Hearing the Banshees of Inisherin

Discerning what "Banshees of Inisherin" is all about is the central mystery of this wonderful film and the answer remains unsolved until the very end.

Padraic, the protagonist, but not the central character, goes to collect his best and longest friend, Colm, who for the first time simply ignores Padraic's rapping at the window and Padraic, confused, and disturbed trudges off to the pub, where he had thought he would be drinking dark beer with his friend and he commiserates with the barkeep, who asks the obvious question, "Are ye row-ing?" That is are you having another fight, which, apparently is not unheard of between the two friends.

No, that is not what is brewing, as Colm finally arrives at the pub and announces that he no longer likes Padraic, and no longer wishes to be friends with him, without explanation. Of course, Padraic asks what has caused this rift and Colm replies he has simply concluded Padraic is a waste of time: Padraic's conversation is filled with the trivia of daily life, down to what he finds in the scat of his donkey, which, after lo these many years, Colm now finds agonizingly banal and "dull." His friend has become a bore, or, more exactly always has been, and Colm realizes he has only limited time left on earth and he doesn't want to waste it on the mundane and the boring. 

He might be a bored housewife on the way out the door after 20 years of an unfulfilling marriage.

Colm wants to create music, like Mozart's, which will last through the ages, after him. Colm is looking for the transcendent and the immortal and Padriac celebrates the joy of every day life and compatible friendship, of being "nice."

All this is happening while the alternative to brotherly love and tolerance is echoing in the distance, across the water, as the Irish Civil War is burning itself out, and its explosions punctuate the calm of Inisherin erratically. 

The town policeman tells Colm he is looking forward to a free lunch he'll earn by attending an execution but he can't recall who is being executed or why--all the policeman cares about is the lunch. He is the ultimate in "not nice."

Padraic's sister, Siobhan, confronts Colm with the very obvious, "But Padraic has always been dull," so why reject him now for what he is and has always been?

Colm has no answer for this other than to say that dull is not enough. Fifty years from now, nobody will remember Padraic for being nice; nor will anyone remember Siobhan fifty years from now. But people will remember Mozart hundreds of years from now, a 17th century musician, Colm says, remembered, not for being nice, but for being great.

Siobhan notes that Colm has not even placed Mozart in the proper century, suggesting that Colm has no real grasp of what real greatness is.

August Macke

It is this moment which challenges Padraic's very essence. Why should being "nice" not be enough, not be celebrated?  He invests that word with so much more than "nice:" Nice envelops the quality of kindness but it also extends to ordinary things, which make life rich. Nice is the every day joy of living, the stuff which people who have been told they have only a short time to live, so relish. The joy of every day things. Obama once observed that as President, he missed this stuff the most--just going down the block and getting coffee, just washing dishes. 

(To which, famously, Obama's  wife interjected: "And when have you ever washed the dishes?" in a scene which could have fit seamlessly into Banshees.)

Padraic unleashes a volley which stuns everyone: It's not important his sister will not be remembered by others in 50 years; what is important is that he thinks Siobhan is nice right now, which, of course, totally endears him to Siobhan, and which makes her decision to leave her brother even more difficult. Padraic continues that Colm can have his friend, the policeman, Peadar, for whom a free lunch is more important than any sort of justice. And, for good measure, Padraic throws in the true stunner: Peadar is well know to be sexually abusing his son, both sexually and physically.

In fact, the character of Peadar the policeman is pivotal in revealing a decent side of Colm: It is after the policeman blindsides Padraic, striking him to the ground, that Colm gathers up his former friend and sets him on his cart back home, and later Colm lays out the nasty cop with a blow after Peadar threatens Padraic. 

But Colm is not the man we can actually sympathize with, even though it is his struggle which drives most of the movie. He could have explained himself more kindly to Padraic, and his insistence on cutting off his own fingers places Padraic in an agonizing position. 

In the end, Padraic is driven to a classic Greek tragedy place--he has got to say, like Antigone, "No"; he has got to stop being nice and start asserting himself, which he does with fire and which, in the end, he embraces. 

Colm has insisted he stop being so nice, and in fact the very first time Padraic stops being nice, however briefly, is the first time Colm finds him interesting.

