existentialism

The Banshees of Inisherin: consider the inkblots in this inky-black dramedy

Posted on by Austin Fitzgerald

When we call a film a Rorschach Test for the audience, we usually mean people will interpret it based on their own preconceptions and beliefs. My favorite film of this type is “Oleanna,” a David Mamet production that has had men and women at each others’ throats since its release in 1994 (it premiered as a play two years earlier).

“The Banshees of Inisherin” is a different kind of Rorschach Test, one in which we are dissuaded from making gut judgments and are instead asked to evolve our thinking as the inkblots rearrange themselves over the course of the film. “Inisherin” won’t tell you what kind of person you are, but it just might spur you to think about the kind of person you want to be.

The film wastes no time laying out its premise: the very first scene involves Pádraic (Colin Farrell), an Irish cattle farmer on the fictional island of Inisherin, discovering that his lifetime drinking buddy — Colm (the incomparable Brendan Gleeson) — no longer wants anything to do with him. It’s 1923, and the Irish Civil War is coming to a close, but Colm’s sudden refusal to put up with Pádraic’s dry and uninspired conversation ignites a war of another kind between the two men.

Who you side with initially will, of course, depend on your own biases and life experiences. I sympathized with Colm’s desire to free up some of his time to focus on his own pursuits, in part because that fatalistic feeling of never having enough time was an attitude I grew up absorbing from my father. And in comparison to Colm’s talent for writing and performing music, as well as his propensity for deep introspection, Pádraic’s daily routine of going to the pub, returning home to take his cattle to pasture, then going back to the pub for a nightcap doesn’t seem particularly interesting.

An image of Colm playing his violin in a pub.
Colm with all ten fingers!

Still, even if you find yourself attached to Colm as I was, it’s hard to say he’s blameless. The two men have evidently been friends for decades (at the very least, Colm went through the motions for that long). The sudden refusal to engage, as dim and annoying as Pádraic can be, seems a bit cruel and illogical after such a long time. As the pub’s proprietor remarks at one point, they have always made an odd match; even putting aside their personality differences, Colm is clearly significantly older than Pádraic, begging the question of how this so-called “lifelong” friendship took shape in the first place. If this odd couple has stayed together for so long, why break things off now with such vehemence?

As you’ll know if you’ve seen the trailer, Colm soon ups the ante after Pádraic continues to ignore the line in the sand: for each unwanted interaction, he’ll cut off a finger. And dear reader: you’d better believe he follows through.

At this point, it becomes clear that Colm is dealing with more than the accumulated annoyances of a life lived in close proximity to a simpleton. He’s depressed, perhaps in the throes of a “late-life crisis” that is forcing him to confront what he sees as an unproductive life. At its root, his thinking isn’t as logical as he’d like Pádraic to believe: each finger cut off makes it more difficult for him to perform music on his violin, the activity he claims will benefit from the extra free time gained by ending the friendship.

Still, it’s not so easy to simply switch to Team Pádraic. He’s what people today like to call an “emotional vampire,” someone who tends to use people as emotional backstops and on-call comforters rather than engaging with them on a meaningful human level.

This is probably the time to talk about Siobhán, Pádraic’s sister and the film’s third major character. For much of the film, Siobhán is the aforementioned on-call comforter, tending with increasing frustration to her brother’s emotional and social needs while seemingly taking care of nearly every household and farm duty. In other words, she might as well be Pádraic’s mother.

An image of Siobhán standing alone in the Irish countryside.
Siobhán sometimes seems at odds with the pace and nature of life on Inisherin; her red jacket contrasts sharply with the trademark green of the Irish countryside.

For a while, director Martin McDonagh seems to be establishing her as a kind of middle path, someone who sympathizes with Colm’s frustration at her brother’s inane existence but prioritizes treating everyone with compassion. Fortunately, Siobhán is more complicated than that.

She spends much of her free time reading, and when the opportunity presents itself to escape Inisherin for a job on the mainland, she leaps at the opportunity. Just as the conflict between Colm and Pádraic is escalating to an insane pitch, she leaves her brother alone, choosing — much like Colm — to focus on her own goals and personal fulfillment rather than sacrificing her time and energy in the service of others. There are at least two important differences, of course: Siobhán isn’t chopping off any fingers, and to her mind, no one person is responsible for the chaos on the island. Everyone on Inisherin is crazy.

