‘Demian’, ‘Ryan’s Daughter’, and ‘The Banshees of Inisherin’
Kirrary, with Rosy and Charles Shaughnessy - a still from ‘Ryan’s Daughter’
In the summer of 1970, or possibly 1969, my family took a holiday in a rented house in Ventry, near Dingle in Co.Kerry, driving down there with Sam, the dog. It rained more or less all the time, with moments when shafts of illuminating sunlight broke through stormy skies. The weather was so poor that our break was abandoned after a week or so, but I vividly recall beautiful moody scenery, long empty beaches, the smell of turf fires, and the milk, butter, and soda bread purchased from the local farm and shop. Many hours were spent inside the house, in those days without televison or or other sources of entertainment, but I had brought with me a couple of books, and I soon became immersed in one of them. I’d recently finished Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, hugely popular among young people at the time, and I turned to the lesser-known Demian to see if it conveyed similar magic. I found it gripping. Moving gradually from innocent youth to knowing adulthood, Emil Sinclair, the novel’s narrator, wavers constantly between temptations of the flesh and the promise of spiritual redemption. Close to despair, Sinclair is befriended by an aloof and charismatic schoolmate called Max Demian, whose keen intelligence and unconventional ideas about God and morality lead his younger companion into an unfamiliar inner world. Demian is both guide and provocateur, encouraging Sinclair to question every value that he has hitherto accepted, and to reject the safe but dull life that he has previously known. Like the path of the Steppenwolf, Sinclair’s journey to adulthood is strange and almost hallucinatory, and I remember being particularly struck by the idea of the invisible ‘Mark of Cain’, a sign of a true outsider, familiar with both good and evil, and perceptible only to the like-minded.
One afternoon, on a jaunt, we happened upon what seemed to be a phantom or abandoned village. The reality was more mundane; it was the set of David Lean’s ‘Ryan’s Daughter’, which had been completed not long before. Filming had begun in early 1969, and it involved the construction of real buildings made from stone and slate, not theatrical mock-ups. The story, which takes place in 1917, is about Rosy, the only daughter of the local publican, Thomas Ryan, who is bored with life in Kirrary, an isolated village on the Dingle Peninsula. The locals are nationalists, and they taunt British soldiers from a nearby army camp; Tom Ryan publicly supports the recently suppressed Easter Rising but secretly helps the British as an informer. Rosy marries the village schoolmaster, Charles Shaughnessy, imagining, although he tries to convince her otherwise, that he will add dash and excitement to her life. When Major Randolph Doryan arrives to take command of the army camp, however, Rosy falls in love with him and tragedy ensues. She has failed to comply with the values of the community and suffers the consequences.
Lean thought that the project would take about three months, but it kept expanding, and in the company of a vast cast and crew, he was still in Kerry over a year later, with the film substantially over budget. The visitors were for the most part welcome; they had plenty of cash as well as the will and time to spend it; according to Lean, the production was ‘the last of the travelling circuses’ in the final days of the lavish studio system of film-making. He could not, however, buy good weather. After dawn make-up calls, the director often kept cast members waiting all day, only to inform them they were not, in the end, needed. Unrestrained behaviour was said to have been the consequence; boredom, self-indulgence, and too much money seem to have led both cast and crew astray. When finally completed, the film was not the success that Lean and the producers anticipated; the film set, apart from a solitary building, was eventually demolished, after being offered to the community for free. Nobody was especially interested.
I was reminded of the imitation village when I watched ‘The Banshees of Inisherin’, the recent film by Martin McDonagh, with which it has elements in common. While the Civil War is taking place in the background, an isolated community in the West of Ireland is dealing with its own parochial problems, which are perhaps intended to reflect those of the country as a whole. Two close friends, Pádraic and Colm, have fallen out, and the story deals with the dreadful consequences. The film is no more naturalistic than its predecessor. Locations were found on Inishmore and on the island of Achill, which were combined to become the beautifully bleak and fanciful ‘Inisherin’ - literally, ‘The Island of Ireland’ - and sveral buildings were made for the set. The inhabitants live in small cottages within handy walking distance of a picturesque village, beach, and pub; everything is remarkably clean, and as one reviewer has caustically pointed out, nobody speaks Irish. Little work seems to be required or expected, and life on the island appears to revolve around pints of stout in the pub, often accompanied by traditional music. Sometimes, when the weather is comparatively balmy, they sit outside to drink, and the easy life enables Pádraic, one of the main characters, to keep a miniature donkey as an indoor pet. In short, the reviewer concludes, dangerously ahistorical myth-making is at the heart of a film which suggests that the only sane response to an inexplicably bloody fight between neighbours on an island beset by repression and abuse is to leave or emigrate, the decision taken by Siobhán, Pádraic’s clever sister.
An academic article has examined how the movie ‘represents and employs key sociological concepts and ideas, namely those of liminality, schismogenesis, stasis and transgression, relating to the social pathologies of contemporary civilization’. The ‘real’ subjects of the film are the tension between community and the individual, and how transgression creates liminality. In modern society, the piece continues, there is a nostalgic and romantic tendency to idealise aspects of life in the past; we yearn for what we imagine to have been its beauty, truth, and goodness, values we have lost in the wake of rapid modernization and cultural emphasis on individuality, but for those who actually experience community, with the weight of its hierarchies and rigidities, its monotonous routines and normative constraints, a typical response is very often the same as Siobhán’s, which is that of generations of peasants everywhere: leave if you can, or learn to acquiesce with the community and say nothing. The island of Inisherin, which is visually radiant and lovely, is internally barren and cruel. The violence, both actual and repressed, eventually abates after several sacrificial crises – Colm gives up his music, Siobhán her life on the island; Pádraic's donkey is killed and Colm's house is burnt down; Dominic the innocent ‘pharmakon’ (who has a counterpart in ‘Ryan’s Daughter’) has killed himself. Based on this analysis, however, a reader who hasn’t seen the film would have no idea of its irony and bitter humour. ‘Let's just call it quits and agree to go our separate ways’, says Colm. ‘No, we won't call it quits’, Pádraic replies. ‘We'll call it the start’.
Coincidentally, the end of Demian also takes place against the background of conflict. Sinclair finds himself on the battlefront in World War I, and he begins to see that the ghastly fighting and death all around him are actually external manifestations of hatred and unhappiness in the souls of men, which must be destroyed before there can be rebirth. The answer to the pain and conflict of living, Sinclair learns, lies within himself; he has achieved a glimpse of the way forward to inner peace, which will inspire him when obstacles and challenges inevitably arise.
For further exploration:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demian
https://theasc.com/articles/on-location-with-ryans-daughter
https://www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle/arid-30909179.html
https://www.rte.ie/archives/2019/0905/1074036-kerry-village-on-offer/
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-dangerous-myth-making-in-the-banshees-of-inisherin/
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/07916035231170359
Image on index page: Siobhán - a still from ‘The Banshees of Inisherin’
Colm’s house, with Pádraic outside - a still from ‘The Banshees of Inisherin’