The Banshees of Inisherin: The Death Knell of Male Friendship

          I’m going to go out on a limb today and put out the idea that our society is kind of obsessed with romance.

Annie Hall (1977)

In popular storytelling, the topic has two whole genres to itself (romantic-comedy, romantic-drama), which gives it a huge slice of the media pie. Yet even in narratives where romance is not the focus, it still has this standing invitation to weave itself onto basically any kind of story. It’s almost more worth remarking upon when a story doesn’t feature some subplot with the main character getting the guy or the girl. And it’s also not just the romantic happy ending that we’re obsessed with. Some of the most cathartic stories of romance see the main couple breaking up or falling apart, and there’s something to be gained from seeing that playing out on screen as well.

But what’s interesting is that it is assumed that a person has a singular “one and only” romantic partner. By contrast, a functioning adult has the capacity to enjoy many platonic friendships at once. And yet, there’s little media reflecting on the labor of developing and maintaining those relationships. Neither are there any social scripts for how to process their failure or dissolution. Friendship has formed the backbone for many of our most celebrated stories, but these are almost entirely in the context of youth and childhood. It's as though we have resigned to see "friendship" as some artifact of days gone by, not an active component of adult living. Jennifer Senior wrote for the The Atlantic, 

“Practically everyone who studies friendship says this in some form or another: What makes friendship so fragile is also exactly what makes it so special. You have to continually opt in. That you choose it is what gives it its value.

“But as American life reconfigures itself, we may find ourselves rethinking whether our spouses and children are the only ones who deserve our binding commitments … 

“The unhappy truth of the matter is that it is normal for friendships to fade, even under the best of circumstances. The real aberration is keeping them."

I want to talk about one recent film that deals with this issue both sensitively and truthfully: Martin McDonagh’s 2022 Oscar-nominated film, The Banshees of Inisherin.

This was the movie I was most rooting for during the Oscars that year (chill out, I liked Everything Everywhere All At Once too), even though it walked away empty-handed. The film pulls off a lot that is hard to achieve in film and storytelling. All the performances were phenomenal. It walks that line between somber and hilarious. And it is actually one of those rare films that actually puts into words just how distressing it can be when a friendship just breaks apart. 

But it’s also not just the idea of friendship itself that the movie explores, but the unique space that male-friendship occupies. I think every review I read of the film singled out how the film specifically deconstructs the complexities of male friendship and how that made this film unique. And this begs the question … why? Why is the film such an outlier for unwrapping the intricacies of adult-male friendship?

Mad Men (2007)

    It's not as though we there aren't ample opportunities for men to interact onscreen. The tally stands at men taking 70% of all speaking roles in film and tv, but look at the kinds of interactions that make up these conversations, even the sorts of "relationships" that are cast as the most important that men can have. Would we describe these as warm, uplifting encounters where the bonds of kinship are forged?

    The prevalence of something like the Bechdel test attests to an urgency to create onscreen representations of honest female interaction, but there is comparatively little discussion on what good representation of male interaction looks like. That is the paradox of male friendship onscreen: because it is everywhere, it becomes invisible. Because it is the default, it never gets to be the specialty.

It’s also not as though audiences are unwilling to celebrate demonstrations of healthy male friendship when they do wander into the discourse–The Shawshank Redemption is IMDb’s highest rated film, and I have seen like twenty appreciation posts about “Sam & Frodo=Friendship Goals.” So why don’t we see more thoughtful depictions of male friendship?

The Banshees of Inisherin is one of those rare films that actually bothers to answer these questions, and I want to finish what it started and spell out the connections it makes–that men especially are not trained to see friendship as serving their larger masculine identity and that the consequences for this neglect wreck formidable damage to the heart and soul. 

The Banshees of Inisherin

At the center of the film are two pals living in Ireland in the early 1920s: the pragmatic Colm plagued by illusions of grandeur and the unassuming Padraic who’s content to just take care of the farm animals. The two have been best friends for years, which is why Padraic is thrown for a loop when Colm announces that he no longer has room for Padraic in his life and does not wish to continue in their friendship. Colm describes feeling an increased sense of urgency to create something lasting, and he says that he’s going to use the time he would have spent entertaining Padraic to compose a new song. This completely confounds Padraic, who just can’t wrap his mind around why his best friend doesn’t want to have anything to do with him anymore.

