The Great Escaper (2022): Dark myth and trauma on the British coastline

Abstract

The recent film The Great Escaper (2022) raised important questions as to how ongoing public memory of World War Two is both embedded within conceptions of coastlines (Dunkirk, Normandy) and how personal memories of the war clash with public commemorations of the conflict; what may be termed ‘coastal trauma’ of individual memory provides a parallel narrative to national, triumphant myth. As this article explores, interrogation of these problematic disparities also raises further questions as to more pervasive instances of coastal trauma. Hierarchies of militarism within British society, inter-generational discord, coastal poverty, displacement and inequality all contribute to the British coast as being a personal, cultural, societal, economic and political battleground. In addressing these issues, this article will demonstrate how The Great Escaper and The Last Rifleman (2023), both based upon the story of Bernie Jordan, a World War Two veteran who absconded from his care home in Hove to attend the Normandy celebrations, situate the coastal realm of the British Isles at the centre of traumatic instances of recent British history, from the ongoing trauma of World War Two, to the effects of Brexit, Covid19 and the recent lurch to the far-right of British politics as it constellates around the British coastline as a multifarious site of physical, mental and ideological battleground.

The Great Escaper recounts the story of World War Two veteran Bernie Jordan who absconded from his coastal care home to travel to Normandy for the 70th Anniversary of the D-Day landings. It is replete with liminal, coastal spaces; filmed in Hastings and Camber Sands on the Southern English Coastline – a mythical site of ‘Englishness’.

As well as illustrating the cultural centrality and significance of the coastal space within British cinema, the film also engages with prevailing cultural myths, especially of World War Two. Yet, in doing so, it connects more meaningfully with what might be termed a form of ‘coastal trauma’ which underpins British myth and history. The Film offers a private act of memory which differs from the public act of remembrance of the conflict. The coastal spaces of the UK, so readily associated with national identity, as espoused by Dunkirk, Normandy and ‘fighting on the beaches’ rhetoric, continue to be utilised to project conservative and imperialist discourse. Coastal trauma, by comparison, and which this article will describe, is trauma that occurs within the coastal spaces of the UK and its operations overseas and is the violent but largely unspoken residue of colonial and other discourses.

Anderson ¹ and Billig ² both describe the vexed notion of national identity as by turns ‘obscure’ or ‘banal’ and reinforced by tradition and routine, often reproduced by the media and cultural industries; or cultural phenomena, as Smith ³ suggests. For Anthony Smith, ‘Few have done more to confirm, express and disseminate the ideals and problems of the nation than the artist in painted or in moving images’. ⁴ The coastal appearance in British film and media cements its cultural centrality: ‘This ritual, cultural reproduction of the maritime sphere enables it to be viewed as a habitual British cultural practice’. ⁵

Coastlines are also symbols of national decline in its various manifestations as much as they are symbols of nationhood. As this article will elaborate, close analysis of cultural texts pertaining to the British coast reveal the dark duality of myth and history and signpost that the British coastal regions are still cultural and ideological battlegrounds, over nation, immigration, gentrification and beyond. As in The Great Escaper, national myth is more often than not a signal of national trauma.

This article will situate The Great Escaper and The Last Rifleman (2023), which is also based on the story of Bernie Jordan, within conceptions of World War Two (henceforth WWII) trauma and ultimately consider the British coast as a more capacious zone of trauma. It will explore the ability of screen media to create an immersive sense of PTSD and trauma as well as a complex inter and extratextual counter-myth of private remembrance, which works against simple, linear and heroic acts of conflict remembrance. In their specific use of space and place, these texts illustrate the centrality of the coastline to conceptions of WWII and how this radiates, problematically into cultural and national identity and public hierarchies.

By doing so, this article seeks to address a gap in the knowledge in adumbrating the specific role that evocations of the British coast have in articulating the function that trauma has in both the cultural representations of coastal spaces and their original referent – the conflict itself. It describes the complex interplay of socio-cultural factors in collective responses to coastal spaces and multifarious manifestations of coastal trauma.

Coastal spaces and World War Two

Coastal spaces have deep resonances with the history, mythology and public remembrance and dissemination of WWII within the collective public imagination. On a global scale, the Normandy landings of June 1944 remain the largest amphibious invasion in history. ⁶ As such, it has been kept alive in vivid celluloid retellings – most famously in The Longest Day (1962), and Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998) as well as annual and other acts of public remembrance. Then US President Barack Obama summarised its importance as well as the attendant coastal imagery in 2014 (on the 70th anniversary of the landings): ‘this tiny sliver of sand upon which hung more than the fate of a war, but rather the course of human history’. ⁷

Likewise, the Allies action in the Pacific and Mediterranean theatres have helped to cement images of island conflict, beach assaults and other images from the liminal realms of the maritime sphere in the public imagination. Hence, the Pacific-set Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) or the Mediterranean-set Captain Correlli’s Mandolin (2001) to name a few.