In the end, it is Colm who suffers the greatest abuse, but it is a suffering he has invited and in some way deserves. Padraic has had to change; his suffering has made him less nice and more interesting. His path down that road to nastiness is step by step, first lying to an innocent musician which he rationalizes as a lie which will be discovered and will be harmless in the end. But, step by step, he moves away from a man who prattles on about his donkey's scat to a man who burns down the edifice of a lost friendship.

Getting Lady Chatterley Right, At Long Last

 

Adapting any novel for a feature length film is always a kayak run down class V rapids, but when your novel is D.H. Lawrence's "Lady Chatterley's Lover," the cauldron is especially daunting.

Any print to film challenge has multiple hurdles to leap:

1/ Every reader has already seen the character's faces, bodies and habitus in his or her own mind's eye, so the casting is always treacherous, finding just the right look, voice, carriage for each character. 

I don't know who did the casting for Netflix's Lady Chatterley, but whoever it was got each character just right, with the possible exception of Clifford, who I had pictured as a young Michael Redgrave type, or possibly a young Christopher Plummer, with fine features, high cheekbones and thin lips. 

But that is a quibble. 

Lady Constance Chatterley herself, Emma Corrin, has the sculpted features, the asthenic qualities which give her instant vulnerability and upper class credibility. Jack O'Connell is just right for Mellors, not movie star hunky, but plenty good looking enough to be believable as a temptation for Lady Chatterley, and her first look at him bathing naked in an outdoor shower beside his hut is lovely, as just a glimmer of a smile flits across her face and you know he will set her fantasizing.

2/ Each important character and incident has to be managed and choices made to keep the length down to about two hours. The screenwriter here, David Magee, simply has made all the right choices. 

In the case of characters, all the important folks made the cut, and the decision to economize on the Irish playwright, Michaelis, is a sound one. His role is just a cameo in this version, but that's all he really needs.  In the book Constance has a brief, unsatisfactory coital experience with him, but he only really serves to show how unsatisfactory simple sex is for Lady Chatterley.  He is simply too uncouth for her, and he complains about her climaxing before he has a chance to do so, as if that is her fault.

But all the other scenes, the important scenes, are there, from her initial sighting of Mellors, to her holding the hatchlings, "New Life!" to her mad, naked  dance in the rain, to the wheel chair scenes between Clifford, Mellors and Constance. All the important stuff makes the cut.

3/ The actual themes are every bit as clear and artfully presented in the film as in the book:  Laure de Clermont Tonnerre has kept the pace exactly correct, made the right choices presenting the sex, which has to be volcanic and raw to make Constance's choices understandable. Even the brief scenes of Lady Chatterley masturbating have a clear point--she is missing sex, which you knew from earlier scenes she had once enjoyed. 

Clifford's belief that his class was meant to rule and the lower classes to serve; Clifford's idea that Constance should produce an heir by taking on the "right sort" of lover; Clifford's ruthlessness about keeping the coal miners repressed with low wages and his lack of sympathy for the common folk whose economic fate he controls and most shockingly, the deep seeded ideas about not mixing classes.  

The Neflix Lady Chatterley highlights Constance's rebellion against the gilded cage in which she finds herself trapped. When she raises objection to Clifford's plans to keep wages low, she is told she is thinking like a woman, and when Clifford tells her she should feel free to acquire a lover because he cannot get an erection, that might seem open minded and even generous on his part, but he conditions this liberty with the comment, straight from Lawrence's original text, that he trusts her to choose the right sort of fellow, not the sort he might object to--so even in his emancipation proclamation, he still insists on control.

All this prepares you for the gradual alienation Constance develops toward her husband, and it allows us to understand what Mellors means when he says the upper class men he sees at Wragby, the estate, are "dead" men. Constance knows he has chosen exactly the right word for what she has been seeing in the drawing rooms, the dining table and the village, where she can feel the "drizzle of resentment" from the coal miners and villagers, as Lawrence put it. You see that drizzle on screen here.

Hilda, Constance's sister, who is her champion and her rock, is, still, apart from all her stellar qualities, shocked and repulsed by her choice of lover: For Constance to choose a servant rather than someone of her own upper class is tantamount to the plantation mistress at Tara taking on a Negro lover. 

