문학과 영상 2018 봄

Love in the Time of the Troubles: The Cultural Politics of Tragic Form in Northern Irish Cinema*1)

Lee, Hyungseob / Hanyang University

In her introduction to the Oxford edition of Romeo and Juliet, Jill L. Levenson offers three “angles” from which to view the perennially popular play. At one level, it is a play that “dramatize[s] a love-story that transcends time and place”; at another, modern psychology has enabled us to see “Shakespeare trac[ing] paradigm of adolescent behavior”; yet at another level, it is “a tragedy [that] enacts a love-story shaped by the social and literary conventions of late sixteenth-century

* This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government [NRF-2008-361-A00005].

Love in the Time of the Troubles / Lee, Hyungseob 125 England” (1). Philosophy, history and psychology vie one another for the interpretive prerogative. Shakespeare’s play is a universal paean of love in tragic form, a thwarted Bildungsdrama or an ingenious representation of, and response to, political situations of its own time thinly disguised as a youthful romance. Romeo and Juliet can endure all these interpretations and more, we are led to believe. What goes often unnoticed or submerged in the overflow of the two young lovers’ concurrent romantic self-aggrandizement and self-effacement is the fact that violence pervades the whole play. Swordsmen, militia, gangsters, medieval versions of rednecks and bitniks—whatever you call them, they are the ones who people the city of Verona, and intimations of violence are everywhere. Thanks to cinematic adaptations such as West Side Story (1961) and William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet (1996), we become keenly aware of the violent atmosphere of Shakespeare’s play in which two warring families or tribes have been at loggerheads for a long time. With the “ancient grudge” turning into a “new mutiny,” as Chorus tells us, we see a “pair of star-crossed lovers take their life.” How long has this enmity been going on? What is the origin and nature of the ancient grudge?—Shakespeare does not tell us. But we know that the feud between the Montagues and the Capulets that Shakespeare dramatizes is historically rooted: the Montecchi were supporters of the Holy Roman Emperor and the Cappelletti were followers of the Pope in Rome. Dante refers to these two ancient families as prime examples of civil strife any prince should be mindful of (Weis 43-44). The political conflict between the secular regime and the religious power at a critical historical juncture is an unsung backdrop against which the two innocent teenagers dream their rosy

126 future together. This hidden, bigger picture may help us better understand Shakespeare’s artistic agenda (which is not our immediate concern here). On the narrative terrain of the play, certain ramifications of the deaths of the lovers need to be considered: Romeo and Juliet being the only child of each family, what does the belated reconciliation mean really for the future of the two families? Perhaps with the grudge being ancient and no commemoration of the origin of the inter-familial feud practiced and ritualized, the rampant violence we witness in the play has become habituated and internalized: the violence may have become less political than atavistic. Is European politics implicated in the perpetuation of the tribal feud and atavistic violence of Verona? Will Prince Escalus, the governor of Verona, be able to enforce a fair distribution of justice when he has been incapable of policing the situation and when he has lost his own kinsman, Paris, by the sword of Romeo, a fair Montague? This paper discusses the tragic narratives adopted by the films that depict the conflict known as the Troubles. It focuses, in particular, on those films that take the form of romantic tragedy with the love-across-the divide structure. A major question concerns tragedy’s ahistorical and depoliticizing tendency and its adequacy for cultural representations of the Troubles. By organizing itself tightly in terms of individual actions and their fateful consequences without the full knowledge of those forces (whether divine, natural or political) working outside and beyond their control, does tragedy place moral weight and responsibility ultimately on its heroes? The paper begins with a brief discussion of the formal and narrative constraints that tragedy innately possesses that may debilitate the social and political contextualization of the tragic hero’s action. It moves on to identify

Love in the Time of the Troubles / Lee, Hyungseob 127 certain tropes and schemes in the Troubles-related films, with special consideration of the “love-across-the divide” films. By shifting the emphasis away from its eponymous lovers and focusing on the political and historical contours under which this “little” tragedy unfolds, the tragic narrative of Romeo and Juliet can serve as a useful conduit to help understand the complex cultural politics of the Troubles-related films in both their shortcomings and possibilities.

