Even by the standards of Martin McDonagh’s lifetime of work, The Banshees of Inisherin is a masterpiece. Like all masterpieces, everyone will have their own interpretation, because the layers of meaning are complex, multiple and interconnected. So what follows is just my own reflection on the piece — because it’s been hard to think about anything else this week. I watched the movie twice, and the first time I was riveted to my seat by the sheer emotional rawness of it all; and the second, I just couldn’t stop laughing. I suppose all dark comedies are a bit like that. But this one was darker and funnier than any I recall. (Spoilers follow)
In some ways, the star is Ireland itself. The movie, featuring Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell as two longtime friends, is full of marbled sky and clinging mist. One script direction:
Storm-clouds and rain over various parts of the island; the castle ruins, the lonely lake, the laneways, then nearer home; the cows, the pony, the donkey, then…
Drone cinematography swoops you over a quilt of higgledy-piggledy stone-wall enclosures, wild goats, meandering sheep and dirt roads until you reach the Atlantic, where the chiseled rock formations drop suddenly, like a wall, into the vast ocean.
This is Inisherin, an imaginary island off the west coast in 1923 during the Irish Civil War. The residents sometimes hear the sound of mortar shells or the rat-a-tat-tat of firing squads on the mainland but don’t seem particularly interested. Their world is still apart, as it always has been. Electricity is rare; farmyard animals wander in and out of houses; a sailboat acts as a ferry to the mainland; and everyone knows everything about everyone else, deeply, from childhood.
This is life before modernity, before liberalism, before even radio — the kind of world today’s post-liberals talk so fondly about. It’s what the sociologists call a “thick” community — unified by a shared religion, entertained by their own music and storytelling, congregating every day and night in the same pub, repeating the rhythms of centuries. No atomization here: just the deepest of communities and the simplest of existences.
And the film, to my mind, is about this breaking down, and breaking up. Quiet aspirations to go beyond this simplest of existences nip at its edges. Two characters, Colm (played by Gleason) and Padraic’s sister, Siobhan, secretly share these hopes, searching for something more, driven close to crazy by the dullness of it all. Colm’s cottage is crammed with strange puppets and masks, and his fiddle; Siobhan is always reading something. “Dull” is the word used in the film to describe Padraic (Farrell), a “nice guy,” a happy fella, with little curiosity about the wider world, and a deep ease with his existence. “You’re more one of life’s good guys, aye,” the pub owner tells him, rather than a thinker. “Apart from when you’re drunk.”
Every day at 2 pm, Padraic says goodbye to his beloved miniature donkey, Jenny, and leaves the home he shares with Siobhan to pick up his older friend, Colm, and they go to the pub for a pint and a “normal chat.” It’s a routine as fixed as the landscape. And then, one day, it ends.
Suddenly Colm doesn’t answer the door, and tells his friend he no longer wants to see or talk to him any more — ever. When pressed by the bewildered Padraic to tell him why, Colm bluntly tells Padraic he’s too boring to waste his time on and he wants to devote the rest of his life to writing music.
Watching Padraic’s face absorb this sharp shock of abandonment is a short film all by itself. He just cannot understand why his friend would do this, and at first we don’t either, and the entire heartbreaking film is about Padraic being forced to understand and accept that his world is now over. Colm is fat, brusque and brutal — as well as capable of deep tenderness. We see his struggle for meaning, his attempt to do or create something before he dies that might outlast him. And we see the victims of this, which include himself. We see the priest in confession ask Colm simply: “And how’s the despair?”
Soon enough, Siobhan gets an offer as a librarian on the mainland, in a letter opened by the butcher’s wife, Mrs. O’Riordan, who also seems to run the post office. “Well it’d crucify him, your leaving!” she says, and we all instantly know who she means by “he.” “No-one’s leaving!” Siobhan shouts, and then, quietly whispers to herself, “ No-one ever leaves.”
