Some Thoughts on 'The Banshees of Inisherin'

Martin McDonagh's movie opens with Padraig walking at the edge of the world in the paradisal beauty of western Ireland. As he makes his way toward his friend Colm's modest, oceanside cottage, we hear a haunting women's choral piece full of longing in a language I don't recognize. Is that Gaelic?  I would expect it to be, but It sounds eastern European. That's weird. So after watching the movie, I look it up, and it turns out that it is Bulgarian folk song Polegnala e Todora, and the first thing that comes to mind is Yeats great poem of spiritual longing, "Sailing to Byzantium". 

1920s Ireland/Bulgarian folk song/Istanbul/Byzantium/Yeats. Ok, it's a stretch. I have no idea whether this was in McDonagh's thinking, but it's in mine. So while making that connection of the song to Yeats might appear somewhat tendentious, indulge me. It provides an interesting entry point into a film that otherwise seems so bewildering. I've pasted the full text of the poem in Note 1 below. Read it first, and then I'll try to explain how the movie and the poem explain one another. 

This movie has been described as a breakup story between Colm and the younger Padraig, and it is that, but clearly it's working with much more than the psychology of friendship. It's also been analogized to the breakup that defined the sides in the Irish Civil War, and clearly that's there, but more in the background. These folks live on an island that is undisturbed by history. [See Note 2] 

The site for this film is Edenic, and there are three characters that stand out because they don't fit in it: Colm, Siobhan, and Dominic. Everyone else is more or less like Padraig, happy children in paradise. [See Note 6 about the priest and the policeman.] Colm, Siobhan, and Dominic are restless in a way the other islanders are not. All three need to get out of this beautiful but spiritually claustrophobic world into something bigger. Siobhan takes the boat; Colm takes to art; Dominic commits suicide. 

The story begins in that opening scene when Padraig arrives at Colm's little white house to fetch him to go the pub as is their daily ritual. When he knocks, Colm won't answer. Looking through the window, Padraig can see Colm just sitting, staring blankly, unresponsive to his calls to come out with him. Flummoxed, Padraig tells him he's going to the pub, and he'll wait for him there. No response. Padraig arrives at the pub without Colm, orders two pints, and when Colm comes in later he avoids Padraig at the bar and takes a seat by himself. When Padraig asks him what's going on, Colm tells him he no longer wants to be friends because he finds Padraig too boring.

This is a rather blunt, if not cruel, thing to say to an old friend, especially someone as good-natured and likable as Padraig. We take Padraig's side immediately in this dispute. Colm seems to be a grumpy, old curmudgeon, but soon we learn that the older Colm is feeling his mortality, and he wants to do something with his life--he wants to touch eternity.

This sounds at first rather pretentious, and surely that's how it looks to Padraig and others. But Colm is dead serious. When Padraig refuses to take Colm's ending the friendship seriously, Colm threatens to cut off one of his fingers each time Padraig talks to him. This is shocking, and soon enough, because Padraig cannot restrain himself and so peristently tries to restore the friendship on its old terms, Colm cuts off all the fingers of his left hand, first one and then the other four all at once.

What's going on? Is Colm suffering from some borderline personality disorder? I think this is where Yeats' poem might help us to understand Colm better. He's the aged man about whom the poem speaks--

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress,

Nor is there singing school but studying

Monuments of its own magnificence;

And therefore I have sailed the seas and come

To the holy city of Byzantium.

 

We learn that Colm is composing a tune, and he wants to devote all his time to his music, and so the time he spends with Padraig is time wasted. Well, ok. But it still seems unnecessarily cruel for him to be so blunt about it, and we feel for poor Padraig who finds this change in his friend utterly incomprehensible and destabilizing.  He doesn't understand that Colm has set sail for Byzantium, and in doing so he must leave his old friend behind him if he won't come along.

 

Yeats' poem is about old age, but more than that it's a poem of deep spiritual longing, a longing to be transformed by spiritual fire--

 

O sages standing in God's holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

And be the singing-masters of my soul.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is; and gather me

Into the artifice of eternity.

