Whack-a-daddy-oh!

[muckefuck]

This image doesn't do justice to the colours of the original, but I'm not sure anything could that hadn't been irradiated. You know what it's like to stumble across a cultural product and think, Oh my god, this has so much to answer for? I'm surprised the town of Cung, where it was filmed, didn't change its name, given how much this movie has done to establish and image of "Ireland" in the minds of American tourists--even those like me had never seen it.

Last week I was trying to remember when I'd first become conscious of "Ireland" as a real-world place and my family connexions to it. My terminus ante quem is fourth grade, when I drew a map of it freehand for St Patrick's Day which my teacher put up on the bulletin board. (That may also have been the year we began to annually abuse food dye; I distinctly remember green pancakes at the house we moved from when I was ten.) It's no coincidence, I suspect, that the same teacher had given us the assignment of finding out our ethnic heritage. (Again, I clearly recall my chagrin when she read out "Austrian" as "Australian".)

By high school, I was a full-on romantic Celtic nationalist, but I'm very vague on how I got there. The 80s were an active time for the Provisional IRA, so they were in the news a lot, but that's hardly the sort of thing to convert me. I remember that fantasy RPGs spurred to me read everything I could about folkloric Celtic creatures, but was I avidly reading fairy tales before that? I can't remember. I know that we would hardly have touched on the actual history of the island in any of my school classes before then; even in high school, we touched on it only tangentially, insofar as it related to the history of England.

I've been trying to make up for my lack of information about the real Ireland for years now. The wind that shakes the barley is still waiting at home to be viewed. But last night, I only wanted to indulge my longing for a hunk of overripe Burren Gold, and after two hours of Maureen O'Hara's electric orange hair and Barry Fitzgerald's living leprechaun antics, that hunger was well and truly sated. The two-hour running time was padded out with plenty of landscape porn and at least three musical numbers; naturally the cúpla focal was present, too, in the form of a barely comprehensible exchange between O'Hara's penitent spitfire and her angling-obsessed parish priest. (Aon tuairim ag éinne cad é an chiall atá le "níor rith sé ar a shon"?)

What the movie didn't do, however, was draw me in in any way. The story is changed considerably from the Maurice Walsh short story upon which it's based and which I read some years ago now, but not in any way that deviates from established rom-com formula. Despite Wayne's famously limited range, there actually were scenes were you could glimpse the rounded outline of an emotional core, the tragic story of two proud people straining to love each over in spite of their fear of sharing their vulnerabilities. But then it would be back to all the toola-roola and whack-a-daddy-oh and the opportunity lost on us.

Speaking of whacks, an absolutely creepy amount of anti-woman violence--even for a film from the 50s and even for a John Wayne vehicle. His character keeps contrasting the quaint Irish customs with "the way we do things in America", but his America was as foreign to me as the Technicolor vision of a Connemara without electricity, class divisions, or true poverty.

Comments

[dorisduke.livejournal.com]

hmm movies are not the best place to learn of a culture and 1950 movies are the worst. Ireland is diverse with simple and complex minds even with in my own family. Wackawoman was never the norm as far as I know.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

That was exactly my point. Wackawoman was never the norm in American either, but you'd never know that from the way Wayne's "Yank" character carries on.

[dorisduke.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah I know, I should have stated it better in that I was agreeing with you.

[lhn.livejournal.com]

We actually watched the movie in high school, though I now can't for the life of me remember what class or why. (I'm guessing it was an English class and we'd read the story, but I'm not sure.)

I developed a minor strain of similar romanticism about Ireland in my teens by way of folk music, though being me my interest tended to stop quite a bit before the Boyne, let alone the Troubles. Thanks to Isaac Asimov, I knew about the importance of Celtic Christianity in Dark Age Europe long before How the Irish Saved Civilization hit the charts. I also got interested in the varied misfortunes surrounding the efforts of Elizabeth I's suitors and courtiers to do something impressive there, due to hearing "Follow Me Up to Carlow" and being introduced to the poetry of Sir Philip Sidney around the same time. And I got a smattering of myth, though I never managed to make it all the way through the translation of the Táin Bó Cúailnge I took out of the library once or twice.

Not having any family connection to the subject (and growing up in an area with much less of an Irish-American presence than Chicago) I didn't know much about modern Ireland, but I also didn't absorb much in the way of "Danny Boy"/"Quiet Man" preconceptions about the Auld Sod. I do remember being more or less an adult before I twigged to how different actual speakers from Ireland sounded from stage/movie Irish accents.

[joebehrsandiego.livejournal.com]

The "real Ireland", early 21st century edition:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/joebehr/5199306240/

And, the 1863 utopian edition.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/joebehr/5221894358/

[sconstant.livejournal.com]

Come on, you're just trying to make me feel foolish by reviewing an entire movie without actually telling me the name of it. Yeah, I could Google the clues, but why not, you know, just say it? Unless it's somehow hidden here in acrostic form?

[lhn.livejournal.com]

The Quiet Man

[(Anonymous)]

I spend every St. Patrick's Day watching "Hear My Song", which is superior in many many ways, and every year, I remember why I love it so. Takeoffs of Abbott and Costello routines. Lovely and glorious singing. It's barely aged at all, and makes me happy. Give it a whirl. Gwyn

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

The best thing about being English is that you're automatically the hated enemy of every self-consciously ethnic white group in America. The best thing about being Cornish is that you're kind of Celtic but still a hated Englishman. And the best thing about growing up in Cornwall but having been born outside London is that you're not authentically anything: to the Cornish you won't be local but your grandchildren might stand a chance if they behave, to the English you're laughably rural and to Americans you're routinely confused with Liverpudlians.

There was some film set in Ireland with Jeanane Garofalo where a character made a point of saying "this is the real world, too, not some quaint fantasy fairyland" and I could relate to that. Otherwise undistinguished, though.

[lhn.livejournal.com]

And the best thing about growing up in Cornwall but having been born outside London is that you're not authentically anything: to the Cornish you won't be local but your grandchildren might stand a chance if they behave, to the English you're laughably rural and to Americans you're routinely confused with Liverpudlians.

If you're finding Americans who can localize you better than "English" (or, interchangeably, "British") you're already dealing with a minority.

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

Thy've been to Liverpool because of the Beatles. I think the association is irresistible because I wear glasses.