No important detail is omitted: Even the story that both Constance and Hilda had taken on lovers as adolescents, when they were at school in Germany, surfaces and this  becomes important as it serves to demonstrate that this class of English is not so constrained as to think sex belongs only within the confines of  marriage, but they do believe that there are "proper" partners.

And, of course, Hilda fears Constance is simply enraptured by the sex with Mellors, given her husband's inability to satisfy her, which to her is simply not the point of a man. For Constance, the point of the man is the rapture, not to mention his capacity for tenderness and the other qualities she finds more important than his social status. She says they should escape England and flee to Australia, where they can be "left alone."  This is D.H. Lawrence peeking through the visuals. 

I've read "Lady Chatterley" at least four times through the years. The first time, I was simply too young and too unsophisticated to see the class issues--all I was interested in was the sex.  Later, I saw the story as primarily about the notion of fidelity and betrayal. Later still, the class prejudices leapt out, and I wondered how I could have been so dense as to miss all that.   And finally, the last time, I saw it as an ode to life and the imperative to pursue every day as a gift, because, as mortality begins to loom large, you look back and think how silly societal strictures really are.

Scanning through some of the reviews of this Netflix version online I've been surprised and disappointed about how thoroughly most reviewers have missed the essential quality of this Netflex version. There have been other attempts at "Lady Chatterley" -- all of them forgettable. 

But this one is a gem. The director, the actors, the casting director, the screen writer and likely a lot of folks I don't even know about like the cinematographer have all succeeded where all others have failed before them. 

If there was ever a film which demonstrates how it is actually possible to transform a print book into a living film, this Netflix effort has achieved that.

This version is a triumph and it is the only film version I can say would be worth watching even if you've never read the book, before you read the book, because it is that good.

Half a Percent: How Much of a Problem is Transgender?

 

Googling the question: "How many transgenders live in America?" you get various answers, but the most generous estimate is somewhere around half of one percent of the population identifies as transgender or gender fluid at any given time.

There are, of course, no real numbers, no good numbers. 

As someone who has devoted his career to thinking about some very rare conditions, along with the common ones, The Phantom is moved to ask: Why are we so concerned about the transgender folk who live among us, our fellow citizens?

Thinking about my own high school, that means in a school of 2,000 students, we are talking about, roughly, 8 students. 

Assuming we are talking about half of these folks who are male transitioning to female, you're down to 4 students. 

Now Ron Desantis and Ted Cruz and Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene will howl about the danger of having these students undressing in the girls' locker room, sharing bathrooms with "normal" girls or trying to swim as females on the girls' swimming team, but really, how likely is this really ever going to be a problem? 

This is not to say there haven't been problems: When a swimmer who lived the first 18 years of life as a male, developing male muscles, joints and bones under the influence of testosterone began to swim as a woman on the Penn swimming team, that swimmer crushed the competition and the existing women's records for the sport.

Penn Swimmer

So one person can cause a disturbance.

Partial Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome

And then you get to the problem of a person who did not need to ask a doctor's help to become a gender bending individual. Caster Semenya, the South African women's track star, who has set all sorts of records has posed a problem, not because she is transgender, but because she is like genetically male, while not being biologically entirely male, and, in fact she does not have a penis. But she may have testes, or had testes in her inguinal canals once. From what you can see on the internet she has partial testosterone insensitivity syndrome.

Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome

She is a rarity.

It should also be noted, she did not seek to have her gender altered by any doctor, if she has this syndrome. She simply "is" this way.

Gdansk, Poland 

So why are the Republican culture warriors like DeSantis and Cruz so obsessed with these rare cases?

Paul McHugh, MD

The answer may be because these are cases which make people who are "woke" or otherwise open minded look foolish or bizarre or simply ridiculous, as they try to cleave to a position of extreme tolerance in a case which tests the understanding of the average citizen, who is unversed in what exactly transgender is, and how that may be different from "intersex" or from homosexuality or pseudohermaphrodism, each of which is separate and different from each other. 

So the far right has found the perfect scapegoats, small in number, poorly understood, people who most people have no first hand experience with.