Films of Neil Jordan

“Two Films of Neil Jordan – in an Irish context”, published in Through a Catholic Lens, ed. Peter Malone, Sheed and Ward, Lanham, 2007, 25-32.

Michael Paul Gallagher SJ

“Ireland has changed so much”. Such a refrain is heard in many circles and with varying tones. It can be an expression of surprise, voiced, for example, by visitors returning after a number of years and struck by the visibility of new wealth and its attendant life-styles. It may be a statement of worry, possibly on middle-aged lips, implying that older values are in danger of being lost through the sheer speed of change. Or it can be a cry of victory, by those who fought for new approaches on various fronts and who are delighted to say goodbye to previously dominant assumptions. Among those in the latter category one can include many writers and artists of the generation to which Neil Jordan belongs.

Neil Jordan is undoubtedly Ireland’s best-known film director, even though he is rivalled by some of his near contemporaries such as Jim Sheridan or Peter Sheridan or Gerry Stembridge. As it happens all of these were students of mine in the English Department of University College, Dublin, and at that stage they were already leaders in the field of theatre. I recall being shown one of Neil’s earliest stories when he was about nineteen, and even then he was exploring zones of ambivalence and how these were regarded with hostility and prejudice from the perspective of the “normal” world.

Two cultural revolutions

It is important to situate this group of film-makers and their companion novelists, such as Joseph O’Connor, Roddy Doyle, Aidan Mathews, Colm Toibin, Emma Donoghue and Niall Williams among others, as part of an unusual explosion of talent in the relatively small world that is Ireland. (In fact all of those mentioned studied in that same English department, though not at the same time). Having known most of them personally, my own over-simple comment would be that they were born in the old culture and spent their childhood in a highly traditional Catholic Ireland. Then came the first cultural revolution of the seventies when many of these were students and it was a time of exciting awakening for them. This was a period when a creative minority was forging new horizons. I recall a Jim Sheridan production of Oedipus Rex in the old aula magna of Newman House, where the audience had to climb up on uncomfortable scaffolding and act the role of the citizens, except that the city was not Thebes but Derry: these were the early years of the Northern troubles, the time of Bloody Sunday, and also the South experienced a new drive for liberation from old moulds.

Pushing this insight further, Albert Camus once wrote that people write tragedy when they are changing their gods. This new generation of Irish artistic talent had all experienced “on their own skin” (as they say in Italian) the shift from one Ireland to another. It was a time of anger and of critique of all authorities, including of course the Catholic Church. Many of this creative galaxy now look back on their Catholic upbringing with more nostalgia than bitterness. It had its securities in spite of all the narrowness, a theme evoked in Seamus Heaney’s poem “In Illo Tempore”. (Of course Heaney belong to an older generation than any of those mentioned here). As Jordan himself has said in an interview with Adrian Wootton, it was easy to abandon the outer aspects of a religion learned as a child, but “they never leave your sensibility”. Even though I have lost contact with Neil in the last decade or so (because I now live in Rome), I was reliably informed that he was delighted to know that a priest in Dublin commented positively on The Crying Game as part of his Sunday sermon. He is also on record as saying that although he does not count himself as a believer, he actually likes churches. Concerning The End of the Affair Jordan quipped that “I’m not as tortured about religion as Greene” but that he wanted to confront something that could not be explained. Again, he would surely have been pleased that this film was listed among the best ten of 1999 by the U. S. Catholic Bishops’ Conference.

Before coming to discuss two of Jordan’s films from a somewhat religious perspective, one has to mention Ireland’s second cultural revolution, which happened in the nineties. These were years of much more visible change than in the seventies. Newspaper headlines can sum up the main strands: “Celtic Tiger” (unprecedented economic success, now in some decline); “Artistic Renaissance” (the emergence of that new generation to international success, including U2 and other musical names); “Church disgraced” (from the point of view of the Catholic Church these have been terrible years, mainly on account of the scandals of sexual abuse among clergy). In short, within the last decade the Catholic strand in Irish life entered an unforeseen desolation, whereas creative and economic Ireland was experiencing an equally unexpected boom.

This more recent wave of cultural change certainly affects that generation of creative artists now largely in their forties or early fifties. Jordan was born in 1950. But I would argue that the main forces shaping their imagination came earlier. The exploratory and rebellious sensibility of a Neil Jordan is testimony to a transition from one world to another. Indeed, as I want to propose here, a recurring and central concern in his work is with frontiers of strangeness. Tolkien once remarked that he wanted to retrieve an “arresting strangeness” that seemed lost or suppressed in modern culture. Jordan’s focus is more on a disturbing and entangling strangeness. He wants his audiences to be drawn beyond safe normality and to encounter something of the fear and the attraction of the unfamiliar.

