Somewhere on screen

There’s a passage in The Moviegoer where Walker Percy has the narrator muse on what he calls ‘certification’.

‘Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighbourhood, the place is not certified for him,’ he observes. ‘More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighbourhood. But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighbourhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere.’

I got to thinking of that over the last week, with the Oscar attempts of The Banshees of Inisherin and the almost impossibly good An Cailín Ciúin, and me remembering how excited we used to get about any films at all being shot in Ireland. They were rarities, or felt to be so, and just as we all knew that The Spy Who Came in from the Cold saw Smithfield standing in for Berlin, Excalibur was filmed in Wicklow, and Educating Rita was shot all over Dublin, so we were doubly thrilled to see films that were set here. I mean, Eat the Peach was a film people seemed to talk about endlessly when I was small. ‘Eat the Peach’, I tell you, about a couple of lads in Kildare building a ‘wall of death’ for motorbikes.

This was long before Tom Hanks was storming the beaches at Enniscorthy, mind, never mind Luke Skywalker living his best hermit life off the Kerry coast.

I wonder if it’s related to something a friend of mine from Pittsburg used to notice in his years studying in Dublin. He’d find it baffling that Irish people would be proud of things he’d take for granted. ‘How do you know that?’ he’d ask. ‘Irish people always do this -- I’ll mention Jaws or something, and somebody will always throw me that an Irish person was second-unit cameraman on it or something. How do you know this? And why do you care?’

We’re a small country, one that’s somehow got both a village mentality and a exile one, where there’s a sense that everyone knows people and should be able to connect with people, but also an awareness that we’re scattered all over the world. I think that twin mentality may probably be combining with a desire to be able to prove that somehow we matter -- that we have gone places, and that we have done things. A big chunk of our history, after all, is a history of things being done to the Irish more so than by the Irish, with culture, language, religion, and even the basic necessities for sustenance all having been attacked. I suspect that in any society where there’s a sense of somehow having survived with just shadows of your heritage, an excitement about being recognised globally as Somewhere is probably inevitable.