Autobiography
We went to go see Kenneth Branagh’s new film, Belfast. It chronicles the youth of a Protestant boy growing up during the strife of the religiously war-torn Irish city. The message is quite stark and clear, growing up amidst religious strife is no fun. The young boy is presumably Branagh at about age nine. His father and mother are Belfast natives who live on a street near where they were raised in working-class Belfast. The street has a blend of diversity ranging from Protestants to Catholics to Hindus. The “Branagh” family is trying to get by with the father working in England in construction and traveling every fortnight back home to be with his family. As the religious fervor boils over, culminating in street rioting and threats of reprisals from Protestant gangs that want all Protestants, including the Branaghs, to stand strong against the Catholics, the family is torn apart. The older son gets involved in the contraband trade, the cousin Vanessa joins a Protestant gang out of no particular conviction other than to just belong somewhere. The young Kenneth (Buddy), is sweet on a Catholic girl who is the top student in her class. We don’t learn of her religion until the end because the portrayal of her in school and at home is that of someone just like Buddy, blonde and blue-eyed, shrouded with a purity of youth. The parents are likable, tolerant and handsome people who just want to live the life they have grown to love on the streets they know.
As the unrest visits the family’s street and invades their everyday lives, they consider moving far away to Australia or Canada, but the draw of their culture, as embodies in the presence of Buddy’s grandparents who live on the next street, is a powerful magnet to stay put. So, they adjust their lives to crossing the barriers every day and going about their business as best they can. The normal stresses of life, however, continue to invade their tranquility. This is mostly in the form of the father’s need to work in England and be away most of the time. He stands up to the threats of the local Protestant thugs, but he is simply not there much of the time as life on the streets goes on while he toils abroad.
As the discord grows, so does the unsettled nature of the family. The grandfather grows ill and goes to hospital. The older son is dragged back into the street life of crime and even Buddy is introduced to petty crime by his cousin, despite being very scared and quite incompetent as a shoplifter. Meanwhile, the family is thrown a controversial lifeline. The father has been offered promotion and long-term work in England including a house with indoor plumbing (the Belfast Council Flats are of Angela’s Ashes vintage with outdoor toilets that are part of the lawn furniture in the way the family members sit in them during outdoor gatherings). The opportunity brings with it the healthy life of a home garden where Buddy can play football and pursue his love of sport in harmony. The family is torn because they don’t want to leave the life they know even though it is rife with compromise and danger.
One line between father and son resonates the most during the film. Da always tells Buddy to be good and if he can’t be good, to be careful. That seems to work for the family as a whole until the unrest gets to the boiling point and they are literally caught in the crossfire with troops at both ends of the street and the local gang member threatening them at the same time. They have nowhere to run and narrowly escape. That moment of tension is broken by the grandfather’s death and burial, punctuated by a huge and glorious wake. Da declares that his father was popular…and that he also owed money to most of the attendees, which seems to symbolize the cost of staying in the life they had all grown to know and take comfort from.
The family decides to go to England and when its Buddy’s turn to give flowers and say his goodbyes to his sweet little schoolgirl, that is when he reveals her religion to his father. Da’s reply is that regardless of her religious affiliation, she will always be welcome in their home. In one brief commentary, Buddy’s father has cast aside all the reasons for the damage to their lives and shown how easy it could be to bridge the divide that has ripped the community apart. As the family rides off in the bus to the airport, the grandmother, played by Dame Judy Dench says to herself, “Go, go and never look back.”
This weekend we are reminded how easily our culture can fall back into the painful yet silly tendency to rally ourselves around the hatred of others. Religious differences between Hindus and Muslims always seen so stark. The same between Jews and Muslims that enshroud the Middle East. These differences apply to dress and other very visible extremes. Less so between Jews and Christians, especially when they live in the modern world of suburbia. The story of Belfast reminds us of how much the emphasis of these differences can harm us even to the extreme of drawing very vague lines between Protestants and Catholics, who ostensibly look and act very similarly. Even Buddy thinks being a Catholic might be better since you can skip church and just seek salvation through confession. But one of this country’s most controversial and symbolic figures, Michael Flynn, presumably a good Irish boy himself at some point, has shown us just how perilous is the peace we enjoy in America. We are not Belfast, but apparently, Flynn has reminded us that we are never far removed from Belfast either.
In a speech this weekend, Michael Flynn said that we needed to be one nation under God and that that meant we needed to all be of one religion, Christianity. I grew up wondering how something as wrong-minded and vile as the ethnic superiority of the Third Reich could possibly exist as recently as a few decades prior. It was almost inconceivable and barbaric. Ethnic cleansing might take place in uncivilized worlds like Africa and Asia Minor, but not in Europe and certainly never in the United States. But Flynn has showed us what Charlottesville and other similar displays have been warning us about on an ever-escalating basis. We are never very far away from the perils of hatred. Religion is a fine palliative for the masses. It gives hope to the weary and downtrodden and it espouses, almost universally, a philosophy of love and acceptance. And yet that is only the honed part of the stick. The blunt end of the same stick is the one that the likes of Michael Flynn seem bound to eventually turn to bludgeon our neighbors who choose to believe ever so slightly different things than we do. Our founding fathers, notably James Madison in the case of religion, noted that our nation was based on a belief in religious freedom and punctuated that point by insisting on the separation of Church and State.
Michael Flynn needs to see Belfast and he needs to invoke the very thoughts that ripped his homeland apart during the last Century. We owe Michael Flynn a note of thanks. Subtlety is devious in things like hatred and discrimination. We are never quite sure these things are wrong when they are cloaked in familiar tones and themes such as family and tradition. But when someone comes right out and says what is being implied, we are all shocked and appalled, or at least we should be. I think Kenneth Branagh needs to have a chat with convicted-yet-pardoned Michael Flynn as a fellow countryman. Maybe he should ask Flynn to draft his own autobiography and ask himself if he is a victim of Belfast or perhaps one of its creators.