Official release poster (part)

A couple of nights ago, as our daughter was home for the weekend, we three settled on the sofa in front of the television in her rooms to watch the Netflix drama The Dig.  Its storyline may disappoint Anglo-Saxonists.  It is not really about the discovery of the Sutton Hoo ship burial.  Neither at the dig nor in the conservator’s lab do we get to gaze upon the glories emerging into the light of day after fourteen centuries.  No, this is a movie of the lives of those involved in the dig, most of them real people, and their place in that most pregnant moment in history.  Starring Ralph Fiennes as self-styled excavator Basil Brown, Carey Mulligan as the landowner Edith May Pretty, and Lily James as Peggy Piggott, it was released to general approval - and some disapproval - in January this year.

To be clear at the outset, the film as such is of secondary importance in the thesis of this short essay.  It is really only a vehicle for a commentary on our nationalism.  So let us dispense with it quickly ...

The plot is thin.  War with Hitler’s Germany is imminent.  An old Suffolk archaeology hand is called in by a dying landowner to excavate some barrows on her property at Sutton Hoo.  He uncovers a 6th century Anglo-Saxon boat, and the big names in British archaeology in the 1930s come bouncing in and take over.  These middle-class folk do some middle-class things, including snobbery, professional in-fighting, and extra-marital sex, some of which latter, we are led to believe, is homosexual (completely illegal at the time).  But they also unearth the greatest archaeological treasure in British history.  The excavation closes.  War is declared.  The End.

And that’s it, really.  If the action is boorishly, predictably infected with the modern, the Suffolk coastal landscape breathes history and regulates the action with a heavy sense of the timeless.  Its photography is rich and beautiful, and the lead acting performances match it.  Feinnes revels in the broad country accent and the native intelligence and simplicity of his character - a man who can say “My father taught me,” and for it to mean all the long line of fathers in our past.  The important lines, the ones which reveal meaning, all belong to him.  Feinnes delivers a performance that is at once austere and entirely human in scale.

Mulligan, meanwhile, is too young and too winsome at the age of 35 (at the time of shooting) to pull off the role of an Edwardian English lady who was, in fact, 55 at the start of the excavation in 1938.  But Mulligan’s Edith does convince us that here is a thinking, reflective woman who, in the second half of the movie, appears increasingly desiccated by the coming close of death.  As a widow she suffers the knowledge of it not for herself but for her young son.  It is a portrait of a substantial Englishwoman whose redolent middle-class virtues lend her an easy command of her household and raise her above the others of her class in the movie.  One can quite believe that Edith is well-fitted to the responsibility of determining the fate of the treasure.  Mulligan’s is a performance of no little depth and elegance.

The film is based on John Preston’s 2007 novel, The Dig, in which he states in his Author’s Note that confections for dramatic effect include the placing of the fictional Rory Lomax at the site as Peggy’s love interest.  Actually, there were three photographers on site, none of them Edith’s cousin or a dashing Fighter Command pilot-to-be called, for some reason, Rory.  Peggy did not discover her sensual nature with a member of the local dashing pilot community.  Peggy’s archaeologist husband Stuart was not homosexual, and the two did not divorce until much later, in 1956.  But, y’know, film-making is a liberal industry, and it is only by the grace of the Anglo-Saxon gods that pre-war East Anglian rural society was not presented as oppressive to blacks, Muslims, and all farmers’ children who longed for radical surgery and transition.

So let’s park those hot-button social issues right there, along with (it is said) Raedwald’s fabulous, kingly treasure now held in the British Museum, and proceed on to the meat of the movie: excavation.

The constant reminders of approaching war and all the characters’ recognition of and resignation to the fact not only situate the movie historically but establish the psychological tone of realism breaking through, and of a native stoicism and growing inner preparedness doing likewise.  It is a moment of a Heideggerian Being Towards Death. Folk whose livelihoods reside in the working of the soil inhabit the lanes and fields, the pubs and villages with other folk from outside whose livelihoods reside in the scraping and sifting of it.  Both seek a bountiful crop of sorts.  But one of these folk, dressed in Nature’s dull browns and greens and easy in her embrace, is living daily and by their own physicality in the deep historical dimension, while the other only intrudes into it temporarily from the modern, from metropolis, from academy, from a single perspective of the life of the mind.  In this moment, though, all speak of uncertainty and danger and a war that will be fought in the air, and all are united by the soil and by history.  They have committed themselves to timelessness.  As Feinnes character Basil avers, “We’re part of something continuous.  We never really die.”

It should be clear to us, then, why the excavation of the ship and the treasure is only a side issue in the movie.  No great warrior’s golden helmet is its centre-piece, no moment of awe at the artisan’s handiwork, no picture in the mind of the fealty and unity of the society which produced it, revered its dead wearer, and committed both it and him to the soil.  None of that comes close to the quiet, living truth of the matter; for that is the excavation of what we are, everything of the essential in and to us, and of the readiness, when it is necessary, to overcome doubt and dread and put the whole of our selves unreservedly and as one against the great, collective hazard of the time.  For what is real in us is all we really, finally have.  In its non-adhesion to us ... its not belonging ... everything else is ultimately illusory in comparison, and will dissolve into formlessness in the heat of the test.

Our nationalism stands at a cross-roads.  We can continue in our adoration of the symbols of an imagined masculine greatness of the past, like a child gazing at Raedwald’s helmet through the glass of a museum display case.  We can tell more Nietzschean tales to one another, as we have for seventy years in the fond belief that an inanimate philosophical object will finally bring our people to our side and transport us to a position of influence in this world.  We can continue to ignore the complete failure of that idea, because we do not know any different.  We can continue failing to finish what the BNP started at the turn of the millennium, which was to deny our political and ethnic foes the opportunity to traduce our struggle as fascism.  Or we can, like the long line of fathers of the English past and that of our Scottish and Welsh brothers, express our belonging to something continuous that must never die.  We can turn to the existential, the preservational, the natural, the real, the true, the ethnic.

But here’s the thing.  It’s a dig.  The breaking of the ground is the making of a working, foundationally Heideggarian philosophy of ethnic nationalism, and the excavation is that of a politics of it ... a politics of the being and life of our people.  It is a living treasure which we would, by this way, lay our hands upon; and it is the treasure that abided in the wartime generation and abides in us still.  It is something continuous.

Like all healthy peoples, our fathers’ people always knew, quite instinctively, how to bring out into the light its quiet, indomitable force and make it their own presence.  They understood that belonging to the soil and belonging to the light are the same.  Brought into the light, the being and life of our people is always sufficient unto the task of the day, and it will be so again.  So, then, however you are able ... dig!