We don't think of art as performing this function anymore. And so if there is nothing in you that feels the pull of that to which Yeats is pointing, it will probably be difficult to accept my reading of Banshees: But clearly the movie isn't just about two friends breaking up because one has lost interest in the relationship, but about one waking up in a bigger world and the other adamant to remain dreaming in a smaller one. It's about one who longs to soar, and the other who is happy, utterly unrestless and unalienated, and blissfully undisturbed until the events of the movie that turn his life upside down. But rather than adapt and grow in the new situation, he insists to remain only a talking animal, one whose talk is little more than good-natured birdsong, He's Papageno, [See Note 3] --one of the--

The young

In one another's arms, birds in the trees,

—Those dying generations—at their song,

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

Caught in that sensual music all neglect

Monuments of unageing intellect.

In other words embedded in the beautiful, waxing-and-waning cycle of life and death, an eternally closed but repeating cycle the artist and the saint seek in their different ways to break open.

To sail to Byzantium does not require that one be an artistic genius. Colm is not one, but the longing for eternity that Yeats's poem so beautifully articulates is working in him. He must hearken to it, and he must resist all the forces that seek to draw him back into dreamy Eden. Chopping his fingers off is his way of saying that he no longer lives in a world where such a gesture is absurd. Absurd because why would he do that if his music is so important to him? It prevents him from playing it. But playing isn't the important thing, creating is, even if what he creates is modest by most standards. 

 

I've been re-reading Dreyfus and Kelly's All Things Shining, and this morning came across this passage about Moby Dick that explains exactly what is working in Colm and then why he must resist Padraig's friendship--

Melville too considers a character—Bulkington is his name—who is at home only in the infinite openness of the sea, for whom land “seemed scorching to his feet.” And he thinks there is something serious and terrifying and wonderful about such a character.

I looked with sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon the man, who in midwinter just landed from a four years’ dangerous voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still another tempestuous term.

...

Bulkington reveals a deep tension, perhaps even a paradox, of human existence, in Melville’s view. As a human being Bulkington has to work hard to keep his freedom; the seduction of the shore’s safety is a constant danger. For upon the land is where all normal human comfort and vulnerability lies. And though these comforts and vulnerabilities are not true realities but only seeming ones, although they are not as stable as they seem to be and grounded in God, and although Bulkington himself recognizes this, nevertheless their comfort appeals to every human being.

The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our mortalities.

For Bulkington these human comforts and vulnerabilities must be resisted. Sure, the happiness of friendship seems a joy to normal folks, but Bulkington knows this joy is sanctioned by no God, and therefore in it lies no eternal truth; he knows that boredom, and anger, and frustration, and melancholy—yes, even the “damp, drizzly November in the soul” that we shall see is so important to Melville’s central character Ishmael—all these are a mirage, a nothing, and so can properly have no effect. He is not driven to the sea by melancholy, like Ishmael is. Rather, the “slavishness” of the land can only be counteracted by the complete lack of constraint one finds at sea. 

All Things Shining, pp. 50-51

It should be pointed out that D&K think Bulkington is a kind of nihilist because of his inability to live a normal, grateful, down-to earth life where the local gods will shine if you can attune to them. They see the longing for transcendence as a temptation to be resisted and that leads inevitably to suicide. There is something of Bulkington in Yeats and Colm, but maybe more in Yeats--

 

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

 

And while I'm sympathetic to much Dreyfus and Kelly's argument against the kind of transcendence that seeks to lift humans off the earth and out of nature, there is a place for such ecstasy, and ecstatics need to be part of the mix in a society that has recovered its vertical dimension. [See Note 4] And the phrase "out of nature" could be parsed in ways that mean more a transformation of nature than an escape from it. [See Note 5]

 

So Colm is a Bulkington type who must resist human slavish comforts and vulnerabilities if he is to hearken to eternity's call--he needs neither his fingers nor his house to live in the free air of the spirit. But I think there's an important difference between Bulkington and Colm in that Colm's path is not some Icarian, hubristic flight toward the sun. His path is that of an artist. Artists like him don't seek to leave the immanent world to live in a transcendent one, but to bring the transcendent into the immanent world through their poeisis. And that's the reading that I'd give to Yeats' fourth verse. The artist becomes an agent of spiritual transformation in his act of making. He becomes himself transformed by the power that inspires his making. 

