What the Banshees of Inisherin is about

The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) written, directed and produced by Martin McDonagh, starring Brendan Gleeson (Colm), Colin Farrell (Pádraic), Kerry Condon (Siobhán) and Barry Keoghan (Dominic) has received many international accolades, including nine Academy Awards nominations. If there were such a thing as an ‘academy awards’ in Social, Cultural and Political theory The Banshees of Inisherin should get an Oscar for its representation and exposition of key concepts and ideas of liminality and schismogenesis, stasis and transgression relating to the social pathologies of contemporary civilization.

The Banshees of Inisherin is about the tension between ‘community’ and the ‘individual’. Community restricts individuality, but individualization risks alienation and isolation. Although The Banshees of Inisherin is set on an island in the west of Ireland in 1923, the ‘peasant community’ it represents could be anywhere and anytime – Minoan Crete, an island in the South Pacific, a mountain village in France (Berger 1985). This sociological and anthropological generalizability is signified by the masks from various cultures that adorn Colm's cottage, and by such tropes as the figures of the ‘crone’/Oracle and the ‘village idiot’/Pharmakon (Derrida 1981). The island and its people exemplify how a community is a ‘collective self-portrait’ whose members continuously re-create and repair by their practices of storying and talking (Berger & Luckmann 1967; O’Carroll 1987).

The Banshees of Inisherin is about relations of ‘reciprocal gift exchange’ (Mauss 1966) as the fundamental institution of community, and how disruptions of the grammar of gift relations unleashes confusion and conflict. The film begins when Pádraic calls to his friend's house to invite him to the pub, as per their usual rhythm. But Colm ignores Pádraic; he turns away from him: he refuses to participate in the gift relation, and things unravel from there into anti-structure and violence.

The Banshees of Inisherin is about ‘schismogenesis’ (Bateson 1958) and about how conflict escalates in complementary and symmetrical patterns towards a paroxysm of violent ‘sacrificial crisis’ (Girard 1979). There are many latent conflicts in the community: the Priest is a closeted homosexual; the Garda [police officer] is physically and sexually abusing his son. The Garda and the Priest, the key representatives of the ‘big Other’ – the Law, the ‘Name of the Father’ (Dufour 2008), the authority figures that structure the symbolic order and imaginative texture of the community, are secretly violating culturally deep-seated taboos. These latent conflicts become focused on the manifest conflict between Pádraic and Colm and are discharged cathartically through the ‘scapegoat mechanism’ (Girard 1979).

The Banshees of Inisherin is about ‘stasis’ (which means morbid and social-pathogenic, rigidly sedimented relations in which people are locked): the protagonists’ lives, like those of all of the villagers, are dull, monotonous routines. We see the villagers traipsing off to mass; in and out of the pub; eavesdropping and hungry for ‘news’ in an insular community, where there is nothing ‘new’, only repetitions of the same: ‘You have no news!’ the village gossip/gombeen shopkeeper/postmistress who opens Siobhán's mail declares. A butterfly flutters trapped helplessly against the inside of Pádraic and Siobhán's cottage windowpane. Colm desires to transcend stasis by Art, by his music; Pádraic's sister Siobhán desires to transcend stasis through the power of her intellect, by her access to the realm of Ideas. Thus, Colm and Siobhán break the stasis of island life by ‘transgressions’ of one form or another.

The Banshees of Inisherin is about ‘transgression’, and how transgression entails breaking limits and creating liminality (Szakolczai 2014). Pádraic, so says Colm, is ‘a limited man’. Pádraic is aware of his limits, and he is comfortable living within his limits; he is ‘a happy man’, and ‘one of the nice ones’ in the community's collective self-portrait. Pádraic's vision is limited: like a cyclops happy on his island cave Pádraic sees things mostly from his own point of view – his surname is Súilleabháin – súl amháin literally ‘one eyed’. Pádraic ‘has always been dull’ Siobhán says; he is a ‘gawm’. Colm links himself in a chain of significations with the name of Mozart, even though in reality he is just a fiddler in the local pub. Pádraic, Colm says, is holding him back from ‘bringing a new tune into the world’, but Colm's new tune is no more than a memetic repetition-variation of a worn traditional form.

