In this latest excerpt from Reviews for Non-Existent Movies (available here!), Eric Goulden Kimball presents to us another essay that, although the name of the Church is never invoked, it is everywhere present. Certainly the story of a self-destructive civilization locked in a genocidal civil war that presages their complete erasure from all of ancient history will be a familiar one to anyone reared on the Book of Mormon.
For that matter, the tale of a self-destructive civilization told against a possible futurist backdrop of rising sea levels and the impending catastrophe of global climate change in these latter-days, should likewise be familiar to us.
And the drained-and-empty city park the author walked through that one snowy night, he informs us, was Liberty Park in Salt Lake City, by the way.
Review: The Prehistoric Doggerland Suggests That the Returned Should Remain Repressed (Grade: B)
Once in college, I went out for a night-walk in the snow through an empty city park, when I passed by an artificial pond that had been drained for the winter. On a whim, I decided to walk down into the pond-bed directly. I stood there a moment on the frozen mud, took in the silent majesty of the snow surrounding me…and then left again quickly, unnerved. Not for any rationale reason, mind you: there was zero chance the pond was about to refill itself with water that time of year; and even if for some unfathomable reason it had, it was shallow enough that I could’ve waded out again easily. But just the sheer act of standing there on dry ground, in a place that was normally supposed to filled with water, threw me off me in a way I couldn’t quite put my finger on. It was uncanny—a Freudian term, from the German unheimlich, meaning “unhouse-like”, in the sense that something is there that shouldn’t be.
And sometimes that thing that shouldn’t be there, is you.
That same unsettling sense of the uncanny is the best way I can think of (inadequate though it still feels) to explain the strange mood of the new English film Doggerland. As an opening text-scroll informs the viewer, Doggerland is the modern-day designation for the land-mass that once connected what is now England to what is now France at the end of the last Ice Age, an era when a Wooly Mammoth could’ve walked on foot all the way from the Thames to the Rhine unimpeded. Rising sea levels finally began to cut off the Doggerland from both Britain and Europe alike around 6500 BC, until a mega tsunami off the coast of Norway (termed the Storegga slide by geologists) finally buried it for good around 6200 BC—that is, 3,300 years before Stonehenge, 3,700 before the Pyramids of Giza, and over 5,000 before the Biblical Exodus, the Trojan War, and the Epic of Gilgamesh. The land was rediscovered in the 1930s when fishing trawlers pulled up antlers, Mammoth tusks, the remains of lions, prehistoric tools and (portentously) weapons. This is the land Doggerland chooses as its setting.
Hence, the entire time you are watching Doggerland, you are uncannily aware that everywhere you are standing should be submerged and buried—under water most certainly, but also under history, under all memory and all consciousness. The film Doggerland itself has been marketed as a caveman story, a tale from before the dawn of history. Such a genre does not generally have a good track record in Hollywood: they either tend towards the goofy and silly, or the overly self-serious, and in either case are usually filled with glaring anachronisms and slippery history, e.g. humans hunting dinosaurs, or pyramids in 10,000 BC. Doggerland’s solution, then, is to embrace the slipperiness: rather than try to make it historically accurate to 5,000 BC, it instead keeps all sense of epistemological consistency permanently unsettled. Part of that is simply by blatantly violating its own opening text by compressing the geologic time-frame that buried the Doggerland from about 300 years to about 3 months: The film opens with a rag-tag clan of hunter-gatherers lead by a chieftain named Erwan (Christian Bale, showing his age and almost unrecognizable under a scraggly beard) descending from the lowlands of Britain to chase after a wounded Mammoth, only to find the way back cut off by the beginnings of the English Channel—a shallow river of sea-water at first, but then, those waters only keep quietly rising. All throughout the film, various landmarks scattered throughout the Doggerland tundra—oak trees, burial mounds, bleached Mammoth skeletons, Stonehenge-esque pillars—keep on gradually receding into the steadily advancing surf every time they circle pass them.
