Diversity in The Banshees of Inisherin

At the end of the Irish Revolutionary War in 1921, the Anglo-Irish Treaty partitioned the country and retained formal links to Britain which weren’t acceptable to hardline republicans. This was followed by a civil war, and the resulting implacable enmities between erstwhile brothers in arms structured Irish political and sometimes family life until the 1990s. At the same time, these party antagonisms coincided with political values that weren’t very different from one another. This is why in the 21st century the civil war parties have been able to form a durable coalition to oppose the rising power of Sinn Féin, once the political front for the Provisional IRA. However, Ireland has also become a multicultural tax haven subject to the influences of woke capitalism emanating from Brussels, Washington, and Silicon Valley, and all three of the main parties are drinking the Kool-Aid. Our literary festivals and cultural programming reflect this consensus, and anybody who doesn’t sing from the progressive hymnsheet on issues like immigration, vaccines, gender politics, gay marriage, and abortion is smeared as far-right in the national media.

This is to say that the old politics have given way to a new globalist dispensation in which nationality and religion are no longer important to the Irish cultural elites, so it is interesting that they can still be moved by a work of art that takes the Civil War as its historical point of reference. Internationally, some have read Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin as an allegory for the Civil War, but the fact that its island-dwelling protagonists are uninterested in the reasons for the gunfire they hear coming from the mainland suggests it is as much about who we are now that we’ve repudiated the values of those who fought for independence from Britain. This partial distancing of the film’s action from 20th-century nationalism not only makes it palatable to contemporary progressive audiences, but it enhances the story’s archetypal resonance by turning the 1923 war into a symbol of ever-present undercurrents in civilised society. As such it transmits a fundamentally conservative message, albeit one that is likely to fly beneath the radar of its progressive audiences.

At the beginning of the film, Colm Doherty and Pádraic Súilleabháin are friends who go for a drink together at two o'clock each day in the island’s only pub. On this day, however, Colm ignores Pádraic’s knock on the door, and subsequently lets him know that their friendship is over. Colm is a fiddle player and he longs to be free of the small talk to which Pádraic subjects him. He regrets his cruelty, but, as he confesses to the local priest, he has been struggling with despair and now he wants to spend his remaining time in the kind of contemplative peace he needs to compose music. Pádraic, on the other hand, regards ‘niceness’ as a supreme virtue and struggles to understand Colm’s attitude. When he fails to leave Colm alone, Colm vows to cut off one of his fingers each time Pádraic bothers him, paradoxically sacrificing his ability to play music in order to preserve his artistic seclusion. He follows through on this promise, shifting the film’s register from comedy towards tragedy.

Colm has a variety of masks hanging up in his house by which the spirit of these classic genres is evoked. The word ‘person’ is derived from the Latin per sonare, meaning ‘to sound through’, suggesting it refers to the masks worn by actors in ancient drama. Masks also imply that who we are socially and who we are when the mask of sociability comes off can be very different things, a type of complexity that we don’t share with animals. Both Colm and Pádraic have companion animals, a sheepdog and a miniature donkey respectively, but these remain for them narcissistic mirrors. The dullard Pádraic is a much more complex counterpart for Colm than a sheepdog could ever be. Yet the animals have a symbolic resonance beyond their ken when we see them waiting together outside the pub and realise that, beneath the two men’s estrangement, there is a deep unrealised intimacy; that companionable silence is what has been missing from their relationship.

The presiding deity of McDonagh’s tragi-comedy is not Apollo or Dionysius, but the Blessed Virgin Mary, whose statue looks down on the action and is ironically mirrored in the widow Mrs McCormac, who predicts an imminent death on the island. Although McDonagh’s most obvious Irish precursor is J. M. Synge, Inisherin is a community of incels that recalls in this way the absurdist works of Samuel Beckett and Flann O’Brien. The reasons for our contemporary incel phenomenon have more to do with the dynamics of woke capitalism than with the religious repression of 1920s Ireland, but in both cases, the breakdown of relations between the sexes is a recipe for despair. Colm tries to address this with his art, and Pádraic with being liked by everyone. Their neighbour, Dominic, addresses it by proposing to Pádraic’s sister. When she rebuffs him, he drowns himself and fulfils Mrs McCormac’s prophecy. 

