By Miranda Mellis

The ‘mental health’ epidemic, the depression and anxiety epidemic, the loneliness epidemic. It seems that feelings are contagious diseases. As for the loneliness epidemic, don’t epidemics spread when we are too close, whereas loneliness is the absence of closeness? Of course, we can be lonely in a crowd. We can feel lonely in the most intimate moments, which is one reason people sometimes cry after having sex, when distance, detachment, and separation reasserts itself.

We might, at times, feel less lonely alone. Yet we are rarely, these days, enjoined to solitude, nor much encouraged to consider the benefits to the socius of an ability to, as they say, ‘sit with yourself.’  The more isolated, anxious, depressed, housing insecure, and polarized we are, the more talk of the health benefits of being with others. We’re encouraged to live with cats and dogs because they will lower our blood pressure and release our oxytocin. The motivation for coming together or living with animals is instrumentalized, scientized.

You might say it doesn’t matter what motivates us to return to one another, to dwell with each other. But if we are describing relationships in biomedical terms and using each other and animals as emotional medications for what are in fact structural harms (separating out domesticated animals for special luxuries and leaving all other animals vulnerable to every human form of exploitation and extinction) then we are attempting to treat our ‘epidemics’ by capitalizing on, rather than realizing and practicing, interdependence and mutual reciprocity.

As the answer to global warming offered by oil companies has been for us to track our carbon footprint, so we’ve been exhorted in the face of social neglect (and in the case of legislation against abortion and gender affirming care, social sadism) to maintain our social lives.

We are certainly well advised to keep our commitments to one another, to deal with what Lauren Berlant called ‘the inconvenience of other people’ in the name of sanity, to recycle, ride a bike, and keep in touch with our friends.

And we do have carbon footprints, the rich disproportionately so, yet the more responsibility devolves upon us as individuals, the less capacity there is to address our problems at the levels of policy, system, and structure and the lonelier we are. Relationships need social fabric. Masculinist, self-seeking, immature, and individualist models of being tear the social fabric to shreds.

The Banshees of Inisherin is a parable of the destructiveness of the immature man. The film centers on the attempts of Colm (played by a sharp-eyed Brendan Gleeson) to end his friendship with Padraic (played by a sad-eyed Colin Farrell), because he finds him, in a word, dull. Padraic is a waste of his time, Colm tells him to his face. In the few years remaining to him, he declares, he’ll be composing and playing music. (He is a talented fiddler, people come to the village specifically to study and play with him). Padraic can’t believe it. ‘Nice’ is the word Padraic uses to describe himself. He is, he insists, ‘the nicest man on the island.’ This niceness makes a perilous demand upon the artist Colm. Politeness is the price you pay for not wanting what is offered.

In the face of Padraic’s refusal to understand, Colm gives evidence. He describes having to suffer Padraic’s recent, prolonged inventory of the contents of his beloved donkey Jenny’s excrement. At this point we are on Colm’s side.

We see Padraic looking melancholy by the fire. Perhaps he is trying to imagine Colm’s point of view, wondering at himself, how he might change, be a better interlocutor, less full of donkey-shit. But no. It turns out that one needs to be taught how to see things from another’s point of view. You could devote your life to it, and some do, but not Padraic, whose name means ‘boy’ and ‘patrician’, same root as father. Padraic ignores Colm’s requests, drawing inferences that suit him better, seeing signs of rapprochement where there are none, and refusing to self-reflect.

Colm’s realness is outmatched by Padraic’s wish to keep it unreal. Colm is resolved to end the friendship; Padraic is determined to keep it. W.R. Bion wrote that resistance is always to the threat of the real. Disbelief is an aspect of that resistance, a defense against what one nonetheless already knows: “Resistance is only manifest when the threat is contact with what is believed to be real.” ^[1] Beckettian bewilderment hovers. As he writes: “Dear incomprehension, it’s thanks to you I’ll be myself in the end.”

