Words by
Eric Hillis
Like so many of 2020's involuntary shut-ins, I've spent much of the
year binging TV shows. Watching an episode each evening, I began back in
March with Moonlighting before working my way through
Remington Steele, and I'm currently four seasons deep into
Murder She Wrote.
What do those three shows have in common, aside from all being American
shows that follow a detective format? Well, they all feature ludicrous
portrayals of Ireland and the Irish at some point in their runs.
Moonlighting features an episode in which
Bruce Willis and Cybil Shepherd's bickering dicks are
hired by Kathleen Kilpatrick (lol) a young "Irish" woman who believes
she's a leprechaun. The role of Kathleen is played by red-haired (of
course!) American actress Alexandra Johnson, and as you can
probably guess, her accent is atrocious. It's that "Stage Oirish" accent
that you won’t hear anywhere in Ireland, but which American movies and
TV shows continue to persist with.
Remington Steele goes further, with multiple episodes
both set and filmed in Ireland. Well, I say "set in Ireland", but
they're certainly not set in the 1980s Ireland of my childhood. Rather
they appear to take place in pre-revolution Ireland, with English Lords
living in mansions on hills while the local flat-cap sporting peasants
get drunk and fight among themselves. Some of the houses don’t even seem
to have electricity. I can attest that Ireland was in a bad state in the
'80s, but we still had Wham, Back to the Future and
Dallas like everyone else!
I haven't gotten to an Irish set Murder She Wrote episode
yet, but they're coming. So far however the series has featured multiple
Irish characters, none of them played by Irish actors, and all
performing with that bloody Stage Oirish brogue.
While a few Irish people find this sort of genuinely offensive, most of
us can laugh it off, especially when it happens in movies and TV shows
from decades past. But here's the thing - Hollywood continues to persist
with this baffling version of Ireland that only ever existed in the
minds of Americans who have never set foot in my country.
Take the newly released trailer for Wild Mountain Thyme, an upcoming movie that appears to do for the Irish what
Song of the South did for African-Americans. Written and
directed by John Patrick Shanley - one of those Americans who
probably calls himself Irish despite clearly having no tangible relation
to or knowledge of the country his ancestors left - and based off his
play 'Outside Mullingar', the film stars Emily Blunt and
Jamie Dornan as a pair of squabbling lovers in the
John Wayne/Maureen O'Hara mould, with
Christopher Walken cast as the latter's father, a farmer who
threatens to pass his land onto an American nephew played by
Jon Hamm. There's also some guff about a family curse, because
we're all a bunch of backwards superstitious yokels here, you see.
It's no surprise that the accents are terrible, but that's the least of
the problems here. A shot of the New York City skyline, with the World
Trade Centre notably absent, tells us that the film takes place at some
point in recent years. Why then does Ireland resemble the 1930s?
Has Shanley ever been to the outskirts of Mullingar? If he has, he
would know that rural Ireland looks nothing like the imaginary Celtic
theme park of his film. He wouldn't find anyone living in houses of
wattling and clay. He wouldn't see too many red-haired cailíní. And he'd
no doubt be shocked to find that not everyone is white and Irish. If
Wild Mountain Thyme were set in a genuine approximation of
20th century small town Ireland it would feature a supporting cast of
Poles, Nigerians and Brazilians. Blunt and Dornan's characters wouldn't
be working the land, they'd be employed in the giant call centre on the
edge of town. If Shanley wanted to find someone wearing a flat cap, his
best bet would be to take a train into Dublin and look for the nearest
tourist haunt.
What's particularly annoying about the continued backwards stereotyping of Ireland
is that Irish actors continue to be complicit. Witness
Saoirse Ronan taking part in a shockingly bigoted episode of the
terminally unfunny American sketch show Saturday Night Live, an episode so malicious that it would likely have led to the show's
cancellation if it targeted most cultures in such a cruel manner. Jamie
Dornan has spent most of his life in Ireland, so what's his excuse? Why
is an Irish actor adopting an accent that makes him sound like an
American attempting to sound Irish? English actress Emily Blunt is
talented enough that I imagine she could easily pull off a passable
Irish accent. But I don’t think Hollywood wants genuine Irish accents.
