“The World Goes One Way and We Go Another”: Movement, Migration, and Myths of Irish Cinema by Dana C. Och B.A. in English, University of Pittsburgh, 1996 M.A. in English, University of Pittsburgh, 1999 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2006 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH FACULTY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Dana C. Och It was defended on 8-31-06 and approved by Dr. Nancy Condee Dr. Adam Lowenstein Dr. Colin MacCabe Dr. Marcia Landy Dissertation Director ii Copyright © by Dana C. Och 2006 iii “The World Goes One Way and We Go Another”: Movement, Migration and Myths of Irish Cinema Dana C. Och, Ph.D. University of Pittsburgh, 2006 The dissertation considers Irish films through the valence of movement and migration to conceptualize a cinema that can account for how films function locally and transnationally. I consider various forms of migration in films produced in Ireland to interrogate how identity and the nation are presented. Considering forms of migration opens a different approach to the films that enables questioning of the myths of the nation-state within globalized capital and culture. In Ireland, the land has given shape to the physical boundaries of imagined identity; land is understood as a material trace denoting a linear history of invasion, conquest, and ultimately independence – an evolution from colonial oppression to postcolonial identity. Movement and migration make the boundaries defining subjectivity permeable by demonstrating how place, identity, language, and consciousness are located in the intermezzo. Using a case study approach that considers diverse films, including big budget, small budget, documentary and popular genre films, I demonstrate how changes in conceptions of national cinema and identity occur on aesthetic and epistemological levels, resulting in multiple points of entry for transnational audiences. I examine the movements of people, the landscape, and storytelling as forms of mobility. Analyses of the films and their context focus on exiles, internal émigrés, nomads, disaffected young people, and Travellers to shift the consideration of migration from emigration toward a conception of epistemological mobility. A double consciousness is elicited though the use of legends derived from earlier Irish history, redefining the relationship between myth and iv nation. The resultant fluctuating and mobile sign systems refuse strict adherence to any one mode of narration or style, often breaking down boundaries between reality and fantasy. I discuss Irish films in terms of censorship, funding and distribution, arguing that these issues must inflect an understanding of the dispersed form this cinema exhibits. The transformations to genre conventions and meanings are an effect of the necessary movement toward international co- productions. The dissertation culminates in a discussion of how the heterogeneous body of recent films shifts, metamorphoses, and defies definition, indicating transformations in the time, space, and body of the nation. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the Nationality Rooms Scholarship Committee for the Ruth Crawford Mitchell Memorial Award that made possible my research trip to the Irish Film Archive at the Irish Film Centre in Dublin. Because Irish film for the most part does not circulate theatrically or receive release on video/DVD technology, this research trip, where I was able to view over fifty unavailable films, was essential to redirecting my attention toward movement and migration in Irish cinema. I owe particular gratitude to Sunniva O’Flynn and Eugene Finn of the Irish Film Archive for discussion, assistance in choosing films, and encouragement. This work would not have been possible without the financial support of the English Department, the Lawler Predoctoral Fellowship and the Cultural Studies Predoctoral Fellowship. I would like to thank the faculty and graduate students of the University of Pittsburgh for stimulating discussions and support. In particular, I would like to thank Lisa Roulette, whose endless encouragement has helped to keep me focused, as well as Kirsten Strayer, Manisha Basu and Anustup Basu. The film faculty members at the University of Pittsburgh, including Lucy Fischer, Jane Feuer, and Moya Luckett, have been essential to helping me develop this work, especially as I was introduced to the discipline while taking film classes during my M.A. coursework. I thank my committee for helping to guide me through this process: Adam Lowenstein, Colin MacCabe, and Nancy Condee. Their questions challenged me constantly to rethink and revise my approach. I especially thank Marcia Landy for her tireless investment and careful attention in helping me to bring this dissertation to fruition. My gratitude is eternal. vi Finally, I would like to thank my friends and family for helping to keep balance in my life. I thank Chris Cannon for his love and support, not to mention his willingness to watch innumerable Irish films with me. And – to my cats – I am thankful that they didn’t manage to erase my whole work despite attempting to sit on the keyboard every twenty minutes. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION......................................................................................................................... 1 1. Subverting Heritage: Fools of Fortune (1990) and Love and Rage (1998)..........................22 1.1. The “Irish” Question.....................................................................................................22 1.2. Heritage and Anti-Heritage: Visualizing Obliteration and Destabilizing Authenticity 31 1.3. Love and Rage (1998): Popular History and the Case of Lynchehaun.........................43 1.4. Gender in the Anti-Heritage Film.................................................................................54 1.5. Rethinking the Nation...................................................................................................66 2. No Word We Speak: The Body and Language as Refusal...................................................70 2.1. Language and the Nation..............................................................................................79 2.1.1. Language and Resistance......................................................................................79 2.1.2. Language as Defining the Nation.........................................................................82 2.2. Language in Film: Imagining Another Ireland.............................................................87 2.2.1. Bob Quinn: Gaelic................................................................................................88 2.2.2. Disco Pigs (2001): The