    When Padraic proceeds to ignore these new boundaries, Colm presents an ultimatum: anytime Padraic bothers him from then on, he is going to take out a pair of old shears and cut off one of his own fingers, saying he will do this however many times he needs until Padraic learns to stay away from him. There are some back and forth episodes between them, and against all logic or reason, Colm not only makes good on his promise, but then proceeds to throw his severed fingers at Padraic’s door.

The townsfolk, including Padraic’s sister, Siobhan, and the local fool, Dominic, watch the conflict unfold with unease as the two former friends are drawn into increasingly bizarre confrontations. The conflict escalates when Padraic’s favorite Donkey, Jenny, becomes a casualty in this war when she accidentally chokes on one of Colm’s dismembered fingers. In retaliation, Padraic confronts Colm, saying he is going to burn down his house the next day and he won’t be checking to see whether Colm is still in it when he does. Padraic follows through on this promise, but not before retrieving Colm’s dog, sparing him from the violence Colm unwittingly afflicted on Jenny. 

The next morning, Colm sincerely apologizes for having inadvertently killed Jenny, and he thanks Padraic for watching out for his dog. Padraic replies, his voice cracking ever so slightly, “Anytime.” They then part ways, each returning to his own fortress of self-inflicted solitude.

         Director Martin McDonagh had previously worked with Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson on his 2008 film In Bruges (and that movie is also fantastic) and had long teased the idea of rounding up the old gang to work on another project. McDonagh has also spoken several times about how the COVID-19 lockdown brought the onset of an escalating sense of desperation to achieve and accomplish. Blending that desperation with the isolation of lockdown was interesting to him, and it seemed as good a chance as any to call up Farrel and Gleeson for another project. In the words of Farrell,

“… the whole script, for me, was about love, was about respect, was about regard, and how those things get lost under the tumult of words unspoken, dreams unfulfilled, and losses that haven’t been grieved properly.”

         The time period during which the film takes place is also relevant. It’s only alluded to in the film itself, but the backdrop of this conflict between two friends is a civil war within Ireland, a conflict over the participation of British rule. Writer Poulami Nanda described this as a time where,

“... men, who were previously brothers and friends, were fighting among themselves, resulting in death. McDonagh rarely depicts the Civil War in relation to Inisherin, but two lonesome locals, Padraic and Colm, emerge as significant representations of war in his film.

“Padraic and Colm were inseparable souls, and no one in the village had ever seen them apart. However, a sudden shift makes them distant from one another. Colm had no justification for chopping off his finger, but he wanted to prove his supremacy to Padraic, and Padraic couldn’t have gone to him to refute him either. But his loneliness began to consume him, so the two of them unwillingly got involved in this craziest game to appease their stubbornness and masculine egos. It was shocking to watch Colm commit horrible acts of self-mutilation, just as it was a surprise to see a different version of Padraic than the one we’ve known from the beginning of the story arrive to set Colm’s house on fire.  A conflict between them started out as a trivial game and ended up being inhuman, representing the horrible essence of the war and how it has the potential to transform a tranquil world into hell.”

The movie puts itself in an unusual position by trying to capture a very specific part of the human experience, one that is almost entirely detached from logic or reason. It’s perhaps because of this that the elements at work in “Banshees” feel a little eclectic and even bizarre. This is a film about the loss of friendship, but by the end, we’ve seen one man completely prune his hand of its extremities. But the film actually manages to have it both ways: capturing the experience of being in an emotional tailspin while also managing to say something coherent. Much in the same way that the film’s setting doesn’t feel incidental, all the elements at work build toward something.

But first, let's give ourselves a framework and ask ...

Why Can’t Men Make Friends?

        In many ways the origin of our social obsession with the heterosexual union as the ultimate end goal runs deeper than cultural or even biological imperatives.

Ikiru (1952)

    There are marxist schools of thought that highlight how the capitalist machine wants people to do two things: give all their labor to the machine, and make lots of babies to replace them in the workfield. And so there are two ways for participants in this game to self-actualize: be good at your job, and raise more workers. While society has historically granted men more autonomy than women, this also leaves men more prone to make all decisions based on whether they will advance their station in life or prove their worth to the machine.

