We're not in Ireland anymore... but then how would I know. I've never known any Ireland except the Hollywood version, which Joan claims is not bloody accurate.
My favorite line from an IRA movie...
Brad Pitt talking about the assassination of his father, before his eyes, at the dinner table, as a child.
Harrison Ford: Did they git the fekkers?
Brad Pitt: Th' worr tha fekkers.
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Screening the IRA
by Joan Dean
The popularity of John Ford's The Quiet Man (1952) prompted Patrick Kavanagh to observe that "the only place where phoney ould Oireland is tolerated is in Ireland itself." Were he still alive Kavanagh might lament yet another version of "phoney ould Oireland" - a fiction of the IRA served up by Hollywood largely for the delectation of the 45 million Americans who claim Irish ancestry.
The differences between films about Ireland made by outsiders, especially by Americans, and those made by the Irish are obvious. The most egregious recent example, Ron Howard's Far and Away (1992), shrouds Ireland in all of the heart-wrenching bathos of ballads that celebrate a lost homeland. Not surprisingly, it ends up in America where the image of a romantic motherland can be left undisturbed - frozen in a rugged landscape, fixed in the past. This is, of course, a Hollywood version of Ireland that is untroubled by the realities of past or present.
The IRA has been an especially alluring subject for non-Irish film-makers who recognize the appeal of a secret brotherhood of political and social idealists dedicated to overthrowing an oppressive colonial presence. For Hollywood, the possibilities for intrigue, romance, righteousness, violence, and devotion to a cause offers an almost irresistible formula. Even better, everybody speaks English. Although characters might drift into a few words of Irish, no one will ever lapse into Italian. Important directors, like John Ford, and big stars, like Harrison Ford and James Cagney, have been attracted to films about the IRA. Many of these films, despite very high production values and aspirations to moral values, have no integrity when it comes to Irish history, politics, or geography, let alone accents. In some cases, the Irish content of the films exists only on the level of travesty and perhaps for that very reason many have proved extremely profitable.
The IRA that emerges from films like John Ford's The Informer (1935), Michael Anderson's Shake Hands with the Devil (1959), Philip Noyce's Patriot Games (1992) and Stephen Hopkins' Blown Away (1994) is a fabrication with its own cinematic life. Almost invariably, Hollywood treats the IRA and its leaders as noble, serious, and honest: Ford's Gallagher in The Informer, the General in Shake Hands with the Devil, and the Sinn Fein representative in Patriot Games, all represent an organization that is a far cry from what we see of the IRA in Neil Jordan's Angel or The Crying Game and only remotely connected with the IRA as it appears in Jim Sheridan's In the Name of the Father.
Eschewing the complexity of politics, the American films focus less on the organization than on a fanatical individual who, driven by the need for personal revenge, desperation, or monomania, betrays or operates outside the IRA. Entirely deracinated, literally cut off from the roots of political or historical cause, this individual typically offers a study of perverse pathology. The most obvious example, and perhaps the best novel to be thus exploited, is 'The Informer'.
Ford's The Informer begins with a critical and telling alteration from O'Flaherty's novel: the setting from the Civil War to the War of Independence. By employing a date before Partition, Ford not only divests the IRA of any ambiguity, but identifies it with Ireland. Having dabbled in Republican activism when he was in Ireland in 1921, Ford recognized the military occupation by the British as a political situation accessible to an American audience. The poster advertising a twenty pound reward for Frankie McPhillip, for instance, identifies his crime as "sedition against the Crown", an activity Americans could easily understand if not applaud. Similarly, Ford purges the novels characterization of the IRA Commandant Gallagher as a dangerously unbalanced man, "a dictator". And the film enlarges the scope of what Gypo Nolan hopes to gain beyond recognition. Only after Frankie McPhillip tells him "I know I'm dying Gypo ... I got the consumption" does O'Flaherty's Gypo think of betraying McPhillip "for a bed for the night." But Ford's Gypo has loftier if not visionary ambitions: twenty pounds will not only pay his passage to America, but will enable him to rescue Kate from whoredom (in Kimmage or elsewhere). As he stares at the model ship in the travel agent's window he imagines his marriage to Kate and the honeymoon that will take them to America. O'Flaherty's Gypo thinks no further than the immediate gratification of a bed that night, but Ford's Gypo plans out a new life for himself and his bride.
