This is a hybrid review of Naked and Sing Street. Contains minor spoilers for the former and major spoilers for the latter.
Deconstructing the Irish Myth
Mike Leigh is an English film director. He has no immediate familial connections to Ireland or any Celtic identities, none of his theatrically released movies have ever centered around Irish characters, and not one of the recurring actors in his films is Irish. It might seem as if he was not qualified to confront Ireland’s complex history of representation in media, but in 1993, Leigh did it anyway, releasing the black comedy drama Naked to both widespread acclaim and controversy.
Naked opens on an alleyway in Manchester at night. Johnny Fletcher has rough sex with an anonymous woman that quickly turns into rape. He steals a car and flees to East London where his ex-girlfriend Louise lives. As Johnny runs down the alleyway, gets in the car, and escapes on the highway, the opening credits roll, and we hear Andrew Dickson’s score for the first time. It starts with a reverb-drenched low drum, sounding far away from what we are seeing, as if coming from the depths below. The booklet that comes along with the CD for the soundtrack describes Dickson’s thought process during the creation of the score, “Dickson was aware that it would have been very easy to titillate the action on screen or even turn it into melodrama - something he wanted to avoid at all costs. It was his wife at the time who had an epiphany and suggested to her husband, a collector of musical instruments, to simply beat his big military bass drum in order to give the scene a sense of foreboding” (Eicke 8). Then a double bass is added into the mix, then a viola, then finally a harp. The harp is really the focus of the score. It is relentless, “driven by a recurring ostinato” (Eicke 7), and it is the first subtle connection the film makes to Ireland. Of course, the harp is not only a Celtic instrument—and the way that Dickson refers to it, “classical” (Eicke 8), indicates that they most likely used a pedal harp more often found in concert halls rather than a traditional Celtic lever harp or other variant—but it is not only the choice of instrument that connects the score with Irish traditional music. The musical structure that the harp follows, the repetition of a theme, is reminiscent of Irish dance music. This very minimalistic composition is used again and again throughout the film. See below for Dickson’s sheet music for Naked.
As Naked continues, we follow Johnny, who Irish film scholar Padraic Killeen describes as a “motor-mouthed philosopher manqué who believes himself to be living on the cusp of history’s end” (76), as he wanders the streets of London over the course of a week.
Naked’s connection with Ireland and Celtic cultures would seem tenuous if based solely on the presence of a harp and some Celtic influence in its music, but the film contains much more than that alone. In fact, Killeen wrote about the connection, dissecting the movie’s relationship with Ireland in his essay, “Stained flesh – Ireland as idyll/damp patch in Mike Leigh's Naked.” He draws attention to a number of instances in the film where Leigh and his creative team make reference to Ireland.
The first connection requires some conjecture. Johnny and Louise throughout the film refer to their pasts. As it would be against his style of filmmaking, Leigh never indulges in exposition, so we never get a full picture of any of the characters’ full backgrounds, but some inferences can be made. Johnny and Louise both hail from Manchester, a city that Killeen describes as “a heaving Irish émigré destination for the past two centuries” (79). In addition, both characters appear to be Catholic, as it is explicitly referenced in the script for Louise (“Louise is a Catholic. Did you know that?”), and as for Johnny, he consistently refers to the Bible with an interpretation that is certainly not Protestant. Finally, Louise’s surname, Clancy, is a name with Irish ancestry. All together, Killeen concludes that Johnny and Lousie must come from a predominately Catholic community in Manchester which more than likely consists primarily of people of Irish descent.
The other allusions to Ireland come in the form of four props. The first is an ashtray that Johnny and Louise’s roommate Sophie use while smoking together at the beginning of Johnny’s spontaneous visit. Although out of focus in the foreground, it can be ascertained that it bears some sort of green text, and Killeen confirms that it is Celtic lettering for the word “Ireland.”
