In this essay I hope to cover and discuss Martin McLoones views on The Butcher Boy, especially when he mentions that the movie is a metaphor for Ireland as "The abused child of History." I will hope to relate his comments and the film itself back to Irish National Cinema.
Martin McLoone sums up the Butcher Boy by saying, "Set in small-town Ireland of the early 1960s, the film traces the descent into violence and madness of twelve-year-old Francie Brady, the victim of a dysfunctional family and an uncaring and abusive environment. Francie starts out as a witty, loveable rogue who 's happiness is built around his friendship with Joe Purcell" (McLoone, pg. 213, 2000) The description of the movie when it was first released was as follows; "A dark
This problem of identity for Francie is evident as Francie had to grow up at a very fast rate. He was very independent as his mother suffered depression and his father was an alcoholic and abusive man. The development of Francie 's childhood was extreme. He knew nothing better. But that seem to be a topic in Irish Film; if we compare it, "The butcher boy is similar to Connor Mc Dermottroe 's Swansong: the story of Occi Byrne (2009), the institutions of church and state do little to protect the vulnerable family that is Austin Byrne and his mother Bridget"(Debbie Ging ,pg.73, 2013) We see that this is an element that society does not like to discuss as we have not been made aware to a high enough degree to fully understand how to help people. The story on Occi Byrne highlights similar clerical issues, in the fact the priests would have intercourse with Occis mother, who also suffered mental
Throughout the film we have a narrator. This narrator was there to give us a deeper insight into the life of Francie Brady. The narration of Francie 's life made us grow more found of him, and even though he was committing crimes we were in a way cheering him on, as we grew to love the Character. Smith goes on to say, The butcher boy was a landmark even in Irish culture 's increasing use of personal narrative as a means of excavating "the elided history of Irelands architecture of containment (Smith, 2001: 112). This backs up my statement on the narrative aspect of the film, it made us more aware of what was going on and gave us a deeper insight into things. A new era was born for Irish Films. Within the Butcher Boy we see the scene where there was a nuclear bomb. This wasn’t an actual explosion but a turn of events in Francie 's life. It was to highlight the inner pain and hurt that had built up inside of Francie. All the events throughout his life, his mother’s death, sexual abuse at school and the loss of his one and true best friend Joe has got to him. In my own opinion this explosion identified to us a change in Francis '
Often people are not what they seem. According to Roald Dahl, in “Lamb to the Slaughter,” “But there needn’t really be any fuss. I hope not anyway. It wouldn’t be very good for my job.” When in public Patrick Maloney was the doting husband, but when the doors hid outside eyes Patrick revealed his true feelings. He wanted a divorce. He wanted to ruin his wife and soon-to-be child, but without anyone knowing. Thought the passage, the tone is revealed as condescending. The way Mr. Maloney talks to his wife is as though she is a small and unknowing child.
Too many horror films provide scares and screams throughout their respective cinemas. Not many viewers follow what kind of model the films follow to appease their viewers. However, after reading film theorist Carol Clover’s novel, watching one of the films she associates in the novel “Halloween”, and also watching the movie “Nightmare on Elm Street” I say almost every “slasher” or horror film follows a model similar to Clover’s. The model is a female is featured as a primary character and that females tend to always overcome a situation at some point throughout the film.
Included within the anthology The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction,1[1] are the works of great Irish authors written from around three hundred years ago, until as recently as the last decade. Since one might expect to find in an anthology such as this only expressions and interpretations of Irish or European places, events or peoples, some included material could be quite surprising in its contrasting content. One such inclusion comes from the novel Black Robe,2[2] by Irish-born author Brian Moore. Leaving Ireland as a young man afforded Moore a chance to see a great deal of the world and in reflection afforded him a great diversity of setting and theme in his writings. And while his Black Robe may express little of Ireland itself, it expresses much of Moore in his exploration into evolving concepts of morality, faith, righteousness and the ever-changing human heart.