Power of Naming............................................................94 2.3. The Aberrant Body: Nomadic Identity in Crush Proof (1999)...................................103 2.4. Imagining Other Irelands............................................................................................111 3. Not Irish, Not Celtic: Migrating Myths in Bob Quinn’s Atlantean (1984)........................113 3.1. Bob Quinn and the Myths of Irish Cinema.................................................................113 3.1.1. A “Literary” Cinema...........................................................................................116 3.1.2. An “Authentic” Cinema......................................................................................118 3.1.3. A “Nationalist” Cinema......................................................................................123 3.2. The Real Ireland?: Atlantean (1984)...........................................................................130 3.2.1. Deterritorializing Knowledge.............................................................................134 3.2.2. Atlantean (1984) as Modern Immrama: Exploring Migration and Identity.......138 3.2.3. The Revolution Will Be Televised.....................................................................155 4. Straying from the Path: The Body and Movement in the Films of Neil Jordan.................162 4.1. Production, Distribution, and Reception.....................................................................163 4.2. The Body and Movement............................................................................................171 4.3. The Movements of Angel (1982)................................................................................177 4.4. The Butcher Boy (1997) and Nationalism...................................................................184 4.5. Are All the Beautiful Things Gone? Horror and Movement......................................194 5. Wolves May Lurk in Every Guise: Becoming, Irish Film..................................................217 5.1. Muc Inis (Pig Island)..................................................................................................221 5.2. Mobility and Becoming Animal: Absolute Deterritorialization.................................226 5.3. Becoming-Irish and the Transnational........................................................................230 5.4. Kill the brain!: Becoming Zombie in 28 Days Later (2002) and Dead Meat (2004).236 5.5. Neil Jordan: Becoming-Woman.................................................................................243 5.6. Becoming Imperceptible.............................................................................................248 5.7. Epilogue......................................................................................................................258 BIBLIOGRAPHY.......................................................................................................................264 viii Introduction In a work that concentrates so heavily on movement and storytelling, not to mention storytelling as movement, it seems only appropriate to begin with a story: When I was a child, I traveled with my Nana on vacation one year. I saw a sign on the highway that said “Falling Rock.” When I asked what the sign referred to, I was told a story of a Native American tribe that included a young boy named Falling Rock. He left the tribe to endure a maturation ritual, where he had to survive alone in the forest for a few days. Falling Rock never returned to his family, and his parents spent the rest of their lives searching for him across what is now the United States of America. Their search was so eternal that when the American government built the interstate highway system, they put up signs alerting travelers that they too should watch out for the nomad Falling Rock. Though I forget about this story in my everyday life, when I travel the highways and see a sign for “Falling Rock” I am jarred to experience another way of thinking about history through storytelling. While the story was made in an instant and it is not based in truth or rational fact, it has forever allowed me a way to experience the migration of signification represented, literally, by a sign. In the following dissertation, I concentrate on Irish films within a theorization of movement and migration, often through the figure of the nomad. The overwhelming stress on movement of characters and the camera in Irish films, ranging from the short films to independent, television, and mainstream feature length films, served as the impetus for my interest in Irish cinema. As my research progressed, I became attuned to the migration of meanings across sign systems. By focusing on shifting and permeable boundaries, I strive to forge connections between a disparate collection of films that are often excluded from a consideration of Irish national cinema by 1 considering how a migrating double consciousness manifests through the inclusion of culturally specific historical and mythical markers. By utilizing movement and migration as the tools to think about how the films function, I am proposing a way to think about Irish cinema that accounts for both a regional and transnational utterance. I, in fact, do not think that this movement toward the nomadic is unique to Irish cinema (see, for example, Elephant [Van Sant, 2003], Code 46 [Winterbottom, 2003], Lola Rennt [Run, Lola, Run, Tykwer, 1998], and Haute Tension [High Tension, Aja, 2003], but that Irish films serve as an ideal test case by which to look at a larger trend in transnational filmmaking, whereby movement and migration become central concerns for the ways that they displace the preeminence of boundaries and dichotomies for defining the terms of modern existence. Although I discuss concepts of “nation” and “history,” their use serves as an opportunity to explore the ways that specific films challenge the production of meaning and issues of imagined identity. Instead of reading the films in relation to an already determined history and politics, I look at the ways in which the films narratively and structurally revise notions of history. In particular, myths and legends of migration and nomadism that played into the originary development of the nationalist imagination in Ireland are now redeployed in the films to criticize the modern form that the imagined nation has assumed. Thus, using a case study approach that looks closely at a small number of diverse films, including big budget, small budget, documentary and popular genre films, I conceptualize migration as a term that questions and complicates the ideological connections between landscape, imagined identity, and history. 2