She isn’t wrong. Almost every incidental character in the film is either exceedingly nosy, rude, abusive and self-important, or otherwise insufferable. And despite her departure, she never stops offering her love and compassion, even in the letter she sends later. Nevertheless, her departure signals a turning point. Without the rules and structure she provided, Pádraic starts to become untethered. He lets horses and his beloved pet donkey into the house, one of many instances in which the film suggests he is more comfortable around animals than when navigating the intricacies of human connection — though he retains an almost painful need for friendship and support.

An image depicting Pádraic walking with his beloved donkey through the Irish countryside.
Pádraic and his beloved donkey.

The film had me tightly in its grasp at this point. Pádraic, in despair at his isolation, is an increasingly sympathetic character, while Colm’s actions are beginning to look more like mental illness.

But then the film throws a curveball: Pádraic’s pet donkey chokes to death on one of the freshly-severed fingers Colm has been throwing at Pádraic’s door over the course of the film, marking a tonal shift away from an ingenious mixture of dark hilarity and deep, painful sorrow toward a bleaker home stretch.

When this happened, I didn’t know what to think. Every other event in “Inisherin” is motivated, even if those motivations are sometimes difficult to decipher. But here was an event ruled purely by chance, a cosmic joke played on both characters.

Understandably, Pádraic is infuriated; for the first time, we see him shed his need for affection and companionship. The accrued hurt and anger from Colm’s rejections, coupled with the traumatic loss of his donkey, burst out in the form of violence. He sets Colm’s house on fire, taking care only to ensure that Colm’s dog is safely out of harm’s way.

An image that shows Colm sitting fornlorn in his home while Pádraic peers through a window at him.
Some images don’t need a caption.

One of the worst feelings a filmgoer can experience is the sensation of watching a brilliant film fall to pieces in its final minutes, and as Colm’s house erupted in flames (with oddly CG-augmented fire??) I feared that was happening to me. In a film almost single-mindedly occupied with motivations — of human relationships, of daily life, even of suicide — what was the meaning behind such a strikingly unmotivated event, other than to draw the film toward a bombastic conclusion?

But as I have thought about the ending in the days since, I have come to the realization that the donkey’s death, so tied to the characters’ central conflict and yet apart from it, is emblematic of the film’s attitude toward conflict and tragedy. Colm’s initial actions are intended only to protect his own interests, but they ultimately accomplish the opposite, robbing him of his ability to play music and engulfing those around him in a gradually widening circle of chaos. Siobhán, in declining the advances of one side character while treating him like the unimportant comic relief figure he appears to be, unwittingly serves as at least a partial motivation for that character’s suicide. And Pádraic, in doing everything he can conceive of to repair his most treasured relationship, sends Colm over the edge into self-mutilation. Motivations, it seems, don’t really matter. In the end, our actions always cause pain to someone. But amidst this pain and suffering, what we can control is our ability to show compassion (Siobhán was right!).

Perhaps this way of looking at the film, which sees conflict not as the collision of differing motivations but as a series of non-sequiturs with consequences that are wholly disconnected from intentions, explains its strangest and funniest dialogue: the final lines of the film.

“Thank you for looking after my dog anyway,” Colm says after surviving the house burning.

“Any time,” says Pádraic.

Other ravings

There are a few aspects of this film I wasn’t able to fit into this discussion. Dominic (Barry Keoghan in a characteristically off-kilter performance), the character who commits suicide, is probably worth an analysis all his own. However, I mostly see him as a foil for Pádraic’s self-absorbed neediness and ineptitude and as a late-film symbol of loneliness and unintended consequences. He isn’t quite a fully-formed character in my view, and I don’t have a lot to say about him. But coming back around to the film’s nature as a kind of Rorschach Test, I’m sure there are people who will identify with him and use him as their anchor for understanding the film.

The film’s setting is interesting but a bit odd — I’m referring to the repeated references to the Irish Civil War. I’m not a native Irishman, so perhaps this makes more sense to people who have a stronger sense of the culture and history of the island (though I don’t think I’m a slouch in that regard), but the connection between the plot and the war seems to be little more than “here is a reference to a large-scale conflict, and here is that conflict (supposedly) in microcosm without any direct parallels that would seem to justify that connection.” Other than the fact that war happens, I’m not sure what we’re supposed to make of that. The film does not seem to have anything to say about war specifically, so while I suppose a gentle correlation to the civil war adds a bit of intriguing background noise, I don’t see any depth there that rivals every other aspect of the film. (Side note: I wrote this before spotting this article, which strives to explain the significance of the war within the story but doesn’t really say anything more complex than what I’ve written here. Points for both of us using the word “microcosm,” though.)

