I really like The Banshees of Inisherin. This post is going to be about its flaws.
(Or, at least, its complicated relationship to Irishness and Ireland.)
Stop now if you haven’t seen the film yet and don’t want to be “spoiled.” If you want to read on, I’d suggest reading this Slate piece by Mark O’Connell, which is about Banshees, McDonagh’s stage Irishness, and the limitations of McDonagh’s cultural imagination. I’m about to respond to that essay as much as I’m about to respond to the movie itself, and I’d rather not rehash the whole thing, though I think you’ll understand what I’m about to say just fine without reading O’Connell’s essay first.
Anyway. The Banshees of Inisherin is a dark comedy (or tragicomedy, really) about two men on a fictional island, called Inisherin, off the west coast of Ireland. One man (Brendan Gleason), a fiddle player with grand notions about Art’s Immortality, decides he can no longer abide the company of his longtime friend (Colin Farrell), who’s a simple but “nice” (that word is key throughout the movie) man who’s devoted to his animals, his sister, and his 2pm pint at the pub.
We’ll get back to the sister. She’s more important than O’Connell’s Slate essay ever acknowledges.
Though Banshees seems like a departure for McDonagh if you’re only familiar with his movies (In Bruges and Three Billboard Outside Ebbing, Missouri especially), it’s really a return to form for him. McDonagh rose to “fame” with his three West-of-Ireland plays, collectively known as the Leenane Trilogy. Like Banshees, these plays are violent and brutally funny. Like Banshees, these plays find a home in the sweet spot between embracing Irish literary tradition (think Synge, Yeats, O’Casey, and others from the Literary Revival era) and mocking it.
The Slate piece lays out how Banshees fits into this mold, so I won’t go into the weeds here. O’Connell’s central argument about McDonagh, boiled down for those of you who haven’t read the essay, is that his depictions of Irishness are dated (by more than a century, at this point) and rooted in colonial ideas of Ireland and Irish people. It would be one thing, O’Connell implies, to use these features of Revival-era Irish literature—exaggerated Hiberno-English, rugged landscapes, insular and petty communities—if, and only if, this 21st century and arguably post-modern story were trying to comment on and/or upend those features. Without that upending, Banshees is another tourist-oriented commodity selling Irishness to outsiders.
The big question, for me, is whether or not we can consider McDonagh himself one of those outsiders. (Those who know me personally know how large this question looms over me.) McDonagh is British, actually, though his parents are from Ireland, and he spent most of his summers as a boy in the West.
Is that enough of a personal, cultural connection to be writing so savagely and specifically about a country and its people? A country and people with such an intense colonial history with and against Britain at that?
I want to answer those questions with more (and more specific) questions. Maybe that’s a bit of a cop out, but you’ll forgive me—those are lifelong questions that I don’t think I can answer in the space of a single newsletter post.
My new question: Is McDonagh actually writing about Ireland, or is he writing about Irish literature and art? Is there a difference between a country (especially one like Ireland) and its cultural output?
I agree with a lot of what O’Connell writes in the Slate piece about Banshees, but I actually don’t think the essay pushes far enough in its interrogation of art’s role in the film. O’Connell suggests that the cracked mirror we see a few times over the course of the movie is an allusion to Joyce and his thinking about Irish art. From the essay:
“I couldn’t decide whether this was a deliberate reference or just a bit of coincidental set dressing, but it was hard not to think of Stephen Dedalus’ famous remark, in the opening pages of Ulysses, about a similarly damaged mirror: ‘It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked lookingglass of a servant.’ The line is among the most resonant in the novel, and therefore in all of Irish literature, because it encapsulates Stephen’s (and Joyce’s) desire to break free of colonialism’s disfiguring influence on representations of Ireland and Irishness. It alludes, in particular, to the sentimental renderings of rugged Irish peasant life that were at the time among the predominant modes of Irish representation in literature and art: the donkeys, the landscape, the stoic women.”
Okay, maybe McDonagh is alluding to Joyce; maybe he isn’t. But I do think the central conflict of Banshees is intrinsically tied to Irish art, and it’s not even much of a push to make that claim: Gleason’s character, Colm, “breaks up” with his friend Pádraic (Farrell) because he wants to spend the rest of his earthly time focusing on making lasting music. He even makes a point of mutilating specifically his fiddle hand every time Pádraic tries to speak with him.
Oh, there’s so much to say here about the blood literally spilled in the name of music—literally spilled on the music. The violence tied to Colm’s relationship with music. But I can’t take screengrabs of that one particular scene on HBOMax, so have this clip instead.
The desire for artistic immortality is what literally creates the conflict in this film. The central tension is between “art” and “chat.” Is there anything more “typically Irish”—stage Irish—than trad fiddle music and a good bit of chat? And the film’s absurdist, allegorical nature makes it easy to realize just how inane this conflict is. The movie knows it, McDonagh knows it, the audience knows it.
The sister definitely knows it.
If every story has an implicit narrative “winner,” then Pádraic’s sister Siobhán (Kerry Condon) is the only almost-winner at the end of this movie—and mostly because she’s the only character who completely removes herself from the narrative. I mean that both on the small and the large scale: when she leaves Inisherin (translated as “Ireland Island,” does it get more allegorical than that), she’s leaving behind the Colm vs. Pádraic conflict and the larger conflict about the value of art vs. the value of human connection.
“You’re all fecking boring,” she says to Colm. But, importantly, not only does she clearly adore her brother and his “niceness,” the movie also suggests that she, too, sees the value in art—she’s a reader, after all, and she leaves to take up a library job on the mainland.
Despite this, Siobhán realizes the uselessness of the men’s little war and the danger that lies at its heart, and so she escapes the “Ireland Island” and its microcosmic, allegorical fable before the true violence ever begins. It’s almost like McDonagh is saying something about artistic obsession and insularity. It’s almost like he’s criticizing those who live only for Irish art and those who couldn’t care less for it.
Maybe it’s enough, when you’re Irish, but not from Ireland, to make art about Irish art and not Ireland itself. Or maybe that’s not enough at all.
Or maybe McDonagh made a dark comedy about a failing friendship that just so happens to be set in Civil War-era rural Ireland. At the end of the day, maybe that’s entertaining enough.
Enough, enough, enough.
Oh god, once again, I could keep going. I haven’t even touched on this being a period piece—historical fiction, really—and I definitely haven’t done justice to Siobhán’s role in the film. I could write a whole different post about how I think these questions would play out a million times differently if Banshees were a stage play instead of an Oscar-nominated movie.
I don’t know if McDonagh actually fully succeeds in that tradition-upending that O’Connell wishes for in the Slate essay, but I do think McDonagh was trying for it, at the very least. For what it’s worth, I think there are plenty of other places where Irish writers—this time writers actually from Ireland—are interrogating the future of Ireland and Irish art and not just its past: Sally Rooney, for one, whose novels, beyond being about young people in artsy circles, question how Irishness functions on a global, 21st century stage. Naoise Dolan’s Exciting Times asks similar questions. Actress by Anne Enright does a much more thorough job than McDonagh in exploring stage Irishness’s effects on contemporary Ireland through the lens of a woman learning about her mother’s theatrical past.
We’re all still living in Joyce’s wake, really. And maybe that means the future of Irish culture and art can still be found in the novel. There’s a reason Joyce never got his kicks on the stage, after all. And there’s a reason Synge and Yeats did. And McDonagh, too.