I. The Individual and Society in Tragic Form

Classical tragedy develops and envelops a curious narrative of the individual’s downfall in which the attainment of self-knowledge is so crucial and yet so inessential as to question its rightful status in the overall dramatic structure. George Steiner points to this paradox when he writes:

Tragedy would have us know that there is in the very fact of human existence a provocation or paradox; it tells us that the purposes of men sometimes run against the grain of inexplicable and destructive forces that lie “outside” yet very close. To ask of the gods why Oedipus should have been chosen for his agony . . . is to ask for reason and justification from the voiceless night. There is no answer. (128-29)

The audiences as well as the tragic hero come to realize the moral weight and consequences of his action, but they are not gifted with any knowledge of those forces that implicate the hero in the tragic situation in the first place. Despite the propulsive force of the hero’s recognition of his or her “tragic flaws,” tragedy leaves us with the ultimate

128 inexplicability of the tragic milieu and causes. The terror that Aristotle posits at the center of his discussion of tragedy consists precisely in the horrifying fact that the downfall is always already predetermined by the forces beyond the confine of human agency. Tragic form dramatizes the individual hero’s acceptance of their downfall with the painful recognition of their flaws. It is also characterized by its narrative closure which aims at recovering the socio-political order which the tragic drama unfolds in and threatens to disrupt. Tragedy also imparts the sense of inevitability and finality to the audience. In Aristotle’s tri-partite conception of tragedy, dramatic resolution or narrative closure is absolutely necessary in order to produce the ultimate effect of catharsis. It is difficult to tell whether the cathartic state the Greek philosopher had in mind is psychological, emotive or intellectual. Moreover, nowhere in Aristotle’s Poetics do we find the intrinsic connection established and assured between the telos of action and the dramatic effect of catharsis. When action is exhausted in catastrophe, the audience may well be left with a sense of resignation instead of moral boost, with forlorn deprivation instead of spiritual transfiguration. In our mind’s picture, the bigger social world is zoomed out and the individual fills up the frame. The world experienced through tragedy may become all the poorer. Aristotle’s analysis of tragedy is specifically calibrated to the Attic tragedy of Sophocles. This has led some critics to argue that tragedy is ill-equipped to capture the vertiginous complexity of the modern world or, more to the point, the modern life is unfit for the lofty grandeur that tragedy offers. To give a couple of examples, George Steiner’s well-known theorization highlights the incongruity between tragic form and modern sensibilities (thus the “death of tragedy”) and John von Szelski attributes the “failure of modern tragic drama” to the

Love in the Time of the Troubles / Lee, Hyungseob 129 ill-founded confusion of tragedy with sheer pessimism.1) Like all art forms, tragedy has gone through various transmogrifications and permutations to accommodate to changes in socio-cultural conditions. When the generic base changes from tragic drama to the cinema, further accommodations have been necessary. The cinema is more inclusive and flexible in its narrative layers and other constitutive elements than tragic drama, with its economy of action that eschews elaborate characterization and visual mapping of surrounding landscapes, allows for. With that in mind, four kinds of tragic narrative have been identified as particularly adaptable to the Northern Irish situation: “revenge, romantic, and domestic tragedy, as well as versions of classical Greek tragedy” (Cleary, “Domestic Troubles” 503). Romantic tragedy is more expansive than the original form in the sense that it introduces a pair of individuals instead of a singular hero and therefore two social forces at loggerheads. It also advances on classical tragedy in that the tragic narrative is built on the conscious inclusion of the social forces that lurk behind the lovers and stand in their way. The families (or tribes) are constructed as adversarial forces, and the lovers experience the domestic sphere as a confined and oppressive space. Thus it opens up possibilities for investigating the nature of larger forces. In other words, romantic tragedy can lead us to an awareness, if not a critical understanding, of its social and political contexts.

1) Szeliski attributes “the most crucial failure of modern tragic art” to “its unprecedented insistence on a terrified, wailing, pessimistic view of existence” (3).

