Let's forget that I am young and female, just for a moment; let's forget about being a "fangirl." Because what I can't forget is how Harry Styles just gave me a gut-punch on the inescapable reality of human frailty and our responsibilities in this world.
One Direction's Harry Styles will be appearing in Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk. The film, to be released in July, will be Styles's first solo project since the band's hiatus and his first acting gig. An early film trailer was an aesthetic piece that refrained from showing much of the lead actors, but with the second trailer, we got more, and yes, we finally, finally got to see Harry. Memes abounded – Oscar for best dramatic head turn. There are posts entirely dedicated to appreciating the trailer's glimpses of his "tiny ears."
And I'm there with them. I'm a young, female, One Direction fan – but mostly, a fan of Styles – and I'm not sure how I'll make it through the full film, considering how affected I was by a two-minute trailer. Harry Styles is special; he has a beautiful voice and a beautiful vibe and he cracks dad jokes while still managing to be sexy and mysterious and he has magical hair (at whatever length). Seeing him cowering in fear, screaming underwater, is a shocking change from the charismatic-rockstar-Harry I'm familiar with.
According to my dad – my first stop for any questions about military history – the siege of Dunkirk was a major German mistake, a turning point in the war. The Allied forces in France had been forced back, pinned to the beach – 400,000 men as Kenneth Branagh's character states in the movie trailer. But instead of pressing their advantage, and completely decimating the Allied forces on the beach, the Nazis allowed them to escape. As a result, the Allies were permitted to survive, regroup and eventually win the war.
That being said, Dunkirk wasn't an Allied "victory" per se. They didn't defeat the Germans, they merely escaped them. That doesn't mean the evacuation of the beaches at Dunkirk wasn't heroic, herculean even. The soldiers at Dunkirk were saved due in large part to an impressive civilian effort, with the deployment of British fishermen and pleasure-boat operators to the beaches. As my dad said to me, it is a somewhat unfortunate truth that "there is nothing like a war to galvanize the masses and bring people together." Soldiers saved by civilians, the everyday working men; it's heartwarming, but in that way that hurts a little, too.
I might have gone to see Dunkirk in theatres even if Harry Styles had not been cast in it. And while I can't pretend to know as much as my father about battles, key figures and critical events, I have consumed my fair share of Second World War multimedia.
Mud, and cold, and death, and small lights of hope; I could never understand, but it hasn't escaped my notice, or my imagination. Without Harry Styles, however, I would not have squealed and left bruises on my best friend's hand when I saw the teaser for the first time. I would also not have awoken, seen the link to the new trailer and watched it in bed with still-crusty morning eyes, becoming an emotional wreck all before 8 a.m.
Harry Styles and I were born in 1994. Despite the rather extraordinary path his life has taken, I identify with him as someone my age, and in the trailer, he looks it. He's 22, and he looks scared. He is surrounded by death. Yes, he is playing a character, but it's merely a question of timing that allows him to participate in the fiction instead of the reality.
More than ever before, I became aware of Harry Styles as a proxy for every boy I know, and in an age when gender constrictions don't mean as much as they used to, as a proxy for myself as well. There are kids my age and kids younger than me who have and are going to war.
Frightening things are going on in the world right now, but for many of us, these realities are still not immediate. We see horrors on the news every day, wars that are being conducted elsewhere in the world and racial conflict and rhetoric that should be raising alarm bells for everyone everywhere. People seem to have forgotten what we swore never to forget.
It doesn't seem like much more than chance that I was born now and here, instead of then and there, where I might not have made it to my age as happy and whole as I have. But the chance of my birth, the privilege I enjoy, does not ensure my safety forever, and it shouldn't be something that I get to leverage merely for my own gain. Finding a way of acting on that knowledge will be more difficult than the realization of it and the truth is that it may take more than just Harry Styles screaming into the Atlantic to truly force me into action. But it was a reminder, and I plan to hold on to it as long as I can.