Next is a book seen later in the film. As Johnny roams around London, he encounters a number of peculiar characters, one of them being Brian, a night security guard who holds similarly bold beliefs about the universe as Johnny. Brian reads a stack of books to help keep him sane while sitting in that empty office building at night, and one of those books is Liam O’Flaherty’s Famine. On a home video commentary for the film, Leigh mentioned that he included the book intentionally to “resonate with the other Irish allusions in the film” (Killeen 82).
Through their conversation, Johnny finds out that Brian watches every night a woman across the street through her window. Recently he had seen her undress and fantasized about being with her. Later, unbeknownst to Brian, Johnny wheedles his way into her bedroom. They engage in some sort of flirtation with her drunkenly roving around the room while he chats about the things he sees around him. He picks up a stack of books, comments on Emma by Jane Austen, and then points across the room. “You from Ireland?” he says. She responds, “No, why?” “What’s that, a damp patch?” We cut to a poster that hangs on the wall: a map of Ireland. “Oh. I’ve never noticed that before.” Cut to the two of them having sex, and the map is never mentioned again.
Brian and Johnny meet again the next morning and have breakfast together at the restaurant Brian frequents. They order food and discuss Johnny’s tryst the night before—suddenly Brian brings out of his coat pocket a photo, possibly a postcard, of a small house on a grassy knoll by the ocean. “What is this?” Johnny asks. “That’s where I’m gonna live.” “Where is it?” “Ireland. I’ve lived in that cottage before.” Referring back to their previous discussion revolving around Brian’s belief in reincarnation, Johnny asks, “What, in one of your past lives?” “Yes, as a matter of fact.” Johnny tosses the photo aside, “Fuckin’ shit-hole, innit?” Brian mumbles to himself, “Don’t waste your life.”
Since Leigh has never directly commented on the presence of these Irish artifacts (besides the aforementioned remark he made in the DVD commentary), along with Dickson’s Celtic-influenced score, there are a number of interpretations that can be made. Killeen describes Naked as an “‘anti-odyssey’” or an “‘anti-epic.’” In many ways, Naked plays counter to what is expected in cinema—everything from the need for sympathetic characters to the way Ireland is used as a symbol.
Moya Kneafsey in her “Tourism Images and the Construction of Celticity in Ireland and Brittany” writes, “Romantic constructions of Celts tended to portray them as living simple, rural, pure lives close to nature, in contrast to the complex, corrupt, urban lives of modern people who had lost their connection to the natural world” (129). Initially it might appear that the allusions to Ireland in Naked kowtow to this common cliche surrounding Celtic cultures—the dirty streets of London stand in direct opposition to Brian’s Ireland fantasy—but it is more complex than that simple dichotomy. Killeen writes, “The enigmatic interruption of Ireland in Naked seems ultimately to facilitate a rebuke to fantasies of Arcadian escape from the pressures of modernity … In invoking and undermining, then, this master signifier – Ireland as idyll – Leigh may simply be denying the possibility of escape from, or cure for, the deeply anomic dystopia he depicts in Naked” (78). Essentially, Naked associates these indicators of “Irishness”—a humble cottage, a book about the Famine, a Celtic tchotchke, a map of Ireland, and Irish traditional music—with the dystopia of late ‘80s-‘90s London (or at least the version of London that Johnny inhabits). In doing so, Leigh challenges the notion of Ireland as a place separate from the rest of the world—in other words, their people go through the same hardships, the same conflicts, the same class struggles. Certainly Celtic nations have their own distinct cultures distinct from what is found elsewhere, but Naked unravels the romantic concept of Ireland as a place of refuge from the world’s modern problems.
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An interesting companion to Naked’s depiction of Ireland is 2016 musical comedy-drama Sing Street, directed by John Carney. As opposed to Naked, Sing Street is a fully Irish film—it has an Irish director, takes place in Dublin, and has an almost entirely Irish cast. The film is centered around Conor who, upon transferring to a new school, starts a band. All together, the filmmakers had ample opportunity to feature Irish music, and yet instead there is music from The Cure, Duran Duran, The Clash, Spandau Ballet, The Jam—all English bands. In fact, the film’s narrative is structured around the band being inspired by each of these bands, taking on new identities (and clothing) that emulates them, then writing and recording songs that fit their new styles (i.e. their first song is “The Riddle of the Model,” a new wave song obviously inspired by “Rio”). Being set in 1985, there were many Irish bands that could have been included in the film—the Dubliners, U2, The Pogues, etc—in addition to a diverse catalog of traditional Irish music. The exclusion of these artists, then, feels intentional.
