The Banshees of Inisherin

By Marcus Holmes | January 26, 2023

I think Ernest Becker’s thesis on the psychology of Man, compellingly argued in his The Denial of Death (and other texts), offers a good interpretation of this film. To paraphrase Becker, his thesis is that our hyper-awareness of our mortal condition fills us with dread, and so we neurotically deny it, not merely death, but the futility of life as well. Unlike the other animals, our mortal peril is something we consciously or unconsciously meditate obsessionally about, and though we have evolved elaborate faiths about morality and purpose and life after death, maintaining these self-protective illusions is difficult in the face of constant assault by the real world.

Even those who have abandoned religion still deny death—which is to say they deny the brutal conditions and pointlessness that all biology is heir to—by finding refuge in some other mode of denial, what Becker called a “hero project”. These culturally-based self-esteem projects, religious or secular, provide for a defiant creation of meaning and a living myth of the significance of human life, despite all evidence to the contrary among the animal kingdom.

The artist and atheist and scientist and mother, Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy, are all in denial of death in the sense that they seek refuge in their cultural project of choice. Becker (drawing mainly from Otto Rank) argues that Man’s tragedy is A, that we cannot function without our illusions and B, that our illusions are never entirely convincing.

This state of anxiety about death and the pointlessness of life is precisely the condition of mind that the character Colm evinces when he laments to Padraic that his time is running out, and that he like everybody else shall soon be forgotten. Thus his desperation to produce music and be remembered like Mozart etc. is his “immortality project”.

I have to say I can relate to Colm’s wanting to waste no more time in idle conversation with Padraic who, though “nice”, is remarkably boring, his own sense of purpose founded in an overweening love for his sister, his friend, and his donkey, with the occasional bout of heavy drinking to palliate his insecurities.

Padraic is content, more or less, so long as these living “props” continue to reassure him, but Colm and his sister need more, and they both finally abandon him, as does Dominic—brilliantly acted by Barry Keoghan — who kills himself upon learning that there’s no hope for such a misfit as he with Siobhan. Even the Donkey dies absurdly and Padraic’s illusions are shattered.

Siobhan is suffering within the same malaise of self-doubt as Colm. She finally sees her life with her brother as a tedious resignation and failure, illustrated by her angry outbursts at perceived stupidity. Padraic allowing animals into her tidy little house is symbolic of her own illusion of being above the beasts. Siobhan keeps herself and her house in wonderful trim, informs her mind with reading, and is intolerant of any nonsense or disorder. Order is her mainstay, but Colm’s pleas for peace and threats of self-mutilation, and his actions, shake her out of her contentedness. Just as the strife continues on the mainland she realizes she must make more of her life, find meaning in something more durable.

The absurdist theme is pointed-up everywhere. What did Dominic do to deserve his impairment? His obscene father—and no mother’s love? His ultimately friendless and loveless condition and his final existential crisis? It’s all just the indifferent hand he was dealt, that he tried desperately to make a fist of.

Paradoxically, though Colm is obsessed with producing something immortal, he says it’s a relief once all his fingers are severed—even his apparent numbness/indifference to the pain is absurd—releasing him from the compulsion to deny death/secure immortality. Thus the black-comic scene of him carousing finger-less in the pub with his band of horrified musicians. He’s free to just make merry, live in the moment for a moment, accept his mortality. Though of course his/our dark presentiments always return.

Now finger-less his hero project is impossible, and so he can accept death, or be indifferent to it. And yet, as when he leaves the burning building, like the rest of us self-preservation gets the better of him. It’s absurd! We spend our lives denying death—via one cultural prop/obsession or another, or constant diversion, only to be regularly confounded in our illusions of meaning and confronted by it ever anon. We can only keep running away from the knowledge of our mortality/futility, Like Siobhan does, until it eventually catches up with us and thwarts our illusions again.

As Colm looks out to sea beyond the breakers, and we wonder if he’ll stride on in to drown, I couldn’t help thinking of Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach, indeed the whole film could be said to illustrate Arnold’s themes. The last two stanzas peculiarly so:

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

But lest we get lost in the sublimations of poetry ’tis best, sure ’tis, to add that Colm’s bleeding stumps, in all their gory strata of marrow, bone, flesh and blood, uncensored – why should they be? We’re bags of blood and guts after all. Nothing sublime ­­– are a carnal reminder of REALITY.

It’s a hell of a film!

Marcus Russell Holmes was born in London in 1960 and migrated to Australia with his parents in 1970. He is self-employed in the service industry. He completed his doctoral studies 10 years ago in English Lit. combined with Cultural studies/theory. He is married with 5 children, and has in recent years embraced pessimistic realism as his guiding philosophy. Ernest Becker continues to be influential in his thinking, along with several others.