Pat Duffy ENLS 4040 Irish Film Final Essay The Politics of Masculinity in Irish Film Spanning from

the silent era to the digital age, the films viewed in this course offer a complex historical portrait of Ireland in many of its facets and from many different angles. One theme that binds their disparate storylines and unique settings, however, is masculinity. The films discussed in this essay, with their male protagonists, define masculinity in relation to female characters and other male characters in different time periods and socioeconomic situations, and its definition hinges thus on the protagonists acquaintances and social milieu. From its formulaic rigidity in The Quiet Man, to its stiltedness in My Left Foot, to its binarybending fluidity of The Crying Game, to its infiltrating the private sphere in Nora to an amplification of its old structure in What Richard Did, masculinity in Irish film describes an arc. The films explore traditional patterns of masculinity, break them, reevaluate them and ultimately reinstate an imprived version of them. They do not merely engage in a purely academic discourse on masculinity, however. Each film, whether purposefully or not, uses its commentary on masculinity to express and reflect an aspect of Irish politics or economics contemporary to its setting, from Colonialism to the Celtic Tiger. John Fords The Quiet Man (1952), chronicles the Irish-American Sean Thorntons return to his mothers native home of Innisfree. Through his assimilation to Irish customs he comes to perform an Irish identity, and thus the film becomes a character study of (stereotypical) Irishness. These customs, however, are inextricably linked with masculinity: his construction of a home, his courting an Irish woman, his firmness and dominance over this woman, his playing the various roles of an Irish husband, his physical brawl with and victory over the alpha male of

Duffy 2 Innisfree (Red Will Danaher). In this way, Thornton not only performs Irishness but manliness as well, in relation to the contrasting societal roles of his wife Mary Kate and the similar roles the men of the town play. These roles are clearly defined, inherited, and non-negotiable; the character of Michaeleen serves as a sort of mentor, guiding Thornton at every step of his assimilation. In The Quiet Man, masculinity is thus achieved through the performance of a series of specific, inherited patriarchal roles. Keeping in mind that Irish identity is linked inextricably with masculine identity in that these roles that Michaeleen guides Thornton to complete have the explicit purpose of achieving Irishness and only produce masculinity as a byproduct, Thorntons surpassing even the Irish in these roles suggests Irelands weakness in comparison to Americain both nationality and masculinity. As McLoone points out (57): When the Rev. Playfair and his wife see the cottage that Sean has prepared, she opines, It looks the way all Irish cottages should look and so seldom do. And only an American would think of painting it emerald green. This American upstaging of Irishmen at Irishness is played out in Thorntons relation to Will and Mary Kate Danaher. He literally beats the Irish at their own game when he asserts his dominance over Red Will Danaher in their comically long fight scene, and McLoone calls his dominant command of Michaeleen, saddle my horse! a gesture of decisive masculinity (56). In both the fight scene and the scene in which he drags Mary Kate home from the train station, Thornton draws a huge crowd: the whole village comes to view Thornton in his two gestures of decisive masculinity: the physical overthrow of an alpha-male and the physical putting-into-place of his wife. That Sean Thornton is an Americanalbeit of Irish descentlooms large in consideration of a particularly Irish masculinity. That Thornton can surpass native Irishmen in manliness becomes a politically imbued statement; it harkens back to the metaphor of colonial

Duffy 3 Ireland being feminized by Great Britain. Now however, another outsider in the realm of culture feminizes it: the United States is able to surpass the Irish at their own game and provide a model of Irishnessand masculinity. Jim Sheridan, in his 1989 film, My Left Foot, takes this idea of stilted Irish masculinity to an even more acute degree in the figures of Christy Brown and his father. Christy suffers from cerebral palsy and only has complete control over his left leg, which he uses to move around. Eventually he will overcome his condition to achieve renown as an artist and author. In the meantime, however, his disability bars him from developing a fully masculine identity. He still participates with his brothers in play (as they push him in a cart) and sport (as he kicks unblockable penalty shots in soccer), so that in the domain of male interaction and camaraderie his masculinity is substantially developedalbeit in unorthodox ways. His condition keeps him from interacting with women in a sufficient way however, and from adolescence to adulthood all of his romantic aspirations are shattered: from his ego-crushing position in spin-the-bottle as the worst possibility for a girl to kiss, to the valentine returned to him by his crush, to Dr. Eileen not returning his romantic affection. His despair comes to a head at the dinner following his first exhibition where he shouts, fuck platonic love! when his feelings for Dr. Eileen are aired but not reciprocated. Similar to how Christy's brothers create an unorthodox space for him to develop that aspect of his masculinity defined by male camaraderie, their mother directs the boys to let their father shine when building Christy's annex. In her telling the boys to let it seem like their father has finished his part of the construction first, she feeds the illusion that he is still the alpha-male of the house. In The Quiet Man, the figure of the wife serves as the feminine presence in relation

