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]

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