The Banshees of Inisherin is about ‘hubris’. In making his Confession to the Priest Colm admits to ‘a little bit of pride’; and, perhaps aware of his own limits, and to atone for the sin of his hubris, Oedipus-like, Colm mutilates himself and makes a bloody sacrifice of his musical fingers. As though acknowledging that he's no Mozart by sacrificing his own fingers, purportedly because of Pádraic, Colm makes Pádraic the scapegoat for his own shortcomings.

The Banshees of Inisherin is about corruption: Pádraic, who at the beginning was ‘a good man’ – ‘innocent’, and basically ‘nice’, gradually becomes corrupted by envy and rivalry. Envious of a musician who has come to Inisherin to learn traditional fiddle tunes from Colm, Pádraic tells his rival that his father is dying on the mainland so that he will leave the island. Even Dominic, the village idiot, abused by his Garda father, thinks that this is a cruel trick, and that Pádraic ‘isn't nice anymore’.

The Banshees of Inisherin is about human–animal continuities and animal sacrifice. Animals are central to the community; they have proper names: ‘Jenny’ is Pádraic's pet donkey, she is often in the house with him, like Colm's dog, with whom he dances. So close are the protagonists to their donkey and dog, respectively, that the animals are not available for substitution in sacrifice. Colm kills Pádraic's donkey – albeit unintentionally – it chokes on his severed fingers, and this bad sacrifice escalates the schism sharply. Pádraic burns down Colm's house, with him inside it, but first, he rescues Colm's dog.

The Banshees of Inisherin is about ‘reticence’ [self-restraint] as the darker other side to reciprocity. Community, and the relationships of trust and goodwill that underpin it is sustained by reciprocal gift exchanges, and this keeps at bay the constant danger of tipping into some kind of conflict. But the other dimension of community is reticence – keep it to yourself, and internalise it, in the interests of wider peace. Reticence means restraint, reluctance, the normative principle that one must contain one's self, that one not express one's feelings. ‘Sush now Pádraic’. ‘Yes, I’d sush now Pádraic’ the brothers who run the village pub caution him. Reticence is the ‘niceness’ that Pádraic initially possessed, but being nice isn't necessarily being honest; reticence can be hypocritical – to be insufficiently critical. People in modern metropolitan contexts can afford to be frank and even blunt with one another because of the individuated nature of their society, but the West of Ireland islander does not have that luxury, so conflicts have to be lived with and not spoken about. The result is the violence of asceticism, where violence is turned in against oneself in the form of seething bitterness and resentment, expressing itself in all those things that West of Irelanders have traditionally used to do to cope with ascetic stress – drink heavily, become depressed, prefer company with one's animals (Brody 1973; Scheper-Hughes 1979).

The initial offence is Colm's refusal of reciprocity, but the other transgression committed in the film is Pádraic's refusal to be reticent. Pádraic's transgression of the normative principle of reticence is brought to the surface repeatedly. In keeping with the asceticism of communal cultures pent-up violence is not expressed outwards, but against oneself. Colm chops off his own fingers, not Padraic's. The pent up violence which threatens to become contagious, to overflow and engulf the whole community is contained by Colm's self-inflected bloody sacrifice. Community does not descend into violent schismogenesis; peace is maintained, community is intact, but at the cost of doing violence against oneself. This is the substance of the plot concerning Dominic. Everyone tacitly knows that Dominic is abused by his father, but no one speaks about it. Even though it is plain for all to see on his bruised face Dominic does not articulate the violence, but rather he internalises it, with the consequence of becoming the village idiot – not proud and articulate, but inward, evasive, with a muddled mind. By refusing to be reticent about Dominic Pádraic challenges the hierarchy of community that rests on reticence, exposing the brutal father/Garda. But rather than leading to a progressive outcome, this completely destroys Dominic's modicum of social status, who previously could fool himself in his dreamworld and jokey, benign, public role. Pádraic's transgression denies Dominic even this, and when Dominic tests and proves that he is in a dreamworld of compensations (the idea that Siobhán could love him) he is completely destroyed existentially, leading to his suicide. The Garda is exposed, but is as much a bully as ever probably, maybe becoming more of a drunk and more of a menace than before. Similarly, the priest, exposed for just a fleeting moment, remains trapped in his repression.