Duffy 4 to which masculinity is defined; in My Left Foot, masculinity is further undermined by the wife figure secretly controlling the circumstances that define masculinity. Through the special accommodations made for Christy and his father, masculinity (or the need for it) becomes a weakness to be fed, and the figure of woman (as wife and object of desire) makes the sort of masculinity defined in The Quiet Man impossible to achieve. The underdevelopment of masculinity in My Left Foot reflects the poverty of the social milieu in which Christy Brown grows up. Ireland seemed to be crippled, and Christy's use of only his left foot mirrors the country's severely limited resources and stressed economic situation. Just as Christy is unable to achieve a gratifying sexual relationship with a woman, the Ireland he grew up in was unable to satisfactorily participate in the global economy. Certainly the most complex treatment of masculinity in this course comes from a film not screened during class: Neil Jordans 1992 film The Crying Game. Whereas The Quiet Man and My Left Foot operate within the same system of defining masculinitythe former showing its successful development and the latter its stiltedness, The Crying Game reorganizes this system. The transvestite Dil does not complicate matters as much as might be assumed: though she is sexually male, hers is a female identity against which Jody and Fergus can still distinguish their male identities. It is only when Fergus dresses Dil as Jody, effectively turning her into a man, that the system changes. Suddenly, male-male interaction is no longer limited to the use of traditional male narratives of sport and war (Ayers 332); it encroaches upon male-female interaction by appropriating sexual interaction into its scope. In films prior to The Crying Game, masculinity was inextricably linked to being sexually male just as femininity was linked to being sexually female. Jordans film makes the case for the first time (in this course) that gender identity is a performance: an identity not defined by sexual organs.

Duffy 5 The films political use of masculinity, however, hinges less upon the rules of this new system of gender definition and more upon its break from the old system. Jodys dying wish is that Fergus take care of Dil, and the moment in which Fergus realizes that Dil is sexually male is one of profound discomfort and disillusionment. In this way, Dils secret sexual identity can be seen as a British weapon used against the NRA: Jodys last act of defiance in captivity is the setting of a prolonged trap into which Fergus falls. Interestingly, Fergus continues his relationship with Dil despite this revelation, and in the context of Jodys trap, this persistent relationship with Dil translates to persistent NRA resilience in the face of British opposition. At the heart of the Crying Game lies a discourse on the balancing of public and private relationships, personal desires and public responsibilities. Katherine Ayers analyzes how the film plays with gender in terms of the traditional binaries of public/private life and masculine/feminine identity. According to her, Jude is a private actor in a public world (332). She is a soldier who lets her emotions get a hold of her, a public actor with the private weaknesses of her anger of being sexually rebuffed by Fergus and her almost irrational hatred of Jody (332). Further soldering the corollary between femininity and private life is the fact that when Fergus demands tea for Jody, [Jude] is the one who makes it, along with sandwiches for the men (332). This relation of femininity to private life binds the other feminine character, even though she is sexually male: Dil expresses no political opinions and takes no side in the central political dispute (333). Therefore, even though The Crying Game redefines the system by which masculinity and femininity find definition, these gender identities, once defined, still operate along the lines of the traditional feminine-private/masculine-public corollaries. It is in Pat Murphys Nora (2000) that these traditional private/public binaries will be reevaluated. The home life of James Joyce and Nora Barnacle in the film exhibits a typical

Duffy 6 dynamic for the era. Occupying the public sphere, Joyce works as a teacher of English in Trieste while Nora stays in the private sphere of their apartment tending to young Lucia and Giorgio. Joyces occupation as an English teacher, however, is second to his ambition as a writer, and the type of writing he aims to do involves an upset of this public-private dynamic. His appropriating Noras private and personal story of her young love into The Dead exhibits how his public profession encroaches upon the private sphere of his household until the two spheres are one. This blending of the public and private can be seen as a sort of feminizing for Joyce. He further undermines his own masculinity by trying to establish an affair between Nora and an Italian acquaintance. In another instance of publicizing the private, Joyce confronts this acquaintance on a boardwalk filled with pedestrians, frantically screaming, Did you fuck my wife? Whereas in the model for masculinity set forth by The Quiet Man, in which film Sean Thornton and Mary Kate keep their domestic troubles private to save face, in Nora Joyce publicizes the couples dirty laundry in both literature and companydirty laundry that Joyce himself is responsible for soiling. For Dig OConnell, the political statement implicit in Noras treatment of masculinity is global, not specifically Irish. For her, the film is a sort of revisionist view of history, telling a love story that expresses equality, speaking of gender relations in a positive, progressive, and complex way (125). In her interpretation, the gender equality of twenty-first century criticism is injected into the world of Dubliners in 1904. Though the couple do interact on somewhat equal terms, this interaction is not so much a result of a progressive dynamic in which men and women are equal, but of the old patriarchal binary of private/public, in which Joyces public self invades Noras private space. Thus does Nora illustrate a return to the gender-defining system of The Quiet Man, but Joyces masculinity is as impaired as Christy Browns in My Left Foot. Unlike