Yet, it is for Britain, the Island nation, divorced physically and, at other times, spiritually and ideologically from mainland Europe, that the beach and coastal regions continue to heavily infuse national mythology. Between the mythology of the ‘little boats’ and the evacuation of the beaches of Dunkirk, the Normandy landings themselves, Churchill’s famous rallying cry that the nation will ‘fight them on the beaches’ and Vera Lynn’s wartime hit ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’ – which served as a cultural shorthand for nation, sovereignty, freedom and much more besides, the coastal realm was, and remains integral to Britain’s wartime imaginary. Outside of the ubiquitous stream of televisual documentaries on the subjects, British cinema has helped keep the conflict a dramatic myth in films such as Dunkirk (1958), Atonement (2007) and Dunkirk (2017).

The coast in British film

The coast itself has been an iconic and central part of British film from Rough Sea at Dover (1895), one of the first films produced in Britain and one of the first films screened in the United States, ⁸ via silent classics like Hindle Wakes (1927), WWII films such as In Which We Serve (1942), the British New Wave (The Entertainer, 1960; The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, 1962), the British revival of the 1980s (Chariots of Fire, 1981) to numerous iconic moments and films: Bhaji on the Beach (1993), This is England (2007) and more.

The coast and coastal resort often function as a symbol of levity and temporary escape, echoing its deep role within British cultural life since the nineteenth century, as exemplified by Hindle Wakes and many others. However, it is also a place of stasis and entrapment, and even in narratives of gaiety, the temporary reprieve of a seaside trip serves only to highlight the claustrophobic realities of the everyday.

Indeed, as Mazierska and Győri indicate, ‘If the coastal experience is constitutive of British National Identity, it owes this position to its widespread cultural mediation’. ⁹ They point out that this dissemination is diffuse through such diverse cultural products as comics, postcards, literature and, particularly cinema (crucially, omitting television as a vital cultural form that takes on the representational baton somewhat, especially from the 1950s onwards). This useful conception of the coast as a polyvalent space will be returned to later.

World War Two films and Britain

It is well-documented how central the British cinema industry was to the propaganda project of WWII. ¹⁰ It is also noted how it cast a long shadow over the following decade, with over eighty films released in Britain in the 1950s relating to WWII, as war films recounting the recent conflict kept stories of heroism firmly in the public imagination. Significantly, this period also preceded the contraction in scale of the seaside holiday from its 1950s heyday. ¹¹

Films about WWII thus often served to offer a nostalgic and mythological view of another age, with strict class and gender boundaries, ¹² the presence of the Empire and the importance of Britain on a global scale. As Robb indicates, popular accounts of the war tend also to present women as ‘dilutees’ on the home front as well as almost entirely eroding the active contribution of civilian men. ¹³ As Murphy also suggests,

The Second World War, like most wars, was fought by very young men (the average age of Battle of Britain pilots was twenty-one) and for those who survived it was likely to be the most traumatic and dramatic period of their lives. War films allowed an opportunity of re-living and coming to terms with that experience. ¹⁴

While for Nicholas Pronay:

They allowed the people in the audience to re-live vicariously their experiences, the fears, guilt and dilemmas of their own particular war; and to catharsise psychological sores still festering. ¹⁵

This celluloid mythology, although characterised as more complicated and nuanced over time, especially from the 1960s onwards in narratives that questioned national mythologies (such as Lawrence of Arabia, 1962 and The Charge of the Light Brigade, 1968) continued to keep the mythology of WWII prominent and relatively sacred.

As will be seen, many British narratives concerning the war often constellate around increasingly sacred and mythological coastal spaces, in particular, The White Cliffs of Dover, Dunkirk and Normandy Beaches, while Churchill’s ‘We Shall Fight them on the Beaches’ rhetoric continues to centralise the coastal space as a heroic, last line of defence (even in narratives of relative failure and defeat).

The more recent cycle of British films concerning WWII films may offer a similar cathartic function for the dwindling number of those who actively experienced the conflict (Ronay’s Catharsis) but are far more explicit in presenting the trauma as very real and present decades after the events took place; as separate, private acts of [trauma] remembrance. They also function to extend the vicarious experience of taking part in the conflict for audiences to a vicarious experience of the longitudinal trauma it carried with it.

