Do not ask for whom the banshees of Inisherin wail

They wail for Martin McDonagh

Critics and sophisticated audiences love to hate allegories which they rifle through artworks to find. The first time I watched a production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? an acquaintance reviewing it for the papers wouldn’t let us talk about much else than how George was the U.S. and Martha was the U.S.S.R. and the moment where he shoots a gun that fires only a cocktail umbrella (or was it Martha lighting Nick’s cigar? I forget) symbolised - you guessed it - the Cuban missile crisis.

Now it might seem with The Banshees of Inisherin writer/director Martin McDonagh is very much trying to say something about the Irish Civil War. The war is the backdrop of the story’s conflict, one that’s simultaneously more personal and more abstract. While just over the sea the guns rat-a-tat, on the isle of Inisherin Colm (Brendan Gleeson) is threatening to cut off his own fingers if Pádraic (Colin Farrell), his sometime friend, continues to talk to him and so fill their years with idle chat when he could be writing music. The film ends with the men looking out to sea, at the start of what looks like will be a very long war of their own.

About the apparent metaphor of all this, Isobel Harrison writes in the London Review of Books:

The movie is set in the 1920s but the self-harm and the quarrelling seem insulated from the political tensions of that decade: gunfire audible on the mainland is neither fully discussed nor metabolised by the characters. As a metaphor, the dismemberment [of Colm’s fingers] short-circuits whichever way you run it and what’s left is a barren gesture. Nothing of meaning resonates beyond the noise.

Mark O’Connell for Slate shares her confusion:

As a metaphor it’s both vague and clumsy; for it to work, you’d have to think of the Irish Civil War as some kind of basically unfathomable squabble between former best friends, as opposed to a conflict over a treaty with the British government that granted only partial independence and divided Ireland into two political entities, to disastrous results. As a political allegory, it seems obviously retrofitted, tacked onto the narrative to add unearned resonance.

For O’Connell this vaguery and clumsiness is of a piece with the cod-Irish blarney he finds in McDonagh’s film and wider work: the drink, despair, the fecks and fecklessness. (I suppose it’s the kind of criticism The League of Gentlemen were making with their spoof of hackneyed plays about the North by Jim Cartwright, Willy Russell and “John fucking Godber.”)

Pretend though the film’s not meant as an allegory. What else could motivate McDonagh to use the Irish Civil War as a backdrop? The word backdrop is key. By setting his story on an island off Ireland he isn’t treating the latter and its war as context but distancing them. The film is not like The Wind that Shakes the Barley, where two Irish brothers face off on either side of the war, or even like The English Patient, say, where the political tensions of the decade keep interfering with the fates of the characters. Inisherin is unruffled by the war. I should say ‘even by the war’. Inisherin’s insularity is spiritual as well as physical. It’s what drives Pádraic’s clever, cramped sister, Siobhán (Kerry Condon) also to leave Pádraic before her life is frittered away, the positive but tragic flip-side to Colm’s excommunication.

So, when Pádraic surveys the mainland and wonders after “whatever it is [they’re] fighting for”, or when the film’s worst character, a violent cop, brags about getting a job hanging traitors though he can’t quite remember for which side, this might not necessarily betray a cheap ‘war is absurd’, ‘a pox on both your houses’ relativism on McDonagh’s part. They’re how he dramatises his characters’ insularity: the sort that drove Siobhán and Colm to their wits’ ends in their separate ways.

Reading Colm’s violent rejection of Pádraic as instead “really” about the Irish Civil War doesn’t even scan as a clumsy metaphor. Out of grumpy muso Colm and nice-but-dim Pádraic, which one would be the Provisional Irish government and which the Irish Republican Army? Or if Inisherin is more generally a microcosm of Ireland then does Pádraic’s gregariousness make him the more ‘Catholic’, Colm’s work ethic the more ‘Protestant’? None of it maps.

McDonagh first wrote the story as a play set in contemporary Ireland. Perhaps turning it into a film a hundred years after the 1922-23 Irish Civil War, the calendrical chime was what pleased him more than anything. Or, like James Joyce - who O’Connell spots as being referenced in Pádraic’s cracked looking-glass - he wanted to throw in enough allusions to keep the critics busy.

O’Connell hits nearer the mark when he treats the film less as a realist commentary on Ireland:

I confess there’s something about the country, or the abstract idea of it, that lends itself to the particular kind of fabulism that is the film’s mode—where everything is slightly heightened and unreal… Inisherin, crucially, is not a real place, but its name, translated back from Irish, would mean something like “Ireland Island,” which playfully suggests we should be thinking of it as a kind of fantasy microcosm of Ireland as a whole.

