FILM / A Severing / Wyeth Leslie
Image © Searchlight Pictures
Hard to understate the ways life can cut with irony. In 2015, an old friend from high school was killed when his apartment complex caught fire. Unable to escape, his body was found in the aftermath curled around his dog. I got the call as I sat drinking at a brewery bearing his name.
I had to break the news to a few mutual friends as well as my family, my mother sobbing in the hallway as my words poured out. My phone call caught my best friend from high school preparing to board a plane. We had been drifting apart in the seven years since graduation. Different ideologies, different careers, fatherhood versus bachelorhood. The usual barrage of life changes that come during and after college. I told him the news could wait till the other side of his trip but he insisted, the boarding sections being called out in the background. When I told him what had happened he was silent for a moment before promising to call back and that he’d see me at the funeral.
It was over a year later when we talked again, my phone lighting up at the arrival of a text message filled with political misinformation. When I told him I wasn’t interested he asked if he could call to explain it in more detail and again I turned him down. No mention at all of our dead friend, not even an apology for never checking in. Through the silent months in-between, I had thought a lot about our relationship, finally noticing fault lines that had been present for so long I wasn’t sure where or when they had started. With this came the pain of a fresh perspective, that I had understood only a few facets of a life lived by my side.
I haven’t stopped thinking about Colm Doherty’s (Brendan Gleeson) severed fingers since I first saw them flung against the door of his former friend, Pádraic Súilleabháin (Colin Farrell). An act of grotesque protest, Colm is mutilating himself to show his commitment to ending their friendship. Martin McDonagh’s fourth feature, The Banshees of Inisherin, is set on the fictional titular Irish isle. The lives of the inhabitants are structured around routine: work, pub, repeat till Sunday then add church. On the mainland, the Irish Civil War rages on, violence unseen but everyone on Inisherin can hear the bombs go off. In parallel, strife between the two friends begins to simmer.
Pádraic is a simple man, concerned only with the present and hanging out with his friends, sister, and beloved farm animals. Colm is a man out of time, envious of the great artists of the past, and worried about what legacy will remain after his inevitable passing. Long have the two men been drinking partners and friends but as one local inhabitant admits, they do make for a funny pair. Then one day, Colm decides to end their relationship. “I just don’t like ya’ no more,” he puts it bluntly early on in the film. Farrell deserves an Oscar for eyebrow work alone in that breakup scene, slowly arcing from confusion to heartbreak. How shattering it is to be told by someone you consider a friend that they no longer have room for you in their life.
I’m sure you see where this is going. Perhaps this isn’t even your first Banshees break-up piece that you’ve read.
It’s the balm-against-loneliness beauty of the movies, to be able to point at the screen and say, “That’s just like me.” But Banshees presents a complicating twist in that both men are right and both men are wrong. I see myself torn between Colm and Pádraic with their opposing ideologies, ranging from wounded animal-like drive to live life on one’s own terms versus fighting tooth and nail to save a sinking friendship. Both men are open and honest about what they want, with Colm desiring to be left alone and Pádraic wanting to still be able to chat with his best friend. Who both men are is what leads to their impasse. Halfway through the film, in the middle of the island’s sole pub, Pádraic pours his drunken guts out to Colm in front of all the other patrons. “You used to be nice, or did you never used to be,” he slurs, his face falling in time to the scales from his eyes. “Oh God, maybe you never used to be.” He is fighting for a façade, the projections of a man who has lived so close to Pádraic that he never had a chance to see Colm for who he really is.
A perk and curse of modern life is that social media allows friendships to become museums when they end, spaces that you can wander back through to look at the good times. A gentle form of ghosting, there’s no need for a violent end or to be left wondering what happened to that person. You can do as the titular banshees do: sit back, amused, and observe. I know I do with some friends I no longer keep in contact with but I still root for them from afar. This approach hasn’t always been the case as I am no stranger to the emotional desperation that comes with wanting someone to remain a part of your life. This feeling was especially strong in years past, in particular during my transition from high school to college, from a class of twelve people to a campus where no one knew my name. This era was the beginning of the split with my best friend. For the first time in four years we weren’t seeing each other almost every day and like Darwin’s finches, diverging evolution began to take hold.
In 2010, after two years apart, my friend and I undertook a late summer road trip fit for a mid-level Midwestern emo band. Our route took us from Oklahoma up through Kansas on our way to South Dakota. From there we would make a right turn for Chicago by way of Iowa before beginning our downward arc home through St. Louis. While writing this I went and looked back at the photos and wound up caught on a trip wire of memories. The lineup from Chicago is particularly packed. There are the obligatory Bean selfies and shots of us shoveling deep dish slices. There’s also several hasty shots from when we inadvertently wandered through the set of one of the Transformers movies. After that, nothing. Almost 12 hours’ worth of travel and not a signal image taken during that span despite the almost incessant documentation up to that point. The majority of the trip had been catching up with old friends and each other, of falling into familiar social patterns. But there was something new within my friend, a knife-edge sense of competition that began to cut into more and more of our discussions the further we traveled. He had to be right at all costs, and anything, from theology to personal tastes in pop culture, became debates as though the world was at stake. I remember the route back from Chicago became fraught with conflict and by the time we were a state away from home I had stopped talking. After some time spent not being in cramped quarters together, I chalked it all up to road weariness. I also found other handy excuses for subsequent outbursts of dominance in the following years. Afterall, we were friends. We were supposed to bear with one another no matter what.