The Normandy (D-Day) Landings and Dunkirk, specifically, have been imagined on film on multiple occasions. Some of the most notable of these are the Hollywood productions The Longest Day (1962) and Saving Private Ryan (1998). Spielberg’s big budget and high-profile Ryan has become a cultural touchstone for providing a ‘realistic’ and unflinchingly visceral evocation of the storming of Normandy beaches (particularly the notorious Omaha Beach). In these instances, according to Redmond,

The body of the beach becomes a killing machine, a blood-soaked canvass, where the fallen sink and disintegrate into mere bloodied flesh and bare bone. ¹⁶

In many regards, Spielberg’s gritty vision of noise and chaos, severed limbs, leaking entrails, blood and corpses in the water, beach and surf, have formed a powerful cultural discourse, which challenges sanitised memorials and mythology related to the conflict. Indeed, a character in The Last Rifleman mentions having seen the film and therefore ‘understands’ the sacrifice the titular character undertook. As such, cinema continues to perform an important social function in providing visions and evocations of a conflict that is historical, abstract and partly mythologised for most.

The Great Escaper

The Great Escaper (2022, henceforth Escaper) is based on the ‘true’ story of Bernie Jordan, an 89-year-old retired D-Day veteran and Royal Naval Officer, who ‘escaped’ his care home in Hove in 2014 to travel to France and take part in the seventieth Anniversary of the Normandy landings. Bernie became a minor celebrity when his story was picked up by the national press. Indeed, Bernie’s ‘real life’ story is embedded within the coastal town of Hove as he served as a Borough councillor for several decades and as Mayor in the mid-1990s.

At 10.30 am on 5th June 2014, the day before the commemorative events, Bernie left The Pines Care Home in Furze Hill, Hove, taking the train from Brighton to Portsmouth, where he then caught the ferry to Caen, France. ¹⁷ The Pines had agreed for him initially to attend the celebrations but could not find him a space on the accredited Royal British Legion visit, even renewing his passport for him in advance. It is claimed that Bernie was unsure as to whether to go which had caused the delay, ¹⁸ while his wife Irene knew about it and agreed. Care staff subsequently listed him as a missing person.

On board the ferry, Bernie spoke to the Orrell veteran group, one of whom was a specialist nurse who had worked at The Pines. They asked Bernie if they could call the home on his behalf which he agreed to, and plans were made to have him picked up from ferry terminal on his arrival back home. ¹⁹ News crews gathered on his arrival home while Bernie himself displayed the self-effacement attributed to the ‘golden generation’: ‘Anyone would think I’d defeated Hitler on my own’ he declared. ²⁰ The same level of self-effacement is present in The Great Escaper.

The Great Escaper was the most successful British Independent film of 2023. ²¹ It introduces Bernard ‘Bernie’ Jordan (Michael Caine) and his wife Irene ‘Reeny’ Jordan (Glenda Jackson). Known only to Irene, Bernie plans his ‘escape’ from the care home to attend the D-Day celebrations. Bernie ducks out to catch the bus to Dover ferry terminal (after the appearance of a care home worker on the bus foils this plan, he is forced to take a taxi along the coastal road). He is helped onto the ferry by a young, Black soldier, Victor (Scott Selwood); a veteran of a more recent conflict. On the ferry, he befriends another veteran, Arthur (John Standing) who invites Bernie to stay with him and his party in Normandy, and who proceeds to get drunk on gratis wine the first evening. Meanwhile, Reeny privately confides to the care staff of her own terminal diagnosis. Bernie and Arthur meet a group of German soldiers, emotionally bond over their traumatic memories and offer them their tickets to the official celebrations, instead, deciding to visit the respective graves of Bernie’s friend and Arthur’s brother. Bernie has numerous traumatic flashbacks to D-Day while Reeny similarly has flashbacks to the trauma of being on the Homefront. These are mixed with romantic flashbacks between the pair in their youth. It is clear that both Bernie and Arthur, and possibly Reeny also, have levels of unresolved trauma or PTSD from the conflict.

On the ferry home Bernie discovers that he’s a cause celebre which he reluctantly embraces. Back at the care home, he assuages his private guilt, seen in several flashbacks, that he was somehow responsible for the death of a comrade whose tank was shelled upon landing at Normandy. The last scenes show Reeny and Bernie enjoying their company at the relatively tranquil coastal space of Hove in their last few months; reestablishing the coastal space and resort as one of peace and contemplation.

The Great Escaper juxtaposes a number of coastal spaces – Hove and Dover 2014 and Normandy 1944/2014, combining memory, remembrance and trauma (combat and PTSD) enacted within these liminal realms. As such, it replaces the public with the private as acts of remembrance, and substitutes collective public mythmaking with private, haunted memory. It thus creates a counter-myth and narrative to the mainstream – what might be termed a ‘dark mythology’ and one that predicates the loci of these to the individual and their relation to the space of the coast in its contrasting utilisation.