130 II. Gangsters & Psychopaths, Avengers & Penitents

The Troubled-related films have often tried to lure audiences by shutting out much of the larger social world and being awash with the morbid obsession of the public with violence. Indeed, much of Anglo-American representation of the Troubles is purely exploitative. Targeting in main the Irish American population whose constituency is largely sympathetic to the Republican cause, Hollywood has kept pouring out ostensibly Troubles-themed films that feature a glamorized version of the fallen hero by mobilizing the star power of Mickey Rourke, Jeff Bridges, Brad Pitt and Harrison Ford. A Prayer for the Dying is a 1987 thriller about a former IRA member trying to escape his past. The film, directed by Mike Hodges, stars Mickey Rourke, Liam Neeson, , and Alan Bates. Based on the Jack Higgins novel of the same title, the film tells a story of an ex-IRA man, Martin Fallon (played by Rourke), who tries to sever his ties with the paramilitary organization and his own violent past. Saving a priest and his blind niece from the London-based Northern Irish gangster with IRA connections, Fallon confesses his past to the priest, who grants him absolution, and dies in peace. Brimming with stereotypes and clich éd dialogues, the film skirts around the complex fabric of Northern Irish politics, fabricating a pseudo-humanist narrative. In A Prayer for the Dying, a journey is taken by the protagonist who moves from Northern Ireland to London, a spatial movement that is recurrently used in many films. London is afflicted with violence as much as , but violence is not internally created: it emanates from the Irish contingent in London. In The Long Good Friday (1980), the British film made at the height of the Northern Ireland conflict, Harold Shand (played by Bob Hoskins) is the ruling kingpin of the London

Love in the Time of the Troubles / Lee, Hyungseob 131 underworld who double-crosses the IRA and is kidnapped for an inevitable execution. The IRA is portrayed in this film as the omnipotent power beyond the human realm and as the evil incarnate heralding the tragic fate. The infiltration of the Northern Irish rebels into the capital of British imperialism also sets off the narrative of ’s (1992). The film is arguably the most well-known and well-received of all Troubles-related films, thanks in no little part to its ingenuous play with sexual and racial identities. Unlike the other films mentioned above, The Crying Game allows for possibilities of redemption through romantic love—the prospect at least available in London. And yet, Jordan’s film is more a fanciful modern-day love story than an astute political analysis, its underlying political views as conventional as any. A journey across the Atlantic introduces Irishmen on a mission impossible in America. In Blown Away (1994), Boston becomes the site of an internecine war between two former friends who were members of the Northern Ireland terrorist cell. Jimmy Dove (played by Jeff Bridges), now a bomb squad leader of the Boston police force, is called on by Ryan Gaerity who came to America for personal vendetta: his girlfriend was murdered during the terrorist operation in Belfast, which was aborted by Dove. The film is a pure revenge flick, with Tommy Lee Jones as a psychopath who literally blows everything away. Another American film directed by Alan J. Pakula, The Devil’s Own (1997) revolves around a member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (Brad Pitt) who comes to the United States in order to obtain anti-aircraft missiles to be used to shoot down British helicopters in Northern Ireland. The plan however, is complicated by an Irish-American policeman (Harrison Ford), whom the IRA member has come to regard as family. The opening sequence of the film shows a

132 rustic Irish cottage broken in by gunmen who kill the father of the house, with a young boy trembling in fear under the table. The film condemns political violence by having Pitt killed, but it also humanizes Pitt’s action by tapping into the audience’s sympathy with the scared little boy-turned IRA man. The film advertising copy reads: “One man trapped by destiny / and another by duty. / They’re about to discover what they’re willing to live, / To fight, and to die for.” Historical specificity is forsaken for the sake of a universal human story, which is not a bad thing in itself. However, the lingering image of (Northern) Ireland and its people is that it is a place and people incurably infected with atavistic violence. These rather mindlessly expensive productions play on the simplistic binary of good and evil or the former evil-now repentant and the incorrigible evil. The narrative drawback of these British and American films is to be found in their decision “to focus on Irish violence while failing to place it in the social and political context which would permit its explanation” (Rockett, Gibbons and Hill 178). When we look into the Irish and Northern Irish films depicting the Troubles, greater realistic details and fuller and more complex characterization (especially for women) are found. Nevertheless, the thriller genre convention adopted by these films depicts cyclical violence in such a way that it tends to focus on a myopic view of human relationships at the expense of the contextualization of the historical origins and causes of the quotidian violence. To put it crudely, surface realism effaces politics. Neil Jordan’s first film Angel (1982) has been praised for its “original exploration of Irish (and non-Irish) violence” that is structured around a subtle “interplay between the public outerworld of the thriller plot and the private innerworld of psychic motivation” (Kearney,