One other bone to pick — not with the film, but with the commentary from critics. This film has received the acclaim it deserves, but most critics spend a lot of time hyping its status as a kind of reunion for McDonagh, Farrell, and Gleeson, who last worked together on 2008’s “In Bruges,” without acknowledging the film’s kinship to another Gleeson and McDonagh joint: “Calvary,” released in 2014.

Gleeson and Kelly Reilly in “Calvary.”

The McDonagh who directed “Calvary” is actually Martin McDonagh’s brother, John Michael McDonagh. As in “Inisherin,” that film features Gleeson as a tired, increasingly fatalistic man with a good heart who finds himself in conflict with residents of his small Irish town. His home doesn’t burn down in that film: his church does (he plays the town priest) after a disgruntled parishioner sets it ablaze. Suicide and depression are prominent themes in both films, and both films feature a central conflict between two men, one of whom is largely in the dark about the extent of the conflict for much of the runtime. Both films end in a beachside confrontation. At their core, both films are set in motion by a seemingly arbitrary decision by one character to make an enemy of the other. Both films also take pains to avoid hamming it up with traditional Irish music, a decision that Martin and the press seem to be selling as a unique, defining feature of “Inisherin.”

I’m not saying there is any funny business here; despite their similarities, these are different films with different things to say about the world. But a little appreciation for John Michael’s superb work wouldn’t be out of place. It would be absurd to say Martin was not inspired in some way, shape or form by his brother’s film, just as it would be absurd to ignore Calvary as an early evocation of the world-weariness that Gleeson so expertly portrays in “Inisherin.”

I mean, come on. John Michael’s own (brief) Wikipedia entry can’t help but refer to him right at the top as “the older brother of playwright and filmmaker Martin McDonagh.” Must we continue to render him invisible in his brother’s shadow?

What ‘Blade Runner 2049’ means to me

Posted on by Austin Fitzgerald

We often hear that films, like all forms of art, are “subjective.” But what does that actually mean?

There is a deeply personal side to watching movies that we rarely acknowledge. Reviews, for good reason, generally address the more “objective” qualities of a film—the quality of its camerawork or soundtrack, for instance, or whether or not its actors were convincing in their roles. Then there is film criticism, which, like its literary counterpart, delves into the themes and background of the work. But even if you combine these, as Roger Ebert often did, you still have only half the picture of the true experience of a film.

How were you feeling when you entered the theater? Were you still thinking about how your boss chewed you out earlier in the day? Maybe the film triggered a long-forgotten childhood memory, or a character’s voice sounded just like your mother’s. Perhaps a comic relief sidekick everyone hated was your favorite character, if only because you once knew someone just like him.

These are not objective measures of a film, but we should not discount them, either. After all, there is a reason few critics agree on their favorite films. What pushes a film from great to magnificent is not perfect technical precision or classically trained actors; it’s the moments when something inside us connects with something in the film, and for a time, the line between reality and performance fades away.

With that said, let me tell you about a time when, for me, a great film became magnificent.

I saw Blade Runner 2049 four times when it entered theaters in October of 2017. I like to watch great films more than once, but four times in the span of a few weeks was unusual even for me. I’ve already written an analysis of some of the film’s themes, which provides plenty of reasons why I should like it, but that’s not the whole story. You see, in October of 2017, I was working as a manager at a big-box retailer (if you would like to know which one, consider that the experience of working there felt like repeatedly banging my head against a brick wall, and its name references that same wall). Despite several positive developments in my life (including marriage), I was languishing in depression. I have always had something of a morose personality, but the deeply cynical realities of working in this particular environment were driving me into the ground at an alarming rate.

Along came 2049. Somewhere around the scene where K (Ryan Gosling) learns—or thinks he learns—that he is more than your average replicant, I began to sense a working-class parable in the making. K is essentially a slave at the beginning of the film, and he is closely monitored for any signs of dissatisfaction with his role via a “baseline test.” He is an arm of the State, which could just as easily be a megacorporation, and his identity is tied to that entity. Developing his own sense of self is forbidden for two principal reasons: First, it would affect his ability to do his job. Hunting replicants depends on accepting the narrative that they are inferior and unworthy of free will, because denying that narrative means empathizing with those he is supposed to kill or capture. Second, a sense of self, with all the emotions and aspirations that come with it, would rob the powerful of much of their hold on society. Consider Niander Wallace (Jared Leto), a rock star of an entrepreneur who derives his immense wealth and power from the assumption that his replicants are completely under his control. Lt. Joshi (Robin Wright), K’s boss, also alludes to a figurative wall separating humans and replicants that must remain in place to prevent all-out war between the oppressors and their slaves.