Appropriately, the film opens on a coastal space, as Bernie stares contemplatively out to sea. The setting is the coast of Hove, East Sussex but filmed on the adjacent coastline at Hastings and St. Leonards-on-Sea. This is not an insignificant change in the location and will similarly be returned to. The camera is trained on Bernie, switching between wide shot, medium close-up, close-up and birds-eye view to create a sense of intimacy and space. Intimacy is contrasted with more expansive shots, also showing Bernie as a small figure in the landscape, with the weather and location somewhat reminiscent of Casper David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog, c1818. This last point, whether intentional or not, establishes a sense of the sublime to the scene, whilst elsewhere it also establishes a juxtaposition of scale; this is Bernie’s intimate story but also fits into a more expansive national (and international narrative) while also rooting both narratives firmly within a coastal setting.

The meeting with the German soldiers is particularly significant as it highlights several facets of the conflict and its traumatic scars, alongside public versus private history and alternative national remembrance. The scene is marked by melancholy. The fact that the British soldiers are clothed in military apparel replete with medals compared to the German soldiers in casual clothing is also significant, as it indicates the differences between the glorious myth of Allied Victory compared with the shame, guilt and defeat of the fascistic Axis powers; ²² Germany especially. Hauber and Zank indicate that around 3% of the German population above sixty fulfil the criteria for PTSD compared with, for example, 0.9% in the Netherlands or 0.7% in Switzerland. ²³

The narrative and its temporal and spatial juxtapositions also work to maintain the demarcated gender spaces of the time period it partially commemorates. In flashbacks, Reeny is left to deal with the Home Front; the manufacture of munitions and handling of loss and grief and likewise deal with her husband’s absence in the present as well as her own terminal diagnosis. Again, both in flashbacks to WWII and the present day, the demarcation of spaces is apparent as Bernie is the strident male crossing the Channel for a mission, both public and private, in militarised contexts compared to Reeny’s relevant relegation to the domestic and private spheres.

However, the stoicism shown as necessary in the conflict is also reflected in Reeny’s internalisation and withholding of the news of her illness from both the carers and Bernie. This display of feminine fortitude serves as a reminder that the ‘Golden Generation’ extends beyond the battlefield to the Home Front of WWII veterans. As will be discussed, this was an important factor in the dissemination of reportage concerning COVID-19. This is also demonstrated in her conversation with the carer – ‘It’s between me and him. It always has been as far as the war is concerned’ again, proving that there is a difference between public and private memories of the conflict, while also suggesting the specifically British context of ‘stiff upper lip’ stoicism which may account for the ‘bottling’ up of anxieties. Stoicism, as identified by Jeffrey Richards ²⁴ as a central feature of British National Identity was also a central feature of propaganda films produced during the conflict itself, ²⁵ such as In Which We Serve (1942), and Fires Were Started (1943). This also extended to propaganda films made explicitly for the purpose of encouraging women to work in such places as munitions factories, including Women Away from Home (1942) which stressed the need for sacrifice. ²⁶

Therefore, a flashback sequence that follows the news in which a death is announced in the munitions factory Reeny worked in is typically heroic, with Reeny (significantly, for the nature of this article) standing atop indeterminate white cliffs as RAF planes travel overhead towards the direction of the continent. Reeny can see explosions and other signs of the landing across the channel – providing a temporal, spatial and spiritual link between the two places, further cementing stoicism, resistance, and strident activity to the mythologised coastal spaces of England (specifically).

It is also significant that the title of the film intertextually refers to a previous (Hollywood) film about the war which has attained classic status, The Great Escape (1963) a film about POW’s who effect an escape from the Stalag Luft III internment camps (based very loosely on actual events). The film has become a popular institution on British television while also attaining boundary ritual status by being associated with regular Bank Holiday and other screenings. It is also a film about relative failure as all but three of the ‘escapers’ are either caught or executed. Such narratives help to project the ‘plucky underdog’ spirit that endures despite Great Britain still having an Empire at the point of these events and which is present somewhat in Bernie’s autobiographical tale, thus presenting a complex interweaving of fact and fiction – private and public, textual and intertextual.

The Last Rifleman (2023)

The Last Rifleman directed by Terry Loane (hereafter Rifleman), is also inspired by Bernie Jordan’s story but transposes it to Northern Ireland with Artie Crawford (Pierce Brosnan) similarly absconding from his care home to visit Normandy. It received a limited theatrical release before moving to VOD. In this iteration, Artie’s dementia-suffering wife Maggie (Stella McCusker) dies in the first Act, acting as a prompt to Artie’s pilgrimage. Taking on the tropes of the road-movie somewhat, Artie hides in a laundry van, then catches a coach – meeting up with a young man who helps him on his way to the ferry terminal via hitchhiking on a lorry. Ultimately, Artie reaches France without a passport by stowing in the back of a caravan. There are many more similarities with Escaper as Artie also meets up with German soldiers, notably Friedrich (Jurgen Prochnow) and is haunted by guilt and trauma as flashbacks reveal the incidents that shaped the rest of his life. Artie blames himself for his best friend, Charlie (who was also Maggie’s betrothed), dying on the battlefield – a stronger man who refused to leave Artie behind, leading to, Artie believes, his own death (‘I Killed my best friend’).

