Trick of the Light

“A rainbow slides over a harbor as Pádraic Súilleabháin, presumably our hero, walks into frame. He is good-looking and clean. Do we think he is a nice man? We do: he looks like Colin Farrell. He raises his million-dollar eyebrows. He waves to someone. He’s wearing dark woolens with just a splash of pink”

“It is, based on these clothes, somewhere in the past, maybe in the never; “idyllic” practically doesn’t cut it. The world appears halcyon in this instant, soundtracked by an Irish choir and every inch the image of an Irish Country fantasy”

“Perhaps our first indication that history and memory are being played fast and loose is that the Irish choir, labeled as “soft folk music” by the closed captioning, is not Irish at all. “Polegnala e Todora” is a traditional Bulgarian love song arranged by Filip Kutev, one of the co-founders of the State Ensemble for Folk Song and Dance”

“Its inclusion, however, reveals a strategic disjunction, a subtle feint. What does the cultural object look like, absent of historical context? What is the role of nationalism in cultural production? And what responsibility, if any, does the artist have to the world around them?”

“To make art about Ireland—to make art in Ireland—is to grapple with a second civil war (1969–98) not 40 years removed from the first (1922–23), itself an outgrowth of the Irish War of Independence (1919–21.)”

“All of this violence is neither glorious nor incidental but rather the only action left for people living under imperialism”

“This is the story of two men who ended their day as friends and woke up the next morning as strangers, or worse. This is the knot in the Irish idyll, McDonagh suggests. It is a land defined by these dark realizations and an almost fanatical, infinite capacity for men to inflict violence and melancholy on themselves and each other”

“a broken friendship has to stand in for the whole of Irish revolutionary struggle and the friends have to stand in for warmed-over concepts of niceness and depression, art and aspiration”

“The Banshees of Inisherin has been rightly criticized for its creator’s flimsy relationship with its setting and people, nowhere more righteously than in Mark O’Connell’s recent essay”

“Accusations of blarney have pursued McDonagh through his career—the Londoner (born to Irish parents who moved abroad in search of work) built his playwriting bona fides on the backs of two loose trilogies of plays set in Leenane and the Aran Islands, all coastal Irish locales”

“The plays establish McDonagh’s penchant for pinching; everything from dialect to physicality is fair game in the creator’s pursuit of his own particular truth”

“Rather than excuse McDonagh’s bad politics merely by saying he’s a man with bad politics (true as that may be), I would argue that an aesthetic principle that insists on aesthetic principles as not just plausible but ideal tools for engaging with a world ravaged by imperialism itself creates bad politics”

“McDonagh metaphorizes history: the struggle to create a genuinely free Irish State becomes “a breakup” (The Banshees of Inisherin); police violence against Black people in the United States becomes “reconciliation” (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri); traditions of paramilitary activity become “madness” (The Lieutenant of Inishmore)”

“metaphor—absent a desire to disrupt the power structures of language—becomes merely a different way to say the same thing”

“personal liberty is not political liberation, and an inability to conceive of the latter is often the result of an overabundance of the former”

“despair masquerading as profundity, an artist in search of a world to believe in, let alone a worldview”