Martin MacDonagh's "The Banshees of Inisherin": Agonistic friendship as allegory of civil war
“The Banshees of Inisherin,” the recent film by the Irish playwright Martin MacDonagh, is something of a didactic fable, which is facilitated by its strongly marked elements of character and story, place and situation.
The setting in which the film’s confrontations are staged (Inishirin, the name of the island, literally means “island Ireland”), and which figures quite centrally, is little touched by the 20th century (the year is 1923), and has the iconicity of a postcard image, as it moves between verdant patches of land with stone-walled paths, little houses at some distance from each other, a pub that could be contemporary or unchanged since then, and a seacoast that is partly an empty space to look out on. Across the water on the main Ireland island is raging the fratricidal Irish civil war, fought between England-friendly centrists and IRA radicals, many of whom were on the same side during the 1916 revolution. Clearly, the little Irish island is a microcosmic mirror of the big one. The film partly allegorizes the civil war as a conflict between two men that is devoid of all of the contents of politics, leaving only the form of antagonism and the question of how to fight for what you want, and of what that is or should be.
Pádraic, an 40-ish unmarried man who lives with his sister, has one friend, and is quite fond of the time they spend together, every afternoon, at the pub. Suddenly the friend, Colm, a man of perhaps 70 (the actors, Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, are 46 and 67, respectively), announces, with a sense of fatigue and exasperation but no evident hostility or rancor, that he no longer wants to spend time with this desperately friendly man whose talk bores him. With Irish bluntness, he says simply that he doesn’t like him anymore. He’s insistent, but leaves the matter dependent on the other man. His means of enforcement introduce a plainly surreal, even absurdist, element (MacDonagh obviously knows his Beckett) to the situation: For every time that the younger man speaks to him, he will cut off a finger. And here’s the twist: Not Pádraic’s but his own.
A review I read mentioned this extreme measure of de-digitation, but leaving the impression it was one of those many films about conflicts between aggressive men that turn on acts of vengeful cruelty to the other. But this film is not a genre exercise that makes use of its presuppositions without foregrounding and staging them; it centers around a tale that derives its pointed ethical weight from its particular way of contravening of the usual pattern of village feuds. In fact, Pádraic’s problem is one faced by many people today, perhaps more than ever, in very different environments: Pádraic’s need is to engage in a friendship that centers around talk because he is otherwise lonely.
As in the course of the film, he loses this esteemed friend; another friend, Dominick (played brilliantly by Barry Keoghan, whose provocative way of seeming half-mad we recognize from his role in Yorgos Lanthimos’s “The Killing of a Sacred Deer”), who is described as dumber than himself; his sister, who moves to the relative mainland; and his beloved donkey, we can read the film’s story as a way that Pádraic learns a life-lesson. That lesson would be, surely, to love other people instead of thinking only of his own need (for company), and using them to feel less lonely. He is like the many people today who spend time with friends whom they don’t really care about but hang out with to assuage the anxiety of either loneliness or boredom, or in a certain way (as social media tend to do), both, as if we look both to depersonalized interactions to salve our loneliness, and to socializing for its own sake in order to palliate our boredom, rather than engaging with things that are interesting in themselves. And in fact, this confusion of the need to do things that are interesting and the need to be loved, if only by being liked, and being liked if only by being tolerated, is precisely at issue.
Pádraic presents his own desire in the schematic form of an interestingly dubious proposition of a philosophical ethics: Colm ought to return his attentions because Pádraic is “nice.” But Colm, anxious at his impending death (Gleeson in the role looks rather older than his 67 years) is sick of niceness. An amateur violinist in a band that plays at times in the pub, who lives alone in his hut decorated with objets d’art, he wants to write a musical composition. He wants to spend his time on that, and more broadly doing things he deems worthwhile, including perhaps the solitary contemplation that the believer in an idea of art that he (a bit of a snob) is will prefer to idle talk.
The provocational question here is: What if one were friendly but never said, or thought, anything interesting? In other words, what if one were stupid (not, likely, as a consequence of lacking marbles, but because one has not learned to use them or to want to) but nice? What is the relative value of kindness on the one hand and artful intelligence on the other? Is the good an object of wisdom, or a natural product of innocence?
The song’s title is the film’s. A banshee is a figure in Irish pagan legend, a female spirit warning of impending doom. There is a mysterious old lady in the film, lacking any concrete connection with any other persons, who seems like she might be darkly portentous in the manner of a wizened sorceress. The film has the same relationship to pagan religious roots that classical Greek tragedy and Shakespeare sometimes do, using them as a narrative device.
Colm is an avuncular figure for the younger man. Is that why he cuts off his own fingers? He may want to teach the terminally immature protégé a lesson. In a twist on Freud, we could suppose the son’s dream would be of a father who says, “Son, can’t you see you’re destroying me?” This would be intended with a very different effect than a more usual act of punitive violence upon the son. The aim would be to get the son to learn to care about the needs and suffering of others. The father figure here is so into his role that he doesn’t seem to even feel pain with his own dismemberment. I am reminded of the role of Elisabet vis-à-vis Alma in Bergman’s “Persona,” and of P. Adams Sitney’s reading of it, in Modernist Montage, as an allegory of psychoanalysis, in which the analyst should conceal his or her own feelings and reactions, while observing the analysand and speaking only for effect. For a live person with real needs and not some mythical paternal archetype, or an actor playing a role who in his own core is unaffected by it, this can pose a problem if in fact one has skin in the game. Colm is willing to pay the price of his withdrawal, but….
No sense belaboring the analogy of fingers to other bodily members, but with or without such analogy, that the father here is castrating himself is a metaphorical fact no matter how you think of it. Some psychoanalytic critic must be having fun with this; the father pointedly affirms a truth of this matter that the son cannot appreciate; the son is denying something, and the anxious innocent person he obviously is to begin with is not well positioned to recognize it or deal with frustration. The effects of the paternal sacrifice include his inability to play the violin—though perhaps not to compose music: is this like an older person’s writing for future generations while ceasing to be invested in his own performance, as he will soon enough die and his potentialities may wither or vanish before that? In their penultimate encounter, Colm reveals to Pádraic that he has finished his eponymous musical composition. Maybe that’s what he wanted most to do before dying.
The film ends with the two men on the beach looking out at the expanse of water as if facing an open future. Colm, whose house has just been burned down by Pádraic in a final act of revenge meant to kill him, expresses regret about having inadvertently killed the other’s man beloved animal, his donkey, and thanks Pádraic for being considerate by saving the older man’s dog. This unrealistic Stoic is is a man of circumspect, and purposely measured speech to the end. I recall the words my Irish grandfather liked to quote with comic irony: “If a young man could learn, what an old man could tell.” The teacher has taught only himself; Colm had wanted to end not the conflict but the relationship. In the end, so does Pádraic, but because he is angry and not a Stoic, he uses a different tactic, making his act of violence serve as a statement in a demonstration meant to show that he was right in the stakes he chose to wager his desire on. The questions behind this tragedy are Biblical: Not just the question (which today is posed by sex scandals from #MeToo to pedophilic priests), what is to be done when we find we have taken our neighbor for granted—yet cannot? But also, how do we love the neighbor we also hate? And, more realistically perhaps, how do we manage our hatred, or disdain, for people we cannot easily avoid?