Banshees of Inisherin

Frank Falisi writes about Martin McDonagh's treatment of art and politics in “The Banshees of Inisherin” and his other works....

But personal liberty is not political liberation, and an inability to conceive of the latter is often the result of an overabundance of the former. And metaphor—absent a desire to disrupt the power structures of language—becomes merely a different way to say the same thing. Colm’s depression serves a similar purpose, as do Michal’s abuse and subsequent “slowness” in The Pillowman and Red Welby’s (to say nothing of Jason Dixon’s) in Three Billboards. It’s a shame because the film has potential: not unlike the story of the stolen Vermeers, The Banshees of Inisherin is narratively concerned with the leveraging of artistic merit against personal liberty, and the fallout of that negotiation. In 1923, the Irish Civil War was in its final months, a war that sparked as a result of the signing of the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty. Is the filmic image of Colm’s palm ending only in stubs meant to conjure the hands of IRA Volunteers, who often suffered gruesome dismemberments in the homemaking of explosives? The crucial flaw of The Banshees of Inisherin isn’t that it suggests a figurative representation of 1923’s historical fracture as a split between best friends. It is the way we might struggle and the thing we struggle for. The framing matters, as does the language: organizer and historian David Swanson has proposed calling this period “the Second Irish Civil War” instead of “the Troubles,” a term that feels inept (if not outright patronizing) towards the Irish effort to dismantle the British colonial apparatus in their own land. [suggests in a recent interview](https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/tnyradiohour/segments/director-martin-mcdonagh)with the writer-director. At the horizon line is a jagged limb of land that extends out beyond our field of vision. The ransom for the artwork is not money but a demand: Dolours and Marian Price, two Provisional Irish Republican Army members convicted in the 1973 Old Bailey car bombings, are to be transferred from London’s Brixton Prison to a Northern Irish prison.