Instead they want an accent that Americans recognise as Irish, even if
it's a brogue that doesn't exist in real life. Tom Cruise's
performance in Far and Away is often held up as the worst
attempt at an Irish accent in screen history, but it's said that Cruise
worked hard to perfect an appropriate accent, only to be told by his
producers that it wasn't recognisably Irish enough for American
audiences.
Aside from the issue of getting our accents completely wrong, Hollywood
insists of portraying Irish people as a bunch of loveable dolts. In 2020
we're still being portrayed in the same patronising manner as
African-Americans were in the 1930s, as very charming and funny idiots
who like a dance and a drink, but don’t give us too much of the hard
stuff or we might get a bit rowdy. Decades of this stereotype has
created a vision of Irish folk in the American psyche as the sort of
people it's fun to go for a pint with, but not the sort of people you
want to give any responsibility to. I know from personal experience that
when an Irish person walks into a bar anywhere in America they're
immediately embraced by fascinated drinkers, who often lose interest
once they realise you don’t conform to their perception of the Irish.
While in the US I was told by Irish-Americans that I wasn't really as
Irish as they were, because my surname is Hillis and theirs were Hickey
or Murphy. Until recently, the state of the Irish economy meant most of
our young people were forced to emigrate. Many chose the US, and while a
few found success, most ended up in dead end jobs. I wonder how badly
affected they were by American employers' Hollywood cultivated
perceptions of Irishness. If your only experience of Irish people came
from The Quiet Man, would you want to give a position of power to someone you assumed was
a drunken, poorly educated gombeen? Even the tagline of
Wild Mountain Thyme - "there is nothing more dangerous … than an Irish woman in love"
- suggests a darkside to the Irish psyche, that we're a potentially
"dangerous" people who lack self control.
These screen representations of Ireland might warm the cockles of
American viewers, but they also warp perceptions of a country that has
made so many strides in recent decades that Ireland is now a lot more
advanced than the US in many ways (we don’t pay our employees with
cheques and the idea of signing for a credit card purchase would have to
be explained to anyone under the age of 20). For better or worse,
Ireland is as modern a society as any in Western Europe. Romantic
Ireland's dead and gone, it's with O'Leary in the grave. And that's
where it belongs, because it never really existed outside of the minds
of Hollywood filmmakers.
If you want to see what modern Ireland really looks like, there are
plenty of options as over the last decade the Irish film industry has
made significant strides. Ironically, some of the most accurate
depictions of today's Ireland can be found in movies made by British
filmmakers. Peter Mackie Burns'
Rialto
and Phyllida Lloyd's
Herself
play out in a Dublin that I recognise as the city I call home, but which
American audiences would probably mistake for London. Dublin is a modern
city like any other, populated not by flat cap wearing, whiskey imbibing
loveable rogues, but by normal people. You know, like that Irish TV show
that Americans fell for this year.
There is one Irish character in a Hollywood movie that Irish people can
feel proud of, even if he is a villain. That's
Halloween III's Conal Cochrane, who enacts a plan to kill the children of America
with a signal sent from a TV commercial to microchips embedded in the
Halloween masks made by his company, Silver Shamrock. I'm not saying I'm
in favour of mass infanticide, but Cochrane stands out as an American
depiction of an Irishman. For a start he's played by one of our greatest
ever actors, Dan O'Herlihy, and performs the role with a genuine
Irish accent. But what's most notable about Cochrane is how competent he
is. Where most Hollywood Irishmen are gobshites, Cochrane is an evil
genius. The icing on the cake is how he turns America's commercial
appropriation of a Celtic festival, Halloween, or Samhain as we
originally knew it, against itself. Many Americans aren't even aware
that Halloween originated in Ireland ("You don;t know much about Halloween," as Cochrane puts it). It's probably our greatest
cultural gift to the US. And what did we get in return? A never-ending
series of movies and TV shows in which we're portrayed as drunks,
terrorists and idiots.