The Banshees of Inisherin is about ‘toxic community’. The gift relation of reciprocal exchange is a power of grace that can save community from descending into symmetrical schismogenesis (conflicts escalating ‘tit for tat’; ‘blood feuds’ etc). But, community is more often than not characterized by complementary schismogenesis (Bateson 1971). People get trapped in asymmetrical roles that mutually accentuate each other – such as gender roles and rigidly stratified hierarchal relations of power and status – the figures representing the Church, the Law (and although it is not explicitly represented in The Banshees of Inisherin, always in a peasant community is the looming presence of the local Big Man (Sahlins 1963) the ‘strong farmer’, the native Irish proprietor who has replaced the colonial landlord). The rigidity of stratified roles of power, party and property and the morbid stasis of latent conflicts masked by the normative principle of reticence makes for the miserable monotony of community life and entrapment in its roles and routines. This toxic community can be exposed through truthful speech – parrhesia (Foucault 2001), but in The Banshees of Inisherin parrhesia does no good. Speaking the truth, honest speech violates the reticence that maintained a modicum of tolerability of that way of life. Siobhán unlike the others does what is the most realistic option – she leaves, which is the ultimate story of peasant society everywhere – emigration to escape its narrow confines that cannot be internally reformed because of the normative imperative of reticence, a normative imperative that, while functional and necessary, can be pathological ‘toxic community’.

The Banshees of Inisherin is about stasis, transgression and liminality, and about how transgression may bring about liminality and put new action into motion. Stasis means ‘civil war’, a Civil War that is happening on the mainland, as a background context to the various forms of civil wars raging amidst the island's community. Colm's transgression of the grammar of the gift relation, and Pádraic's transgression of reticence by breaking the omerta masking the Garda's abuse of power create conditions of liminality, with its attendant dangers of schismogenesis and contagious mimetic escalations of conflict. Violence eventually abates after several sacrificial crises – Colm sacrifices music; Siobhán's self-exile sacrifices life on the island; Pádraic's donkey has been killed; Colm's house has been burnt; Dominic the innocent pharmakon has suicided. Life returns to ‘normal’, but a ‘new normal’ in which, as Pádraic and Colm acknowledge might be more hopeful than it appears. ‘Let's call it quits’ Colm proposes. ‘No, let's call it the start’, Pádraic retorts. ‘Some things can never be made right’ Pádraic says, ‘and I think that's a good thing!’ Through dialectical ‘struggle to the death’ (Hegel 1977), a struggle for recognition as ‘the moral grammar of social conflict’ (Honneth 1996), Pádraic has developed a new, stronger, more solid identity; and Colm from now on must relate to Pádraic no longer as though he were his inferior, a ‘gawm’, but as ‘an equal and opposite self-consciousness’. The Banshees of Inisherin is thus about liminality and dialectic, and transition from formless liminality to formative dialectic: formless liminality, empty repetitions, sterile silences, repressions, solitudes and isolations, spiralling vortices of mimetic rivalry with cathexes of sacrificial violence and scapegoating transitions into potentially generative and world-forming dialectics. But is this a too-happy ending for The Banshees of Inisherin? Is ‘the start’ that Padraig proposes a new start, or a starting all over again; is it a positive reanimation of a cycle of reciprocity, or is it the defeat for the hope of individuality for Colm? Colm challenged reciprocity and failed. Padraig challenged reticence and caused chaos. They are both sucked back into complementary schismogenesis. Only Siobhán represents hope by choosing the only way out of the bind of community – just leaving, placing a foot on the path to individualism, which has its own ambivalences of choice and dislocation (Beck, 2002).

The Banshees of Inisherin is about mourning and melancholia for an idealized lost loved object (Freud 1917). In modern society generally, we have a nostalgic and romantic tendency to idealise community. We yearn for what we imagine to have been beautiful, true and good, a form of life that we have lost and sacrificed for modernization and individuality. But for people who actually experience a real community, with all of the weight of its hierarchies and rigidities, its monotonous routines and its normative constraints their response is very often Siobhán's response, the response of generations of peasants everywhere, whether from Albania or Sardinia or the Steppes or Inisherin, which is – get out while you can; or else give in, don't speak up, practice reticence (Douglas, 1996) and avoid the consequence of not doing this – violent schismogenesis; but as a consequence, having to live with the entrapment of complementary schismogenesis. Ultimately, Siobhán is the heroic figure of The Banshees of Inisherin, the character who resonates most strongly with audiences everywhere.