    This is also part of why men are generally more reticent than women to enter committed relationships, but the machine has a way around this too. After all, the family is also fertile ground for immortality and legacy, and so popular storytelling feels an incentive to center so many stories on the importance of men finding a happy romance/work balance. Where does that leave friendships with other men?

    Men are allowed to, even expected to, have a baseline camaraderie with other men, other combatants in the game of capitalism with whom they can sharpen their knives, but relationships that don’t directly feed into either the family or work are seen as a distraction from these higher imperatives. The machine has no use for such luxuries, and so neither do men. Professor Michael Kimmel, noted in his book, Manhood in America: A Cultural History,

Modern Times (1936)

“Although industrialization pushed more men together in the workplace, it also increased the distance they each felt from one another. Gone were the casual intimacies of boyhood. Gone too was a view that other men—coworkers and friends—could act as moral constraints on excessive behavior. Instead, other men were potential economic rivals.”

(Yes, I also featured this quote in my essay on Lamb, but it works here too!)

But culture at large has trained men not just in where they are allowed to spend their efforts, but in what qualities and activities they are allowed to engage in. Men in the room, ask yourself the last time you had a conversation with another dude that was more emotionally revealing than how you felt about the economy or The Super Bowl. When was the first time you tried, and what were the reactions of the other men around you? Jennifer Senior further wrote, 

Parks and Recreation (2009)

“When I consider the people I know with the greatest talent for friendship, I realize that they do just this. They make contact a priority. They jump in their cars. They appear at regular intervals in my inbox. One told me she clicks open her address book every now and then just to check which friends she hasn’t seen in a while—and then immediately makes a date to get together.”

These are not things men are expected to do with other men. If two men are shown to have more than a casual interest in each other’s wellbeing, it seems somehow aberrant, and popular culture is generally quick to find a label for it, usually that the feelings between these two men are romantic which is of course makes them less manly which ... is like a rabbit hole within a rabbit hole inside another rabbit hole, and we’ll just save that conversation for another day … 

Mind you, pop culture has given us many iconic male friendships, but there are patterns to such presentations: these friendships are typically played for laughs almost exclusively. In these pairings, one of these characters may be made to appear naïve or somehow otherwise underqualifying in the way of manlihood, and this character is almost treated more like a pet that the manlier of the two is consenting to take care of (think Joey and Chandler, or Peralta and Boyle).

    You see this explored directly in something like The Odd Couple, a 1968 comedy with Jack Lemmon and Walter Mattheau centered on the ironic arrangement of two adult male friends sharing an apartment after their wives divorce them. In this pairing, Lemmon plays the emotionally-wrecked manchild that Mattheau’s character is saddled with, and the center of the humor hangs on a sort of irony in seeing these two men enter into an arrangement that feels almost like a marriage. Indeed, their repartee rivals many onscreen couples of the rom-com realm. But the film culminates with the dissolution of this arrangement with Lemmon’s character eventually moving out without either character really getting to articulate how, even amidst the chaos, they were ultimately better for having been so involved in each other’s lives. 

You also have films like Stand By Me which spotlight how the friendships of boyhood are so formative in the lives of men long after they have disappeared. Much of the film’s emotional punch comes from the shared understanding that the deep friendships of childhood are not really compatible with the realities of adult living once boys have to start to prove their mettle in the game of adulthood, that this sense of kinship is a lost relic for men. As grown-up Gordie concludes, “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?” 

Saving Private Ryan (1998)

         There are certain outlets in the media where male friendship is allowed to be put in the center. War movies, for example, often center on the brotherhood that naturally grows from men laying down their lives to protect one another. That is a very real display of companionship. But these emerge out of very specific circumstances that are not translatable to the real conditions by which lasting friendships are made. 

You see this phenomenon deconstructed in something like It’s Always Fair Weather, a lesser-known Gene Kelly musical following three brothers in arms who are determined to keep the flame of their friendship alive, vowing to meet up ten years later. Camaraderie comes naturally to them while they’re charging the battlefield together, but in the intervening decade, these three men all become different people as they are forced to adapt into the working economy, such that when they do finally meet up again, they find each other’s company rather odious.

