North and South of the River: Demythologizing Dublin in Contemporary Irish Film

Introduction

Given the historic focus upon rural narratives in Irish film, it is surprising that only within the last twenty years have urban representations broadly appeared as "recognizable" Irish settings.¹ Although Paddy Breathnach's I Went Down (1997) and Kirsten Sheridan's Disco Pigs (2001) depict Cork² and, more recently, David Gleeson's Cowboys & Angels (2003) depicts Limerick, such urban films are set predominantly in the capital, Dublin.³ Until the mid-1990s cinematic representations of urban Ireland were dominated by the Roddy Doyle adaptations of "authentic" Northside Dublin imaged in terms of urban decay and working-class suburbia. However, the Celtic Tiger's transformation of the social and economic landscape of Dublin provided an opportunity for the production of new cinematic images incorporating the global iconography of wealth and success. Responding to these transformations, recent scholarship on Irish cinema increasingly has oriented itself around discussions of urban space and an interrogation of social change as inscribed on these spaces.⁴

The concept of Dublin as materially, socially, and economically halved by the Liffey permeates representations of Dublin. Though this division is often reduced to a jocular rivalry between North and South (and in fact is the subject of much local satire), these spatial delineations emerge as discourses of class and are a way of referencing social and economic difference indirectly through the cultural vernacular. How to engage with this mythology in their representations of Dublin is of particular relevance to Celtic Tiger films in their navigation of the changing spatial and socioeconomic configuration of the city.

Films produced during the Celtic Tiger period undertake an overt reimaging of Dublin that both renegotiates and overwrites prior representations. This article examines the role played by the binary division of North and South in filmmakers' situating of the recent economic boom and the pockets of dereliction and neglect left behind. Alternative narratives that represent the city outside the North- and Southside division challenge this binary way of thinking about Dublin's urban space. For example, John Crowley's Intermission (2003), one of the highest-grossing Irish films to date, portrays Tallaght, an outer suburb of the city, as a new socio spatial entity imbued with its own unique set of working-class mythologies. The analysis that follows considers how urban phenomena such as suburban sprawl, gentrification, and regeneration produce alternative mental images (or imagined geographies) of the city pursuant to new axes of division defined by social class.

Mythologies of Division

Seminal urban theorist Henri Lefebvre argues that cities concurrently exist in a "present and immediate reality, a practico-material and architectural fact," but also in a "social reality made up of relations that are to be conceived of, constructed, or reconstructed by thought" (103).⁵ Thus cities transcend their physical constructions of brick and mortar to become spatial reflections of society and its principles of organization. Though Lefebvre has become associated with the exploration of the sociospatial dimension of cities, this concept informed critical discourse in urban studies prior to Lefebvre's work. In The Image of the City Kevin Lynch argues that urbanites form mental images of the city and render the cityscape legible through a subjective structuring of their environment. According to Lynch, an individual "creates and bears his own image" of the city through the mental organization of the city in terms of paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks ("Image" 7). These facets of city topography possess "imageability," which Lynch defines as the quality in a physical object that evokes a strong image in a particular person, and which is essential in the structuring of the mental image (9). Though Lynch initially discusses the individual formation of city image, he also notes that a "public image" of city can exist as "common mental pictures carried by large numbers of a city's inhabitants" that reflect shared perceptions of the city (7).

A city image, according to Lynch, consists of three basic components: identity, structure, and meaning. Imageability, then, is wholly subjective in its reliance upon an individual's perception of the city. As Lynch argues...