The Banshees of Inisherin - something something symbolism

Okay, easy Oscar bait, this one. Witty, well-acted, and rife with metaphor and symbolism. A little gross and plodding. Not really a movie for anyone except for “film people”. I’m sure there are some dope video essays on how the dissolution of Pádraic and Colm’s friendship mirrors the Irish Civil War. Their quarrel is dubiously originated, pointless, and both cyclical and escalatory. Simple slights lead to bigger ones until we’ve descended into full violence and no one really knows how we got there.

A friend of mine and I came up with something called the Anjelica Test, named after the film The Strange Case of Anjelica. We both found the film confusing and were completely unmoved, but we both agreed we could probably manufacture a compelling narrative for why we actually maybe liked the film. So the Anjelica Test was born: when discussing a film, are we discussing something about it that genuinely moved us emotionally, based on our lives and experience, OR are we using our verbose, idea-oriented brains to construct, out of whole cloth, some narrative of why we liked the film?

So let me apply that test here. The only thing that touched me personally was the sad, avoidable dissolution of a long-time friendship without even the slightest touch of thoughtful, empathetic communication between the two. I know, that’s the most of the point of the movie. But I’ve had this reoccurring thought watching things recently - that most drama in movies is created through people feeling one way but telling the world another. Like, all of Marriage Story would fall apart if both parties were solid communicators. Easier said than done, sure. But I’m a little worn out by movies that use avoidance and miscommunication to drive forward the plot. Pretty much rules out all rom-coms and sit-coms, I guess.

And the thing I was more interested in seeing didn’t come to fruition at all - how DOES one thoughtfully end a relationship? The idea of saying, “I don’t want to have this relationship any more” scares the hell out of most of us, and it IS a hard thing to say to someone. So yes, it’s hard - let’s examine it! How do people communicate through that? What pitfalls, missteps do they hit, and how do they come back from it?

I recently told a long-time friend that parts of our friendship were not feeling good to me any more. We talked about it on a long walk. It was not easy, and I was basically tripping over myself to hedge and caveat the whole thing. But we got somewhere more productive, and the next time we hung out, it felt better. I don’t exactly where that friend is at with me, but so far so good.

I’ve told friends in the past about similar difficulties in our friendship - I nearly lost one of my dearest friends once. But that also turned out to be worth it, because that friend had some old, deep hurts to address with me, ones that I had inflicted and never honestly reckoned with. And god knows I’ve hurt people I’ve dated by avoiding painful thoughts, and lying to them via omission at best, directly at worst - some huge regrets there.

So where’s the media that portrays people whose first instinct is to do the work of communication and relationship maintenance? I’d love to see it and learn from it. I’m sure it’s out there. I probably just need to look harder.