Those who have not learned – cannot learn – how to separate become stalkers. Padraic’s denial, willful misinterpretations, and refusal to leave him alone leads Colm to desperate measures, acts of self-mutilation which literalize the mutilating quality of his life as a hostage to Padraic’s intolerable dullness, rooted in his inability to practice philosophy of mind. The question for Colm is a negative one: what will it take to rid himself of this man? Colm, whose name means ‘dove’ won’t visit violence upon Padraic. Finally, Colm tells Padraic that every time he bothers him, Colm will cut off one of his own fiddling fingers.

Why must Colm threaten self-castration to be free of Padraic?^[2] It’s a test of Padraic’s care: if Padraic truly loves Colm, he won’t risk letting him destroy himself as an artist. But although everyone else in Inisherin takes this threat seriously (they comprehend Colm’s seriousness) Padraic does not.  At the end of seminar XI, “The Rat in the Maze” Lacan writes that “. . . to know what your partner will do is not a proof of love.” The implication is that Padraic does know Colm means it, but isn’t bothered, like an infant who cannot care what price the parental ‘slave’ pays to meet his needs, causing the infamous maternal hatred.^[3]

Padraic and his sister hear a thump and, going out to see what it is, they discover one of Colm’s bloody digits on the ground. He’s cut off a finger and lain it at Padraic’s door. But the sacrifice of the finger is no deterrence for Padraic. By the end of the film, Colm’s left hand is a fingerless stump.

The film limns variations of brutality. There is Colm’s brutal commitment to his art. There’s Padraic’s narcissistic brutality, masked as niceness. There is pretend brutality, as when Padraic imagines that Colm will find him more interesting if he is rude, so charges into Colm’s house and insults him thinking in this way to win him back, after which Colm cuts off all his remaining fingers.

And there is the cop, the ur brute–no one would call him nice. He’s the repressive, traumatizing agent of the patriarchal state who abuses his power, the community, and his child with impunity, a sadist who relishes spectacles of punishment and is known to sexually assault his son. The violence he metes out is normalized here, well understood, and tolerated. Denial of and complicity with abuse is culture. 

In this cosmology police violence and parental abuse cannot be stood up to let alone abolished, only escaped, and temporarily at that. The cop’s kid hides out at Padraic and his sister Siobhan’s place finding temporary refuge but cannot really get free. The cop cannot be stood up to, even by those who know his crimes. Siobhan has no sisterhood: the other women in the village are fragmented. The local witch can prophesy and witness, but she’s lost her power to heal or help. Everyone is under thrall to the wrong kind of power: the violence of policing hovers. The cop’s son drowns in a lake, or he drowns in the failure of the community to protect him and hold the abuser accountable.

The brutality of Padraic’s niceness is of a different order. Instead of destroying children as police violence does, niceness merely destroys artists.

Padraic may be dull, but he does not lack for cunning. He resents Colm’s music students and tells one of them that his father has been hit by a bread truck and killed, to get him to leave town. In one of the film’s many Beckettian moments, the lie is all too believable: it turns out the music student’s mother was in fact killed by a bread truck. When Padraic recounts this lie to his pal, the cop’s son (who also plays as a fool but comes by it honestly, being the youngest character) the kid tells Padraic that it’s the meanest thing he’s ever heard of and walks away.

Padraic’s greatest love is his beautiful donkey, Jenny. They would live in harmony inside the house together but for his sister, the cranky and bookish Siobhan and her exasperated insistence that animals must live outside. Padraic’s intimacy with Jenny and all his animals is at once emblematic of a kind of saintliness – perhaps he is a holy fool – and metonymic for his passivity.

When his beloved Jenny accidentally chokes to death on one of Colm’s severed fingers Padraic’s rage knows no bounds. Unlike the earlier scene where he pretends to be mad at Colm, now he is truly angry. The loss of his friendship with Colm, Colm’s loss of all his fingers and therefore his life as a musician, all of this is as nothing compared to the loss of the darling ass.

The loss of the donkey Jenny precipitates Padraic’s murderous aggression and deceitfulness. He mourns wildly, setting Colm’s house on fire and looking to kill him in the process: as the flames lick Colm’s house, Padraic sees Colm sitting inside. He rides away on his buggy, content that Colm will die, and justice will be done. But Colm does not die. They encounter each other again at the end of the film, on the beach, survivors of each other.  