The film also juxtaposes a number of transitory and liminal spaces (care home, van, coach, taxi, lorry etc.) and liminal coastal spaces (coast, ferry, port) again, suggesting the restlessness that can accompany war trauma. Coastal flashbacks to young Artie, Maggie and Charlie in Bangor and later with an ageing Artie and Maggie at the same resort again (as the inception of Maggie’s failing memory is hinted at), powerfully links the coastal space of escape and gaiety with traumatic war memory and dementia.

The conflict, as a memorial presence, is personalised again in an encounter with a Black American soldier, Lincoln Jefferson Adams (John Amos) as he discusses his experiences of Omaha Beach. Adams neatly exposes the duality of public and private remembrance, first by proudly detailing his role as a pioneering Black GI, before lamenting that his little brother died at the same time. Adams elaborates, ‘that’s the thing about you and me Artie, we’re all living with ghosts’. This also echoes an earlier conversation with Friedrich: ‘We did terrible things. . .I’ve had to live with that;’ ‘we all have’ Artie responds. Again, there is a suggestion that trauma is internalised and the burden of the individual, as well as those close to them, while celebration/commemoration is a public pageant.

In his article, ‘The Politics of War Trauma’, Jolande Withuis outlines the three key diagnoses of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder; (1) intrusive flashbacks, (2) avoidance of situations and emotions associated with the war and (3) a persistent state of physical hyperarousal. ²⁷ All three of these are either implicitly or, more often, explicitly present in both film’s fictionalised depiction of Bernie Jordan’s ‘escape’. Most evident is the ability of audio-visual media to create immersive, subjective flashback sequences that, through use of audio and moving images, give an insight into the nature of war trauma that echo the symptoms and feelings of PTSD.

Both Bernie in Escaper and Artie in Rifleman are haunted by the loss of a friend and comrade. Less explicitly but no less potently in Escaper, the character of Arthur (John Standing) is similarly tormented by painful memories of the conflict and the loss of his brother during it. Arthur seeks solace in alcohol, a side-effect that Hauber and Zank suggest of WWII survivors; ‘a higher risk of alcohol disorders’. ²⁸

The representation of servicemen and women who survive the conflict in both these films, perhaps ironically, don’t necessarily reflect the specific experiences of the real-life Bernie Jordan, whose wartime experiences are actually little-known ²⁹ but rather those outlined in specific research into the effects of trauma on WWII survivors. According to Hauber and Zank, there is a higher prevalence of medical conditions, including higher pain, poorer general health and higher depression levels in this demographic. ³⁰ Furthermore, they state that many express mental illness through somatisation (i.e. via physical symptoms). ³¹

It is worth considering both Escaper and Rifleman as well as other films about WWII in relation to new approaches to representations of the conflict, particularly as expressed by Eileen Rositzka. ³² Rositzka suggests a new re-mapping of war and its representations (especially film) as it relates to the human body:

Nowhere becomes the notion of a measurable landscape more evident and decisive than on the battlefield of war. . .which encompasses cognitive processes of abstraction and anticipation as well as attuning the body to different geographical conditions. ³³

Rositzka further suggests that the somatic impact of warfare needs to be considered as a full impact on all the senses, ‘the thunderous sounds of explosions, the smell of smoke, or considering how it feels to wade through mud and water’. ³⁴ This is equally true for the diegetic actors as it is for the spectator. Spielberg’s evocation of the storming of Omaha Beach is a particularly immersive and extreme version of this but it is also evident in the flashbacks to combat present in both Escaper and Rifleman and in appealing to the senses, helps to illustrate the likelihood of ongoing trauma as outlined earlier. Indeed, they all have the ‘thunderous sounds’ that so readily provide a sound bridge to traumatic memory in these texts, but smoke and water are represented here, fully mapping coastal trauma as it relates to WWII and beyond.

Rositzka also usefully quotes from Gregory and Castree:

Geography is no longer ruthlessly partitioned from History; time and space are no longer absolutes but defined in relation to people, events and objects, and these are not located ‘in’ time and space but enter into the co-production of time-space; and ‘physicality’ now carries a much livelier, more sensuous charge. ³⁵

The screen arts, cinema especially, have been instrumental in producing the ‘sensuous charge’ and reproduces its multiple physical and imaginative geometries. Where the propaganda films of WWII connected audiences to current events and the war films of the 1950s and beyond to historical events of the recent past, Escaper and Rifleman very much relates the conflict to the mental and somatic trauma of the individual.