    On the surface, it reads like they’ve all just outgrown one another, but this isn’t played like them progressing into their most natural selves. They each return home from the war with their own dreams and ambitions, but these are all put away once they have to “get serious” about making a living. We see how they have each become unlikeable in their own way as they have been forced to stifle themselves in order to keep their head up in the career game. And so when these three are put in the same room again, there’s none of that natural companionship, only a hollow facsimile of the people they once knew, and it’s that inauthenticity that they each find so repellant.

You see all these factors influence the division between Colm and Padraic. Colm feels like he is failing at his most basic function as a man by not achieving some vague notion of grandeur and achievement, and culture has conditioned him to see Padraic as a distraction from this goal. Moreover, Colm and Padraic are both without the tools to comprehend and articulate their own dissatisfaction, tools which might have helped save their friendship. There could have well been ways for them to salvage the relationship, or at the very least transition peaceably into this new stage of life.

No one needed to lose any fingers.

 

The Best of Friends

Colm and Padraic have a lot in common with onscreen depictions of male friendship where one is the serious-minded friend, and the other is a sort of benevolent, hapless lackey. And you also see the film exposing how this model doesn’t really agree with how men approach friendships in real life.

    The core of Padraic’s character is that he cares for neither glory nor achievement. In a lot of ways, Padraic at the start of the film is an embodiment of a very healthy portrait of masculinity. He is approachable, in touch with his emotions, and he really cares about his animals. This makes him pleasant company, but it does also make him a failure at what society says makes a man.

In this way, Padraic has a lot in common with characters like Christian from Moulin Rouge! or Pat from Silver Linings Playbook. As with those two characters, the question on the mind of everyone who knows Padraic seems to be "is this guy ... okay?" To the outside observer, it makes sense that a man who cares little for glory or achievement should be somewhat dim or slow. Moreover, it makes him a distraction for those who do value glory and achievement. Colm instigates this separation because he wants to achieve that same kind of acclaim promised for the greatest of us, and he sees time spent with Padraic as a drain on his time and resources.

    Colm's whole arrangement is also tinted with a tragic irony. He might just finish his song, but that doesn’t mean anyone will be playing it a century from now or remember his name. Siobhan suggests as much when she calls out Colm for incorrectly identifying which century Mozart is from. Colm is turning away his best friend chasing a dream that he will likely never realize.

During this time, Colm also confides in his priest that he is experiencing bouts of depression. We presume that 1.) this is not something he has told Padraic, and 2.) Colm’s division with Padraic is partially a result of and possibly a response to his depression, and pushing Padraic away doesn’t seem to be giving him what he wants, which further endows this whole mess with even more irony. Now, clinical depression is obviously a multifaceted issue, and combatting it is never as straightforward as just having friends, but multiple studies have linked strong communal bonds with lower rates of depressive symptoms. Nicholas Kristof writes for The New York Times,

The Big Lebowski (1998)

"The Great Depression was economically devastating, and yet mortality then didn’t rise but actually fell. Why didn’t we have more deaths of despair in the 1930s? I think in part because in the 1930s there were community institutions — churches, men’s clubs, women’s associations, bridge clubs, bowling leagues, extended families — that buffered the pain and humiliation of unemployment and economic distress, and in some cases these groups actually stepped up and became more active during times of distress.

"Those community institutions have frayed. Now we’re on our own, and perhaps that’s why so many are also dying alone."

         This theme echoes in how other characters wrestle with their own sense of displacement. You have the hapless Dominic, who acts like a sort of shadow to Padraic. The two share many scenes together, and they also exhibit many of the same qualities and face many of the same disadvantages. You get the idea that Dominic hangs out with Padraic not just because he enjoys Padraic’s company, but he is also in some ways dependent on the friendship between Padraic and Colm. Once that security blanket is gone, and as the casualties of the feud start to mount, Dominic starts to have his own offscreen spiral that has consequences for him. The last thing we see Dominic do is ask Padraic’s sister, the self-assured Siobhan, if she would ever be interested in him romantically, and she decidedly but gently turns him down.