If the film is a fable, what else might be its moral than a critique of the Irish Civil War? O’Connell touches on it when he writes how the film is about, “a man who attempts to secure his freedom to make art by hacking off the very appendages which enable him to make art in the first place.” (By comparison Harrison’s “Why is Colm not speaking to me, Pádraic wonders? Nobody knows, not even Colm” is just inattentive criticism.)

Remember that Colm asks Pádraic not to talk to him, more than he declares he himself will no longer talk to Pádraic. It’s not conversation that he is rejecting; he keeps conversing with the other islanders. It’s what Pádraic’s talks about and how. Pádraic is small-talk: time-killing trivia, sociable chitchat as our species’ version of primate grooming, words words words as some kind of attempt to fill the insular void. Hence it’s no coincidence that McDonagh makes Colm’s art violin music, i.e. a wordless art, highlighting the contrast with Pádraic and his wordiness.

Why’s making that music so important to Colm that he’d cut off his fingers and cut out Pádraic for it, and why now after all these years? Well what’s the film called? There’s a point to the crone character, Mrs McCormick, other than more of O’Connell’s Irish blarney. Mrs McCormick predicts death in the story, as banshees do. Without their actual supernatural presence in the film, she provides that foreboding. And not of death in general but death as the ultimate waste of time, the mortality that frames the question: What’s important in the one life you get, having nice times with your family and friends or doing whatever it takes to make art that’ll last? And what leaves the truer legacy?

The irony is Colm’s extreme measures to get peace and quiet for his music is what narrows his ability to make it. He does manage to finish writing his tune but by the end can only conduct others in playing it, his own hand a stump and the sheet music spattered in his blood (there’s your heavy-handed metaphor, if you’ll excuse the reverse pun). Colm’s bloody-minded commitment to art ends with him further out of touch with life—again, literally.

It’s a sly joke on McDonagh’s part that Colm’s music when we hear it is basically fine. The folk songs we hear more generally in the pub provide another double-edged counterpoint. Yes they demonstrate art can last long after its makers have died. But then who remembers the composers of folk songs?

Siobhán, and also local weirdo Dominic (Barry Keoghan) have crucial roles in this light, throwing both men’s delusions into relief. She’s the one to remind high culture-aspirant Colm that he got Mozart’s lifetime wrong by a century. And it’s island idiot Dominic who knows that touché is a French word and not “to shay”, as condescending Pádraic thinks.

Pádraic’s reluctant hang-outs with Dominic, the one islander on a lower rung than him, tracks his fall from niceness. Before the fall, and in the most moving scene of the film, Pádraic makes the case for niceness to Colm. But it’s this very niceness, affableness, sociability that aggravates a depressive case like Colm. When time’s running out - Colm is visibly older than Pádraic - when you’re still just as much a no-mark as your Pádraics and even your Dominics, then “Eat, drink and be merry” might not give much comfort but the opposite, a feeling of ‘Is this it?’ Colm is afraid in the end his life will be as trivial as Pádraic’s talk.

The conflict of the film, then, is less about war than art, and is an internal one. I don’t think writer/director McDonagh is ‘symbolised’ by the artist Colm while everyman Pádraic stands for life and its distracting friends and family. I think both are McDonagh, the same way the twin Nicholas Cages in the film Adaptation were sides of Charlie Kaufman (serious artist Charlie and affable party animal Donald, the Id in Ego Ideal). Colm is the posterity-anxious, depressive side of the artist, the man of convictions who wants to isolate himself in his ivory tower (or island cottage) before it’s too late to leave his mark. Pádraic is the worldly side of that same man, nice to his sister and his donkey, whose parents were nice to him, who just wants a drink and a chat now and then: the cord from art back to life out of which it springs. The side that believes art has to keep in touch with ordinary people and the outside world, wars and all, and that’s embodied in the film by McDonagh’s tenderness towards his characters and their humdrum lives. (Did I mention Banshees is a sad film?)

The saddest touch is that, although it might be about life versus art, it’s not abundant authentic rich life versus important grand genius art. It’s mean life and it’s minor art. It’s Pádraic talking shite about shite, and Colm writing nice-enough music in honour of composers he’s more ignorant about than he realises. But, by the end, as a commenter on Harrion’s piece points out, “Pádraic takes over as enforcer of serious conviction.” Having lost the three people he loves, his best friend, his sister and his donkey (his niceness didn’t leave any legacy either; or maybe he wasn’t as nice as he thought) he’s no longer so trivial. He doesn’t care whether he kills Colm or whether Colm dies. He is the banshee now. Colm best hope his art was worth it.

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