I connected with K immediately, because I felt similar pressures to conform and defer to questionable authority. Staff meetings were thinly-disguised baseline tests; Incomprehensibly stupid instructions were sometimes given for seemingly no other reason than to ensure I would blindly do as I was told. Employees with difficult home lives or mental issues were steamrolled unceremoniously by an unsympathetic system run by traumatized nutbags. A certain deceased entrepreneur (you might say he contributed a “ton” of bricks to the “wall” I mentioned earlier. Gosh, I’m clever) was practically worshipped as a prophet for his pure and altruistic motives, even as the corporation he founded raked in monstrous profits by terraforming local economies to suit its business model. Wallace would have been proud.

It felt good to see K realize, all at once, that he had far more potential as an individual than he had been allowed to believe. The rage and sadness he felt at simultaneously understanding the extent of his oppression and becoming aware of his own capacity for free thought made me think about how I might have been limiting myself in my depressive haze. As tears streamed from K’s face, I recalled a time when I had broken down in tears in the middle of an aisle at work, having dwelled a moment too long on the vast difference between what I wanted to do with my life and what I was doing with my life. I felt trapped on a path I had never intended to take. I sensed that K, too, felt his life had been guided by a malevolent hand.

Of course, K eventually realizes that he is not, in fact, the “chosen one” he believed himself to be. This is the film’s most brilliant touch, because by the time this happens, K has already steered himself onto a path of self-actualization. As it turns out, the idea that he was the first natural-born replicant was never his primary motivator. It was simply a push in the right direction, a red pill that allowed him to see past the life society had built for him. His true motivation is the knowledge that he is an individual, that he serves no master but himself.

This internal drive is underlined by his rejection of the replicant freedom fighters, who seem at first to be saviors but treat him as just another cog in the machine, a pawn to be sacrificed, an arm of the rebellion. He defies their orders to kill Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), saving the old hunter instead. Rather than swapping one set of overlords for another, he serves only his own will.

The scene in which K fights to save Deckard, battling against the ocean’s inexorable tide and Wallace’s replicant minion, struck me more powerfully than any other part of the film. It has been noted by many critics that the enormous waves thrashing into K in this climactic scene function as a nod to Rutger Hauer’s final rain-drenched scene in the original Blade Runner. While this is certainly true, the waves meant something far more profound to me. As I watched K struggle to hold his ground against the unstoppable elements, I began to feel a perverse sense of pride. I know what that feels like, I thought. I’ve been doing that every day.

The waves represented every outside force conspiring to weigh me down. They represented internal forces like doubt, mental exhaustion, and fatalism. They represented the overwhelming power of a society that wanted to cram me into a corner and leave me there to rot. And yet, dealing with these same forces, K fought on.

Maybe I could, too.

From that day forward, whenever I began to slip into despair, I would remember K standing firm as waves whaled into him on the shore, and I would find the strength to keep going. I had never had what you might call an “idol” growing up, but suddenly K, a fictional character, fit into that slot perfectly. In less than two months, I found a job that was better in every way, a job where I could use my degree and where the work environment did not make me feel like I was competing on “Survivor.” This was no coincidence. Crazy as it may sound, Denis Villeneuve’s film inspired me to climb out of the quicksand and better myself. 2049 understands what it is like to be dehumanized by a power structure consumed with its own self-interest and corrupt, insular morality. It understands how people become machines, and how machines become people. Regardless of whether or not Villeneuve and the writers fully intended to create a story about a working-class drone rising up to defy the dictates of society, that was the film I saw, and I will forever be grateful for it.

How will Ghost in the Shell treat its lead female?

Posted on by Austin Fitzgerald

The Ghost in the Shell franchise has enjoyed many iterations over the years, each one depicting lead character Motoko Kusanagi in various stages of undress. In some cases, this has related to the overall themes and philosophy of the work. Other times, not so much. This has me wondering: How will the new film, starring Scarlett Johansson and releasing on March 31 in the United States, depict its lead female?

The 1995 Ghost in the Shell animated film — the first exposure to the franchise for most in the U.S. — manages to depict its main character as nude or semi-nude throughout without sexualizing her. She is often filmed from a low angle, emphasizing her power and authority. Her sole vulnerability is an existential crisis, in that she is constantly in the process of examining her own psyche, wondering if her transition to a cyborg body robbed her of humanity. By portraying a woman in this way, with so few concessions to a male audience, the original film functions as a important example of feminist film and an intriguing look at what it means to be a woman (or, more broadly, a human) free from sexuality. It wrapped all this up in an incredible work of sci-fi existentialism.

