The Dig (dir Simon Stone 2021)
My friend Bob Eaglestone said this, over on Facebook, with respect to this movie:
“Watched ‘The Dig’ finally: very beautiful but so brexity it made me a bit sad. ‘Our’ deep rooted Englishness buried in but dig up from the barrows; bad experts (‘enemies of the people’); workers and elites united against the state (here, the British museum and ministry of works); barely latent homophobia; memory of the war as the founding event of ‘our time’; social relations as simply about capital (‘her land her treasure’); rejection of foreigners (as vikings, as Germans, ‘they were Anglo-Saxons’); women saved by shagging toffs. Hm.”
I replied:
I enjoyed the movie (v. well acted, nicely mounted etc) but entirely agree with what you say here Bob. Indeed, I wonder if Brexit has made me a bit paranoid. Still: the more I think about this movie the more Brexity (in a malign, toxic way) it seems to me. At its core is a narrative about Ralph Feinnes’ superior, because “of the land” Volkish magical knowledge, his instinctive somatic connection to the past. When the foppish idiots from the museum come along trying to tell Feinnes his business, the movie could have superimposed Gove’s floating head saying “the British people have had enough to experts”.