Then we go full Flannery O’Connor. Colm, driven nuts by Padraic’s refusal to take no for an answer, then threatens to chop one and then all four fingers off his fiddle-playing hand if Padraic talks to him again — which begins a tit-for-tat of senseless, mounting, self-defeating grudge-keeping which upends both their lives. Padraic is wounded; Colm is almost literally cutting off his nose to spite his face. Neither gives in.
“What makes life worth living?,” the film asks insistently. Is it love and friendship and community and shared meaning? Or is it achievement, ambition, aspiration and individuality? The answer is both, of course. But the two instincts — the conservative one and the liberal one — chafe at each other. The trade-off is real — and modernity is the stage on which this conflict takes place. McDonagh sees both human urges lovingly — and puts this drama of modernity on a symbolic island.
The charm of pre-modern life is undeniable: that Irish blend of bluntness and humor, rage and gentleness, all moderated in the fog, is real and connected to the long living in this bleak, beautiful place. The pudgy priest, the bully cop, the sharp emotional insights of a “slow” kid called Dominic, the gossips and drunks and oddballs: what a place to live and die!
And yet also McDonagh lets Colm decry the banality of it all: “The other night, Padraic, two hours you spent talking to me about the things you’d found in your little donkey’s shite that day. Two hours, Padraic. I timed it.” And in a fight with Padraic, Colm tells the truth: “Who will remember Siobhan, and your niceness? No-one will. In 50 years time, no-one will remember any of us.” And as the movie continues, you see the human cost in these soon-to-be-forgotten lives: abuse, violence, alcoholism, suicide and flashes of near-luminescent rage.
And then in a pivotal scene with Siobhan, Colm gets to the nub of it all:
COLM: This isn’t about Inisherin. This is about one boring man leaving another man alone, that’s all.
SIOBHAN: “One boring man”! Ye’re all fecking boring! With your piddling grievances over nothing! Ye’re all fecking boring! (pause) I’ll see he doesn’t talk to you no more.
COLM: Do. Else it’ll be all four of them the next time (indicating his left hand), not just the one.
SIOBHAN: You’re not serious. (pause) Well that won’t help your fecking music.
COLM: Aye. We’re getting somewhere now.
SIOBHAN: I think you might be ill, Colm.
COLM: I do worry sometimes! That I’m just entertaining meself while I stave off the inevitable. (pause) Don’t you?
SIOBHAN: No, I don’t.
COLM: Yeah you do.
Gleason rendered that line like a depth charge in my soul.
Like many meritocrats of my generation, I left my home and sought the wider world as soon as I could and have few regrets. But part of me, especially as I grow older, sees more and more the value of the ordinary, the rural, the dull and the predictable. Padraic is a good man, beached by modernity, and I feel for him.
And I also felt something I rarely do: a sense of affinity with my deeper roots, my ancestors, on the west coast of Ireland where, according to some spit in a tube, almost all my DNA comes from. (Padraic’s last name is a version of my own.)
Is it possible to feel in your blood and psyche a sense of connection to a place you’ve never been merely by how it feels, by its weather and landscape, by the rhythms of its speech, by the effortless way the Irish can swing from rage to humor, from kindness to cruelty, from the deadliest serious things to the most ridiculous and trivial? Is there something in my very genes that resonates with this?
I didn’t use to think so. But I heard in the cadences of these characters echoes of voices I heard in my childhood, through the cigarette smoke, the tenacity of their grudges and the passion of their loves. I heard my parents “rowing,” and the dulcet tones of my maternal grandmother, born in Tralee with twelve siblings, who routinely scared the bejeezus out of us kids with her ghost stories, and whistled the tune of a hymn as she put the washing on the line. I hear my uncle Paddy’s big deep laugh and mordant sense of humor. And the statues of Our Lady. And then that symbolic miniature donkey, at once absurd and yet the most soulful, gentle performance of the entire film — and Padraic’s deep, beautiful and tender love for her.
And as we entertain ourselves while we stave off the inevitable, it gives a kind of solace, so it does. And a few good belly-laughs, so, as well.