The fictional name Inisherin can be Gaelicised to mean ‘the island of Ireland’, but this is not a mirror in which to find superficial reflections of ourselves, as is suggested when Pádraic’s reflection in the window of Colm’s house gives way to a perspective on Colm ignoring his plaintive knocking. It’s a strange story wherein a sublime landscape provides a backdrop for people who are bored with each other, and comic triviality turns into surreal violence. The sounds of gunfire across the water may be those of a similarly intimate conflict on a national level, but by pushing history and politics to the background McDonagh gestures towards eternity. So does Colm by his crime against sociability in the interests of his art. This art demands a high price in terms of his ability to live with his neighbours. His continuing freedom to hear the silence of eternity unimpeded then demands an even higher price: his music itself, something he can no longer play without his fingers.

As in the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles, Colm and Pádraic’s feud tells a story about the nuclear family, which some Marxists would have us believe is a recent invention that needs to be abolished. McDonagh’s other works depict things like sibling rivalry between middle-aged bachelor brothers in rural communities. Violence between men stands in for the intimacy that should exist between men and women in a healthy community, and the jilted male friend provides a defamiliarising perspective on the rejections and disappointments we go through in our romantic lives. This is not to say that Colm and Pádraic are repressed homosexuals, a ‘queer’ reading that may suggest itself to some because of the scene where a priest asks Colm if he has impure thoughts about Pádraic. This question reflects back on priestly celibacy, however, and on Dominic’s relationship with his widower father who “fiddles” with him, mirroring Colm’s fiddle-playing in the same distorted manner as the rancid Mrs McCormac mirrors the Blessed Virgin.

While riffing on themes from recent Irish history, The Banshees of Inisherin is, among other things, a story about the loneliness of the artist. Is it then a form of narcissism on McDonagh’s part analogous to that of the new identity mavens who want to see themselves reflected sociologically in the art they consume? Writing about oneself doesn’t have to be narcissistic for the reason that artistic solitude may be the truest kind of encounter with diversity. Pascal said that most human problems were caused by people’s inability to stay in their rooms, meaning we avoid self-encounter by pursuing power, sex or achievement in the world. Pádraic can’t understand why his sister feels lonely and wants to leave the island any more than he can understand why Colm seeks artistic solitude. His niceness is an aid to sociability in a small community, but it is an alienation from his inner life, and as Jung said in a revision of Pascal’s insight: that which remains unconscious in us we are forced to encounter externally as fate.

Watching McDonagh do publicity for this film I’m reminded that while we’re fascinated by artists as people who achieve the authenticity we strive for in curating our own identities, it’s easy to be disappointed by them too, because whatever they tap into in the throes of creation is occluded by the banality of their talk about it in public forums where niceness prevails. They themselves don’t know how they do what they do, and it’s not fair that not everybody can do it. Nature doesn’t care about equality, and most of us are never visited by the muses. However, artists operate beyond politics, so their work usually outlasts the petty resentment of their contemporaries. One of the progressive intelligentsia’s favourite methods of virtue signalling these days is discovering lost artistic voices instead of studying the canon, but they’ve found very few forgotten geniuses over the years because, in a world filled with groupthink, people are drawn to authentic individuality like Colm’s—as seen in the fact that music students travel to the island to play with him. The Banshees of Inisherin is individual in the same way, and most critics seem to recognise this despite its failure to tick the kind of diversity boxes progressives are trained to look for in movies now.

John Tangney is a writer, photographer and podcaster from Ireland. He has a PhD in Renaissance Literature from Duke University and spent a number of years working as an academic in Singapore and Russia. His articles can be found in New English Review, Bright Lights Film Journal, The Time Traveller, Religion and the Arts, Litteraria Pragensia and Literary Imagination, among others. You can follow him on YouTube.