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Major Kusanagi as she appears in the 1995 film

The subsequent anime series, Stand Alone Complex, tackles some intriguing themes but constantly depicts Motoko in an extremely sexualized bathing suit-like outfit (in a police work environment, no less) and is filled with every variety of gratuitous, sexualized nonsense the directors had at their disposal. Unlike the original film, the camera is nothing more than a stand-in for the male eye. Though Motoko is never nude, she is more eroticized in her bathing suit outfit than she ever was in the original film. Interestingly, though, the sexualization is only visual. Motoko is treated seriously in every other way; if one were to read the dialogue without seeing the animation, there would be no indication of the ridiculous outfit or the camera’s single-minded focus on her body. This attempt to have it both ways — catering to a horny male audience while telling a serious story about a female lead character — makes every scene unintentionally hilarious. While the series can sometimes reach impressive depths of emotion and intelligence, its failure to reign in the visual treatment of its lead character cannot be ignored.

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A shot from Stand Alone Complex

Then there’s the original manga (Japanese comic book, for the uninitiated). Despite being the source of most of the 1995 film’s philosophical underpinnings, it included an undeniably pornographic two-page spread of Motoko engaged in a lesbian orgy.

So…in theory, both approaches could work in a feminist film. A woman “free” from sex and a woman who likes-sex-very-much-thank-you-may-I-have-some-more both deserve to be depicted in film with equal respect. But so far, I’m inclined to say the former tack is more successful, with the exception of rare films like David Fincher’s Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Usually, when a film says it’s doing the latter, what it’s actually doing is knowingly titillating the audience and reducing feminine rebellion or independence to “look how little clothing I can wear and not even care! Wooo!” In other words, a woman’s “strength” becomes inextricably tied to her sex appeal. For a film to successfully depict a woman who is also a sexual being, it needs to shed the male eye, and this is depressingly rare.

There is, of course, a third path filmmakers have attempted: Depict a woman as strong mentally or emotionally, but avoid any hint of sex appeal by any means necessary — cast an older actress, apply a mask of “uglifying” makeup, etc. This approach is wonderful if it feels unintentional and natural (in the BBC series “Broadchurch,” Olivia Colman’s character is a brilliant detective who is never sexualized, and it’s a breath of fresh air because you would never see her in an equivalent part in an American production, unless her part was about parenting or some other marginalizing role). But when it’s completely intentional, which happens more often, it can imply that womanhood, sexuality, and psychological strength should not or do not exist together in women for the purposes of film.

So, which approach will the new film take? We can rule one thing out already: Scarlett Johansson will not be “uglified.” She is a talented actress, but the trailers make it clear the film will not shy away from her sex appeal. Her body in the new film, an artificial shell that imitates a female body but does not approach the lifelike realism of her body in the original animated film, is an attempt to be faithful to the original’s nudity while maintaining broad market appeal. However, it clearly delineates an obvious physical difference between her and a person with a natural body, which may somewhat lessen the viability of the character as a metaphor for womanhood.

You see, the original film visually framed her existential conflict both as one between body and mind, and also between body and gender. What does the outward appearance of a female body actually mean? Is a mind gendered? She is even referred to at one point as an “Amazon,” an explicitly gendered reference to women of Greek myth who were said to alter their bodies (by cutting off a breast) to make it easier to wield a bow. And let us not forget that the film opens with a line that calls into question Motoko’s ability to menstruate in an artificial body.

In the upcoming film, however, the visual metaphor is dampened by the fact that the body screams, “fake!” Her central conflict will likely be more about the conflict between “real brain” and “fake body,” perhaps eliminating the gender slant altogether. Yet the nature of the body, alone, will not necessarily define the film’s approach. The film could conceivably tackle the body vs. gender issue by making her “fake” body the whole point.

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The major’s cyborg body as it appears in the upcoming film (via Paramount)

We are left, then, to consider Hollywood’s track record, and the verdict isn’t good. Johansson’s “Black Widow” in the Marvel films is worryingly close to the portrayal of Motoko in Stand Alone Complex. While Widow is strong physically and psychologically, she wears a skin-tight outfit tailor-made for a male audience, and her role in the films is usually as a partner for one of the male heroes. Furthermore, the new Ghost cost almost $200 million; with that kind of investment, it’s safe to say director Rupert Sanders won’t be aiming for an existential character study. Sex appeal is a money-maker.

Thus, of the three approaches we started with, we are left with only one that could still lead to a successful film: a Motoko that is openly sexual, placed within a story that makes her question the relationship between her body and her gender. I’m not optimistic, but I am hopeful. If Hollywood pulls this off, it will be a miracle, but it doesn’t hurt to root for miracles once in a while.