All of these changes aim to make the film version readily accessible to American audiences, especially those enduring the Depression. Frank Capra once called John Ford (ne Sean Aloysius Feeney) "half genius, half Irish", but like Capra, Ford had a first-generation immigrant's eye that made him one of the most American of all film-makers.
Ford's vision is also prototypical of the American treatment of the IRA and Ireland in its extensive religious imagery. O'Flaherty's final page is, of course, explicit: forgiven by Frankie's ma, Gypo "stretched out his limbs in the shape of a cross. He shivered and lay still." None of this is understated in Ford's film. But given the fact that Ireland's a Catholic country, the American (as well as British) movies about the IRA indulge in a veritable smorgasbord of religious imagery. A Prayer for the Dying is even more overwrought: its barrage of religious symbolism culminates as Mickey Rourke slides down a huge crucifix clinging to the body of Christ.
Whereas Gypo Nolan is a lumbering brute of a man, his flaws do not preclude audience sympathy or even his redemption. Not so for the IRA zealots of Shake Hands with the Devil, Patriot Games, and Blown Away whose pathologies manifest themselves in symptoms ranging from misogyny to monomania. In Shake Hands with the Devil so violent is the response to any hint of female sexuality by Sean Lenihan (James Cagney) that his barely repressed homosexuality is as evident as his republicanism. By 1959 too many years had past since Cagney smashed a grapefruit in Mae Clarke's face in Public Enemy (1931). Here it's easy to forget he's the devil of the film's title.
As for The Informer, the adaptation of the novel 'Shake Hands with the Devil' is revelatory: The everyman medical student is no longer Kerry Sutton, the son of an Irish Roman Catholic mother and an English Protestant created by the novelist Rearden Connor, but rather Kerry O'Shea, an American son of a 1916 Irish patriot and martyr. We are often reminded that Kerry O'Shea is American because so many of the actors, irrespective of their presumed nationality, speak with an American accent.
Whereas Lenihan's bonhomie dominates his relationship with Kerry as well as all the scenes of male brotherhood, the novel and even the script call for Kerry to discover an increasingly menacing side of Lenihan whenever a woman, preferably one of childbearing years, comes into view. Cagney's Lenihan, however, remains largely avuncular until the very end when he returns to the lighthouse to execute the British woman held hostage. To Lenihan, the execution represents a "two-fer" as the hostage is not only British but female. The linkage of his sexual animus and diehard politics is now explicit.
A distinct cowboy ethos is imposed on Shake Hands with the Devil. Despite having been shot in Ireland, Donovan's pub has the look of a cantina in the American Southwest. Glynnis John's costuming and cleavage, let alone her midnight skinny dip, suggest a climate closer to that of Southern California than County Wicklow. The gunfight on the quay only prefigures the final hilltop shoot out between Kerry and Lenihan. But the resolution is unambiguous: Seeing no further need for the IRA, Kerry tosses his revolver in the sea, renonounces violence, and settles for the Free State.
That cowboy ethos demands that moral issues eclipse political ones. This should surprise no one who has ever seen a Western, let alone an American film about the Vietnam war. In Hollywood's Southeast Asia the forces of good and evil are neatly compartmentalized: the decent Wilhelm Dafoe is set against the savage Tom Berenger in Oliver Stone's Platoon (1986), a totally depraved Marlon Brando must be stopped by Martin Sheen in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979), Michael J. Fox squares off against the thoroughly debauched Sean Penn in Brian de Palma's Casualties of War (1989). Hollywood's IRA men face similar dichotomous pairings: Victor McLaglan v. Preston Foster in The Informer, an uncharacteristically kinky James Cagney v. Don Murray in Shake Hands with the Devil. And the contrast is no less simplistic as we near the present: Mickey Rourke is a terrorist with a conscience and the heart of gold to boot in A Prayer for the Dying, Jack Ryan (Harrison Ford), saviour of the the Free World v. Sean Miller (Sean Bean) in Patriot Games, and finally the grotesque contrast between Ryan Gaerity (Tommy Lee Jones) and Jimmy Dove (Jeff Bridges) in Blown Away. For that reason much of the violence becomes internecine-directed against members of the IRA by members of the IRA. And whereas The Informer and Shake Hands with the Devil both set before Partition, show characters struggling to get into the IRA, the challenge since 1970, in A Prayer for the Dying, Blown Away as well as The Crying Game has been how to get out of the IRA.
