More Thoughts On Friendship, From the Isle of Inisherin

 

Last night I got around to watching the critically acclaimed dark comedy The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) with Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson. The synopsis is rather easy to relay and develops quickly straight out of gate: Pádraic and Colm are long time friends living in a village on a remote island off the mainland coast of 1920's Ireland. One day Colm decides he doesn't want to be friends with Pádraic anymore. When the stunned Pádraic asks why, Colm informs him it's because he is dull and he wants to spend his remaining years composing and playing music rather than engaging in the inane pub chatter that has composed their friendship til this point. Pádraic has trouble accepting this sudden "divorce" and Colm feels forced to take drastic measures to make it clear he wants nothing to do with Pádraic anymore: every time Pádraic attempts to talk to him, Colm will cut off one of his fingers (which, for an accomplished string musician, should indicate that he means business). What ensues is a string of escalating and tragic Quixotic events which leaves one eventually wondering "How did we get to this point?"

We don't know much about the friendship of the two prior to Colm's declaration of independence, but I found myself straddling the fence of sympathy for both characters in the aftermath: for Colm, because I don't blame him for his desire to live in silence and preserve his peace; and also for Pádraic who sees himself as a "nice" guy whose small world has just been turned upside down by his former friend. Pádraic hasn't done anything wrong; Colm has simply changed. And so there is an ideological war raging behind the character front between the opposing forces of "being nice" and "telling the truth." And because of the interdependent ecosystem of the small remote village, the social ripples emanating forth from this parting is not as without consequence as it may be in, say, a large city or other impersonal setting.  

When I was compiling the chapters for my book, Wisdom and Folly, I led off with a chapter of essays on the topic of friendship. I thought that was curious, amidst weightier topics like Faith, Prayer, Discipleship, Marriage, and Manhood. Why friendship? Maybe it is because friendship is a curious thing. In the case of Pádraic and Colm, it takes the guise of a kind of long-standing, yet non-contractual marriage in which one person can one day say "I just don't like you anymore" and walk away from it. It can hurt just as much as a marriage partner abandoning their vows, but on the face of it, friendship is not a marriage. There is no intentionality about it, but a kind of "social slide" of unspoken assumptions into a partnership of utility. And since this is what most modern friendships are founded upon (the basest level of relationship, according to the philosophers), when it no longer suits us or starts to cramp the life we envision for ourselves, we are free to leave it.  The way Colm did this in The Banshees of Inisherin is actually more admirable because he was honest and forthright, preferring to rip off the bandaid in one swoop rather than lead Pádraic on. Today Pádraic would have most likely just been ghosted via text.

The reaction of Pádraic to Colm's "breakup" with him is equal parts sad and cringe. Pádraic is incredulous to the fact that someone might find it tiresome to keep company with him and engaged in the most mundane of superfluous small talk, as if there might be more to life (as Colm does). He's a simple and nice guy, content with the smallness of his world and whose needs were being met as long as Colm played the part assigned in their friendship. As if this wasn't bad enough, he simply cannot accept Colm's proposition and reacts in a spirit of possessive, shallow narcissism.

The shadow around the corner, however, is that we know many marriages like the friendship between Pádraic and Colm--long standing marriages that lay roots for years and years in a particular time and place, ensconced in a community of friends and neighbors, yet one that may not have been founded on anything particularly meaningful. These could be marriages of convenience or of opportunity, or of mutual interest (running clubs, workplaces, pubs, etc).  The difference is, however, one cannot (or at least is not supposed to) walk so easily away from this legal and sacramental contract that knits two pieces of flesh into one garment. One falls in love and then makes a willful choice--to have and to hold, for better or worse, richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and cherish, til death do you part. The contract is ratified, with one's solemn word, as well as legally and sacramentally. And yet how many of us have known someone who woke up and suddenly thought to themselves about their partners "I just don't love you no more" and seek to dissolve the bonds of the one's solemn word.

In the case of friendship, while a rare friendship goes beyond purposes of utility and has a mutual agape at its core, there is still the matter of like. Liking another person is a tenuous thing; for liking is unlike loving in that loving is an act of the will. One cannot will themselves to like another person. Where, then, does it rest if not in the will? And if one does not like the person they are bound to in friendship, why then would they choose to stay bound thus? They are under no contract to do so. In many ways, it is almost easier to love a person than to like them, for at least one can love against their will and one is forced to work through the barriers to love by way of the vows undertaken. No such contract exists in a friendship. 

The narcissism I noticed in Pádraic is the same narcissism I notice in myself. Rather than honoring Colm's request to leave him alone (essentially "letting him go"), and not taking it personally, he filters everything about the friendship in terms of how it relates to him. What did I do? WTH is wrong with him? Not being liked was a fate worse than death for the town "nice guy." He becomes depressed, spiteful and envious of Colm's music students that come to learn from him (rather than experiencing joy for a man finding meaning and purpose for his life). He even makes friends with the local idiot savant, Dominic, because unlike Colm, Pádraic cannot stand to be alone. The film in this sense is kind of a melding of social-existential and absurdist themes: one would rather burn a man's house down or dismember their hand then put a feud to rest. Perhaps this is the stubborn Irish-ness that is not in my blood. But it does lend itself to a kind of artistic Dadaism that seems to work for the purposes of the film.

But I also notice in Colm aspects of myself as well--the weariness with which I found myself, for years, having endured the superficial pub talk of nonsense and in the process feeling like I was betraying something of myself but too weak to walk away from such friendships. I was being used, and I used. Perhaps I did not know that I longed for something my friends could not provide me, something like an aquifer that flowed for years beneath the crust of my soul, until one day you wake up to--the day your friends all become strangers. You want to love with an agape love, but you realize how self-centered you are and you don't know how. You want more from a friendship, but realize no one has the time. You want to stay the course while recognizing that friendship is always conditional.

It seems like such a far cry from the concept of friendship as Jesus Christ imagined it--a man willing to lay down his life for his friends, friends who turned on him and ran away and left him during his time of need but those same friends he himself never abandoned. He loved them with a love that was not fickle, and hand-chose them for a privileged place in his life. He not only loved them--he liked them too. He prepared a place for them in his eternal home. He poured out his last ounces of love for them from the cross. He judged no one, and made time for everyone. 

One thing we lack today that the characters in The Banshees of Inisherin just took for granted was that village community in which people were knit together at the local level. For some (like Pádraic's sister, Shioban, who flees for the  mainland), the small-mindedness of such insular, inter-dependent communities can be insufferable. 

But I think we are suffering from a worse, more disconnected fate in the modern "social" media era, where we are maintain complete control and autonomy, choosing when and how we respond to someone, hiding behind avatars and monikers, indentured to no man, offering up cheap prayers and hollow consolations because they don't cost us anything, don't mean anything, relationships we can seamlessly step back from with no consequence and no follow up. I don't know which world would be harder to live in. This side of heaven, it all leaves a God-shaped hole.