Interruption

What is it good for? Absolutely nothing.

I don’t like you anymore and I want you to leave me alone.

This is the opening dramatic declaration in the movie I watched last night under the battery operated lights of my Christmas tree, The Banshees of Inisherin, written and directed by Martin McDonough, the Irish playwright. I was instantly transfixed. Cut to the chase why don’t you, Mr. McDonough. No need to build up a relationship or get to know the characters involved before mounting pressure creates a schism. Go straight at it. I smiled. How delightful to be instantly at crux of a human situation. ColmSonnyLarry has decided that he doesn’t have much time left in life and he doesn’t want to waste it continuing to meet his friend Padraig at the pub every afternoon at 2 for a pint. He doesn’t want to get to the end and look back at time and opportunity squandered on boring chat conversation with a dull man. Instead he wants to write music for his fiddle. He wants to make something while he can. Padraic, his friend, has suddenly become an impediment. The friendship has to end.

I loved this set up immediately. I wondered if McDonough had recently gotten a divorce? Or was he reckoning with the pain he’d caused others by choosing his writing over his relationships? Or was he making a case for the need to pull back in order to marshall resources toward the end of life? Whatever his own connection to the central dilemma, it is played out to the end by Colin Farrel and Brian Gleeson, great Irish actors. ColmSonnyLarry tells Padraic that if he doesn’t leave him alone he will cut off a finger every time Padraic violates the boundary Colm has set. Padraic simply cannot understand what happened, what went wrong—he can’t accept Colm’s rejection, can’t leave it alone. Except for the civil war happening across the bay, they are in Eden on their emerald green isle. What’s dull about meeting a friend every day at two and living with beloved animals and a smart sister? Padraic is living in the moment, and doesn’t feel the sense of time that Colm does—the limits imposed by mortality that will cut off his ability to create his music. They poke and prod at each other in an escalation that causes great devastation. Padraic falls out of Eden. As he grapples with hurt, he becomes no longer a nice fella.

Colm decides that after several episodes of exchanged harm they are even and can call it quits. But Padraic is now at war with Colm and with himself. He knows there is no resolution for that war, and he thinks that’s maybe a good thing. Expulsion from Colm’s life has made him fully human. At last, he hates. Ironically, horribly, his hatred is interesting—he is no longer a dull man. Even Colm notices and shows renewed interest. But the grounds for their friendship no longer exists. Colm has cut off his fingers and can’t play the fiddle anymore, and Padraic has lied to his sister for the first time, writing her a letter in which he represents himself as doing fine. (Charmingly for most of the film, sister and brother sleep in narrow twin beds in a tiny room, though they are middle-aged.) He has become one of the men that she rails against. Rejection has broken him down, just as it broke Adam and Eve down. He is an adult, but what is that? A knowing creature, it seems.

McDonough, like Beckett, characterizes by situations rather than traits. (Has growing up inside the immutable fact of an ongoing sectarian conflict diminished these Irish playwrights belief in human choice ?) Options are eliminated. There isn’t much interest in how a situation will develop as much as the effects of the situation repeating itself. The fragility of human endeavor is on full display as Padraig decides that he should be tough with Colm, exert power rather than persuasion. But Colm has made up his mind. Nothing will change, ever. He is willing to cut off his own fingers to make his position clear. This is an odd part of the pact, as it is so non-sensical. If he wants to write songs and play his fiddle, why cut off his fingers? I’m still thinking about that. It was a bit Monty Python. Blood and gore to comic effect.

The dramatic approach here is different than my own way of going about thinking about drama and characters and choice, and I absolutely love seeing how McDonough’s dramatic principles work. It’s so psychologically devastating. It is bewildering and soul-searing to be cut off by a friend, and McDonough elevates the harm done to Olympian proportions. Yet he doesn’t condemn Colm for making this choice. Colm is facing the end of time, and he knows what he wants to do with his time. This feels valid as well. Life span is real. Dullness, too, is a serious consideration—should we waste time on the dull, for the sake of having made that mistake before? This is a situation, not a morality play. The viewer isn’t being prodded toward enlightenment, and can respond without the imposition of a caul of goodness being thrown over the whole project.

Padraig has a little donkey named Jenny he loves without defining the difference between them—human and animal. He is sympathetic to her loneliness when she pokes her head in the door. His sister tells him animals belong outside. She comes home one day to find Padraig and Jenny sitting in their small central room. She reminds Padraig that Jenny belongs outside and he snaps back I’m not going to put the donkey out when I’m sad.

Yes. We are not solitary creatures. We want a friend. And we have the capacity to become more known to ourselves, but that brings us to the next dilemma, and finally to the grave.

I saw the film through the lens of interruption, which I have been thinking about lately being on Day 15 of COVID and having watched way more Insta reels than is healthy. COVID is an interruption, clearly…but it’s hard to blame a virus for doing its thing. People, on the other hand…reel after reel shows people interrupting their children and pets to deliver self-aggrandizing authoritarian scoldings and lectures. A Martian would conclude that obedience is the highest human value. Disobediences have to be interrupted and corrected with no mercy. It’s grim out there for the children and the animals. Adults, too, of course, but showing off authority seems to be more of an attraction when it comes to the powerless. The comments hold a lot of hell. I could go on, but instead I will end with a link Austin Kleon put up on his blog to a review of a book about Maria Montessori of kindergarten fame. It makes the case that Montessori’s central idea was not play but work…uninterrupted, quiet work. I wholeheartedly concur. Signing off to do some now.

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