Cutting: severances in The Banshees of Inisherin

I’ve a set of shears at home, and each time you bother me from this day on, I’ll take those shears and I’ll take one of me fingers off with ‘em. And I’ll give that finger to ya.

WARNING: Major spoilers for The Banshees of Inisherin lie ahead.

‘I just don’t like you much anymore.’

Imagine if the very thing you based your whole life on disappeared without warning or explanation. And, furthermore, imagine if you didn’t realise just how much your life depended on that thing, because that thing was so stitched-into the fabric of your life that it became quotidian. Your having taken it for granted is now part of the pain of its passing.

For kindly, simple cattle-driver Pádraic on the (fictional) Irish island of Inisherin, the thing that disappears is his daily two o’clock pint at Jonjo’s pub with Colm, the leader and fiddle player of the local session band. The film opens with Pádraic knocking for an unresponsive Colm, who, to Pádraic’s bemusement, is just ‘sitting. Sitting and smoking.’ ‘Have ye been rowing?’ asks Jonjo, the proprietor of the local pub and, despite Pádraic’s certainty that they haven’t, ‘It looks as if ye have been rowing.’

They haven’t been, but soon enough the taciturn Colm comes clean. ‘I just don’t like you much anymore,’ he tells a devastated Pádraic. Pádraic’s only other companions are his intellectually-superior sister Siobhán — neither he nor she have married — and poor young Dominic, considered the ‘gom’ of the island, whose idiotic exterior hides his tragedy: he is the son of malevolent local policeman Peodar, who ‘beats his son black and blue every night he’s not fiddling with him.’ Pádraic, without Colm, has lost his centre — he is irritated by Dominic but also, cognisant of the latter’s home life (it appears to be an open secret on the gossipy island that nobody does anything about) he is uncomfortable around that much coiled and potent pain. Siobhán offers some solace, but she wants away; unbeknownst to her dependent brother, she has applied for a job in a library on the mainland. Pádraic has no choice, then, to get to the bottom of why Colm has rejected him so. And here is where the film’s key theme, severance, comes into play. Colm has become aware that his time on earth is fleeting, so he wants to dedicate it to things that ‘matter’, things that ‘last’. Mid-film, when a drunken Pádraic confronts him at Jonjo’s, Colm tells Pádraic that his niceness (the quality by which he is most known on the island) is not enough because it doesn’t last. ‘Music lasts; poetry lasts’, he explains, and he wants to dedicate his time to writing a piece of music he’s called ‘The Banshees of Inisherin’. This is the severance: it is a fundamental incompatibility of ideology. ‘My mammy was nice,’ Pádraic insists, and I remember her’. To Colm, this simply does not matter.

Severance (I)

And so, the friendship is severed, but it is not a clean break. The film plays with image after image of things that were seemingly one becoming two, often by forcible means. Again and again, we are confronted with the dual nature of things. The dualities localised within places, things and people in the film are often contradictory and give rise to key questions, which I’ll spend some time exploring.

Who are you?

Pádraic took it for granted that he knew Colm. When we conceive of ‘knowing’ someone, we can mean it in a few senses:

• To recognise

• To know about them biographically speaking

• To have an understanding of their habits, ways of thinking, etc.

• To have a shared past and present with them, with the conviction of a shared future

• To have an intimate relationship with them

• To know who they have been in the past, whether or not we have shared it with them

• To be able to predict what they might do in the future.

Looking Colm’s rejection in light of the list above, it’s clear why it destabilises Pádraic so. Colm doesn’t just end the friendship: he reveals a self that until that point had been hidden from Pádraic. A few times in the film, Colm visits the confessional. It is there — and only there — that he talks about his ‘despair’, though the film allows us to know no more about the root of it, if indeed there is one. Colm feels despair, the priest has known about it for some time, the priest is unable to do anything about it. It’s worth saying that for Catholics despair is a sin, because it’s a rejection of God’s grace. The priest is Christ-proxy when he administers sacraments; one is therefore never closer to God on earth than when receiving them. Those tight-shot moments in the confessional, then, are paradoxical: though the sacrament should bring Colm close to God, his despair precludes this. Indeed, to underscore this point, during one confession Colm angers the priest, who refuses to give him absolution (meaning that, if he died, he’d be damned, for he would die with the stain of sin on his soul). Severance: Colm is cut off from God the more he strives for closeness.

This is mirrored in Pádraic’s attempts to rekindle the friendship, which only serve to anger Colm. The more Pádraic strives for reconnection, the more Colm pushes for severance. Eventually, things take a turn for the absurd — one can see the influence of Beckett once again, as one does in the films of director Martin McDonagh’s brother, John Michael (especially Calvary), as well as the former’s stage plays (the originally-intended form of this film). Calvary is, in fact, an interesting companion piece, not least because its epigraph foregrounds dualistic and paradoxical concerns:

“Do not despair, one of the thieves was saved. Do not presume, one of the thieves was damned.”

You might recognise this quotation as being attributed to St Augustine, but apparently it’s a misattribution brought about by Samuel Beckett’s popularisation of it. In any case, it frames this film’s concerns neatly: we should not despair, but we also should not presume that we will be saved from despair. McDonagh’s Beckettian world is a world in which opposites are yoked together violently, localised within the perfect image of paradoxical duality and severance: an old set of sheep shears.

Severance (II)

COLM: What I’ve decided to do is this. I’ve a set of shears at home, and each time you bother me from this day on, I’ll take those shears and I’ll take one of me fingers off with ‘em. And I’ll give that finger to ya. A finger from me left hand. Me fiddle hand. And each day you bother me more, another I’ll take off, and I’ll give ya, until you see sense enough to stop, or until I have no fingers left. Does this make things clearer to ya?

