Uploaded 12 November 1999

I first became aware of the myth, the man, almost a quarter of a century ago. It may have been a song, a young man holding forth in a pub, an old woman warming herself at her fire – I don’t remember – but I was left in no doubt that this was no ordinary creature, this Michael Collins. He may have died half a century before, but, Ireland being Ireland, it could have been yesterday. An apprentice anthropologist, I was living at Bantry Bay in West Cork at the time, a part of the country “the Big Fella” could claim as his own, just as it claimed him. As West Cork’s favourite son, he was accorded bi-partisan respect, a rare feat in itself. Fiercely partisan Fianna Fáil supporters – among them men who had themselves fought against the Treaty – went out of their way to give him his due. For their part, Fine Gael supporters represented him to me in terms remarkably similar to those on show in Neil Jordan’s film, Michael Collins.

If I was impressed by the fit between the local legend and the cinematic portrait of Collins, I remain no less struck by the discrepancy between Jordan’s portrait and local opinion when it came to the depiction of Éamon de Valera, Collins’s “Chief” before he became his great adversary. De Valera certainly had his critics; I heard him accused of all kinds of things, including conniving in Collins’s ambush. But he was never once construed as a man lacking in stature, as lacking courage. No, he was a man to be reckoned with, personally as well as professionally. For all his faults, he deserved his own legendary status and would never be denied it. If Collins had lived, history would have been different. No one doubted it. But beyond that there was no consensus. If only he had been given his chance, Collins would have set the country right – so Fine Gael supporters liked to assure me. You can’t be so sure of that now, I’d then be told by those aligned to Fianna Fáil. Don’t underestimate Dev! And there it was; everyone was agreed about that as well. Dev. Love him or loathe him, there was no getting away from him. Any man who can survive the loss of a Civil War only to come back and win the peace, reigning supreme for two decisive decades as Prime Minister before being enshrined as President for another decade and a half, any man who can impose his vision of society on a nation’s Constitution, any man who can survive, prevail and endure the way he did – defend or denounce him, there’s no denying the size of the man’s shadow.

Of the many things that might be said in response to Neil Jordan’s film, [1]  it is this I shall focus on, the paired and opposed portraits of Collins and de Valera. Behind what I have to say reside twin concerns. Firstly, the extraordinary in people and the extraordinary in history: charisma as a combustible property – igniting the collective consciousness and fuelling events. Secondly, the role of the symbol as lie, the lie as symbol; truth as falsity, the false as true. I will address these concerns by focusing on myth as one of history’s ratchets. That is to say, history would not be what it is but for the myths that make it other than what it was. A new mode of myth-making was made possible by the invention of the cinema, with D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (USA 1915) destined to become the famous — infamous exemplar. Michael Collins may do little to advance or ennoble the cinema’s self-declared right to rewrite history as myth, but it certainly deserves a place within that tradition[2] if only because it is perhaps as fine an example of cinema as charisma-making mythology as any to be found outside Hollywood (and not only because it is very much a Hollywood film set in Ireland).

The Collins Legend

Michael Collins begins in epic mythic mode:

At the turn of the century Britain was the foremost world power and the British Empire stretched over two-thirds of the globe.

Despite the extent of its power its most troublesome colony had always been the one closest to it, Ireland.

For seven hundred years Britain’s [sic] rule over Ireland had been resisted by attempts at rebellion and revolution, all of which ended in failure.

Then, in 1916, a rebellion began, to be followed by a guerilla war which would change the nature of that rule forever.

The mastermind behind that war was Michael Collins.

His life and death defined the period, in its triumph, terror and tragedy.

This is his story.

Addressed as history’s heirs, we enter a world of culture heroes, of courage in a good cause, of derring-do and ordinary men defying the odds, ordinary men turned into freedom fighters by the irrepressible energy, ingenuity, grand strategy and meticulous tactics, of one extraordinary individual: the man himself, Mick Collins, a country lad, overgrown boyeen from Clonakilty, who, after thwarting the might of the British army is appointed, despite his protests, to lead the peace negotiations, and then cannot but defend the Treaty he has signed, a Treaty his leader will not accept (because it includes an Oath of Allegiance to the Crown as well as the partitioning of the country) – only to be ambushed and gunned down by fellow Republicans, murdered at Béal na Mbláth, the Mouth of the Flowers, mere miles from his birthplace.