The Banshees of Inisherin is about the End of the World, apocalypse and redemption. The island of Inisherin [which is ‘innis erin’ lit. the ‘island of Ireland’] has been long imagined as a bucolic idyll, a romantic fantasy island (illustrated in its representations as glowing, radiant and verdant in the film's wonderful cinematography) – but it is revealed to be an apocalypse of stone, a barren place in which we meet no young couples. Pádraic and Colm are bachelors who pet and dance with their animals; Siobhán is a spinster, frustrated, yearning to be ‘wild’; children are almost non-existent on Inisherin, and in so far as they exist at all they are extremely vulnerable: after violently striking Pádraic, the Garda ambiguously, threateningly, plucks the cheek of a child who has witnessed the scene; the Garda's son, Dominic, is an effeminated, infantilized man–child, who suicides when his threadbare dream eventually disintegrates. Children are abused and menaced by the authorities of empire, church and state – as they have been everywhere in the modern age of globalization, from Inisherin to Aboriginal Australia to the Amazon to the Arctic (Brody 2022); and as they are today everywhere abused and menaced by the reigning powers of the late-modern global Capitalocene: the time-space of future generations has already been colonized and pillaged; today's children are born into debt-bondage to their modern ancestors’ generation's death cycle of borrowing, expenditure and desolation: the planet, of which Inisherin is a microcosm, is fast becoming a barren rock.

The Banshees of Inisherin is about eschatology, teleology, eternal recurrence and also about redemption and beginning-again. The collective future death, the already-present extinction event that the crone/Oracle/shaman and the Banshees of Inisherin forewarn, may not inevitably come to pass. The end can be averted and the world can be redeemed if the deathly stasis of formless liminality can become a formative dialectics. The shakiness of this prospect is alluded to by the dramatic form of The Banshees of Inisherin, which is tragedy, and specifically Greek tragedy – which reached its high point in the context of civil war between Athens and Sparta. This dramatic form framed Plato's work in Apology, setting out the dialectic as the path to establishing order when the stasis of tradition has been broken, which defined Athenian society. Tragedy sought to understand the crisis and point a way out of it through articulating and representing its cause: hubris – the breaking of limits. Following the breaking of limits and the escalating sacrificial crisis, there is the quest to re-establish order. In their new recognition of one another as equal and opposite self-consciousnesses, Pádraic and Colm have the possibility of turning things around: standing alongside one another on the shore, looking out towards the sea and the horizon, their sullen silence is broken when Colm says to Pádraic: ‘Thanks for taking care of my dog’. ‘You’re welcome’ Pádraic replies. Here, we have the elementary utopian moment that turns around schismogenesis towards a new socio-genesis: redemption is promised by the eternal recurrence of reciprocal gift exchange: munus, which means ‘gift’ is the ur-foundation of com-mun-ity, and mundus – world (Ingold 2017): the possibility for the world beginning-again. However, this is not formative dialectics. It is not critical reason or communicative rationality. It reveals Inisherin as not Athens. Colm and Pádraic revert to reticence. The gravitational pull of community and its compulsory reciprocity has re-established limits. Colm and Pádraic revert to niceness. Experimentation with individualism comes to an end, as Colm's ability to metaphorically finger (manipulate, play and touch experimentally) – those freedoms of individuality have gone with his literal fingers. One handed, he is returned to the practical, reduced from the realm of Art and Ideas to manual work: carrying, holding and laying. Thus the film speaks to the eternal fragility of a critical cosmopolitan society; of the uncertainty of its emergence, and of the magnetic pull back to toxic community.

The Banshees of Inisherin is about the resonances of eternal historical ricorso (Vico 1999) in contemporary geopolitics and the social pathologies of contemporary civilization. The distant sounds of fighting on the mainland allude to this. It hints at a parallel between Colm being dragged back into a reconstituted conservative community and Irish society being dragged back from the critical ferment of international, modern and cosmopolitan nationalisms, socialisms, feminisms and conservatisms that enlivened the War of Independence with their various utopian horizons, into an authoritarian model of society resting on a nostalgic desire to reanimate pre-modern community in de Valera and McQuaid's Ireland. We can hear echoes again in the persistence of the Anglo-Irish ‘border problem’ from the War of Independence through to Brexit, and in the troubles of other similar bodies politic we see that The Banshees of Inisherin is as much about schismogenesis in Athens and Sparta and the liminal collapse of Classical Greece and in the eternal recurrence of the Civil War in contemporary America's spiralling into chaos and the culture wars as it is about the breakup of a bromance in the west of Ireland.