Even stranger, none of these receding landmarks are noted by the various other villagers that Bale’s tribes-men encounter on their journey around the Doggerland, who are constantly giving them contradictory directions back to the “Highlands,” as they call them. In fact, when they find themselves moving in a circle, they find many of these same villagers don’t even remember them from the day previous—even as some of their mud-huts are already being washed into the sea. Quickly, these prehistoric tribes-men find that by crossing the boundary into Doggerland, they have entered some sort of dreamlike irreality, where time moves at a fundamentally different pace, memories are unreliable, places are impermanent, and there is both literally and metaphorically no firm ground beneath your feet.
The slow-burn of this tribe’s palpable descent into desperation is the driving narrative force of the film; infighting breaks out in the clan, long-repressed grievances surface, as they frantically try to hold it together and escape this place. The repressed is returning, in other words—another Freudian term, wherein every savage and uncivilized feeling we had buried deep within ourselves for the sake of society comes bubbling back up. This return of the repressed becomes literalized when a particularly gruesome war suddenly breaks out between the villages of the Doggerland plains, all battling for swiftly dwindling resources in their steadily shrinking land, even while they all deny the reality of the rising sea-levels; two major clans quickly emerge, forcing every tribe it encounters to swear allegiance to one or the other—and brutally slaughtering those who refuse to pick either. It is all that Bale’s tribesmen can do to escape amidst all these outbreaks of violence and wars of extermination.
It is all rather obviously intended as echoes of our own near future wherein rising sea-levels will likely result in similar resource wars within an increasingly polarized world. Implicitly, the Doggerland deserves to be destroyed, and perhaps so do we. In fact, it is not at all clear as to whether this film isn’t taking place in our own near-future: e.g. is that a rusted out old car that sits in the background, just out of focus, or is it just the collection of brown peat-moss on a boulder we see them passing by later? Is that the toppled-base and blades of an electric windmill on the ledge yonder (the UK has indeed been discussing plans to erect a windmill farm on the Doggerland bank in the North Sea recently), or just a white-rock formation, reminiscent of the cliffs of Dover? Are these the last of the Mammoths they are hunting to extinction, or the last of the cloned Mammoths being hunted to another extinction? Are these merely English actors, or are these actually Englishman, speaking actual English, surviving on a resurfaced Doggerland? For that matter, which Ice Age did this particular Doggerland emerge from—the Mesolithic one, or the one after a nuclear winter? That is, is this Doggerland pre-Apocalyptic or post-Apocalyptic—or both? Or are we, for that matter?
Keeping things further unsettled is the presence of actual Druid wizards and magicians that emerge in the battles; speaking in riddles and mysteries, they perform illusions (holograms?), flotation (hovering?) and fire-spells that recalls Arthur C. Clarke’s dictum that any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic.
Yet just when you the viewer think you’re on to Doggerland’s game and can guess the twist, along comes, well, Noah. (Well, he goes by Utnapishtim; but all you lit majors out there will recognize him as the Sumerian Noah from Gilgamesh). Christopher Lloyd delivers his most bug-eyed performance to date, as he boldly prophecies that the gods will smite the peoples for their wickedness and drown them in a righteous fury, all while he builds a boat on dry-land. The boat itself is a monstrosity of peat moss, stone, scant wood, yet also some strangely metallic debris, all of which he assembles through some strange form of telekinesis—again, signs of a futuristic Doggerland? Or of an ancient Druid magic? Does it matter? Or is even knowable? Is anything knowable?
The film ultimately leaves all these questions unanswered, in a state of perpetual, never-ending, unresolved ambiguity. When the inevitable mega tsunami comes to wipe out everyone during the final battle (though whether this is the Storegga slide or a completely different one is also never addressed), the only question is to whether Bale’s tribe can get onto Utnapishtim’s boat in time to return to Britain. All these ambiguities are never resolved, they are merely buried beneath the sea.
At this point, I’m not sure as to whether the film’s failure to fully cohere—tonally, plotwise, whatever—is a feature or a bug, intentional or less so. Is this a fantasy? A cave-man feature? A pre/post-apocalyptic vision? A warning? A sigh? But then, the whole of Doggerland seems possessed of a sort of dream-logic, one that refuses to fulfill itself, either. All I can say is that it unsettled me the same way I once felt on the pond-bed in the snow, like I was disturbing something that should have remained buried.