By the end, all that remains is for history to cast its verdict. It comes in the form of newsreel footage of Collins’s funeral which has these words superimposed upon it:

Michael Collins was 31 when he died.

Half a million people attended his funeral in Dublin.

All parties to the conflict, both British and Irish, were temporarily united in grief.

In his brief lifetime he had fought the British Empire to a stalemate, negotiated the first Treaty of Independence for Ireland and overseen its transition to democracy.

He died, paradoxically, in an attempt to finally remove the gun from Irish politics.

The statement that clinches it comes at the very end, a belated “better man than I was” admission by de Valera as the nation’s President, a statement positioned to leave us in no doubt that though he may have been Collins’s Chief, he was never his equal:

“It is my considered opinion that in the fullness of time history will record the greatness of Michael Collins, and it will be recorded at my expense”.

These words are presented to us as though they constituted an act of contrition, an after-the-event admission. History cannot be altered, but nor can the truth be denied. De Valera may have dominated postcolonial Ireland, but even he has to concede that Collins was the greater man. We might conclude that de Valera was at least big enough to admit it, but then in good conscience how could he not: for haven’t we just seen the evidence of it, seen it for ourselves, there in living colour on the big screen? Of course, an equally valid interpretation might be that de Valera knew something of history, the way it gets written and why; knew that any attempt to redeem Collins’s contribution to the struggle for Independence must question his own. As a survivor of the Easter Rising he also knew that it is the martyrs who ultimately endure, not those who prevail in the interim. In actual fact, we could even go further, as the eminent Irish historian, Joe Lee, has done, and challenge the statement’s very validity. [3]  But that is another issue.

Shades and ghosts

As Lorraine Mortimer has emphasised, the story of cinema is a story of shades, ghosts, projected enchantment, technological magic. [4]  It is light and life shone upon a bare screen, sound amplified, voices ventriloquised, physicality manipulated, speeded up and slowed down, exaggerated, celebrated and excoriated. It is the technological imaginary’s equivalent of T.S. Eliot’s objective correlative, the finding or positing of objects, situations, events – a cluster of sensory experiences – which come to stand for and so evoke, emotions, sentiments, thoughts, ideas and ideals.

As Cavell puts it:

It is an incontestable fact that in a motion picture no live human being is up there. But a human something is, and something unlike anything else we know. [5]

Morin likewise emphasises the fact that human beings have always “alienated” their images, “fixing them in bone, ivory, or on the walls of caves”. Never until now, though, have they been “incarnated in the world itself, never to this point, so close to natural reality”:

Finally, for the first time, by means of a machine, in their own likeness, our dreams are projected and objectified. They are industrially fabricated, collectively shared.

They come back upon our waking life to model it, to teach us how to live or not to live. We take them in again, socialised, useful, or else they are lost in us, we lose ourselves in them.

He goes on to speak of them as “archives of the soul”, urging us to “try to interrogate them” so as to “reintegrate the imaginary” into our reality. [6]

Now of the many things cinema does, my focus is on what it does with charisma. For Max Weber, charisma – meaning literally “gift of grace” – is possessed by leaders who are followed because of people’s faith in their extraordinary personal qualities. In such a view, “the monumentalised individual becomes the sovereign of history”.[7]  There is, of course, far more to Weber’s conception than this. All I can do here is extrapolate from a few key aspects, applying them in my own way to cinema.

The world of the cinema is a double world: of actors portrayed as “stars” who impersonate characters cast as heroes and villains; who, by a strange, enchanted and enchanting process of projective identification, share the charisma they exchange. Cinema not only establishes sensuously and thematises by association, human essences and qualities of character, it makes such things tangible, by imbuing them with their own life, by giving them their own existence, actuality, being-in-the-world. Cinema incarnates and transubstantiates. It embodies, distils and enhances, magnifies and projects – charisma and so much else as well. It borrows vitality, it simulates thought and emotion, phenomenal possibilities, morphing them and giving this communicable version of them its own expressive identity, existence, virtual reality – and therefore also its own actual reality. Spirit is made flesh, or should I say, a simulacrum of it.