Between the animal (Padraic) and the artist (Colm) there is a conflict about insufficiency. Animal presence is insufficient for the artist, while the artist is a threat to the sufficiency of the animal. The root of the word fiction is the same as that for finger, fingere, which means to shape. Colm’s ability to shape a world for himself deprives Padraic, while the latter’s wish to go on being uncomprehending, to ‘be myself to the end’ is imbricated with the sacrifice of Colm’s generative power.

Padraic’s intolerance of the loss of Colm, whom he loses in any case, means he loses everything else too: Jenny; his sister. Colm’s fear of the loss of his life, of his time, and his inability to tolerate and incorporate Padraic, the animal fact of death, means he loses everything too: his ability to play.

When later the cop’s son winds up dead there is a question of whether Padraic, who now turns out to be capable of lying and killing, has murdered him. How the boy dies is left ambiguous.

That a death would come had been predicted by the village witch, who foretold it. The personas here are like the major arcana of tarot, each one imbued with some emblematic characteristic: the crone has her visions, the cop has his weapons, the bartender his bar, the public (a chorus) their pub. The adolescent has his dreams of love, the shopkeeper has her gossip, the sister has her books, the artist has his music, the fool has his animals, and so on. The fool, the child, the cop, and the artist all lose something (their animal, their life, their child, and their art respectively). The sister character, Siobhan, maddened, grief stricken, and bewildered by Padraic’s lack of insight, enmeshed in his vulnerability and foolishness, gains a future by losing him, leaving the island, and pursuing work as a librarian elsewhere. She escapes the banshees, as Colm tried and failed to do.

When the policeman takes Colm’s ‘side’ in the agon between he and Padraic, Padraic finds it in himself to confront the abuse publicly – that is, in the pub. He takes a beating for it. We root for Padraic in this moment, as he courageously calls out the cop for abusing his child, yet in truth he only appears to. It’s Colm he is angry with. Had Colm not been sitting with him, Padraic would not have challenged the cop. Yet this anger he feels towards Colm has this potential benefit. It could be used, redirected here. At least for a moment there is a contestation.

Padraic experiences Colm’s abandonment as an injustice. His fight against Colm, which is a fight for Colm, is momentarily linked to a broader revolution, bigger and more universal questions of freedom and social care. Colm, for whom we may have been rooting, is seated next to the cop that Padraic is standing up to. Colm’s refusal to stay in connection is now linked, proximally, to the cop’s impunity. The film’s consciousness might here have been raised. The transformational moment is elided though, for the sake of what I’ll call patriarchal realism: the sad restoration of the alienated and complicit patriarchal order, treated as an inevitability. Nothing brings about awakening and change, instead loss compounds loss upon loss.

Imagine the film taking a feminist turn: Padraic breaks the code of silence around the cop’s abuse of the child. This galvanizes the others in the pub. A spell is broken, an awakening ensues, and the subject changes: instead of being about the rupture between two old friends, Padraic’s woundedness opens out onto the festering social wound of unchallenged male brutality.

Author Bio: Miranda Mellis is a writer and painter from San Francisco now living in the woods of the Pacific Northwest where she teaches writing, literature, and environmental humanities at Evergreen State College. She is the author of Crocosmia (forthcoming, Nightboat Books), The Spokes, The Revisionist, None of This Is Real, Demystifications, and a number of chapbooks including, most recently, The Revolutionary. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts and Millay Colony and was a recipient of the John Hawkes Prize in Fiction and an NEA grant. 

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^[1] Transformations, W.R. Bion. (Karnac, 1984)

^[2] In the recent film Biosphere, another film about the male pair bond, the moral of the story is quite different. The non-metaphorical castration of the president of the United States is a matter of species survival in this film and a fruitful path of becoming. Paradoxically, the rerouting and redistribution of the male procreative drive is precisely what leads to regeneration and futurity. In Biosphere by means of biosocial transformation and overcoming of transphobia in the last remaining public ‘sphere’, humanity has a chance of a future. 

^[3] “Let me give some reasons why a mother hates her baby,” wrote Donald Winnicott in 1947. “The baby is ruthless, treats her as scum, an unpaid servant, a slave . . .”.