Colm severing his fingers wasn’t his first step but drastic measures became required when his initial request to be left alone goes unheeded. Pádraic tries every which way to mend their relationship: apologizing, striking up conversation as though nothing had changed, even involving the local priest to guilt trip Colm. Out of desperation, Colm declares that he will shear a finger from his fiddle hand each time Pádraic addresses him. Of course, Pádraic being who he is, doesn’t grasp that Colm is serious so it isn’t long before the fingers are flying. Animosity grows and Pádraic begins sabotaging Colm’s other friendships in an attempt to hit back. Colm’s desire is reasonable, albeit cruel in its bluntness, while there’s relatability in Pádraic’s heartbreak and frustration. It’s no different than a romantic relationship. If one person wants out then it’s unconscionable to make them remain. The truth though, what has inspired countless breakup songs, is that rarely are such feelings aligned. From there, escalation is often seemingly the only available course of action.
It took a long time for me to learn when and how to cut someone out of my life as an act of survival. No one teaches this, certainly not in the Bible Belt where any passage can be weaponized at any given moment in order to justify a corrosive presence. Figuring it out for myself was a bloody affair of the soul. I do worry that I have grown too numb to the process after so much emotional nerve damage, hand ready over the emergency eject button. Colm is never shown in pain, his act of self-mutilation always occurring off-screen. He mentions almost passing out during his first self-amputation but the audience is often shown him wearing an expression of serenity, the kind that comes when someone is so sure that they made the right choice. By the end of the film, Colm has severed all five fingers from his left hand. No longer able to play his cherished fiddle, he sits among other pub musicians and holds the instrument in a death grip with his one good hand, shaking it like a fist at God. The table is spattered with blood but no one seems to mind. This contrast between violence and lack of reaction is shocking. A man is less than he was hours ago, and no one is talking about it. It’s the same feeling as the end of a friendship, your accumulated lives together fitting into so many storage boxes. How do you just casually continue on without a former part of yourself?
I admire Colm’s dedication to being a man of his word, if not his methods. He is nothing but honest with everyone around him, even though as the local priest puts it, “It’s not a sin but it’s not very nice.” He does not seem like someone who takes things lightly so it’s obvious that the strife had been internally building for some time. Pádraic had sat across from the man, sharing many a pint together, with no clue what was brewing on the inside. In late 2018, after two more years of silence, my friend sent an apology message to each member of our high school class about who he had been all those years ago. It was for things that all teens do when they’re that young and dumb, nothing particularly malicious. It was clear that guilt had been weighing on him in the decade since but when I received it, something snapped. At the intersection between not having received a unique apology after all that we had been through and how he had had yet to address missing the funeral, I refused to budge. I called him out on both accounts and the relief from honesty was instant.
The instigating moment that led to Colm’s final fiddle fingers being removed was a result of another inebriated bout of honesty from Pádraic. Barging into Colm’s house, Pádraic makes a valiant last-ditch effort at friendship, doing his damndest to be interesting and assertive as Colm had mentioned he wished Pádraic had been during their friendship. For a moment, it looks like it’s going to work as the two men sit chatting, even smiling at one another. Then Pádraic slips back into his old ways as he departs and out the shears come. The final thirty minutes of the film are about Pádraic’s breaking point, Colm’s fingers tipping a line of dominoes that end up stripping Pádraic of all that he cares about on Inisherin. The stubbornness of both men, unable to reckon with the nuance that they are both right and going about things all wrong, boils over into outright conflict and one man’s house burns bright.
I reunited with my friend at a bar shortly after I confronted him about his apology. He confessed that he didn’t remember my phone call about our mutual friend’s passing. I still feel the sting of that reveal. We sat there with our drinks and made small talk. As he spoke of old inside jokes and apologized for past actions while making excuses for new ones, I realized that he was still largely talking for himself to hear. It made me feel like an actor weary of a long lived-in role. I remember congratulating him on the birth of his second child and saying not much else. There was no violence, no fingers returned in small boxes or promises of retribution, only an internal assessment of if there was a place to go from there.
Watching The Banshees of Inisherin is like stumbling upon those boxes of memories tucked away. A lot of them make me laugh, some make me wince from hindsight, all hurt like phantom fingers. It’s been about four years since I last talked to my friend. I don’t even know if that term is still applicable. As 2020 got into the full swing of its horror, I watched on social media as conspiracy theories mingled with family pictures and I made the decision to sever things for good. In the wake of so much death and suffering, I no longer had the patience to hear him out anymore. In the years prior, the questions of whether I had been enough of a good friend and did I do all that I could to hold our friendship together kept me up some nights. Now I have the debate of whether or not I’m hurt that he hasn’t said anything about the split or that I’m relieved he hasn’t. I will never play uncle to his kids, never take care of his yipping dog again, and that’s fine. As Pádraic puts it at the end of the film, there are some things that there’s no moving on from, and that’s a good thing.
A Creative Writing MFA graduate from Oklahoma State University, Wyeth Leslie (he/him) is a humanist poet and author interested in pop culture, technology, and beautiful mundane lives. He is the author of the sci-fi hued poetry collection, This Machine Keeps the Ghost, from Alien Buddha Press. Other writings have been featured in publications such as Bridge Eight Press, Film Cred, The Daily Drunk, and Haywire Magazine. He can usually be found staring into the abyss on Twitter: @Wyeth_was_here