With political premises much more elusive than those in The Informer and Shake Hands with the Devil, Patriot Games is more a study in family loyalty rather than in politics and terrorism. Wracked by guilt over the death of his brother, haunted by the memory of a father killed by the RUC in 1979, the renegade IRA terrorist is no less driven by family loyalties than is the CIA good guy. Having long since abandoned any ambition except revenge, Miller ultimately kills his only remaining cohorts when they insist that theirs is a political cause.
The Sinn Fein representative (Richard Harris) in Patriot Games is typical of the now dominant image of the IRA organization man: straightforward, serious, and awe-inspiring. He is precisely the kind of man who will become a cop in Blown Away. When Ryan asks his help in finding Sean Miller, Harris tells him: "the day I sell out my countrymen will be the day I put a bullet through my own head." His loyalty is carefully phrased; later he informs on the English woman in cahoots with Sean Miller but maintains his scruples about Irish men.
But in at least one regard Patriot Games may prove to be prescient in underscoring the shift from a terrorist offensive against the British to an IRA campaign for American sympathy. In a Washington pub, Ryan threatens to allow the television stations to photograph his injured child and warns Richard Harris of the credibility crisis the IRA faces: "Nobody believes you anymore." Their confrontation is played out as the image of Gerry Adams smiles down upon them both.
Like Patriot Games, Blown Away underscores that the terrorists in question are not IRA, not provisional IRA, but "too crazy" for the provisional IRA. Like the breakaways from the provisional IRA in Patriot Games, Ryan Gaerity (Tommy Lee Jones) is not only fanatical and extremely clever, but also, despite the implicit anachronism, associated with Libya. Both Blown Away and Patriot Games exploit the Hollywood fiction of an IRA lunatic from a hitherto unknown breakaway group whose political agenda is beyond arcane. That, of course, solves two problems: no one in Noraid is offended and the need for any political explanation is obviated.
Gaerity is the apothesis of the renegade IRA terrorist. He and his antagonists, Jimmy Dove (Jeff Bridges), are described as Belfast co-conspirators in an extra-IRA bombing, although neither sounds as if he ever heard anyone from Belfast utter a word. After twenty years in prison, Gaerity breaks out of jail just as Dove, who fled Ireland for the Boston police force, is planning his retirement from the bomb squad.
Gaerity undertakes a personal vendetta against Dove, not for abandoning the nationalist cause but for far more dubious reasons: perhaps because Dove escaped prison, or because Gaerity's sister died in the bombing, or because Gaerity is now devoted to chaos and anarchy. His motives for revenge are as riddled with contradictions as the film itself. Pathologically crazed and inured to mercy, Gaerity directs his insatiable appetite for perverse cruelty against his former friends.
Cut from the same lunatic cloth as Sean Miller in Patriot Games, Gaerity indulges in a perverse fetish - an infantile obsession with bombs as toys. Repeatedly his fascination with toys - puppets, clowns, stuffed animals - is intimately connected with his incendiary devices. Unlike almost all the other IRA hard men he has a perversely frivolous side, although much of his frivolity (dancing while listening to an over- amplified "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For") is imposed on him by the film-maker's need to establish some Irish connection.
By the late 1980's America had grown desperate for politically correct villains. The Cold War was over and won. Nazis, especially blue-eyed Aryan types and corrupt WASPs - preferably judges, politicians, and businessmen - were still acceptable, but every other group had deployed squads of professional apologists to TV talk shows and Congressional hearings to make excuses for their sad ilk. And if the bad guys are all victims, who could be evil? Against that background, Blown Away, a perfectly wretched and indefensible film, created a pathological villain and earned more in its American theatrical release than did Jim Sheridan's In the Name of the Father.
The pattern in the American movies set since 1969 is for a savage, bloodthirsty IRA renegade to square off against the IRA organisation itself, all of society, and ultimately sanity and reason. Like many of these American films, neither Patriot Games nor Blown Away has any overt political agenda in regard to Ireland. Neither comments on the validity of the IRA's objectives or tactics. Neither offers an understanding of Ireland's history or politics. Here the only Irish history at issue is the fact that there has been sectarian violence in Northern Ireland for the past 25 years. No other knowledge of the situation is required or tolerated. In fact here, as in many of the American productions, knowledge only gets in the way.
Joan Dean teaches at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.
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