"In Slaughterhouse Five, -- Or the Children's Crusade, Vonnegut delivers a complete treatise on the World War II bombing of Dresden. The main character, Billy Pilgrim, is a very young infantry scout* who is captured in the Battle of the Bulge and quartered in a Dresden slaughterhouse where he and other prisoners are employed in the production of a vitamin supplement for pregnant women. During the February 13, 1945, firebombing by Allied aircraft, the prisoners take shelter in an underground meat locker. When they emerge, the city has been levelled and they are forced to dig corpses out of the rubble. The story of Billy Pilgrim is the story of Kurt Vonnegut who was captured and survived the firestorm in which 135,000 German civilians perished, more than the number of deaths in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Robert Scholes sums up the theme of Slaughterhouse Five in the New York Times Book Review, writing: 'Be kind. Don't hurt. Death is coming for all of us anyway, and it is better to be Lot's wife looking back through salty eyes than the Deity that destroyed those cities of the plain in order to save them.' The reviewer concludes that 'Slaughterhouse Five is an extraordinary success. It is a book we need to read, and to reread.' "The popularity of Slaughterhouse Five is due, in part, to its timeliness; it deals with many issues that were vital to the late sixties: war, ecology, overpopulation, and consumerism. Klinkowitz, writing in Literary Subversions.New American Fiction and the Practice of Criticism, sees larger reasons for the book's success: 'Kurt Vonnegut's fiction of the 1960s is the popular artifact which may be the fairest example of American cultural change. . . . Shunned as distastefully low-brow . . . and insufficiently commercial to suit the exploitative tastes of high-power publishers, Vonnegut's fiction limped along for years on the genuinely democratic basis of family magazine and pulp paperback circulation. Then in the late 1960s, as the culture as a whole exploded, Vonnegut was able to write and publish a novel, Slaughterhouse Five, which so perfectly caught America's transformative mood that its story and structure became best-selling metaphors for the new age. '"Writing in Critique, Wayne D. McGinnis comments that in Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut 'avoids framing his story in linear narration, choosing a circular structure.
Slaughterhouse-Five: The Novel and the Movie In 1972 director George Roy Hill released his screen adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five (or The Children's Crusade; A Duty Dance With Death). The film made over 4 million dollars and was touted as an "artistic success" by Vonnegut (Film Comment, 41). In fact, in an interview with Film Comment in 1985, Vonnegut called the film a "flawless translation" of his novel, which can be considered an honest assessment in light of his reviews of other adaptations of his works: Happy Birthday, Wanda June (1971) "turned out so abominably" that he asked to have his name removed from it; and he found Slapstick of Another Kind (1984) to be "perfectly horrible" (41,44).
Anyone who has had the chance to read Mary Shelly’s original Frankenstein and watch the movie Young Frankenstein is aware that there is quite a difference when it comes to the two of them. For one it is easy to point out that Young Frankenstein is set out to be a comedy while the original version of Frankenstein is made to be serious. Young Frankenstein is a 1977 film that tells the story of Victor Frankenstein’s grandson. The film adaptation is essentially a parody of the classic tale along with other versions of Frankenstein. It pointed out from the start of the movie that it would run directly parallel with the original tale when Fredrick Frankenstein was mentioned to be the grandson of the infamous Victor
Slaughterhouse Five, written by Kurt Vonnegut is an anti war novel told by the narrator who is a minor character in the story. Slaughterhouse-Five is the story of Billy Pilgrim, a man who has come "unstuck in time. "The bombing of Dresden is what destroyed Billy. Dresden’s destruction shows the destruction of people who fought in the war: the all the people who died. Some people, like the main character, Billy Pilgrim, are not able to function normally like before because of what they saw, because of their experience. Throughout the book, Billy starts hallucinating about his experiences with the Tralfamadorians: he wants to escape the world which was destroyed by war, a war that he does not and cannot understand. Vonnegut uses the technique of repetition.. The main repetition is “so it goes” which is told after anything related to death, he also uses other repetitions throughout the book. The major theme of the story is the Destructiveness of War. Vonnegut uses repetition to reinforce the theme of the story.
