Sorry for being late. But, at least you’ll get two this week. Like, subscribe and share. Most importantly, thanks for coming back.
Andrew Sullivan recently wrote a review of the award-nominated picture “Banshees of Inisherin” in his newsletter The Weekly Dish. Sullivan wrote that the movie was essentially a collision story of modernity and the slow life of days past. The cultural implications are symbolized by the beauty of the coast of Ireland and the inhabitants that dwell there, both in the movie and in reality.
With respect to the indomitable Sullivan, and to the piece he wrote which I find excellent, I don’t think he goes far enough into the symbolic implications.
The story centers around two men and their recently dismantled friendship, and several side characters who are affected by their relationship, one of whom will be outlined below. Colm Doherty (Brendan Gleeson) is a fiddler living in the fictional Irish isle of Inisherin, and his best friend is Pádraic Súilleabháin (Colin Farrell), a bumbling dork with a penchant for apathy and a donkey named Jenny.
Colm chooses to end his friendship with Padraic in the opening scenes, and the first act of the movie consists of Padraic trying to understand what has happened to their relationship. Colm wants to make an impact on Irish music before he dies, and sets to composing the titular song as a chorus of fiddles. “Banshees of Inisherin” will be his magnum opus, his contribution to the world. In order to accomplish it, he must remove all distractions, all drains on his inspiration.
Padraic is boring, a time suck, and apathy is contagious.
Padraic is a man of routine, haunting the town’s bar at the same time every day, with the same people. He makes conversation about pedestrian things. The weather. The diet of his donkey. He lives with his sister Siobhan, and allows the animals in and out of their home. He is as upset at the breaking of his routines as he is the loss of his friend, and he tries to force Colm into relationship with him, showing up at his home, at the bar. Colm, desperate to end the relationship and pursue his ambition, vows to cut off one of his fingers every time Padraic attempts to speak to him. He begins straight away, throwing the first of his crudely amputated digits at the door of Padraic’s home.
Padraic tries his best to understand the situation, to convince Colm to leave off with fiddling and have their relationship again. He strikes up a fledgling friendship with Dominic, with whom he drinks and chats about Colm’s actions. Dominic loves Padraic’s sister, Siobhan, who is a librarian, and he avoids being abused by his father by going about town drinking and chatting aimlessly with the locals. He confesses his love for Siobhan, asking her if she would ever go for a guy like him. She refuses politely, if not piteously, and Dominic takes the rejection in the stride of an aloof half-child. Eventually he is found murdered, by his father we presume, and he is mourned as a dumb, lovable boy who was not wise or strong enough of character to resist his circumstances.
Three men, three symbols for baseline stages of a man’s life. There is Dominic, the youngest of the three, who is driven by the wind of unrequited love for an older, stable, almost maternal female figure. Who is abused by life and who has no notion of what it would mean to be noble or wicked. He only knows his circumstance as defined by his father and his hometown. He has agency, in theory, but he cannot exercise it because he cannot pay attention long enough to make rational decisions, and tragically lacks the inhibitions of decency and self-preservation. He is male adolescence personified, the boy who wants to know love and comfort, but is incapacitated by immaturity, incapable of finding those things on his own. And without a male figure to demonstrate such focus, he is murdered. His death is the death of adolescence. The boy must die, because man and boy cannot coexist in peace.
Then there is Padraic. A kind of in-between, though not one that indicates a clear linear pathway between the two other central male figures. Younger than Colm, but older than Dominic. No longer innocent, and yet decidedly unambitious, he represents something like untapped potential wrapped up in comfortability, the well-traveled road diverged in a yellow wood. Padraic has the building blocks for maturity, a house and family and friends. And yet, he is content with only those things, and has no desire for progression. He is like the sit-com husband, who hopes that all will get along, who is jovial and manipulable around his own house.
Colm is the oldest of the three, and all ambition. He has no desire other than to be remembered, to do something great before he dies. He is the road less travelled, the desire for legacy, distinctively masculine in his desire to be known, by name, for something he does with his hands.
If the three men in Banshees represent three stages of growth in men, then it should be noted that while all three inherently have agency, the possibility for intentional movement, Colm is the only one who exercises it. He is the one who initiates the end of his friendship, who calls in other fiddlers to play his tune, who creates the great song of Inisherin. Dominic is moved along by life, chaff in the wind, and Padraic refuses to embrace any change, which is either an act of agency in itself, or the denial of it completely.
The key to understanding the symbolism is in the way in which Colm solidifies his commitment to ending his friendship with Padraic. He removes the fingers of his hand, and leaves them at the entryway of Padraic’s home, the altar of his life.
When a man finally decides to embrace that part of him that desires a legacy, a remembrance and purpose, it costs him something, and usually something vitally associated with his calling. Every time Colm engages with the distraction, the apathy and monotony of Padraic’s life, it costs him a finger on his fiddle hand. Every time we interact with that part of ourselves that wishes us to remain stagnant, that rebels against the spirit of forward progress, it costs something.
I am reminded of Jacob’s wrestling with God in the wilderness, his wrestling with his purpose. He is renewed in his calling to lead, but he must walk with a limp forever. Moses eventually embraces his calling to lead the people out of Egypt, but his resistance to the call leads to the loss of his voice in the form of Aaron, his mouthpiece. And if our eyes or hands cause us to sin, to miss the mark of perfection, we are commanded in the New Testament to remove the eye or hand to cast into hell. It is rare we move forward towards our purpose completely whole.
A wise man once said, “There are no solutions, only trade-offs.” Trade-offs are sacrifices by another name.