  We see that Siobhan has genuine love for her brother, even if she doesn’t always understand him. Siobhan also ends up making some bids of freedom of her own by leaving Inisherin, but it’s not clear whether her endeavor will bring her what she wants. Perhaps she gets exactly what she’s looking for, something she never could have found on Inisherin with her fool of a brother. Perhaps her efforts are no more fruitful than Colm’s.

    Still, Siobhan probably has the best chance of any of the main players at finding lasting happiness, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that she is not stuck to this game of chicken that snares the men in the film. That’s not to say that she does not face specific opposition as a woman living in the early 1900s or that the film does not address this—part of what motivates her to leave Inisherin is the way her island derogates her as an opinionated woman daring to speak out against the contradictions in her community—but she does not burden herself with the unnecessary pride that compels Padraic and Colm to dig their heels into sinking ground. Padraic asks her to come home in his final letter, but it is unlikely she will ever return to Inisherin, and Padraic will be subjected to his ever deepening isolation as his life goes on.

 

Giving Padraic The Finger

    Even if you watched the trailer and knew that Colm extends this threat, the first time you see Brendan Gleeson’s bloody pointer in the weeds kinda catches you off guard. This isn’t necessarily because the image itself is gratuitous (we never see Colm actually chopping off the digits) but because it is just a bizarre act of self-mutilation. You don’t have one of your main characters chop off all his fingers unless he has a very good reason to. So … what is the reason?

Well, I think that the absurdity is a part of it. It portends a lack of coherency at work within the characters and the decisions they’re making. There’s such a wild disconnect between the issues they’re facing and how they’re choosing to respond to them. Colm is afflicting permanent injury onto his own body to try to punish his friend. The closest approximation I can find to a rationale with this is that Colm is using this behavior to illustrate to Padraic what his continued efforts are doing to him, or at least what he thinks he is doing to him. This is Colm’s way of telling Padraic that being his friend is literally taking away his ability to do the thing he wants.

Colm goes through with his self-mutilation twice in the film, The first instance follows Padraic’s drunken rant in the bar where he calls out Colm’s feud for its innate egotism, which sees him cut off his pointer finger. The second instance follows a moment of near reconciliation after Padraic congratulates Colm on finally finishing his song, and Colm can almost remember what it was like to enjoy the company of a man who could talk for two hours about his donkey’s feces. This episode sees Colm cleaning off his entire hand. Each instance in which Colm severs one of his fingers coincides with Padraic not just making contact, but actually breaking down his defenses: Colm cuts off a finger each time he considers being friends with him again. We see how pushing away Padraic has been taking away pieces of Colm, both literally and figuratively. 

    There’s one scene in particular where Colm sees Padraic being beaten by Dominic’s abusive father after Padraic calls him out for hurting his son. Colm intervenes and stops him from hurting Padraic, and Colm brings him up to his carriage and wordlessly starts to bring him home. Colm is indulging in an act of tenderness for his friend even after putting up his walls. For Padraic this becomes too much, and he starts crying next to him, prompting Colm to exit the carriage and let Padraic drive himself home. Colm knows that with enough pressure, he might lose his resolve and call the whole thing off, and that's not a chance he is willing to take.

The possibility of a reconciliation is constantly teased between Colm and Padraic. You get the feeling that they are both forcing themselves into a dynamic that does not reflect or match their feelings for one another. Again, Colm is putting up this division in pursuit of some vague external motivation that he will likely never attain. They have not stopped caring for the other, but they have bought into prepositions that they will somehow be better served in this new scenario in which they are deliberately denying themselves each other’s company, and this inevitably has consequences.

Banshees

McDonagh has admitted that when writing this movie, he settled on the title almost incidentally because he just liked the double “sh” sound. But the film certainly builds itself around the creature at the title’s center.

Banshees appeared in Celtic mythology as women (usually old women) whose haunting cries in the night predicted the death of a family member. In the film proper, Colm supposes that if there are real life banshees in Inisherin, they likely don’t instigate the death themselves. Rather, they sit back and watch, amused. Indeed, at least some of the deaths we see are not actually instigated by any magical machinations, but by the players themselves.

    The film uses Mrs. McKormick, a village elder, as a sort insert for the banshee figure. Her presence in the lives of the characters, and the unwelcome she finds, certainly mirror the way mythological banshees were feared and dreaded. At the start, this is played as a joke, like she’s just this spiteful old lady that nobody wants to have over for tea, but midway through, she takes on a more ominous affect, prophesying that death will soon come to Inisherin.