New On The Dishcast: Matt Taibbi
The man himself. Taibbi is an investigative reporter in the Gonzo tradition who had a long career at Rolling Stone magazine, where he won the 2008 National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary. He’s written several bestselling books, including Griftopia and The Great Derangement, and now runs a wildly successful substack, TK News. Almost every less-talented hack hates him.
Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — how the MSM condescends to its audience, and what the Twitter Files achieved. That link also takes you to commentary on last week’s episode with Glenn Loury on race in America and being a lonely heterodox thinker.
As we informed all of you paid subscribers in an email yesterday, we just launched a private podcast feed for you to continue to listen to the Dishcast in full without interruptions, let alone ads. (Unpaid listeners will now only get about half of the conversation each week.) The only catch is a little bit of hassle to start with. To access the full pod from now on, go to andrewsullivan.substack.com/listen (make sure you’re logged in). It’s a very quick setup, and you only have to do this once. Some of you may already have the private feed — if so, “(private feed for andrew@andrewsullivan.com)” is seen just below the Dish beagle logo in your podcast app. If you listen to the Dishcast on a web browser rather than an app, you don’t have to do anything new.
I wish we’d been able to avoid even this little hassle, but it turns out for technical reasons I can barely understand, let alone explain, we can’t. (If you run into any snags, you can always reach us at dish@andrewsullivan.com.) Our deepest gratitude for your continued, solid support of The Weekly Dish. It’s made the last two and a half years possible and helped us build and hone the Dishcast, which is thriving beyond my initial expectations — 102 episodes and counting. Rod Dreher up next!
The View From Your Window
New London, New Hampshire, 8.15 am
Money Quotes For The Week
“It was, and is, a corrupt circle-jerk,” - Jill Abramson on Davos.
“A great deal of the media is just kids from selective schools and and colleges viciously squabbling for status, a continuous process with middle school, except with great power over how the American people experience reality,” - Nick Clairmont.
“The liberal response to the surge of migrants goes like this: First of all, the border crisis is fake and racist. Second of all, it was caused by Trump, who is still the president. Third, Park Slope is at capacity,” - Nellie Bowles, on the New York mayor saying the city can’t accept new migrants.
“NHL player Ivan Provorov shouldn’t have to wear a pride jersey for the same reason Colin Kaepernick shouldn’t have to stand for the anthem. … [T]he universal principle is free expression over compelled speech,” - Nicholas Grossman.
“It’s unclear whether West Virginia’s proposed SB 252 counts the mere presence of a transgender person in front of children as ‘exposure to indecent displays of a sexually explicit nature,’ but if so, the law is itself obscene. Can a trans parent not drop off his kids at school?” - Leor Sapir.
“Let’s hear some conservative outrage over child beauty pageants. Or is it not a priority for them?” - Travis Pangburn on the double standards of “sexualizing” kids.
“We had the solution [nuclear power] … and the environmental movement, to be honest, just derailed it. I think the environmental movement did a lot of good, a lot of good … I’m not knocking it, but in this one major matter, it was wrong. It was wrong,’ - Oliver Stone.
“I’ve just tried Redefine Meat’s plant-based lamb and beef. They are, to my palate, indistinguishable from the originals. Taste and texture bang on: I’d challenge anyone to pick them out in a blind tasting. Change is coming, faster than I thought possible,” - George Monbiot.
“My unproven suspicion is that secularization will have/is having worse social effects in the US than in Europe, since our general diversity + individualism raises the personal and social importance of religious belonging and belief,” - Ross Douthat on a new report on deaths of despair in America.
“Your followers? Oh, are you Jesus now, are you?” - a cantankerous Brit on a bench who is beseeched by a fitness influencer to move from her livestream.
The View From Your Window
Propriano, France, 12 pm
Dissents Of The Week: Young And Dem
A reader thinks I overlooked a big factor in my column on how the political right has lost America’s younger generations:
I appreciate your point about the life experiences of Millennials and Gen Z, but I would add one more to your list: higher ed. These generations were immersed in pro-college messaging more than any other, sold on the argument that “unless you go to college, you’re doomed for life.” Then they’re saddled with student debt at levels previous generations didn’t experience — and which pretty much no other country on Earth supports. At best they graduate into careers that let them gradually pay down that debt. At worst they emerge without a degree (or a bad degree) and still confront a debt mountain. This makes some of the other problems you identified even worse, like lower real earnings.
