Bad Boy McDonagh

Today was my last Global Literature class and it featured class members reading scenes from McDonagh’s play A Behanding in Spokane. McDonagh is better known and the writer/director behind In Bruges and Three Billboards. In Ireland he’s better known for the Leenane Trilogy.

I tried and failed to watch In Bruges. Too violent and characters who were too--I’m not sure I remember--sadistic? Three Billboards was pretty much a vehicle for Frances McDormand, for whom it was written. I thought her performance was brilliantly bracing, but I wasn’t satisfied by the plot inconsistencies and the violence that met with no consequences, that seemed to be pure theatre.

So, A Behanding, made into a hit on Broadway by Christopher Walken and Sam Rockwell, is a very creepy tale about a man whose hand was viciously severed when he was a boy. He has spent his adult life collecting severed hands through a variety of violent and bloody means. It’s a story about four macabre and shifty people bent on revenge and survival.

McDonagh describes himself as the product of punk rock--an edgy provocateur who who defies tradition. I take issue with his using that term because I thought punk rock stood for something--expressing the anger of a hopeless generation toward the hypocrites who stole their future. McDonagh seems to stand for senseless violence and having a laugh while there are body parts strewn around. I just looked at a Guardian review that included the phrases: "moments of dreadful cruelty and elaborate violence” and "baroquely violent.”

I know I can be terribly school marm-ish but I feel like, if you’re going to make me sit through something horribly violent, I want some redeeming message or insight. Not just a bunch of pathological, wise-cracking sadists. McDonagh seems like the adult version of boys who are addicted to comic book violence or video game gore. I think one of the gifts of #metoo is challenging male fantasy and the world it creates. I don’t want to live in that world.

March 21