PÁDRAIC: Not really, no.

Two blades work together to give the impression of a whole. This instrument of togetherness is an instrument of severance. The closing of the blades is an act of permanence. So much more is sundered than flesh, tendon, muscle and bone.

Who am I?

Colm cuts off one of his fingers after Pádraic’s drunken pub confrontation with him one evening; the next morning, he throws it at Pádraic’s door. A darkly hilarious scene ensures, in which Pádraic and Siobhán can’t decide what to do with the finger. Siobhán tells Pádraic to throw it away, but Pádraic won’t, because ‘it’s his [Colm’s]’. He eventually lays it to rest in a shoebox. But the tension between whose finger it is now that it has been cut off and given to Pádraic? We see a similar tension in Polanski’s The Tenant:

“At what precise moment...

...does an individual stop being who he thinks he is?

You know, I don't like complications.

Cut off my arm. I say, "Me and my arm."

You cut off my other arm. I say, "Me and my two arms."

You...take out...

...take out my stomach, my kidneys,

assuming that were possible...

And I say, "Me and my intestines."

Follow me?

And now, if you cut off my head...

...would I say, "Me and my head" or "Me and my body"?

What right has my head to call itself me?

What right?”

There’s a distinction, though both films explore the horror of the body. McDonagh’s film is set in 1923, during the Irish Civil War. The war doesn’t make it to Inisherin; it is a quiet, insular place, its concerns mutely domestic and apolitical. Several times, the narrative is punctuated by the cracks of gunfire from the mainland shore across the water; save for the wisps of gunsmoke rising, these are the only signs of, to quote Wilfred Owen ‘some dull rumour of another war.’ Pádraic admits that not only does he not know what they’re fighting about, he’s not even sure who the belligerents are. The island of Inisherin is Ireland, and yet it is severed from it; it’s geographic severance is psychogeographic. It is easy to ignore what one is not confronted with, which is why Colm’s emotional volte face bothers Pádraic far more than the war across the water.

And yet, it is in the crucible of war that narratives of identity are forged. What Ireland is, what it means to be Irish, on many levels, is what’s being fought over. I’m not going to call the film an allegory for the Civil War — I don’t think the film is that simplistic; instead, the film uses it to play with modern constructions of knowing and being. It asks us to consider who we are, and reminds us that there is no easy answer. The film plays with our perceptions of what is part of us — what is ‘ours’ — and what is not.   Padraic’s Colm is not Colm’s Colm; this is what causes Padraic such cognitive dissonance.  The two versions of Colm are incompatible because they are fundamentally different people.

Such dualities abound.  Peodar, the local policeman, might wear the uniform of a moral public servant, but he abuses his son physically, emotionally and sexually until his son kills himself by walking into the lake.  Siobhan plays the housewife to her needy brother, but that’s Padraic’s Siobhan, not Siobhan’s Siobhan.  In the confessional, that screened performative duality, we see the priest question Colm about his ‘despair’; it’s a Colm we don’t see elsewhere.  To look upon something is to see the thing in relation to oneself.

The whole thing is framed by the visual motif of the crossroads, at whose fork stands the virgin, her alabaster hands showing the two options. Religion might offer answers in the form of dualities, but it’s rarely that simple.

Severance (III)

PÁDRAIC: So tomorrow, Sunday, God’s day, around 2:00, I’m going to call up to your house and I’m going to set fire to it and hopefully you’ll still be inside it. But I won’t be checkin’ either way. Just be sure and leave your dog outside. […] Or your can do whatever is in your power to stop me.

Eventually, Colm cuts off his remaining fingers and throws them at Pádraic’s door but, because the latter us out, his beloved donkey Jenny attempts to eat one and chokes to death on it. Stung by this and the revelation that his sister is leaving, Pádraic finally turns on Colm for ruining his life. I note that even the time is a reference to two: the film, as I have mentioned, is full of dualities, things that simultaneously unite and rend. Healing and agony.

Why pain?

The final aspect I want to explore is Colm’s willingness to cause himself immense pain. Part of the reason might be because it’s the only way he can feel any pleasure. In Are There Hidden Advantages to Pain and Suffering? Megan O’Gieblyn writes that

When the brain senses that the body is imperilled, its endogenous morphine system (hence “endorphin”) creates an organic painkiller. All you have to do to get a dose is convince your body that it’s in danger. Viewed this way, masochism is a kind of biohacking, a way of exploiting the body’s electrochemistry.

Is this what Colm is doing? Perhaps? His despair needs some outlet, and the priest’s responses range from the vague to the hilariously aggressive (‘You will be pure fucked!’). So what else is he to do? He tries to solve it with music, but this is not solace enough. Perhaps he just needs an excuse to take drastic action, and his excuse is that Pádraic has driven him towards cutting off his fingers. Perhaps Colm’s treatment of Pádraic us designed to manipulate the latter into giving him the excuse to destroy himself. When we see inside Colm’s house, we see that his house is full of puppets, strung up like hanged men.

Ireland has a painful history. So does Catholicism: it’s foundational myths are drenched in blood. The fact that both protagonists survive the narrative of this film isn’t as optimistic as that might seem: both men have lost so much, and one gets the impression that they have lost more than they bargained for. What’s the point? That’s the wrong question: instead, let the final image wash over you: two broken men, united silently by suffering, looking out, out. To what? To the sea, and Ireland beyond, and beyond that? Yes: beyond that.