‘The Banshees of Inisherin’ and the queerness of platonic breakups
It takes a little while for the language of the breakup between Pádraic and Colm to become clear. The two men at the center of The Banshees of Inisherin, a pitch-black tragicomedy by Martin McDonagh, slowly begin to separate from one another when Colm—a fiddle player suffering through a “despair” (Brendan Gleason) —declares to Pádraic (Colin Farrell), all eyebrows and uncertainty as he grasps for something he can’t articulate – “I just don’t like you no more.” Pádraic insists “but you liked me yesterday,” and while it might be tempting to think of Banshees as being about something contemporary like ghosting, the thing that makes the film work so well—as both dark comedy and bleak tragedy—is that it dives so deeply into a time and place (1923, the midst of the Irish Civil War, raging just beyond the fictional isle of Inisherin) where being able to find the words for these feelings seems impossible.
So there’s no surprise when, not only is Pádraic baffled by the sudden stony silence from his former best friend, but the rest of the sparsely populated isle also tries to make sense of it.
The bartender at the pub the two men frequent—and which seems to be the nexus of all social life on the island—asks Pádraic if they’ve been rowing; a question that he’s unable to answer: “We haven’t been rowing.
I don’t think we’ve been rowing. Have we been rowing?”The lack of an easy language for the end of this relationship ties into something else; the difficulty of defining platonic breakups—defining them either too similar to a romance, or without a frame of reference that can capture the intimacy of friendship.
