(Advisement: some undetailed general plot spoilers.)

I watched the film Banshees of Inisherin in two sittings for outside reasons, and I’m glad I saw it that way. I was a fan of In Bruges, an earlier film of the director with some of the same main cast. That was a witty comedy, but by midway of Banshees, it was clear a main theme was being explored here, calling for a several-day long intermission. The theme is one I would have thought impossible to revolve a film directly around:

Adult abandonment.

The way humans behave when they feel abandoned is not something we typically explore in art. Feelings of isolation, marginalization, rejection, or persecution are often projected on work afterwards, not always with the explicit statement of the artist. When that seems to have been a theme in a visual artist’s life, we sometimes make it a defining narrative element of their work, post hoc.

Sometimes it can feel like critics are superimposing that take on vibrant work, full of love and the possibility of connection. They may be seeing the artist’s life, instead of their work. But a life is a life and a work of art is a work of art. No, we can’t separate the two completely, and no, we cannot accurately separate the two on our own as after-the-fact spectators, as much as we might want to “contribute” in that fashion. The artist can’t construct their entire life, but they can construct their entire work.

An honest artist will even be able to admit that they themselves aren’t truly sure: while society was busy marginalizing them, maybe someone else was lovingly stroking their hair. In Banshees, we see some of that stroking. We see people stepping up to try to fill gaps others have created. And we see disappointment as people’s expectations from that aren’t fulfilled, sometimes heartbreakingly.

Even still, art with these kind of foci rarely explores behavior due to abandonment rather than the feelings. Most usually, the analysis reinforces a common theme that many of us appreciate: that art that cries out from loneliness succeeds in connecting in the end. Here we all are now, in a gallery or the like, appreciating this once obscure art by a once obscure artist, and they succeeded in connecting not only with us, but larger society. The cry was answered, by us, in time, the artist often already passed.

Not so with the Banshees of Inisherin: it announces its concern innocuously with humor at the beginning, but gets to the heart of the behavior resulting from the emotions it explores relatively briskly. The first half is full of choice deadpan villager comedy, but the second half humanizes its subjects even more.

In the beginning of the film, Pádraic (Colin Farrell) is suddenly slighted by his best friend Coln (Brendan Gleeson) for being tedious, and told their friendship is now a cold at-length acquaintance. The setting is their stoic Irish village that is blessedly nonspecific about telling you what part of the early 20th century it takes place in. All we know is civil war is afoot, and that it’s not completely invasive, but omnipresent, even traditional feeling. The villagers in Banshees are not particularly consumed by this conflict; they’re consumed by the banalities and challenges of their own everyday existence.

Coln’s sudden rejection of Pádraic is made understandable when he mentions Pádraic’s two-hour description of his pony’s excrement as explanation, which Pádraic then pedantically corrects. Who of any self-awareness hasn’t been on both sides of those interactions once or twice? Suddenly faced with mortality-conscious concerns of legacy, the fiddler Coln has decided he must be remembered through his compositions, and has determined wasting time with Pádraic is an impediment to the establishment of his oeuvre. Whether an elder artist orating about how they must be remembered is as dull a subject as the contents of excrement is left for the viewer to decide, But Coln’s musings are sincere, gentle, and relatable.

Pádraic’s infinitely reasonable and level-headed beloved sister, Siobhán (Kerry Condon), is a help to him in processing his feelings of abandonment and rejection, but she’s also torn with feelings of alienation in the village that make her seek escape instead of consolation. (Spoiler alert:) We can’t help but root for her: in the end, she seems like the only one who doesn’t belong in this bleak, dead-end place. A voice-over of a letter she writes from the mainland afterwards spells it out: the residents are trapped in resentment and spite. (End spoiler.) This is where such a gloomy period piece cries out in contemporary relevance: that is how we’ve become, now, through the Internet shrinking and expanding us at the same time, accusatorially. Somehow, the Internet seems a spiteful village we’re all trapped in, but our judges and tormentors are distant and anonymized.

In the film, as acts of revenge and retaliation mount from this seemingly petty dispute about a friendship gone stale, we (and the characters, deftly) are constantly posed with the question: whose dispute is this actually, and who’s at fault? When Coln self-harms in response to Pádriac’s refusal to honor the new boundary, is it Pádriac’s fault? When an animal of Pádriac’s is killed by an action of Coln in response to Pádriac’s refusal, is it Coln’s fault? The town is wise enough to never explore these questions: it lets these former friends live their lives without invasiveness, with the exception of a corrupt policeman whose only goal is imposing authority and causing trouble.

One of the things I found so affecting was how the film managed to abstract these questions of fault and liability from the idea of competition, perhaps somewhat disingenuously, in the way we do now. That’s what we, as “moderns,” tend to do: portray conflict as purely emotional or conceptual, not grounded in concrete rivalry as was the overwhelming norm, historically. I have a doubt that this kind of abstract, “mental health” driven portrayal of interpersonal conflict, without any connection to resources, was as common in poverty-stricken 1920s Ireland as it is now.

That being said, the conflict between Pádriac and Coln truly escalates when there’s a loss of property. They can only truly war when property (no matter how sentimental) becomes central. So now I’ll sneak in a draft for an article I wrote three months ago, seemingly apropos:

The Internet is Now One Angry Small Town At Scale

To nerd out: the issues I’ve brought up since February are about identity-based attacks within local networks, in order to try to shift fault and liability. I, uh, tried to make it sound more exciting and look less academic while broaching the subject on the Internet, for hopefully self-evident reasons. Who wants to read that outside of the wonkish, god bless them?