In many ways, Sing Street is similar to another musical comedy set in Dublin, The Commitments, from 1991. It follows Jimmy Rabbitte who, like Conor, decides out of the blue to put together a band. Once again, the film ignores the musical tradition of Ireland and instead opts for another style, this time soul, inspired by black American artists of the ‘60s.
The Commitments opens on a wide shot of a cluttered street in Dublin, then cuts to a medium shot of a man playing the fiddle. People rush by, giving him no notice, and we cut to other activities in the square. Jimmy appears, enters the bustle of the street, and we cut away to a young man singing sean-nós to an uninterested crowd. After these moments, no Celtic music is heard in the film again.
Sing Street has a similar moment early in the film, albeit briefer. Conor is recruiting members for his band, and the first person he is suggested he should see is multi-instrumentalist Eamon. Eamon tries out for the band, edited in a similarly humorous fashion as the auditions in The Commitments, by playing a variety of instruments: bass guitar, drums, keyboard, xylophone, uilleann pipes, and bongo drums. The two second clip of Eamon playing the uilleann pipes is the only moment in the film where any traditional Celtic instruments appears.
Beyond the choice of music, Sing Street also makes an implicit rejection of Ireland in its narrative. Conor has aspirations for “making it big,” something that his brother Brendan encourages. What “making it big” means to him, though (besides getting together with the film’s love interest, Raphina), is finding fame outside of Ireland. Part of his dream which is repeated throughout the film is to leave for London to jumpstart his music career. The end of the film finds Conor and Raphina on a motor cruiser headed toward London. It is a fantastical sequence—Carney has said in interviews that it is not meant to be taken completely literally, that the couple would most likely die at sea—a scene of jubilation, cheered on by his brother.
Sing Street de-exoticizes Ireland (like The Commitments before it) by instead making England (London in particular) the idyll. Of course, that is anything but reality, but by making England a place of opportunity far across the Irish Sea, and by emptying this Irish musical of any substantive allusions to traditional Celtic music, Sing Street questions the image of Ireland as a mythic place of ancient history and spiritual connection.
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“Magic, mystery, music and laughter: these are some of the essential ingredients of a holiday in Ireland, according to Bord Fáilte’s 1999 tourism literature,” Kneafsey writes at the beginning of her essay. "Celts have been positioned as ‘peripheral others’” (8). Naked and Sing Street deconstruct this Irish stereotype from opposite directions, but both ultimately rely on Celtic music, or the lack thereof, and the associations we have with that music. Dickson’s minimalistic score, which contains primarily a harp ostinato, fuels Naked—while we watch Johnny roll around in the dirty alleyways of London, when Johnny is beaten nearly to death, and during every rape (of which there are three), it never changes or stops. By the end, any of the audience’s preconceptions about when and how to use a harp have fallen away and instead have been replaced with these terrible images of perversion. In a sense, Leigh is saying that human depravity knows no boundaries, especially those between England and Ireland. Even the music of your childhood can be corrupted. Sing Street addresses the issue on a much lighter note, but nevertheless, comes to similar conclusions. The film acts as if England, rather than Ireland, is the meridian of “magic, mystery, and laughter.” The characters yearn to get to London while Ireland is stripped of any of its appeal (besides its charming characters), including its music.
If we look at Naked and Sing Street as a pair, perhaps within a shared world, they reflect on each other. The England that Sing Street deifies is the exact hellscape that Naked’s Johnny inhabits. Neither film achieves any level of realism, nor do they aspire to. Instead, Leigh and Carney carefully heighten and lessen certain characteristics of English and Irish culture, all in an attempt to dismantle the limitations of the Celtic mythos and ultimately break down the barriers between their peoples.