Love in the Time of the Troubles / Lee, Hyungseob 133 “Avenging Angel” 300). The film tells the story of Danny (played by ), a saxophonist with a travelling band. Danny accidentally witnesses the IRA’s murder of the band's manager who has been making “protection payments” to the Loyalists and that of a mute girl he just had sex with, at a dancehall in South Armagh in Northern Ireland. Called to the police station to identify the terrorists who blew up the dance club and killed his manager and the girl, Danny has a curt conversation with the inspector named Bloom (a Joycean echo, perhaps):

Bloom: We can show you every face in the country, if it would help you. Catholic, Protestant. . . By the way, in case you’re wondering, I am Jewish. Danny: Are you a Catholic Jew or a Protestant Jew? They can’t all have done something. Bloom: Oh, yes they can. That’s the beauty of it. Nowadays, here, everybody is guilty. Now see, maybe you are better off forgetting. Danny: You asked me to remember. Bloom: I know, I know. But it’s deep. It’s everywhere and it’s nowhere. Danny: What is? Bloom: Evil.

Northern Ireland is a place where tribal loyalty has encroached upon the political unconscious. It is a place where fear of atavistic violence is palpable in every corner of life and where even a Jew is not exempt from sectarian association. Frustrated by the colossal inanity of the justice system, Danny is compelled to take the law into his own hands. His sense of moral responsibility dissipates, however, and he gorges himself with murdering. Danny’s art, that purportedly entitles him to

134 the executiner of poetic justice, cannot wholly contain his violent nature as the Northern Irishman’s penchant for violence proves to be atavistic. If, as Richard Kearney argues, Angel “enables the viewer to delve beneath the ideological clichés of political violence to its unconscious hidden dimension” (Transitions 183), it also blinds the viewer to the unlawful nature of omnipresent state violence. The film (and this is applicable to more or less all of the films discussed here) is marred by a crucial omission from the scope of its presentation: the exclusion of the role of the British state and its security forces. The most offensive case of depoliticized, atavistic violence can be found in Resurrection Man (1998), a film about the notorious loyalist “Shankill Butchers” who in the 70s went around executing random tortures and murders of Catholics in Belfast. The portrayal of violence is so extreme that its pathological queasiness precludes any thoughtful consideration of socio-political contexts in which such violence might arise. In this respect, the 1975 British film Hennessy stands out for its symbolic inclusion of the political imaginary. The eponymous protagonist (played by Rod Steiger), who is not affiliated with any political organization, loses his family during a riot in Belfast, and he is vent on blowing up the British Houses of Parliament. As Ruth Barton observes, “the film makes little pretence of illuminating the history or politics behind the events but its refusal to demonise its killer/protagonist suggests that it concedes that he is at some level justified in seeking revenge on the symbol of British imperialism for the death of what are certainly innocent victims” (160). Unlike many Northern Irish narratives, it “is also wary of the British military presence in the North although principally on the grounds that the colonizer is becoming contaminated by the colonized” (Barton 160). We tend to think tribal loyalty is the pre-modern form of political

Love in the Time of the Troubles / Lee, Hyungseob 135 identity to be subsumed and superseded by that quintessential modern formation, the nation-state. The linear conception of historical progress has been challenged from all fronts nowadays, and yet the Northern Irish experience showcases the need to understand sectarian violence as more than a pre-modern remnant to be modernized (a historical inevitability) or an atavistic practice that needs to be tamed and civilized (a dehistoricized and therefore more daunting proposition). Viewed either way, the remedy seems to have been found most efficiently in the colonizer’s enlightenment project. Although there has been an alarming silence in the Northern Irish narratives in regard to the role of the British state and its security forces, the Republic’s involvement in the Northern situation is also conspicuous for its absence. The historian R. F. Foster asks:

What, if any, is the connection between the economic and social transformation of the South, and the parade of horrors in the North? And what bearing does this have upon the growth of partitionism in the Republic? Another more subtle development requires attention: the connection between Southern partitionism, Northern political events and the development of fashionable neo-nationalism in some sections of Irish opinion during the 1990s. (100-01)

Foster goes on to relate some of the embarrassing cases of the Republic’s conspiratorial involvement in the Northern affairs, such as the transfer of the arms purchased with the government money to the Northern nationalist paramilitary groups which was revealed at the 1970 Arms Trial (109-15). North or south or British, the state is an invisible force, and it is conspicuous by its absence in the cinematic representations of the Troubles.

136 III. Lovers in Trouble with the Troubles

In this section, I use the Romeo-and-Juliet narrative as the major topos with which to identify and group together some of the Troubled-themed films from Northern Ireland. Shaun Richards notes that the idea of the tragic has been so entrenched in both internal and external perceptions of Northern Ireland that tragedy, “as both a descriptive term and a theatrical form, conveys an image of the North as the House of Atreus” (192). The dominant cultural narrative of the Troubles is configured by the “myth of atavism” in Tom Nairn’s well-known formulation (222-24) in collusion with the “two tribes” interpretation of Loyalist-Republican sectarianism. In the cinematic field, representations of the Troubles have been heavily constrained by genre conventions and spectatorial expectations. Thus, they often take the form of political thriller that features a suffering hero whose moral dilemma forces him to go beyond the immediate political situation he has been thrown into. In his suffering, his situation is transformed into the “human condition,” and he achieves the status of a fallen hero, elevating the whole drama to the realm of tragedy, the drama of universal truth. ’s (1947) is an exemplary case. The film has , arguably the most popular actor among the British audience in the immediate post-war period, as the leader of the “organization” who, upon being released from prison, begins to doubt the moral right of political violence. (The same scheme was adopted more recently when, as mentioned above, Brad Pitt was given the role of an IRA terrorist vent on avenging his father who was murdered by the Loyalists in The Devil’s Own, with Harrison Ford as a sympathetic Irish-American cop.) The narrative of an existential hero fighting a

Love in the Time of the Troubles / Lee, Hyungseob 137 metaphysical battle of good and evil has been deployed in the Troubles-related films to create the effect of humanizing a land besieged with tribal enmity and sectarian violence. Northern Ireland becomes everywhere and nowhere, as Inspector Bloom wryly remarks in Angel. The tragification of the Troubles, however, is fraught with problems that emanate from tragedy’s ahistorical self-enclosure: tragedy “forecloses possibilities and depoliticizes conflict by naturalizing the conditions which precipitate it” (Phelan 275). As questions of agency and audience participation are closed off and nullified, spectators are rendered hapless and helpless in front of the spectacle of fatalistic inevitability. In the end, they are, at best, left with the psychological consolation of catharsis. More likely, they remain beleaguered with the pity and fear, vaguely acknowledging the truth that they are all doomed as violence is endemic to the human condition. Odd Man Out also features a romance that suggests that it is the private sphere of personal relationship that provides a ground for human salvation. In pitting the private sphere against the public where social chaos and naked power-mongering rule supreme, the film broadly follows the Irish dramatic tradition set by Sean O’Casey. Oscillating between the thriller genre conventions and the abstract universality of tragic form, the Troubles-themed films tend to obliterate politics as either a social category of intrinsic immorality and failure or an ideologically entrenched divisive force. Depictions of tribal identity/loyalty and sectarian violence are predicated on the radical distinction of the public and the private spheres, the latter of which (spatially embodied in the home, the of emotional attachment and romantic desire) is eroded and often exploded (literally) by the former. Mark Patrick pithily describes the clich éd narrative of the

