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.
Bowie in 2013 after the launch of the first indie Dish, with Dusty’s mug
This week is the first week our entire Dishcast is reserved for paid subscribers, as a reward for their support these past two and a half years. Everyone will still be able to listen to the first half — and the first half of all future Dishcasts — but then you’ll be asked to upgrade to become a full Dishhead. All you have to do is subscribe! It’s a low-price substack — only $1 a week or $5 a month or $50 a year.
We know many of you on the free list read us diligently every week. The data never lies, freeloaders! And after two years and 102 episodes, we’d love you to take the little jump of putting your money where your eyeballs are.
As a paid subscriber you’ll also be able to read all the reader reactions to both my column and the Dishcast of the week, along with my replies to those readers. You also get a weekly guide to the best of Substack, the legendary View From Your Window contest, a Mental Health Break, and all the other Internet goodies Chris has retrieved that week. So subscribe!
A paid-up Dishhead is already psyched:
Many thanks for emailing all the paid subscribers the set-up instructions for the private feed for the podcast. It all worked fine. I am glad you have done this. Your writing is sublime and I love your podcast, so very pleased that folks will be encouraged to subscribe. I am the same age as you, Andrew, and also an ex-pat Pom, though I live in Australia. All I can say to the above is, “I am with you, brother!”
Bro! My man. So grateful. Yesterday we also got several emails along these lines:
Will a podcast app now be required to listen to you? I’ve always simply listened to podcasts from my computer browser. I’m aware podcast apps exist but haven’t felt the need to use one. Let me know if I need to catch up with the times.
No app is required! If you’ve listened to the Dishcast on your computer’s web browser, just continue to do so.
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. A listener loved it:
Wow and thank you for the extraordinary and shockingly frank interview with Glenn Loury. Wonderfully open and sincere and forthcoming from both interviewer and interviewee — terrifically enlightening and thought provoking from beginning to end. This subscription just keeps getting better and better.
Here’s a clip:
Another listener looks to a different episode:
I thoroughly enjoyed (and was horrified by) your interview with Nick Miroff. It struck me at the end, after this long conversation about immigration, and then fentanyl, you asked why Americans want to anesthetize themselves. Maybe the two are connected.
The capitalist system (without real safety nets) is dehumanizing. People are either excluded and broke (despite having 1-2 jobs), or are stuck in a corporate job that treats them like a “resource” to be moved around and reminded constantly that they can be replaced. We have lost all meaning in work and not because we aren’t religious, but because we bow to the stock market and share holders and the almighty dollar. It’s an empty life.
Unless you do something with meaning. Myself, I am a social worker. I will never make much money and I can’t afford to give my kids the life their friends have, but I have tremendous meaning in my work — and thus only have to smoke weed.
Here’s a taste of that episode:
One more on Miroff:
Thank you, Andrew. I gained a better understanding in a handful of minutes than I’d have gotten from any news media site.
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.
Read three more dissents here, for paid subscribers. 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.
In The ‘Stacks
This is a feature in the paid version of the Dish spotlighting more than a dozen of our favorite pieces from other Substackers every week. This week’s selection covers subjects such as “nepo babies,” magic mushrooms, and the “living death” of SSRIs. Below are a few examples:
You can also browse all the substacks we follow and read on a regular basis here — a combination of our favorite writers and new ones we’re checking out. It’s a blogroll of sorts. If you have any recommendations for “In the ‘Stacks,” especially ones from emerging writers, please let us know: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
The View From Your Window Contest
Where do you think it’s located? Email your guess to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Proximity counts if no one gets the exact spot. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. The winner gets the choice of a VFYW book or two annual Dish subscriptions. If you are not a subscriber, please indicate that status in your entry and we will give you a free month subscription if we select your entry for the contest results (example here if you’re new to the contest). Happy sleuthing!
The results for last week’s window are coming in a separate email to paid subscribers later today. From a big fan of the contest:
On Saturday morning, David was making us brunch for the first time in a very long time, so I set up the iPad and sat down to start our VFYW. He sees the title and says Switzerland. We read on and start talking about Mary Shelley, etc. Then what to our wondering eyes should appear, but our holiday card that you posted ... how fun!
We continue to read on .. Wow! You keep getting better and better content from your subscribers. Informative, fun, stories, recipes — I’m still spotting things I’d never think to look for. Of course it’s perfect if you live in Geneva and can get into that building — wow on its ceiling. I love all the other entries with their images and video links and, of course, the weekly postcard from “A. Dishhead”:
Lastly, heads up that I’ll be on Real Time with Bill Maher tonight. See you then or next Friday.