Film as audience rhetoric

In this light I want to argue that religious commentary on film is often blind in one eye. It sees mainly the content of the story and tends to undervalue the process of the viewer’s experience. I am not saying that Jordan is didactic or anything of a preacher, but I am proposing that he wants his audience to undergo a conversion of consciousness. Moreover, if we focus on the aesthetic experience of the spectator rather than on the surface plot or technical structure of the work, it is easier to discover in Jordan’s work hints of a concern with religious frontiers.

Perhaps one of the principal differences between commercial films and what we can call quality films lies precisely in this area. The typical commercial product has no ambition to transform the spectator’s horizon except during the fleeting hour or two of attention to the screen. An action movie offers temporary excitement but few lasting fruits. An art movie aims higher, seeking in various ways the transformation of the viewer’s perspective. Indeed the poverty of much commercial cinema often lies in its cowardice to challenge the prejudices of the viewer. It simply reinforces the typical assumptions and priorities of their culture rather than enlarging into new territory. However, Jordan’s films have the courage to challenge spectators to transcend their cultural blinkers and to lead them into regions of wonder and surprise beyond routine judgements. To repeat, I make this suggestion, not concentrating on the content, but from the more subtle point of view of “response criticism” (Recepzionskritik). Perhaps we can best discern the spiritual value of cinema through this emphasis on process rather than by attending to surface plot.

Companion Films of 1991-1992

To come more specifically to two of Jordan’s films, I want to present him as a rhetorician of cinema, persuading his audience to cross thresholds of sympathy into worlds that initially seem alienating and incredible. He has directed thirteen films since Angel in 1982. For this short essay I want to focus on two films that come from the years 1991-1992, sixth and seventh in his career. The first, entitled The Miracle is not well known and yet it was said to be Jordan’s own favourite film. It is an attractively playful story set in his own home town of Bray (near Dublin) where he grew up, although he was born in my home town of Sligo. It concerns two teenagers, Rose and Jimmy, who walk around inventing stories about the hidden lives of the people they see around them. Then at a certain stage fantasy becomes painful and complex reality when a tourist woman, whom they decide is a French film star and about whom Jimmy entertains romantic hopes, turns out to me the boy’s real mother. This is one of the many twists in the tale, but in Jordan there is always another level of mystery. As the title indicates he also wants to evoke quasi-religious horizons. A crucial scene at the end of the film finds the boy praying in church for a sign from God and a comic miracle happens: all the circus animals are liberated to wander around the town. Leaving aside many details, my purpose, as already mentioned, is to stress that the film rhetoric of Jordan is one of conversion of horizon in his spectators. There are surprises not only of plot but of wavelength of communication and hence what I am calling the rhetoric, or persuasive impact of the film on its receivers, leads its audience away from predictable levels of consciousness to a sense of wonder and of cultural otherness quite rare in contemporary cinema, but which is one of the hallmark’s of Jordan’s work. If this expansion of consciousness is gentle and attractive in The Miracle, some years later it was to be more violent and agonizing in The Butcher Boy. Even here Jordan works something of a rhetorical miracle, in retaining empathy for the boy in the midst of his appalling revenge on the world.

The Crying Game is also a film of surprises (one of which concerning gender identity, was initially kept secret at the request of the distributors). It received six nominations for Oscars and was awarded one for best screenplay. The film critic Roger Ebert has introduced it in these words: “Some movies keep you guessing. Some movies make you care. Once in a long while a movie comes along that does both things at the same time. … Jordan’s wonderful film involves us deeply in its story, and then it reveals that the story is really about something else altogether. . . we have to follow [the central character] through a crisis of the heart but the journey is worth it”.

What are the areas where this film leads its audience into what D. H. Lawrence would call new fields of “sympathetic consciousness”? It tackles two of the most predictable themes of cinema – violence and sexuality – and it succeeds in surprising its audience, leading them beyond their expectations in both areas. It does not simply tell a story: it involves a process whereby the viewer is invited into what we can call transcendence. A double transcendence in fact. The film starts with the kidnap of a black soldier, serving with the British Army, in the North of Ireland. He is held by the IRA to force the authorities to release one of their leaders. If not, he will be shot within three days. Neil Jordan relishes in tempting the viewer to think that this is a normal action movie. Initially it has all the rhythm of a political thriller, with elements of danger and violence. But a strange friendship is born between Fergus, one of the IRA guards and Jody, the captured British soldier. On at least three occasions during this initial part of the film the strategy of music signals to the audience that there is a change of wavelength happening here.

