Viewpoints: Theoretical Perspectives on Irish Visual Texts

Chapter Four - FASCINATING STATES:1 SCREENING NORTHERN IRELAND

If the degree of fascination with a nation can be gauged by the number of films produced about it, Northern Ireland has emerged, in the last twenty years, as an exceedingly fascinating place. The recent release of two films about the history and legacies of political violence, Hunger (Steve McQueen, 2008) and Five Minutes of Heaven (Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2009), caps a remarkable run of films produced about Northern Ireland after 1992, the year The Crying Game (Neil Jordan) hit theatres, including Cycle of Violence (Henry Herbert, 1998), Divorcing Jack (David Caffrey, 1998), Bloody Sunday (Paul Greengrass, 2002) and Omagh (Pete Travis, 2004).2 During this span, moviegoers were confronted with images of the Troubles through cinematic masterplots of political struggle, bigotry, sectarian violence, and tenuous attempts at reconciliation – evidence enough that the film camera remains fascinated by the changing states of Northern Ireland. Without question, some instances of visual fascination invite a cynical response. Consider two Hollywood productions from the 1990s, Patriot Games (Phillip Noyce, 1992) and The Devil’s Own (Alan J. Pakula, 1997). In the former, the screen mythology of an atavistic nation rendered even more chaotic by the ‘bloodthirsty Irish Republican Army (IRA)’ remains the dominant filmic image;3 in the latter, the sexualised, quasi-heroic allure of the isolated IRA gunman (Brad Pitt) is the signal motif, one that recalls the agonised wanderings of Johnny McQueen (James Mason) in Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out (1947). In these films, violence is doubly nationalised but differently valued, for it represents the complexity Chapter Four FASCINATING STATES:1 SCREENING NORTHERN IRELAND Matthew Brown 58 of Northern Ireland through the shorthand of terrorism and curtails its alternatively psychotic and alluring appeals through the sanctioned violence of an American bellwether (i.e., the characters played by Harrison Ford, who stars in both films). Though not a sovereign state, Northern Ireland is nevertheless a fascinating one on screen, projected as a zone of violence, betrayal and dangerous liaisons – it has become, in other words, a means to screen the more lurid pleasures of movie going. Among contemporary filmmakers, however, some radical experiments with the nation’s screen image are underway. Recent films that screen Northern Ireland, such as Hunger and Bloody Sunday, are not only fascinated by the histories of political violence, but also explore the role played by fascination in shaping visual narratives of the Troubles. Consequently, a new way to theorise the politics of visuality in Northern Ireland is being wagered by filmmakers who explore the structures of fascination in film, which can be analysed in terms of the general history of cinematic fascination and the more localised, political force of each production. Hunger and Bloody Sunday are here exemplary, insofar as both films dramatise transitive and intransitive modes of cinematic perception and focus our critical attentions on affect and embodiment within the Troubles film. To clarify, I begin with a brief history of fascination, before moving on to discuss the structures of fascination and ‘pensive spectatorship’ in Hunger and Bloody Sunday, films that diagnose the appeal of visual propaganda in Northern Ireland without being able to fully escape its call. * * * At first glance, one might concede that fascination, if taken as a Hollywood byword for the pleasures of watching manipulative violence on screen, has ruined film: it creates a situation in which the majority of films produced or marketed by Hollywood are, first and foremost, pornographic spectacle, in the sense that each film’s visual pleasures are insidious seductions (Murder! Sex!), each film’s ends bound by what Frederic Jameson terms ‘rapt, mindless fascination’.4 Hollywood’s ability to construct the ocular pleasures of sexuality and violence underwrites this established view and, as Laura Mulvey notes, the two motifs are routinely conflated in mainstream films, in which attention falls on ‘the female star as Fascinating States 59 ultimate spectacle, the emblem and guarantee of [a film’s] fascination and power’.5 The itinerary of The Crying Game, from a little-viewed art house film in Europe to a feted blockbuster in the United States, testifies to the ways in which this type of fascination is commercially manufactured. By the end of 1992, The Crying Game attracted some mixed reviews from the British and European press, grossing about£300,000. After it was bought by Miramax and shown at various film festivals, it garnered significant acclaim. Miramax’s advertising campaign had much to do with the film...