Duffy 7 Christy who is emasculated by his being barred by sexual activity, Joyce is emasculated through his (imagined) cuckoldry and public embarrassment. In What Richard Did (2012), Lenny Abrahamson offers a portrait of a male in both the public and private spheres, with the important distinction that the two do not blend, contrary to Nora and much like The Quiet Man. The portion of the film before Conors death establishes Richards masculinity in the same way that The Quiet Man establishes Sean Thorntons. He is an alpha-male figure, a charming, attractive rugby player whom his male companions idolize and to whom his female companions seem to be attracted. His interactions with men are incredibly complex, however, to the point of entering almost emasculating territory. In one scene, at night after a day of drinking, he leads a conversation with his male friends asking, Have you ever noticed that guys seem to want to get it on with each other? He quickly saves face by saying he is not a homosexual and would only bring up such an issue around close friends. In this way, Richard shows that private, masculine discourse can broach topics considered conventionally taboo for masculine settingsbut that the masculine bond makes this sort of unconventionality possible without judgment. In his interactions with his girlfriend Lara, the audience sees an intensely sensitive aspect of Richard that was absent in his interactions with men: we learn of his childhood and his insecurities as he reveals them to Lara. In this way, What Richard Did operates within similar gender norms as The Quiet Man: masculinity is defined by a mans interactions with both men and women. However, the film offers an important distinction from Fords film in that the scope of these interactions is widely amplified to include topics that, in a system like the one in The Quiet Man, could be considered emasculating.

Duffy 8 The unexpected turn that Richards life takes after his actions lead to Conors death mirror, according to Trevor Johnston, Irelands economic fallout after the boom of the Celtic Tiger. The party is definitely over, he says, and as responsibility dawns, the narrative of the film seemingly [echoes] the country's own cold-light-of-day experience in recent years (47). Richard, however, like the Irish economy, is resilient. After his friends abandon him, he finds a circle of acquaintances for which he can serve as the alpha-male: Jackson and his friends, all about three years Richards junior. Bringing them beer, dazzling them with conversation, and sleeping with the girl on whom Jackson has a crush, he is more of an idol for them than an active participant. The end of the film shows Richards abandoning this last-ditch effort to reclaim his alpha-male status and accepting his new position in life. Just as Ireland came to accept its new economic situation, Richard moves on with his life, still having Lara with whom to spend his time, against whose femininity he can establish his masculinity. The arc described by masculinitys shifting definitions throughout the five films discussed in this essay should not be seen as regressive: after all, though bending back to a similar foundation after curving away from it, an arcs line moves forward. Though What Richard Did operates within a similar gender-defining system as The Quiet Man, there is much more flexibility for what can be considered masculine and feminine. Besides, the confusing alternative of The Crying Game is hardly better: in its abolishing the distinction between sexual and gender identity, it still relegates femininity to the private sphere. Though What Richard Did only offers a glimpse into the male world, the women of the film are not relegated to the private sphere: they are presented the same opportunities for education and careers. Both males and females in the film interact differently in their respective private and public spheres, but both are free to move between either. Ultimately, masculinity is still defined through mens interaction

Duffy 9 with both men and women, but it is no longer a dominating force that keeps women silently restricted to home life like in The Quiet Man. As Irish film continues to explore how masculinity is definedand how this is reflected on the social and political scaleone thing is certain: it is a vital topic. Its definition is always in flux and its discussion will continue to inform how the Irish view themselves as individuals and as a nation.

Duffy 10 Works Cited Ayers, M. Katherine. The Only Good woman, Isn't a Woman at all: The Crying Game and the Politics of Misogyny. Womens Studies International Forum 20.2 (1997): 329335. Elsevier Science Ltd. Web. 8 July 2013. Johnston, Trevor. "Boom And Bust." Sight & Sound 23.2 (2013): 46-48. International Bibliography of Theatre & Dance with Full Text. Web. 9 July 2013. McLoone, Martin. Irish Film: The Emergence of a Contemporary Cinema. London: British Film Institute, 2006. OConnell, Dig. A Modern Love Story Nora. New Irish Storytellers: Narrative Strategies in Film:114-137. Intellect Bristol, UK, 2010.