Another dissenter also thinks I’m “missing a big one: gun violence”:
I was in college when Columbine happened, so I never had lockdown drills or active shooter drills to go along with the usual fire drills. Every kid in America born after ‘84 has grown up doing these drills, watching mass shootings occur (or tragically experiencing one themselves) while the right has done nothing to solve this problem. Rather, the right become increasingly beholden to the gun lobby. As the kids who went through those drills start having kids of their own, it’s easy to understand why they would turn more to the political persuasion that wants to solve gun violence.
A small critique:
Two issues you under-estimated but are top of mind among the young: climate change and health care. I know from experience; whenever one of my three companies recruits employees who are in their mid 20s, the first things they ask are: Will you reimburse me if I take public transportation to work? Is your health insurance as good as my parents’ plan?
A common sentiment from the in-tray: “All of your suggestions for the right are just positions that most center-left liberals already hold.” Along those lines, another reader recommends “this very enlightening discussion between Bret Stephens and David Brooks.” Another reader:
Why does every bit of advice you give to the Right end up being perfectly good descriptions of run-of-the-mill Democrats? Conservatism cannot be that reasonable because it goes counter to the basic impulse of the Right: to hurt those who are different. The most effective countering of the “horror of woke” is, of course, coming from the Left — because for all our “excessive enthusiasm” for righting wrongs, the Right either pretends it never happened (like Dinesh D'Souza) or pretends they have overcome the evils of racism (like Rod Dreher).
The world is changing too fast for either the GOP or their stories to keep up. Their ideas were always awful, but in the ‘80s and ‘90s they could pretend that the bill would never come due. Brexit and Trumpism have been “fact checked” by reality even more quickly than the tripe of Reaganomics/Thatcherism and the Satanic Panic.
I’ll leave my reader’s epic vent up here. In my defense, as you can see throughout Out On a Limb (1989-2021) and The Conservative Soul (2006), the conservatism I’ve championed was so often in conflict with the GOP that it led to my profound alienation from the party for almost 20 years. I took Bill Kristol’s current position two decades ago — but didn’t become a lefty as a result.
Two longer dissents are over on the pod page, along with a variety of other debate points from readers. As always, keep the critiques coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
Mental Health Break
CT scans set to music — so stirring:
In The ‘Stacks
Charlie Sykes calls out the anti-conservatism of the GOP when it comes to the debt ceiling.
Kara Dansky catches you up on the historic move by the UK parliament to block a Scottish bill — on gender recognition. Also, how reasonable is the Dutch protocol really?
For MLK Day, Michael Shermer dusts off his bestseller, The Moral Arc.
Yglesias at his best: “Who is included by ‘inclusive’ language?”
Contra the tone of this week’s Dishcast, Richard Hanania argues that “the media is honest and good.”
Liz Nolan Brown has a lonely defense of algorithms.
Erik Hoel on the dangers of video-game addiction.
Rob Henderson asserts that “nobody is a prisoner of their IQ.”
You, too, might be a “classical fascist with antisemitic views,” according to the WaPo.
An elegant essay by Emma Collins on the “living death” of SSRIs: “I was more functional, but I was not alive.”
Have you heard about “nepo babies”? Ed West lends a hand.
A red diaper baby and lifelong feminist wishes we had more shame in sex. Aella blurs the debate significantly.
Did magic mushrooms evolve to entertain us?
Would the British public have cancelled Lady Hussey?
Sam Freedman tackles dissent over his piece we posted, “Is the NHS in a Death Spiral?”
The View From Your Window Contest
Where do you think? Email your entry to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. Proximity counts. The winner gets the choice of a View From Your Window book or two annual Dish subscriptions.
See you next Friday.