Slaughterhouse 5, also know as The Children’s Crusade, has its intent aimed at showing the innocent people that end up having to partake in war. Many scenes and characters in the book encompass this by reflecting the childish nature in each character or how ordinary they appear to be. The main character is the epitome of this theme, with Billy Pilgram being an otherwise bland (other than the fictional aspect of his “time travel” or the reality of his mental disorder), innocent, average American sent out to war. In my opinion, Billy is also a way for the author Kurt Vonnegut to put some of his own personal views and experiences into his book, since the entire first chapter is Vonnegut explaining his inability to write a serious book of his own first hand account of the Dresden Firebombing.
With the son’s fear amongst the possibility of death being near McCarthy focuses deeply in the father’s frustration as well. “If only my heart were stone” are words McCarthy uses this as a way illustrate the emotional worries the characters had. ( McCarthy pg.11). Overall, the journey of isolation affected the boy just as the man both outward and innerly. The boys’ journey through the road made him weak and without a chance of any hope. McCarthy states, “Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all” (McCarthy pg. 28). The years of journey had got the best of both, where they no longer had much expectation for
Classic narrative cinema is what Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson (The classic Hollywood Cinema, Columbia University press 1985) 1, calls “an excessively obvious cinema”1 in which cinematic style serves to explain and not to obscure the narrative. In this way it is made up of motivated events that lead the spectator to its inevitable conclusion. It causes the spectator to have an emotional investment in this conclusion coming to pass which in turn makes the predictable the most desirable outcome. The films are structured to create an atmosphere of verisimilitude, which is to give a perception of reality. On closer inspection it they are often far from realistic in a social sense but possibly portray a realism desired by the patriarchal and family value orientated society of the time. I feel that it is often the black and white representation of good and evil that creates such an atmosphere of predic...
‘The butcher boy’ was made into a film adaptation in 1997 by Neill Jordan and author of the original book Patrick McCabe. The Novel was highly praised and controversial. Many saw it as the best account of Irish childhood. Its time frame is reminiscent of the
Jones, Peter G. "The End of the Road: Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade" Modern Critical Interpretations Slaughterhouse-Five Ed. Harold Bloom.
In 1971 Tom Laughlin released Billy Jack, the sequel to The Born Losers (1967) starring himself as the main character, Billy Jack, a biracial Navajo Native American. The film explores the plight of Native Americans in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement (the film is set in and was filmed in 1969), as well as their interactions with the dominant White American culture. The main character Billy Jack is set up to be a myth like warrior-savior of the Native Americans and the multi-ethnic populace of their reservation. Billy Jack, even though he is half-white is completely submerged in his Navajo culture, taking a vow of peace that throughout the film is broken. The film shows an unadulterated depiction of White American racism and privilege,
Cultural nationalism is a force that permeates through films as a reflection of the country of origin and production. Naturally, it focuses on national identity shaped by cultural traditions and language – a concept that proves problematic when appertained to Irish film and how the ‘Irish Mind’ is translated on screen. Unlike many other countries, Ireland lacks the strong foundation of indigenous voice to solidify its films as Irish, despite the early efforts of Douglas Hyde and others to restore the Gaelic language. Since the linguistic footing of Ireland was crippled by the widespread use of English, the hope of a distinctive culture was put into the Irish Literary Revival; such hope was then catechised by the Roman Catholic tradition for
The story opens with the boy, whom to this point had ignored his mothers coughs, drops everything to rush to her aid as she “collapsed into a little wicker armchair, holding her side”. (O’Connor 206) As he watched his mother struggle trying to light the fire he told her, “Go back to bed and Ill light the fire”. (206) Now to this point, as the reader, I am unsure of the age of the boy, but I get the impression that he is a young boy. My idea of this boy is that he tries to take on too much throughout the day and eventually it was the demise of the opposite sex that eventually caused the meltdown of the “awesome” little boy. This is certainly something that will happen again to this young lad but he has definitely learned his lesson this time.