In her Atlantic review of the new Colin Farrell/Brendan Gleason movie The Banshees of Inisherin, Shirley Li says the film is about more than an imploding friendship. “Set in 1923 on a fictional island off the coast of Ireland, [director-screenwriter Martin McDonagh’s] latest film is at once a fable about masculinity, a portrait of small-town life, and a treatise on the cruelty of isolation.” But what we really have is simply the latest black pearl to be added to the string of brooding and often bloody jewels the playwright and filmmaker has blessed us with.
Since his first play, The Beauty Queen of Leenane in 1996, McDonagh has been nothing if not the patron saint of low anthropology. He’s never been a full-blown radical theologian of the cross — though many of his characters have religious questions and face moral quandaries — but he’s consistently shown a reluctance or even a revulsion toward human projects of glory. To enter into the world of a Martin McDonagh play or movie is to encounter the truth, the absurdity, and the horror of what lies at the core of fallen human nature.
McDonagh’s directorial debut, the Oscar-winning short film Six Shooter is a perfect entry point to his finely balanced blend of comedy and violent tragedy. Both on stage and on screen, distinct characters, who are never part of the elites, are thrown together in a distinct place that demands the action we see. In his Irish plays, for instance, down-on-their-luck working class people navigate family conflict, the Irish Troubles, or Hollywood using their town as a location, all in the hovels, pubs, and streets of western islands. Inevitably, the core conflict is treated with organic humor and devolves into an outburst of violence.
Six Shooter puts Brendan Gleeson’s new widower Donnelly in a train seat on his way home after his wife’s death in a hospital. The attending physician couldn’t spend time with him because he’s dealing with two cot deaths and a woman whose son “shot the head off her.” In his grief Donnelly is confused and asks if she’s dead, to which the doctor repeats that her head was gone. It’s a standard McDonagh interchange of mordant humor and missed connections.
Across from Donnelly on the train sits the “Kid,” Rúaidrhi Conroy’s filthy-tongued and acid-hearted young man. The Kid is a non-stop talker, an attention-deficit (“Ah, sheep!”) fabulist who wields f- and c-bombs, and a narcissistic equal opportunity offender of tender sensibilities. The grief-laden Donnelly is the Kid’s chosen audience, and his fellow passengers — a couple whose baby was one of those cot deaths — is the target for his most acerbic barbs. By the end of the movie he’ll be the catalyst for a suicide, an attempted suicide, a police shoot-out, and a dead rabbit.
Like most descriptions of a McDonagh plot, it all sounds rather morbid, offensive, and bloody. And it is. But those elements are always dealt with in such a humane manner and utterly without condescension. McDonagh tempers the bursts of violence and horror with humor that never resorts to jokiness but instead arises from character. In Six Shooter, the Kid regales Donnelly with a childhood memory of a local fair where a bloated cow is pierced to release the gas, which in turn is ignited and causes a massive bovine explosion.
The exploding cow gag, though, is in service of a greater point: Life consists only of the unexpected. Planning and strategy are for fools, because things will always go haywire. We will be sideswiped by independent actors and rogue elements. Donnelly only wants to drink his tea on the train and get home to suss out what to do about his twin problems of caring for his late wife’s pet rabbit and his own now-vanished faith. Instead he gets a volatile Kid wielding his pistols. Par for the McDonagh course.
Whether in this short film or his subsequent major works In Bruges, Six Psychopaths, and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, McDonagh’s view of human nature is consistently in the cellar. People are always captive to their histories and their urges. Self-redemption is unlikely if not impossible. We will always act counter to our own best interests.
For years I’ve had a sticker tucked into the corner of the mirror in my office. It’s a black oval with two words printed in white: low anthropology. It’s evidence that I was there before Dave Zahl made it cool (though I’m more prone to use Luther’s language of the theology of the cross as my lodestar). In his latest book, Zahl contends that our culture’s assumption of a high anthropology, with its attendant push toward a sunny life of possibility and progress, is a fiction.
A high anthropology and a theology of glory both hinge on autonomous actors using their so-called free will to achieve their aims. But in McDonagh’s oeuvre our aims are thwarted, and we are our own undoing. In In Bruges, for instance, two British mob soldiers on the lam from a botched hit in Belgium can’t enjoy the medieval history or Gothic beauty of the town. They’re so caught up in their twisted motives and nefarious tasks that Bruges becomes a purgatory for managing their sins. It parallels Donnelly on the Six Shooter train, with an ending involving a blinded drug dealer, a mob soldier gone splat in the marketplace, a movie actor killed in crossfire, and a mob boss executing his own self-judgment.
McDonagh, bleak as he can be, always brings us up against calamity. He pushes us to the hard limits of human agency. As we watch, Paul’s words come to mind. “Who will rescue me from this body of death?” McDonagh does on screen what God does with the law in scripture and in our lives. He demands we recognize our powerlessness. And we can’t help but cry out of the depths with the psalmist.
In a way, our times call for the McDonagh-fication of preaching. So many pulpiteers deliver a message of positivity built on the North American desire for personal progress and dream of autonomy. We get reflections and recommendations for better living. Sometimes they include a dose of piety and religious activity. McDonagh in his wisdom never holds out hope for an altar call or actual freely chosen well-being. His characters are Pauline in their inability to do what is right and meet. They are the people preachers must assume are sitting in their pews.
The students in my classroom have little time for the illusions of institutionalized preachers. And their generation’s declining interest in the church is proof. They have devices in their hands that both show them the chaos of the world and also make unfillable demands for a curated life. They need McDonagh’s honesty from the church’s public proclaimers: “You can’t fix yourself. But the one who can has taken you on as his eternal cause.”
At the end of any Martin McDonagh play or film, the audience is left on the verge. We come to the limit of action, possibility, and self-regard, and we’re ripe for the picking. When we’ve not only slipped from the end of our rope but also are being whipped by its frayed end, the God who kills and makes alive knows what comes next. The only thing is for a preacher to be sent in with the weapon the pale rider wields in Revelation. A word must be spoken to the bleak and bloodied.
It’s what we need to be ready for as we sit in a sumptuous reclining movie theater seat, click on the bun warmer, and reach into the popcorn bucket as The Banshees of Inisherin begins. We’ll see true human nature. We’ll be shed of our illusions. And we’ll be made fit for a word about God’s nature and Jesus’ will for the foolish, insipid, uncontrolled, and broken people at our core.
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Every once in a while I am ‘left on the verge.’ They are times of sanity.
This is SO good. Thank you.!