Two scenes illustrate that Colm is not about escaping Nature but about transforming it. The first occurs in the moments after he finishes his tune, in his joy he wants to dance, but not alone--he tries to teach his dog to dance. This is not about living among the animals as Padraig does but lifting the animal into the spiritual. The other is the scene at the pub where the fingerless Colm while spraying his blood all over the table leads his students in the playing of his new tune. It's a Eucharistic image. He can no longer play, but he's fully engaged with the other players as they are bathed in his blood in this participative ritual around an altar. This is no depressed loner. This is not a man who is seeking to be absorbed into infinity, but to bring some small part of the infinite into the world in musical ritual.  

Colm can only befriend Padraig if he’s willing to come with him on his voyage to Byzantium. He has this kind of friendship with his students and the other musicians. But Padraig can only befriend Colm if he returns to his dreamy, embedded, Papageno level of existence. Padraig is as stubborn in his resistance to wake up as Colm seems to be in resisting the old comforts. Padraig is intransigent, and he declares war on the one who would disrupt his paradisal life. But of course, because it is already fatally disrupted, there can be no restoring it. So like those today on the American Right who are stewing in similar resentments about the disruption and loss of their world, they grieve rather than nimbly adapt, and go to war against those who have destroyed their sleep.

Siobhan's solution is the story told in Brooklyn of those who left the comforts of the familiar to live in a bigger world. But for Siobhan it's more than that because for her it's not just freedom from the old ways, but a freedom that is defined by the life of the mind and the love of learning. For her there’s no neglect of the monuments of unageing intellect. She leaves the island to take a job as a librarian, i.e., to work as a caretaker in a repository of such monuments. [See Note 6] She is happy in her bigger world and wants Padraig to join her, but he cannot. His world is in Eden and his sense of purpose in life derives from his grievance war with Colm. 

I think that it's rather beautiful the way McDonagh celebrates the ways in which this longing for eternity plays out in the lives of ordinary people. It's as if to say great spirits are all around you if you have the eyes to see them. You don't have to be a prodigy to share in some part of this greatness. You have only to recognize it and hearken to it in whatever capacity you have--and be willing to pay a price for not fitting in.   

 

Note 1: 

Sailing to Byzantium

I

 

That is no country for old men. The young

In one another's arms, birds in the trees,

—Those dying generations—at their song,

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

Caught in that sensual music all neglect

Monuments of unageing intellect.

 

 

II

 

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress,

Nor is there singing school but studying

Monuments of its own magnificence;

And therefore I have sailed the seas and come

To the holy city of Byzantium.

 

 

III

 

O sages standing in God's holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

And be the singing-masters of my soul.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is; and gather me

Into the artifice of eternity.

 

 

IV

 

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

 

Note 2: It also occurred to me that there's something of the argument between Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn in My Dinner with Andre. Yes and No. Andre wants to soar; Wally finds meaning in a more down to earth way. The trick is to live in the tension between the urge to ascend and descend by finding a way to bring what's higher into what's lower, and to raise what's lower into what's higher. Seems to me that's what happens every time a mass is said. What's above lives into our death, so that we below might die into into the life that comes to us from above and so in our dying into life become gradually agents whose task is to renew the face of the earth. 

 

BTW, Dreyfus and Kelly's All Things Shining is a resolute rejection of Andre and endorsement of Wally. They abhor all things post Axial Revolution. They make their case in what is rather a reductive interpretation of David Foster Wallace's suicide--

PERHAPS THE SADDEST PART of Wallace’s story is that the human qualities he aspired to, the capacities of spirit that he revered and coveted, are a mirage. Indeed the entire mode of existence that he castigated himself for not being strong enough to achieve, far from being the saving possibility for our culture, is in fact a human impossibility. Wallace’s inability to achieve it was not a weakness, but the deep and abiding humanness in his spirit. (p. 42).