138 Troubles-related plays (equally applicable to the films):

Protestant boy meets Catholic girl meets terrorist bomb, with an insubstantial sub-plot featuring various re-incarnations from Ireland’s bloody past. While an easy target for ridicule, I believed (as I still do) that this type of play had a more serious and insidious side—perpetuating the myths which prevail outside Northern Ireland and fueling the parochialism and self-obsession which reign within. (20)

Joe Cleary has also noted that ”in the case of Northern Ireland, many of the most popular and generically recurrent narratives about the conflict adopt the form of romance that straddles the political divide” (Literature 110), adding “whether they be heterosexual or homoerotic, however, one of the most striking features about these romances is the frequency with which they come to nought” (Literature 112). The love-across-the-divide structure includes a variety of coupling. Traditionally, it has been the romance of an Englishman and an Irish woman ending in tragedy. David Lean’s Ryan’s Daughter (1970) is a classic example. The film tells the story of Rosy, a young married Irish woman, who has an affair with a British officer during World War I despite the moral and political opprobrium of her nationalist neighbors. Accusing Rosy of being an informant (which her father was), the mob shames and disgraces her in public, shearing off her hair and stripping off her clothes. Set against the backdrop of the ominously lush landscape of south-western Ireland, the film’s story exhibits much racially grounded characterization including Ryan as the duplicitous double agent, her daughter as the psychologically unstable woman of Celtic temperament, and the violence-prone Irish mob. These racial stereotypes are common in British cinema, with its depiction of Irish

Love in the Time of the Troubles / Lee, Hyungseob 139 violence as pathological, thereby exonerating the British state from the tragic situation the Irish find themselves in. As Martin McLoone writes, “This tragic flaw in the Irish is the result of either their own innate proclivities, the workings of fate or the effects of nature and environment on the Irish psyche” (61). One can argue that Brian Friel’s play Translations is another notable example: a love affair between an English army officer (Yolland) and a young Irish woman (Maire) and the subsequent kidnapping of him by nationalists triggers a wholesale reprisal by the British army. Although set in 1833, the play dramatizes the familiar trope of the love-across-divide (redoubling it into a love story of a Catholic-Irish woman and a Protestant-English man) that resonates with contemporary audiences. The love-across-the-divide structure is also found in the narrative of the doomed affair between two lovers from the opposing tribes in many films. Pat O’Connor’s 1984 film, Cal, which is adapted from Bernard MacLaverty’s novel of the same name, tells the tragic love story of a young Catholic man and a woman who is married to a Protestant policeman. Cal’s life is deprived of the emotional comfort and security that the home and family are supposed to provide: he has been living with his stubborn father as only Catholics in a Protestant neighborhood. Cal has quit his work at an abattoir, finding the violence of the work repulsive. Jobless now, he is picked up by a friend named Crilly, becomes a reluctant getaway driver for IRA assassins, and gets implicated in the IRA killing of a local policeman. Cal befriends Marcella, a recently widowed librarian who turns out to be the wife of the man he unwittingly assisted in killing. Feeling guilty and remorseful, Cal begins working on a farm belonging to her late husband’s family. Marcella is unaware of Cal’s involvement in her husband’s death, and they begin a doomed love affair.

140 Assisted by fine acting all around (especially by ’s Cannes award-winning portrayal of the woman in distress), Cal successfully portrays the inner psyches of the lost souls of Belfast. Both Cal and Marcella are displaced in their homes, their isolation being both emotional and physical: the young Catholic man growing up without a mother in the Protestant neighborhood, the widowed Catholic woman surrounded by her watchful Protestant in-laws. In the film, the suffocative pathos of being in-place is starkly contrasted by the hopeful glimpse of being out-of-place. This ironic contrast is punctuated by the brutal machination of a paramilitary group. However, the film suffers from the loss of the political dynamic of the Catholic-Protestant conflict thanks to the imbalance of representation: the film is all about the Catholics, both the perpetrators and the victims all Catholic. As for the single Protestant victim, Marcella’s husband, the viewers are not told anything about him except that he is a policeman and that he has been unfaithful to his wife. Little attempt is made to understand the plight of Protestant lives. Instead, the viewers are presented with wooden, hackneyed Protestant types such as the Protestant boys who beat up on Cal and Dunlop, the foreman at the farm, who shows his deep-seated prejudice against Catholics. It is true that Catholic gunmen are never given any sympathetic treatment, either. Nevertheless, the only people with true human souls are the two Catholic protagonists. The same one-sidedness is also found in the final film under consideration. Directed by Jim Sheridan, The Boxer (1997) centers on Danny Flynn (played by Daniel Day-Lewis), a former pugilist and Provisional IRA member, who rekindles his romantic relationship with Maggie (played by Emily Watson), a daughter of the local IRA commander, Joe Hamill (performed by Brian Cox). The film is the third

