MCI Academic Journal #7: Some Mother's Son

As often is the case with many of the Irish films we've watched so far during our time in Ireland, Some Mother's Son is greatly concerned with class, a topic I hope to explore in greater detail in my final paper for these courses.

The themes surrounding class and status in these Irish films are rarely bubbling under the surface; they're placed in the front yard of the "old tropes' home" like a pink flamingo in a Wisconsin trailer park. Some Mother's Son sets the stage with the virtual definition of class struggle and stratification with the initial appearance of Maggie Thatcher at the beginning of the film. Thatcher exuded the image of the prim and proper British women, a pitbull in lipstick long before Caribou Barbie and Hillary N' Pantsuits ever entered the national stateside consciousness. Thatcher was a hardline conservative, more stridently to the right than even our much revered/reviled 40th president. Thatcher's policies and extremely staunch stance against the IRA earned her plaudits at the time, but have left her with a limping legacy, maimed from her regime's treatments of the many who relied upon social services to eke by.

Not long after setting the scene as within a "Thatcher's Britannia," the film consciously contrasts the differences in class between the middle class and comfortable Quigley family to the working class agrarian nature of the Higgins family. Their sons, Gerard Quigley and Frank Higgins, are leading the IRA fight against the British soldiers in Northern Ireland. We meet Frank Higgins' heavily brassy mother who stands up to the British occupation of her homeland, and we see Frank’s rural upbringing and sense of family, lacking in the accouterments and the perfectly poached eggs of the middle class status the Quigley family exists in.

This is no more relevant than the scene where the British soldiers invade the farm on Christmas eve. As the family gathers around the dinner table for a hearty traditional meal, we see the importance of their togetherness and the difficulty of lost sons to the Troubles. Gerard's family not only knows nothing of his activity in the IRA, they truly know very little of the struggle against the Brits oppression. While no means affluent or wealthy to be above the Troubles, their status as a middle class and gainfully employed allows the family to ignore the struggles of the Republican cause for the most part.

Helen Mirren plays a woman dropped into a conflict that she not only avidly avoided, but abjectly denied. It was not her cause to take up, until the arrest of their sons forces Kathleen Quigley and Annie Higgins (played with aplomb by Fionnula Flanagan) to form a cooperative union of support and eventual friendship.

For Annie, the struggle against the Unionists is all she has known. She's already lost one son to the Troubles, and she is prepared to lose a second despite the love for her son. By fortune of her working class status, she is a woman with little to lose in the revolution. She's already lost a portion of her soul, and we agonize when Frank passes at the end, knowing the burden she carries for a second time.

It's a wrenching scene when Kathleen informs Annie she has signed the order for medical treatment for Gerard, to which Annie, a confused mixture of sadness, anger, and pride, responds, "Somebody had to do it."

Contrast this with the actions of Cillian Murphy's med student in "The Wind That Shakes the Barley," an Irishmen with such promise, yet dedicated to the cause of the rebellion. He has nothing to gain for joining the fight, but everything to lose, and yet he barrels headlong into a leadership position in the IRA. Kathleen struggles with this process, never fully capitulating to revolutionary impulses that may have arisen to the unjust nature of her son's predicament. She helps the IRA begrudgingly, and eventually rejects them in saving her son, avoiding certain martyr status for him, and a place within the revolutionary halls of history. She is a woman scorned, but reasoned in her path, all while avoiding a path of righteous vengeance.

Lastly this movie effectively uses the rhythms and sounds of traditional Celtic music scene when the eldest daughter is leaving the country (where is never explained) and the haunting tunes of the uilleann pipes rise to underscore her departure, a journey millions have made, fleeing famine, economic depression, or even the Troubles. The music also underscores the idea that the Irish are a morose and vexed population, in love with their land, culture, and traditions, but forced by circumstance to find fortune and sanctuary elsewhere.