑟是个走街串巷的伦 敦人，他的随从也即后来的圆桌骑士，有两个非裔角色（杰曼·翰苏和金斯利·本·阿 德）、一个中国人（汤姆·吴）和一个地中海女巫（阿斯特丽德·伯格斯-弗瑞斯贝）。 本来可以成为一个关于不列颠人“取得控制”的故事，有利于退欧，相反里奇将其拍成留欧派传奇：一个多元文化的现代都市故事，推翻了根深蒂固的贵族文化。这个亚瑟 王甚至同欧洲敌人和解，影片最终以重建与维京人的外交关系结束。

To its credit, Nolan’s Dunkirk avoids flag-waving jingoism in favour of a more complex account of events. The heroism and courage and sacrifice is duly celebrated, but the movie acknowledges there was also panic, chaos, fear and cowardice. There was xenophobia – “English only!” shouts the naval officer, turning French soldiers away from the rescue ships – but there was also solidarity: “I’m staying ... for the French,” says Kenneth Branagh’s naval commander, as he watches the last British troops sail home. Nolan has said he approached the film “from the point of view of the pure mechanics of survival rather than from the politics of the event”.值得称赞的是，诺兰的《敦刻尔克》没有强烈的爱国主义，影片对事件的叙述更加复

杂。英勇、无畏和牺牲受到赞扬，可影片还展现了恐慌、混乱、恐惧和懦弱。影片中有仇外情节——海军军官喊“只许英国人上船”，将法国士兵驱离，但也有团结的一面：看着最后一批英国军人返向本岛，肯尼思·布莱纳格海军指挥官说：“我会留在这儿…….为了法国人。”诺兰说过，他“从纯粹的求生技巧而非事件政治的角度”处理影片。

It is a theme that resonates beyond Dunkirk itself, and far beyond the Brexit interpretation of it. As we watch hundreds of thousands of unfortunate people huddled on the beaches, hoping for deliverance, the similarity between our boys trying to get home and present-day migrants striving desperately to reach Europe is impossible to ignore. Our identity myths should surely be able to accommodate both.

主题产生的共鸣不止于敦刻尔克本身，也远超出对它进行的退欧解读。我们看到成千上万不幸的人在海滩上挤作一团，渴望获救，我们的孩子们想要回家，而如今移民历经千幸万苦想进入欧洲，两者间的相似性不容忽视。我们的身份神话应该兼容两者。

译者 周江