The conflation of WWII, the coastal space, death, sickness and trauma is made explicit in these films, creating a vivid and powerful anti-myth of national celebration and commemoration; and one that tends to privilege private memory over public remembrance as having a greater impact on the individual with first-hand experience of the conflict. It is useful to consider these depictions alongside traditional national mythologies of WWII as well as the figure of the ex-serviceman in British society. As such, it is especially relevant to consider Escaper in relation to the role of British WWII mythologisation during the COVID-19 pandemic (as it relates to 2020-21).

The ex-serviceman and the national psyche

The figure of the male ex-serviceman, as exemplified by Bernie and Artie in these texts, is at least partly a social construct and also a figure routinely invoked as a conflation of virtues from another age that need to be reproduced in order to make the nation great again and/or to steel the country once again for hardship. This is best exemplified, in recent years and in a specifically English/British context by the actions of the ex-WWII Serviceman Captain Sir Tom Moore during the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020. Echoing the public and media galvanisation of Bernie, both in real life and as ideated in both films, Centenarian Moore became a public phenomenon after he raised £39 million for the NHS by completing laps of his care home garden during lockdown ahead of his approaching 100th birthday in April 2020. ³⁶ Moore was elevated to a public hero and inspiration, released a charity record and was knighted for his services to charity and nation before unfortunately passing away in February 2021, somewhat ironically, from complications arising from contracting Covid.

At a time in which NHS staff were also being publicly applauded, it was WWII veteran Moore who became a national figurehead, as the Blitz mentality was invoked in national discourse. ³⁷ Gallagher suggests that ‘As well as channelling the Britain we wanted to see when we looked in the mirror, Captain Tom also represented something about our collective nostalgia for the past’ and for Robert Gutsche Jr, Moore represented the last of a dying breed; ‘aren’t many like him left’. ³⁸ Both films reflect this complicated veneration of the ‘dying breed’ and the distance this can create between generations.

It has been noted that the actions and image of Moore have overshadowed those of NHS workers and other key frontline staff (despite Moore’s own valiant efforts to highlight these). Writing in Nursing and Residential Care, Francesca Ramadan argues that ‘it is important to pierce through his iconography and the patriotic mythmaking that surrounded his last few months to the real issues lent greater significance by his life and death’. ³⁹ For Ramadan, the irony of Moore succumbing to Covid only served to highlight those who were vulnerable to the epidemic and also underline the need to properly fund the NHS as opposed to being reliant on private fundraising of the sort that Moore spearheaded: it ‘should perhaps be framed as cause for concern, rather than celebration’. ⁴⁰

Nevertheless, Moore himself valorised the work of NHS workers, using martial metaphor, ‘Because every morning or every night they’re putting themselves into harm’s way, and I think you’ve got to give them full marks for that effort. We’re a little bit like having a war at the moment, But the doctors and the nurses, they’re all on the front line. . .’ ⁴¹

Browning and Haigh go further into the mythology and symbolism of Captain Tom, suggesting that his widespread veneration was a further irony as a figurehead for a golden generation of heroism and fortitude when health workers were risking their lives (2022). ⁴² Captain Tom, they argue, was valorised more for what he was, or represented, rather than for what he did. Furthermore, his coverage invoked the latent militarism of society: ‘the Captain Tom phenomenon marked a reassertion of militarized social hierarchies at a time when civilian rather than military heroism had been ascendant in public discourse’. ⁴³

For Browning and Haigh, who describe ‘hierarchies of heroism’, the veneration and privileging of Captain Tom is illustrative of the phenomenon of militarism within society – the active privileging of military values and those with experience and expertise. They state that several forms of vicariousness were in effect in the public discourse relating to Captain Tom. Vicarious militarism relates to the association with veterans of conflicts without personal experience; while vicarious resilience is defined as ‘desires for resilience. . .by identifying with objects embodying national – and militarised traits’. ⁴⁴ Vicarious identity is perhaps something that narratives such as Escaper and Rifleman also tend to invite, through character identification and narrative perspective.

The ongoing mythologisation of WWII, in particular, is excessively bound up in diverse, but capitalistically driven industries, from film and television to heritage and tourism. The popularisation and commodification of the ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ propaganda poster is emblematic of this entangled phenomenon. This is neatly illustrated in Rifleman as Artie encounters a tourist market at Normandy. Children play with gas masks, toy planes, and have their pictures taken posing with models of soldiers in combat, while a Ferris wheel and souvenirs mark the celebrations as both entertainment and commercial venture. Artie looks circumspect as his private memories and grief become a public spectacle and capitalist pageant.

To return specifically, to the subject of carers and care homes, this topic unites the representations discussed. It is especially significant that Escaper’s spiritual home is the care home, while in Rifleman, Artie’s wife lives with dementia, specifically (as did Captain Tom Moore’s wife). This is a condition often associated with the coast due to the fact that this is a common place of retirement and one in which coastal areas have been significant locales for narratives concerning dementia, such as Iris (2001).