This film has two main movements. The first undermines, even deconstructs, expectations of political violence in order to establish a human friendship that transcends differences – differences between Irish and English, between white and black, between terrorist guard and imprisoned enemy. The second part repeats this transformation of sympathy in the field of sexuality. Once again the challenge to the previous horizons of Fergus is experienced by the audience as an expansion of its own “sympathetic consciousness”. An initially physical attraction with Dil, the dead “soldier’s wife” (that was the original title) runs into surprises and ambiguities that force both protagonists and audience towards “a metamorphosis of eros”.

With great delicacy Jordan creates this second story of conflict where Fergus learns another level of love that goes beyond predictable physical expressions. In this way the audience undergoes two conversions of horizon. The first part undermines the conventional political film of violence. The second part repeats this process in the field of sexual assumptions. Jordan himself commented that The Crying Game was mainly a love story but one that delved into political, sexual and racial paradoxes. In a quietly post-modern way he offered his audience the challenge of recognising and accepting diversity.

Christian echoes

In order to support the interpretative emphasis I am suggesting, let me look at a two significant moments in the film. In the first part when Jody the black soldier is a prisoner of the IRA and when Fergus is his guard, as already mentioned a surprising friendship develops between them. At a crucial moment in their conversation the soldier narrates a parable (which, I am told, was used by Orson Welles in his 1955 film called “Mr Ardakin”). The story goes as follows, as told by Jody from under his hood:

Scorpion wants to cross a river, but he can't swim. Goes to the frog, who can, and asks for a ride. Frog says, "If I give you a ride on my back, you'll go and sting me." Scorpion replies, "It would not be in my interest to sting you since as I'll be on your back we both would

drown." Frog thinks about this logic for a while and accepts the deal. Takes the scorpion on his back. Braves the waters. Halfway over feels a burning spear in his side and realizes the scorpion has stung him after all. And as they both sink beneath the waves the frog cries out, "Why did you sting me, Mr. Scorpion, for now we both will drown?" Scorpion replies, "I can't help it, it's in my nature."

It seems obvious that the whole of the film is designed to undermine the fatalism of this parable. The rest of the action evokes an alternative faith, where transformation is possible, and where Fergus (and the audience) can be drawn beyond prisons of prejudice - imaginatively but concretely. A final confirmation of this comes in the closing moments of the film when Fergus is himself a prisoner in a British jail, in fact by his own choice doing time for a killing actually carried out by Dil. By so doing he has also saved Dil from suicide. In terms of the parable the “nature” of the terrorist has undergone more than one conversion and experienced more than one version of redemption. The crowning moment comes when Dil (whom we of course now know to be male) arrives to visit, dressed to kill, one might say, in a leather mini coat and sporting large earrings. In a tone of tenderness Dil says “You're doing time for me. No greater love, as the man says. Wish you'd tell me why”. And Fergus replies enigmatically “As the man said, it's in my nature”. When Dil asks what that means, Fergus begins to retell Jody’s story of the scorpion but the camera retreats, the music increases (in fact Lyle Lovett singing “Stand by Your Man”) and thus the film ends.

The casual reference to the New Testament in the words “No greater love” is not the only one in the course of the film. In the first part Jody at one stage has been crying under his hood and asks Fergus to tell him a story, any story, something like the scorpion one. With the underlining music in the background, Fergus begins “When I was a child”, which seems like the perfect opening for a story. However he continues “I thought as a child. But when I became a man I put away childish things”. Jody interrupts with “What does that mean?” and Fergus replies “Nothing”. Are we to interpret this as a moment of emptiness, where the old language of St Paul on love has collapsed into a rootless echo? Or in the wider perspective of hope that is the thrust of this movie, can we not see here again a core vision of Christianity as religiously faded but humanly alive? Once again the fragment of a story recounted my Fergus is destined to be transformed by the emotional rhetoric of the film as a whole. His helpless “nothing” is not the note on which The Crying Game closes. The whole dynamic of its plot has incarnated, however shyly or ironically or humanistically, something of Christian conversion towards the self-giving called agape.

It is striking that in a highly professional study of the film written by Jane Giles and published by the British Film Institute, it is argued that “The Crying Game is the story of the redemption of its protagonist”. It would clearly be wrong to claim that it is a religious film in the normal or explicit sense of that term. However, as Karl Rahner insisted on more than one occasion, even an image that does not have a specifically religious theme can be a religious image through its “sensory experience of transcendence”. Perhaps Jordan himself was not far from the same intuition when in his Oscar-acceptance speech he commented: “the way audiences have responded to this film has taught me that they have it in their hearts to embrace any range of characters and any range of points of view”.

P. S. In a conversation with Richard Kearney Jordan described his fiction as “an escape to an alternative landscape” and his films as being “faithful to the no-place (u-topos) in us all”.