Love in the Time of the Troubles / Lee, Hyungseob 141 and final collaboration between Sheridan and Day-Lewis after (1989) and In the Name of the Father (1993). Released after a 14-year stint in prison for refusing to “snitch,” Danny starts up a non-sectarian boxing club for boys. While cleaning up the old gymnasium, he runs across a cache of Semtex and throws it into the river. This immediately sets up a rivalry between Danny and Harry (played by Gerard McSorley), a ruthless IRA lieutenant who does not approve of his boss’s involvement in the peace process. The now familiar opposition between the penitent and the evil plays itself out again in the film. In Joe Hamill’s character, we find a mixture of caring father and shrewd politician: his familial concern and political judgment forces him to choose Danny over Harry. The Boxer thrives on one man’s determination to escape from his dishonorable past, thus echoing the old narrative of redemption in death found in films like Odd Man Out and A Prayer for the Dying. In The Boxer, the protagonist does not end up dying and this is only because his lover happens to be the daughter of the most powerful man in town who also happens to be a loving father. In Belfast, a love story is a man’s story, and Northern Ireland is man’s world. This pernicious devaluation of women is made conspicuous by the Irish idealization of the feminine, whether it be Cathleen ni Houlihan, Deirdre, or the Poor Old Woman (Shan Van Vocht). The Irish woman is a mother, a wife, or a daughter and nothing remotely like her own self. Also, in portraying places like Belfast that are sodden with sectarian violence, the representational imbalance vitiates the film’s message of hope and reconciliation. This is especially regrettable when we consider the fact that the film was made at the time peace was becoming a genuine possibility in Northern Ireland: within a couple of months after the release of the film, a peace treaty was signed on Good

142 Friday in April, 1998 in Belfast. As John Hill astutely observes, “the film’s perspective on the peace process is simultaneously interwoven with the fortunes of its romantic couple” (201). In The Boxer as in Cal, the other side of the story, that of Northern Irish Protestants, remains hidden in the dark. The representational inequity found in Cal and The Boxer inevitably leads to the question, “whose side is the film on?” For example, Brian McIlroy complains that representations of the Troubles have been weighted in favor of the Republican point of view. Writing from an expressly Northern Protestant perspective, McIlroy writes:

the nationalist community in Northern Ireland is a minority community; the unionist community is a majority community but only in Northern Ireland. Erase the border, and they become a minority community. Even now, the one million Protestants are a minority of UK citizens on the furthest reaches of a very Disunited Kingdom. Considering the Protestant community and appreciating its spectatorship is to appreciate a besieged minority buffeted on both sides by impotent and lethargic fathers: the Irish Republic and Britain. Unlike the nationalist community, the unionists do not wish to move politically; they just wish to stay put. (147)

With their general aversion to cultural media representation, Protestants have been unwitting victims of this cultural war. Both sides of the sectarian divide feel that they are a minority, precisely because they see themselves skewered on the geopolitical nexus which is configured by a triangular relationship of the Irish Republic, Britain and Northern Ireland. The cinematic representations of the Northern Ireland conflict have been guilty of obscuring, if not obliterating, this big picture. The problem of omission is further

Love in the Time of the Troubles / Lee, Hyungseob 143 exacerbated by the tragic narratives the Troubles-related films adopt. Tragedy closes off the socio-political space in which the individual experiences a series of events that lead to their demise. The tragic hero may be catapulted to their spectacular downfall by divine intervention or nature’s blind force. And yet, they have only themselves to blame. Historicizing tragedy may enable the form to be more flexible, opening it to modern possibilities. However, the flexibility and openness is precisely what is amiss in the tragic representations of the Troubles films.

