Dedicated to Ed Baptist author of The Half Has Never Been Told

Ed, I may have to come back to this.  The issue of aloneness and the desire not to be is a central issue of the human condition.  The great writer of From Here to Eternity, The Thin Red Line, & Whistle James Jones said that the three books when finished would say all he had to say about the human condition.

James Jones did not at all like being alone.  The painting by Marguerite titled The Human Condition, shows the beach twice.  As the beach is seen and then the way it is in a frame.

The Movie Dunkirk made me think of how alone a guy can be in war.  Dunkirk had two characters who were alone.  One was the pilot Farrar played by Tom Hardy, and the other was Tommy played by Fionn Whitehead.  One ended up back on the train, back to the United Kingdom, and the other Farrier the fighter pilot ended up on the beach getting captured.

The pilot ends up to be captured which is an alone surrounded by enemies, and the soldier who survives ends up alone as part of the army back in the UK to be used more in war later.

That the army was defeated ending up in lines on the beach waiting to be rescued exacerbated the every man for himself situation.  It was my theory that Churchhill was all for the soft underbelly strategy that allowed the Germans to turn France’s beaches into a highly fortified network of cannons, machine gun emplacements that was called Fortress Europe because after Dunkirk he didn’t trust his army and wanted to send them and the allies against softer targets first instead of going right back at them after their incredible escape.

General Wedemeyer who did in fact design much of what became the D Day invasion, wanted the allies to go right at Germany as soon as possible, especially before they had a chance to make it more difficult with all those fortified positions.  Wedemeyer presented his plans to FDR & Churchill and ended up in China forthwith.

Others say Churchill was prosecuting the war in a way that would return to the UK it’s empire.  Some say the Americans were in it to make money.  Either way what happened was Stalin had to be kept going or the rest of the Allies were going to lose a lot more than one army.

It is the storyline now to emphasis the irreplaceable depth of emotional attachment to your buddies fighting a common foe.  The storyline that you will be one lonely person with little idea of who you are fighting for and why is not at all something that is going to get the necessary numbers with great enthusiasm to show up for duty.  The majority of soldiers really don’t ever see “the whites of their eyes” but are blown to bits by artillery shells.  Real battlefields become littered by detached legs & arms and heads.  The badly wounded lose mental facilities, or their jaws or are blinded.

Of course there is the Veterans Club.  Seems like most of the time most of the guys or now persons, who return from the wars of the US Empire end up pretty alone.

WWII was about as good a war as you are going to get.  Scientific Socialism was the sickening product of Eugenics and the enthusiasm for scientific wonder weapons on the part of the scientists who like Von Braun who wanted to put m,an on the Moon or Mars were just determined to make the best rocket they could.  He Von Braun was more valuable to the US Empire than the Architect Albert.  Von Braun was pretty well given all the equipment & personal he would ever need to make rockets in competition with the Russians, while Albert Speer did some lonely time in prison.

Maximum Effort frame from watercolor story.

Hey, the US already had Sloan for GM & DuPont.

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………………. The historical advisor, consultant for the movie Dunkirk was Joshua Levine.  He has published a book from what was for the movie.

I can’t remember what the last movie we saw in a theater was.  It is expensive to pay for the cable we get.  Sometimes there are free trials.  We saw The Revenant that way.

The actual movie theater experience of a movie is how they are made to be seen.  I had some complicated dreams the night afterwards.  The movie Dunkirk is not shot in order of events.  Land sea & air are the settings of it.  One week, one day, one hour are the times represented.

The director is Christopher Nolan, whose name as a director of some of the films I’ve seen on the TV set, a flatscreen I got at the PTA Thrift shop for 15 dollars.  It was edited by a man named Lee Smith.  It was shot on film using primarily Panavision IMax cameras.  Real movies are shot using Panavision.  Awhile back Hollywood agreed to use film so Kodak would continue to make it.

When I wanted to look up a few details like who the director & editor was I ended up on Wikipedia where I found all manner of back story to the making of this film, some of it really esoteric like that sound design trick of Shepard Sound that does things to trick the ear with octave steps on a constant tone.  All the math associated with music has been sneaking up on me personally to make me feel inferior.   Humble.

They got to use real Spitfires for the movie from the Imperial War Museum.  The grips did a great job attaching the cameras to the planes.  There aren’t that many of the sort of cameras used.  Panavision is only about a 135 million a year company last I looked.  I posited they left a couple of billion on the table by not putting out a software that made any camera put out a Panavision look in 2012.  In 2015 they put out an app called Panascout.  Their attorney Michelle something said I’d lose, and I want to have good relations with Panavision.  I like making movies.  It’s a long story.  You can find the movie on my TV Channel Transcendian, somewhere in the thousand of episodes.

One of my beefs with the movie is the yellow nose on what was supposed to be a German fighter, the ME bf 109.   If there were ever German planes during WWII painted the way that one was, I’ve never seen it.   The director didn’t want us to get confused?  Like mixing up the progress of the time in a non linear fashion as was done, isn’t inherently confusing.

Confusion is substituted for suspense.   “Hey wouldn’t it be cool!”  is the thinking behind non linear story telling.  No way, really, you make the audience feel sophisticated when you get tricky on them.  In the Wikipedia article it says the editor was cutting the film together without supervision while it was being shot.  If nothing else that is a superior way of making a movie.  Directors are to be credited for getting great performances out of their actors and anything that happens on set.  If they delegate to the people they are working with otherwise good for them.

Watching the movie I never really captured the feel of the events as taking place in a week.  I got the day, and the hour of air to air combat, but I didn’t feel the week.  From my study of WWII events I’m aware of that.