And so the question hangs in the air of for whom the banshee tolls, and what on earth it has to do with the dissolution of this friendship. We spend most of the film thinking that it’s going to be Colm or Padraic who dies, maybe even that one is going to kill the other. That would, after all, be the masculine way to resolve this issue. But the film’s answer to this is a lot more intricate than audiences are trained to expect.

    The literal deaths accounted for include Padraic’s donkey, Jenny, as well as Dominic, who drowns in the river. Padraic supposes he slipped in, but the suggestion of suicide also hangs in the air. Like Padraic, Dominic was an emblem of soft masculinity in a world where that is not privileged. But where Padraic is just kind of overlooked, Dominic is actively punished, especially by his abusive father. We understand that Padraic was one of Dominic's few safe spaces, and as that started to erode away, Dominic comes to the conclusion that there is no place for him, and so he makes a dire choice. Even the deaths in this story are not wrought by carnage or rage, but of neglect and oversight. They happen offscreen and afflict the background players you took for granted, like the village idiot who never could find a place where he felt wanted.

But there is also, of course, a symbolic death of Padraic The Nice. We see his turn telegraphed about midway through when Padraic jealously sabotages a growing friendship between Colm and an aspiring musician. But this is mostly played for laughs. The real turning point is, of course, him burning down Colm’s house in retaliation for killing the one thing in Padraic’s life that never failed to reciprocate his kindness. 

You could say that Padraic does escape some darker fate. It is briefly teased that Padraic might retaliate against Colm for killing his donkey by killing Colm’s dog, but that possibility doesn’t dangle for too long. He doesn’t go completely over to the dark side, he just focuses it all on the one person he holds responsible for Jenny’s death. You see in Padraic a microcosm of what happens gradually to a society when this sense of kinship is lost, when an entire world is equally apt to sever one’s fingers as it is to sever one’s friends.

    But the spiritual death of Padraic does not feel like the fulfillment of some natural law—not any more than Colm cutting off his fingers feels like a logical reaction to Padraic’s persistence. It happened because these two friends were unwilling to honestly relate to one another and their own feelings of despair, and the consequences will be lasting. By the end of the story, Colm has lost the thing he craved most—which he never found—while Padraic has lost the thing about him that was most special—which no one ever valued. The tragedy isn’t so much that they have destroyed their friendship with one another—their sense of fondness for the other will likely endure–but it’s a friendship they will never get to enjoy the fruits of.

Calling it Quits

Longtime readers know I’m the kind of critic who values happy endings, that I’m the kind of critic who can’t stop talking about The Sound of Music and argues that film discourse is wrong! and The Graduate actually does end optimistically! Me being the idealist that I am, I generally try to search for the silver lining, the hint that Padraic and Colm will ever rekindle their friendship.

  But the film illustrates how the divides that keep male friendship apart are strong, and by the film's end, they have both dug themselves in pretty deep. I think that, short of divine intervention, the best thing we could hope for Padraic and Colm is a sort of deathbed repentance. It does feel like the only thing that could possibly bring them to their senses would be to confront the futility of their self-imposed division in the face of their own mortality, and even then, it’s entirely up to them to make that jump.

         Admittedly, a part of me also does feel relieved that the friendship doesn't get resolved in this movie, that Colm doesn’t get to fall back on Padraic’s good nature in the end and have his thoughtlessness just erased. It shows that there are consequences to the neglect of vulnerable friendship and the people who depend on them. But I also don't think that it's as simple the sober ending being stronger just because it's more "realistic." 

    Film is a reflection of experiences--the author's and the consumers.' It is not a prophecy of how things will always be. It is not a banshee declaring that tragedy will come to all men who try to pursue meaningful friendship into adulthood. We can use this reflection to find patterns in the systems and choose to abandon the script we are given and walk a higher path. If something about the way these systems play out feels odd--like the way men can't spontaneously text one another, or the way some men will literally chop off their own fingers if you try to be their friend--it is in our reach to instigate change.

    In short, save everyone the heartache, and the fingers, and just text your friends once in a while.

        --The Professor