Flickless in Dublin

Seven sections follow, corresponding to the seven obligatory parts of the Hollywood formula screenplay. They have been re-formatted to fit your journal.

I. Introduce Hero

This is the part where Luke Skywalker, say, is discovered stuck on a random planet. He is doing quite useful but prosaic chores, but he is filled with inchoate longings. For long ago? For a galaxy far away? For lost relatives? What was left of mine left Ireland for good in 1848 and never looked back: their nostalgia couldn't survive the winter crossing. But right after New Year, 2001, coincidentally just before the Theater of Irish Cinema Conference, I made it back to Ireland for one day to preside as External Examiner at a doctoral examination in the Samuel Beckett Centre for Drama and Film at Trinity University. I went knowing that I would soon be speaking at the conference back in New Haven, but also well aware that when it comes to Ireland and especially Irish film, I'm only a tourist, with nothing to declare but my genes.

II. Hero Has a Weakness

Luke Skywalker is callow, even jejune. I can identify. Until January 4, 2001, the day I spent in Dublin in search of Irish cinema, my most pertinent memory derived from Saturday afternoon re-runs of The Quiet Man, where Maureen O'Hara drives a herd of sheep through the middle of Virgil's Eclogues and won't go to bed with John Wayne until her dowry is paid up. OK, so I loved The Crying Game and My Left Foot, but deep down, I feel shallow.

III. The Enticing Incident

This is where Obi Wan Kanobe appears and tells Luke that he's really a Jedi Knight who must save the universe. It's also where Dudley Andrew tells me I'm the lead-off speaker on the first panel of the conference.

IV. The Quest

All I have is a day in Dublin, without a Speeder Bike. Blessedly, it's a city built for walking, which is the approved research method in my field, which is performance studies. Scholars of performance attend to cultural events of many kinds, from sacred rituals to parades to the micro-behaviors of everyday life, including the interactions between social life and the built environment. A growing sub-discipline in performance studies is the study of tourist performance or "staged authenticity," deriving from Erving Goffman's sociological division of "front region" and "back region" behavior as interpreted by Dean MacCannell in The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (1976; 2nd ed. 1989). The back region of a local culture is what the tourists want to see. The front region is what the locals will show them.

My quest for the theater of Irish cinema begins on the Aer Lingus flight over. CARA inflight magazine features an interview with Brenda Fricker, who talks about how little it meant really to have won an Oscar for My Left Foot. The lead for the article, however, puffs her in bold as the Oscar-winning actress Brenda Fricker.

Landing before first light, I walk through the city as it comes awake. What's the front-region performance? Capital, for one thing. On the heart-stoppingly beautiful path between Trinity and Temple Bar, the Celtic Tiger wakes and purrs in the silicon-fingered dawn. Mainstream movies, for another. The Film and Theater page of The Irish Times for January 4 features display adds for Bless the Child with Kim Bassinger and Jimmy Smits ("Fear the Darkness, Fight the Evil") and Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon ("Absolutely gob-smacking martial arts sequences that make everything from Enter the Dragon to The Matrix look like an episode of playschool"). Multiplexes are showing Meet the Parents, Pokemon 2000, Charlie's Angels, 102 Dalmatians, The Grinch, Coyote Ugly, and Dinosaur.

I head for the Tourism Center. Inside, eye-filling racks of four-color brochures tout local attractions, such as "Haunted Dublin," featuring...