Ill-intended people wanted the conversation to be about anything than that dry sentence above, because that’s one major way fault and liability are shifted— bad faith, goalpost-moving conversations. Most of our conflicts come to down to breach of covenant (breaking agreements), which corrupts trust, and the broken covenants must be obscured by the breakers if they wish to evade detection. Trust within networks may be the issue of the present day, because Internet.

Most of the practical, “personal” issues I’ve faced are security, money and timing attacks in a network, presented as otherwise. I no longer fail to stop them. They were initiated by others’ breach of covenants followed by an illicit liability and fault-shifting routine, over money and network status. Local network stories can then be spread out of network as needed, dependent on the motives and morals of the spreaders.

In order to deal with even a partially compromised network, you may have to abandon or reject it, even if you don’t want to. And still, it may chase, in the worst, most unhealthy of ways. When confronted with rejection, many people have to come up with reasons why that’s the fault of the rejector, and not something they themselves did or didn’t do. It’s a reflexive and reactionary response for many, an often experienced but rarely comprehended facet of human life, distributed unevenly.

In general, we’ve been finger-pointing around this in a destructive way for some time now, on the Internet, disingenuously. We carried a lot of stale 20th century socioeconomic information warfare onto the internet because it was proven to engage, and you could argue it collapsed or imploded under the weight of deceit this year. Is it more reminiscent of Cold War Era thought than even fifteen years ago?

We had full-fledged social digitalization without a system for its informal social governance yet. So the greedy and reckless stepped up to provide whatever caused their equity to swell most. As a result, we’re all facing intensified challenges due to digital network scaling. I’m one of those who can speak authoritatively about having paid a social cost for that. It started most invasively in 2010 after I spoke up in my own socioeconomic defense on the Net—while getting wacky on social media to drive engagement, still too naïve to understand the ways of older people and the powerful—so I’m able to verbalize it now.

Social digitalization and its backlashes are brutal, and it wrecked me cyclically for a while, and many others permanently. Learning, network comprehension, and personal behavior change may be the differentiators. Our common modes of dysfunctional resource conflict now exist in a considerably larger, distributed stratum. Fault can be attempted to be shifted in-network, often through identity-based attack that works in that specific network. Who had the power is revealed through that process, and that power can then be used to try to control the narrative going forward. Often, the provably empowered cry disempowerment or worse. But who was wielding the identity-based bias?

We’ve now evolved a system of identity attack for everyone in America. It’s a marvel, and extremely scary. Anyone can be targeted, with different results in different networks, reinforcing factionalization and divisiveness. The fact that we communicate so much more (with private comms much more important of an anchor than social network comms) has amplified and accelerated things. Messages spread faster and further than ever before, and we do not have many information confirmation and validation systems. Systematic deceivers now have a broader canvas: the broadest.

The narrative spreads under competition for local control in-network, and then spreads to larger networks as needed or paid for. A lot of the “polarization” we talk about is due to this: network narrative incompatibility. As messages spread, they encounter the parameters of the groups they pass between. It isn’t that constructive to make this an issue of only platforms anymore: it’s about our actual, general, human, behavior. And our opposing biases, narratives, and incentives, clashing.

Collectively we were being herded into non-intersecting networks over the 2010s, with lucrative steering from the platforms. We provided the criteria, at scale, not them. Social digitalization has affected how individuals and networks interact with each other at the core. Interactions escalate into misinformation, dysfunction, and even violence, with more network velocity. Increased information amplification and acceleration are our new global gifts, but are they gifts?

We’ve been in the advanced initial stages of social digitalization for a decade. All of this is more like small town dysfunction at scale than anything else. Everyone is encouraged to act like an angry small town resident, full of the unreasonable certainty of limited personal exposure and identity, with lots of homogenous experiences; grievances grouping us in opposition, at scale. The internet didn’t just bring us libertine information liberation, it also arguably regressed us socially. I was yelling about this ten years ago, to no avail: the small town wanted blood and no discussion of its involvement in the production of our deli meats.

Personally, I’ve had two main functional issues: I’m often so early as to count as wrong, then late with my solitary recovery; secondly, I cross networks without a rigid base network— out of necessity and due to identity. From what I saw this year on Twitter, those can be even more giant impediments than ever. Like others, I’m soft-illegal not because of behavior, but because of developing identity orthodoxy in service to competition between identity-sorted networks.

Identity orthodoxy needs bias to advance, and is not limited to a pole of political partisanship. I’m seen as not having a place in this tiny giant town, but not seen as having no value: thus, my value is ripe for extraction without compensation, like many, without a homogenous demographic anchor pool to ally my grievances with. There is no network consisting of a single individual, and our evolving system sorts some people that way, under duress. This doesn’t bother me by definition anymore; it’s just pretty straightforward network analysis. If anything, it helped me understand most of my “personal problems.”

Again, my timing was off in the past. No more. Like most, my problems weren’t particularly “personal,” but darned if there aren’t those who will sink their own ship trying claiming they are, foolishly trying to stick to some tricks that may have paid off for them earlier in life. The last people who made that claim directly to me a few months ago, in regards to monetary transaction, are unlikely to be able to recover from their subterfuge, commercially. Once you catch on, it’s hard not to catch.

One thing it took me way too long to catch on to or accept is that the savviest network identity warfare operatives—who’re also making the biggest category errors—often are doing so intentionally. I thought they were just blind to their own bias, which can be true, but it’s generally more a matter of financial agendas, stonewalling, and finger-pointing. Traditional stuff, at a larger scale than was possible previously.

It may be time for us all to understand that eras reliant on advancement due to tactics like these eventually draw to a close, as people codify and trap the behaviors. I was bamboozled in the past, well, and was in awe of it for a while. But it’s no longer something awesome, it’s something awful.

Hopefully, this can become The Next York Times house review style.▪️