Thus, the treatment of care workers in the film/s are significant, particularly due to the fact that they were characterised somewhat as villains in the media story surrounding Bernie Jordan in 2014, with the press wrongly reporting that they had prevented Bernie from attending the commemorations. This also returns to the point concerning intergenerational differences, which itself draws focus on numerous other forms of coastal trauma that contextualise the films.

Other forms of coastal cultural battlegrounds

To return to the issue of other forms of coastal conflict, especially as laid bare by the effects of COVID, and in particular Escaper’s selection of Hastings, St. Leonards and Camber Sands as filming locations, this final section will relate the films and Escaper’s actual and imagined coastal spaces with the contemporary reality in which it was conceived, whereby different forms of conflict combine within the coastal imaginary.

A number of recent films and television programmes have conflated care homes and/or care of the aged by the young (often within the gothic and horror film genres) with Britain’s coastal spaces and resorts. The television film, Whistle and I’ll Come to You (2010), a reimagining of Jonathan Miller’s earlier version of MR James’ tale from 1968, updates the story to include the guilt of the title character for having placed his dementia-suffering wife in care (her figure haunts him on the beach) while the miniseries Remember Me (2014) touches on similar themes but also positions the coast at Scarborough as one of colonial retribution. ⁴⁵

Also set within the faded coastal resort of Scarborough is Saint Maude (2019), in which a young carer suffers religious mania while caring for an aged client. These narratives, while placing the trauma of ageing and dementia within the coastal realm, also highlight societal tensions between baby boomers and younger generations for whom the material benefits of relative post-war posterity are not as readily attainable, while on the other side, the younger generations are seen to be less tough and resilient by comparison (the negative epithet ‘snowflake’ to describe this has become commonplace).

These cultural tensions are at least underpinned by statistics. The World Health Organisation suggests that global populations are ageing at an accelerated rate compared to previous eras with the proportion of the world’s population aged sixty or above set to double from 12% to 22% by 2050 ⁴⁶ while the UN cautions that the ageing population is set to become one of the most profound social transformations of the century. ⁴⁷

Thus, care work is a relative boom industry, yet one that will do little to assuage the resentment fuelled by generational disparity. This exacerbates a specific set of circumstances which relate to the relative poverty of British coastal towns. Therefore, Mazierska and Győri also point to a number of British films in which the coastal resort is a place of entrapment, deprivation and exploitation for the young, citing the recent films Jellyfish, Vs and Eaten by Lions (all 2018). In fact, this phenomenon can be further traced further at least as far back as the 1980s, in texts such as Wish You Were Here (1987). ⁴⁸

While Escaper and, to a lesser degree, Rifleman, shows the generational divide as that from the perspective of the ‘golden generation’, very much as the reportage and commentary of Captain Moore did, a number of British films reflect the ‘dead-end’ status of the coastal resort as a reality for young people in coastal areas. These texts position the coastal resort from the perspective of teenagers and young adults as a place of entrapment and danger. Steven Allen further describes the ‘limits of liminality’ (2008) of the British cinematic seaside in texts such as Pawel Pawlikowski’s Last Resort (2000) in which displaced migrants face hostility and exploitation in the pre-gentrified, run-down spaces of Margate.

The liminal parameters of the realm (the coastal areas) highlight the disparities of rich and poor, young and old, citizen and non-citizen, male and female and British cinema reflects/projects this. In Last Resort, the displaced Russian political asylum seeker, Tanya (Dina Korzun) is sexually exploited and in Jellyfish (2018), the teenage protagonist Sarah (Liv Hill) is a carer both for her mentally ill mother and her younger sibling and is raped by the seedy owner of the rundown arcade she also has to work at alongside her schooling. Both films are set in Margate which has featured prominently on British screens (especially within recent years) as a site of trauma and uncertainty – it was the liminal end of a funeral trip in Last Orders (2001) and the site of racial tensions and mental illness in Empire of Light (2023) while similar themes occur in Topspot (2004), Gypo (2005), Ruby Blue (2007) and Exodus (2007).

A slightly-less obvious, but no less potent example of this is Neil Jordan’s vampire film Byzantium (2012), also filmed in both Hastings and Camber Sands, in the exact same locales as Escaper. The displaced figure of the vampire – at home in no specific time or place stands as a powerful metaphor for the liminal status of many in coastal contexts.

The fictionalised Byzantium universe mirrors the real-world Hastings/St Leonards. While it may well have been cheaper and easier to film Escaper on the Hastings/St Leonards seafront rather than the more affluent Brighton & Hove, further along the East Sussex coast, it is also both apt and ironic that this stretch of coastline was the place in which the last successful invasion of England occurred with the Battle of Hastings in 1066.

The COVID-19 pandemic, as if it were necessary, only served to further highlight the huge disparities in affluence and life expectancy of those in many coastal regions by comparison to inland areas. ⁴⁹ Yet these problems were long-evident before the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent ‘lockdowns’ placed everything under a national microscope.

