On War and Soap: Banshees of Inishiren, A Review
I have Covid, going on five days which is a bit long to feel lethargic and sick but not sick enough to be entirely shut down. I’m a combination bored and sick, like a combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell — two things that shouldn’t exist together, in the same body, at once.
And so in this hazy malaise, with the rare luxury of hours unaccounted for stretched out before me, I decided to watch Banshees of Inishiren, a movie I knew I didn’t know much about other than it was rather dark.
That’s not entirely true — I knew it involved the sudden and mysterious ending of a friendship. There is no worse feeling than a sudden, unexplained ending to a friendship. When someone doesn’t like you, that’s one thing. But it’s entirely something else when someone liked you, even loved you, and suddenly shuts you out, banishes you to the far reaches of hell. Or they could suddenly care less if you went there. Apparently.
I have something in common with the simple-minded character, Pádraic, played by Collin Farrel (who used to be young and hot but I love him in this role, older and horribly ordinary!), who can’t let well enough alone when his friend no longer wishes to share a pint in his company. As long as there is breath still in him, he would fight for his friendship, even when the tea leaves spell his fate. Even when doing so means his friend chops off his own fingers! (Grizzly, I know.) I am not outwardly persistent as he is, but inwardly, I can’t let things go. I ask why long past an event being dead and buried.
Ahem, back to the story. The other man, Colm, purports it is art he is pursuing, his calendar now cleared of what he considered to be idle chatter, he is free to compose music he imagines will outlive him. What galls this grumpy man is the inevitability of death, which has rendered his time far too precious. Except that he still engages other people in idle chatter, just not his former friend. This is what galls Pádraic, the former friend with the simple heart: his friend in his giant egoism, in his hubris, has invented a fiction, a story of life on that island without him in it.* * *
I once sat across from someone who a year prior (or was it two years or just six months?) had been a very good friend. Let’s call her Sue. A mutual friend (also no longer a friend, but for other, slightly more convoluted reasons) had arranged the setup, or passed along the message to me from her that she wanted to meet. I won’t go into the sudden unraveling of our friendship, although I have written about it before; enough to say I was the Pádraic and Sue was Colm. At least in my retelling. I know enough not to trust my memory entirely — but just because something didn’t happen exactly that way doesn’t mean the feelings aren’t true. And my feelings were she had blown up a perfectly good friendship.
So, I was hesitant that day to meet with her. But ultimately, I consented, thinking like Padrick that Colm had finally come around and was ready to share a pint (or in this case, a cappuccino). We met at a coffee shop we had frequented many times together. I was pathetically honest about my feelings. I had missed her friendship. In truth, I had. I had been lonely in the post college world where people had suddenly gone their separate ways and hanging out required a great deal more intention and forethought than merely wandering down to the dorm’s common room to see who might be there. I only regretted being honest when our mutual friend informed me, several days after the talk, that Sue had found the conversation to bring her, get ready for this, closure. Needless to say, there would be no more coffees.
Closure? CLOSURE?! Had I known that is what she had been after, I would never have met for coffee. The nerve. Closure. I know, fool me once shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. Shame on me. She was a writer, pursuing her life like it was art, and she had written me out. All these years later, a weird movie had me remembering my bitterness so clearly.
Back to the movie, my jumping off point, I knew there were things I did not immediately understand about what I had just seen (I won’t tell the whole plot, but it is sad and funny and strange. Mostly strange), so I googled movie reviews to parse out what had eluded me. This movie takes place during a war in Ireland, the Troubles, on the mainland. I did remember hearing a gunshot in the distance. Did that matter?
I suppose it did. Men will invent things to fight about, even on an isolated island. And when they fight, it is a fiction they are fighting over, a story and which one is true and important; a fiction, whose stories we tell and whose stories we simply forget or decide to call an end to.
Art is beautiful and good and sets us free, but art also is also brutal and can banish us, the pursuit of a perfect beauty, a perfect sound, the perfect arrangement of words means we in some way forsake those in front of us. This isn’t it. Not quite. We cut the less attractive, uninspiring thing out of the frame, the thing that doesn’t quite fit our idea. There, that’s better.
I don’t know why this idea is new to me, the brutality of art, a parallel of the brutality of nature. Maybe it’s not new, this movie has allowed me to put it into words. We are always trying so hard to make the world, and sometimes ourselves, look beautiful, symmetrical. And it isn’t. Not always. Maybe not even mostly. I don’t think this is the main idea of the movie, but it is what I am taking from it. The movie, through my eyes and experience becomes something different. Like a game of bananaphone.
I guess I need to address the title of my wandering piece here. Dominic, an outwardly troubled soul in the village, says at one point two things he is against are war and soap. The line sticks with you, poetry from a riled soul, a diamond in the rough. I’ll cut to the chase — he ends up dead.
Covid brain has me stewing. This strange movie — supposedly a dark comedy — has me stewing. In the end, Colm can no longer make music, having lost his fingers, and Pádraic is no longer just a nice, dull man. He is now a man who has burned down his best friend’s house, and that is far more interesting. A man will do violence — cut off his fingers — for a good story, to exert will, to craft a narrative. And the old creepy lady in black robes (a banshee?) who foretells death, a part of everyone’s story, the part we all know comes, is a witness.