Well, maybe impossible for an entire culture, but not a mirage and not an impossibility for some individuals.

To be fair to D&K, they are mostly critical of DFW for imagining this reaching out for eternity as a willful, egoistic, Icarian project absent a spirit of gratitude, which I'd agree with if it were true about him. But I doubt that was true for someone for whom  St. Paul and Dostoyevski were his favorite authors. DFW is more complicated than that, and he deserves better treatment from D&K than he gets from them as a straw man who represents the longing for transcendence that they, good Heideggerians that they are, abhor.

Note 3: Whatever. Colm makes an oblique reference to Mozart most noteworthy for his being corrected by Siobhan about getting his dates wrong. Colm doesn't really care about history. But then a little more free association gives us Mozart/Magic Flute/Tamino v Papageno/Freemasons/Order of the Golden Dawn/Yeats. It's also interesting that Colm finds Padraig most interesting and likable when Padraig laces into him in drunken rage in the pub. His talk then is more than birdsong. It's also interesting that at the end, Padraig is awake in a way he was not because that's what conflict does--it wakes you up. Colm must concede that he will have a relationship with Padraig even if now it will be eternally adversarial. They can only be friends if the one or the other surrenders to live on the level of his adversary. 

Note 4: It's unlikely that if you've read this far, you need persuading that this transcendent dimension exists. But it's a territory that doesn't get much explored in mainstream, late-modern high culture or pop culture. I don't know if this is McDonagh's intent. I'm not yet familiar enough with the rest of his work. My Geneaology Series is largely about trying to make the case for the retrieval of that sense of transcendence as essential for the restoration of a vertical dimension in our broader cultural/metaphysical imaginary. I deal specifically with the idea of Platonic and Neoplatonic ascent in Part 8: Plato--Habitus as Heuristic . Part 9: Sifting through Hellenistic Hyperpluralism, and Part 10: Face to Face: The Jewish Foundation. For me Christianity works faithfully with the Greek transcendental ontology when it reverses the Platonic movement from ascent from below to above, to descent from above to below. Big difference. It’s a difference biblicists and fideists like Luther through Barth never seemed to grok in the way the Chirch fathers through the cathedral schools to Aquinas and Bonaventure and later Cusa and Ficino did.

Note 5: This kind of transformation echoes Ariel's mysterious Sea Change song in The Tempest:

 

Full fathom five thy father lies:
Of his bones are coral made:
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

 

Note 6: What about  Dominic, Peader, and the priest? It's interesting that McDonagh chooses not to take the easy punch at the priest by making the policeman the sexual abuser instead. I don't know that there's much to be said about the priest. Nothing special about him except the role he plays that he fills in an uninspired, pro forma way. The church, of course, symbolizes the community's spiritual and moral ideals, but usually in a lowest-common-denominator kind of way. For most people the Church is a community's superego, its proclaimer and custodian of social norms.  And while the church seems to spend most of its energies in the domestication of what remains untamed in its flock, it is also the custodian of a tradition that calls its members to  the highest levels of spiritual aspiration. It's interesting to me that McDonagh seems to respect that about the church in that the island's Church has a home for both the domesticated and those that like Colm, Siobhan, and Dominic who don't comfortably fit. 

 

The policeman is the enforcer of the community's norms, but in Peader we have the perverse transgressor of them. I could go off on a tangent a la St. Paul about the psychodynamic of law and repression, but the main point here is that in his abusing his son Dominic, he has awakened him. He is no longer asleep in Eden as the others are. He is no longer an innocent and can no longer live there. He seems at first rather a feral animal than the others like Padraig who are more domesticated. He has become something raw and wild and uncomfortable. But then there's that tender moment with Siobhan when in his stumbling way he asks if it would be possible for her to love him. Siobhan understands the poignancy of the moment, and is kind in her refusal. But for Dominic it was his last hope, to be loved by someone he recognizes as capable of loving but not loving him. And that's the end for him.