Thus, coastal trauma is reflected in culture (and on film) in many ways. The situation of the poor and displaced are likewise exploited by right-wing politicians. These stem in part from Enoch Powell’s famous ‘Rivers of blood’ immigration speech which co-opted aquatic imagery from Virgil’s Aeneid. ⁵⁰ Murphy notes that the Mediterranean as a site of migration has been characterised as a ‘sea of bodies’ with refugees predominantly from conflict in Africa and the Middle East similarly cast in the media as an ‘amorphous mass’ which ‘draws on both ancient fears of the sea as a repository for unknown monsters and more recent fears of the perceived threat of ‘refugee as invader’. ⁵¹ Sadly, one might well equally characterise the English Channel as a similar aquatic space of displacement and tragedy. The Refugee Council announced that ‘2024 was the deadliest year on record for Channel crossings, with at least 69 deaths reported’ ⁵² and one which attracts right-wing fervour to coastal spaces. ⁵³

The mythologised coastline of Southern England continues to be the site of cultural and ideological battles. Echoes of WWII constellate around the continued use of the White Cliffs of Dover as a (often, reductive and conservative) shorthand for England/Britain. The association, especially, of the White Cliffs of Dover as the first sign of Blighty; the drawbridge to the castle of England in the moat of the English channel – the liminal beginning and end of the mother country and the place in which ‘freedom’ is to be defended at all costs has been assimilated and co-opted as a site of ‘freedom’ against imagined enemies. This includes the allegedly invasive presence of the European Union and similarly the alleged invasion by refugees and asylum seekers. Invariably, imagery and rhetoric from WWII are invoked.

On ‘Brexit Day’, 31st January 2020 which officially marked Britain’s last day in the EU, the white cliffs of Dover (or the similar Seven Sisters in Sussex) were a central recurring image circulated within British popular culture. It offered a physically tangible expression to a variety of ideologies and intangible notions, mainly associated with nationalism, security, sovereignty and freedom. The right-wing newspapers the Daily Mail and the Daily Express both featured the white cliffs on their front covers – the former with the words ‘free and independent’ ⁵⁴ and the latter, a year hence, with a Union flag over the top with ‘freedom’ emblazoned on it while the headline expressed ‘Our future, Our Britain, Our Destiny’. ⁵⁵ On the other side of the ideological divide, the left-leaning Guardian newspaper featured a similar image, but with a broken sandcastle with a miniature Union flag on it and the words ‘Small Island’. ⁵⁶ It was also the scene of political spectacle, as a video by WWII veterans, Sid Daw and Brigadier Stephen Goodall, lamenting the exit from Europe was broadcast over the white cliffs of Dover hours before the official exit; ⁵⁷ while Sky News also marked the occasion by projecting a Union Flag on the cliffs with the words ‘The UK has left the EU’. ⁵⁸

It is little wonder, that given the deprivation and displacement of coastal towns, they would become ideological battlegrounds and low-hanging fruit for right-wing, nationalist ideology and politicians. Coastal towns, especially those deprived, voted overwhelmingly in favour of Brexit (83% compared with 66% inland), ⁵⁹ inspired in no small part by the promise to take control of the country’s borders – placed literally and ideologically on them, as they are. Thus, the hugely deprived town of Clacton finally made right-wing populist agitator Nigel Farage an MP in 2024. The English coast remains as a national battleground.

Conclusion

As this article has sought to demonstrate, the conflation of coastal spaces with trauma in the British national imaginary, characterised by personal and public memory, WWII and national mythology alongside a vector of political, economic, societal and ideological factors that create and sustain trauma in British coastal settings, is complicated and multifaceted. Yet, likewise, the power of cinema and audio-visual screen media to vividly evoke and express these multifarious strands cements its cultural significance.

In these examples, the personal collides noisily and painfully with public discourse. That the British coast is a place of traumatic memory is as true for the ‘golden generation’ and their personalised war trauma as it is for the experiences of younger generations in reduced coastal circumstances, yet Escaper suggests that the image and perspective of the WWII veteran and the ‘golden generation’ retains a privileged status in a nation beset with nostalgia for the conflict and chronically infused with hierarchies of militarism within national discourse.

Likewise, the notion of ‘coastal trauma’ may continue to be a useful barometer for analysing the less visible and unheard voices arising from multiple forms of oppression; from economic and ethnic, impoverished and exploited youth and immigrants to neglected senior citizens and even to those members of the ‘golden generation’ for whom the glorious exploits of WWII hide the physical and mental trauma they induced.

The Great Escaper perhaps succinctly encapsulates this problematic distinction between the public and private history; between the real and the imagined. In the words of the fictional Bernie Jordan: ‘because all they want is a happy ending’.