But there is a cost for Padraic too. He is not just apathy, he is comfort. Seemingly every time he brushes up against the ambition of Colm, a piece of his comfort is removed. First he is beaten by Dominic’s father, and then his sister decides to move to the mainland of Ireland.
The final loss is the beloved Jenny, Padraic’s donkey and only companion, albeit one who cannot communicate, and serves more as an object of love rather than reciprocal partner (the implications of which are your own to elucidate). As Colm removes the final digits of his hand, and throws them at Padraic’s door, Jenny the donkey eats them and chokes, dying outside in the garden. The death of comfort because of ambition. Jenny, the archetypal figure of both the ultimate comfort and the jackass, is gone. With her, goes Padraic’s last hope of a life of comfort, his own identity as a loveable jackass.
The film ends when Padraic, in an act of revenge, burns down Colm’s home with him inside. Colm survives, hinting at the symbolism of it all, and the two vow to finally put an end to their relationship, though pledging enmity eternal. Ambition and comfort will always have a conflict, though it is possible integrate them, but only by acknowledging their enmity. Padraic and Colm are enemies, though they do not have to live in outright violence toward one another. At least, not in Inisherin.
Dominic is not at war with anyone. He is hopeful for love and peace. But he cannot survive Inisherin, no more than his hope can survive the realities of circumstance. The two others emerge as two paths of life, one towards ambition and legacy, and the other toward comfort and pattern. The film makes viewers aware that comfort is fickle, and when it is gone and there is nothing to replace it, it turns angry and vengeful in its loneliness. But a life lived in pursuit of legacy is lonely from the start, even if the creative process provides solace and hope to those who choose it. Legacy survives the fires of comfort. Legacy is older, wiser, though selfish in the end.
And we have a choice, the film tells us. When the boy finally does die, either crushed by life or unfulfillment, we can choose to pursue comfort, or we can choose to pursue legacy. But we must not make the mistake of thinking that the two are not often at war with one another, that when not in open conflict, the themes are chafing in constant friction. This is the theme of many stories, and Banshees is no different. Colm or Padraic, red pill or blue pill, the call to adventure or the defense of the homeland. We can hope for both, but the tension remains palpable.
There is another character, Mrs. McCormick, who is meant to be the symbolic Banshee, the harbinger of death, crying out in warning and longing. What wailing is there of the death of our culture, the death of art and marriage and sex and faith? John was the voice in the wilderness, the voice that testifies to life. But our world is teeming with death. The banshee, while tragic, is as necessary as the herald angels. We must be warned of death, and taught to move in a world without it.
In truth, there is no warning for the death of adolescence, of ambition or comfort. There are only other men, who are supposed to tell their sons and brothers what the many lives and deaths will be like, of the choices we must make. But nothing really prepares you for it. And when the father role is abdicated, and false fathers online are given places of idols rather than role models, and the other men of culture are marked by their lack of seriousness, the culture is in bad decline. We are left to cut off our hands in frustration, to burn the house of ambition. Either we are taught to integrate the parts of ourselves, or we must teach ourselves.
When the Banshees go silent, who will warn boys of the choices yet to come, of the men they may turn out to be?
Your piece is very well written and your analysis spot on. I watched the film to the end and pretty much hated it. Dark metaphor is not my thing, and I felt it was deeply disrespectful to the Irish people without really providing much of a lesson for the future.
The Banshees of Inisherin, which will be this year’s darling of the Oscars of course, was mostly the art of ridicule, which seems to be the strongest voice these days, as we haplessly attempt to sense-make dismantling the culture through destruction and self-loathing.
I’m very much for transformation, just not this way. We are in destroy mode, mostly of men by men. Still. Women, who literally bear the future of all, don’t really think in this way, as portrayed by Siobhan, who finally just leaves it all behind for lack of any influence, and the Crone (the Banshee), who is shunned and isolated for her ability to see and foretell the doom of this neglect and disrespect, which in itself is the real story, but again, is secondary.
Artfully told story in the masculine perspective of the same old same old with no way out. Depressing to the core. How much do we hate ourselves before we can love? How much do we strive and compete before we can share? Women don’t hate their babies. We don’t teach them to strive and compete as infants and small children. We do precisely the opposite. So where does this all come from?
You write and express your thoughts so well, you are always a pleasure to read. I’m amazed there aren’t more comments. I’d suggest posting on Medium (though I usually suggest the reverse).
My husband lives in Northern Ireland, so I’ve been in Ireland a lot since 2009 and grew up in NYC with Irish descendants from the Republic of Ireland. I’m not Irish, so am an outside observer. The film does satirically portray life in rural Ireland quite well, and the characters are all spot on and well done. It’s important for young people to learn how the lives and thoughts and culture that shaped the generations before them influence their present lives, but it seeks to portray a demographic the woke elite fear with irrational fervor. Namely, uneducated, rural, village folk with uninformed and superstitious mindsets v the educated, modern, well-informed, science-based enlightened intellectuals. We know where this leads.
Society is grossly lopsided, as the Feminine aspect in both male and female was mercilessly cut from culture a few thousand years ago when men were viciously conquering each other across the planet in order to survive, which then morphed into pillaging and savaging the earth, which continues to this day. It was and is impossible to foster cooperation in this climate of fear and competition.
We are finally in the process of transformation but must get it right. More of the same simply will not do. And this film is more of the same, even though they will tell you it is illustrative and informative.
The answers can always be found in story, but we must change the story, not repeat the same old story ad nauseum.