Keywords: The Troubles, Northern Irish cinema, atavistic violence, political violence, tragic form, the love-across-the divide narrative

Works Cited

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144 _____. Literature, Partition and the Nation-State: Culture and Conflict in Ireland, Israel and Palestine. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. Crying Game, The. Dir. Neil Jordan. Palace Pictures, 1992. Devil’s Own, The. Dir. Alan J. Pakula. Columbia Pictures, 1997. Foster, R. F. Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change from 1970. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. Hennessy. Dir. Don Sharp. AIP/Hennessy Film Productions, 1975. Kearney, Richard. “Avenging Angel: An Analysis of Neil Jordan's First Irish Feature Film.” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 71.283 (Autumn, 1982): 296-303. _____. Transitions. Dublin: Wolfhound, 1988. Levenson, Jill L. “Introduction.” Romeo and Juliet. Ed. Jill L. Levenson. New York: Oxford UP, 2000. 1-125. Long Good Friday, The. Dir. John Mackenzie. HandMade Films, 1980. McIlroy, Brian. “When the Ulster Protestant and Unionist Looks: Spectatorship in (Northern) Irish Cinema.” Irish University Review 26.1 (Spring-Summer, 1996): 143-54. McLoone, Martin. Irish Film: The Emergence of a Contemporary Cinema. London: BFI, 2000. Nairn, Tom. The Break-Up of Britain. London: NLB, 1977. Odd Man Out. Dir. Carol Reed. Two Cities Film, 1947. Patrick, Mark. “Trouble with the Troubles.” Theatre Ireland 20 (1989): 19-21. Phelan, Mark. “From Troubles to Post-Conflict Theatre.” The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Theatre. Ed. Nicholas Grene and Chris Morash. New York: Oxford UP, 2016. 372-88. Prayer for the Dying, A. Dir. Mike Hodges. Samuel Goldwyn, 1987. Resurrection Man. Dir. Marc Evans. Revolution Films, 1998. Richards, Shaun. “In the Border Country: Greek Tragedy and

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146 Abstract Lee, Hyungseob

Love in the Time of the Troubles: The Cultural Politics of Tragic Form in Northern Irish Cinema

This paper discusses the tragic narratives adopted by the films that depict the Northern Ireland conflict known as the Troubles. It focuses, in particular, on those films that take the form of romantic tragedy with its love-across-the divide structure. A major concern with the tragic narrative in Northern Irish cinema is related to the decontextualizing nature of tragedy on the one hand and the (in)adequacy of tragic form for the cinematic representation of the Troubles. The paper begins with a brief discussion of the formal and narrative constraints that tragedy innately possesses that may debilitate the socio-political contextualization of the tragic hero’s action. It moves on to identify certain tropes and schemes in the Troubles-related films, with special attention to the “love-across-the divide” films. By shifting the emphasis away from its eponymous lovers and focusing on the political and historical contours under which a “little” tragedy unfolds, the tragic narrative of Romeo and Juliet can serve as a useful conduit to help understand the complex cultural politics of the Troubles-related films in both their shortcomings and possibilities. Both sides of the sectarian divide feel that they are a minority, precisely because they see themselves skewered on the geopolitical nexus which is configured by a triangular relationship of the Irish Republic, Britain and Northern Ireland. The cinematic representations

Love in the Time of the Troubles / Lee, Hyungseob 147 of the Northern Ireland conflict have been guilty of obscuring, if not obliterating, this big picture. The problem of omission is further exacerbated by the tragic narratives the Troubles-related films adopt. In the end, Aristotle’s categorial distinction between history and tragedy may turn out to be valid, with history’s move toward specificity and tragedy’s inclination toward universality.

Keywords: The Troubles, Northern Irish cinema, atavistic violence, political violence, tragic form, the love-across-the divide narrative

논문투고일: 2018년 3월 23일 심사의뢰일: 4월 3일 심사완료일: 4월 15일 게재확정일: 4월 15일

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