From this perspective, what makes Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins a film worthy of our attention is Liam Neeson’s embodiment of the man. It is a boisterous but subtle impersonation of a complex hero. His is literally a larger-than-life incarnation of “the Big Fella”. In essence, to quote Gary Crowdus,

Liam Neeson’s portrayal dominates the film, literally and figuratively. At six foot four inches, Neeson is even taller than the real “Big Fella” (who was five foot eleven) and his stature visually emphasises Collins’s physically and emotionally prepossessing qualities, including a long-legged stride and a boisterous physicality (such as a boyish preference for wrestling his adversaries into submission, an engaging sense of humour, and a reckless sense of daring). [8]

Such a hero deserves another to rival him – which is why it is such a pity that Jordan doesn’t give him one. And it is this more than anything that deprives his film – as drama, tragedy, as history, but also as myth – of its own greatness. The diminution of de Valera diminishes Michael Collins as tragedy. Rather than a contest of titans, what Jordan presents us with is a great man martyred because his erstwhile “Chief” is imperiously petty, not merely devious but ultimately craven – a blackguard at his worst who loses his nerve. It is surely ironic that, by diminishing the man in whose shadow Collins claims he would have loyally stood if only he could have, Jordan diminishes Collins himself (never mind the movement as a whole: surely only gobshites could ever have called his kind “Chief”).

Artistically the film is but a shadow of what it might have been but for the propaganda implicit in it. And no one need be in any doubt about this propagandistic impulse, for we have it on Jordan’s own authority:

The film is not sympathetic to de Valera, but those were his worst years, between 1918 and 1922. He went on to become a statesman and dominate the country for the next forty years, so he had better days than the ones we show in the movie. What interests me was the opposition between him as a kind of coldhearted political strategist and the pragmatic humanist that Collins represents. There was an element of fanaticism in de Valera’s character that I find unpleasant. [9]

According to Jordan, Collins’s death “extinguished” something in Irish public life “because the Free State that he helped to establish” came to be “dominated by a very rigid authoritarian view of Irishness”. It became, in ways that Collins “would not have allowed” (the monolithic Catholicism, the Anglophobia, the non-accommodation of Unionists), a censorious, “repressive” country. He blames de Valera for the Civil War, citing the speech that speaks of “wading through Irish blood”, saying he accepted Partition but not the Oath of Allegiance: “Basically the Civil War was fought over nothing, and that’s the tragedy of it, really. It was fought over principle.” Even de Valera’s begrudging acknowledgement of Collins has a dark side to it: it was made when relatives of the great man “suggested it was time to build a proper gravestone” for him in Glasnevin cemetery: “de Valera refused them permission”.[10] Need I say I have never myself been a fan of him himself, but nor can I give much credence to a portrait that impugns his principles, strips him of his complexity and demeans his integrity. Jordan’s cinematic portrait is a slander born of caricature. He clearly had an axe to grind. The pity is that in grinding it, he went so far as to sacrifice the very handle on the character that would have allowed him to keep a grip on his revisionism.

If his de Valera is little better than a diminished, casuistic, Jesuitical Robespierre, Jordan’s Collins is a decent Danton, a lusty, witty, rough-and-tumble “physical force” man of the most impressive sort, a leader whose dark side reflects not a failure of morality but the courage of his convictions. “I hate them” – the British – he has him say:

I hate them. Not for their race. Not for their brutality. I hate them because they’ve left us no way out. I hate whoever put a gun in young Vinnie Byrne’s hand. I know it’s me and I hate myself for it. And I hate them so much that I have to do that. I hate them for making hate necessary.

Collins can countenance appalling violence and its appalling consequences. He doesn’t need to rationalise his actions because he is too big a man to shrink from moral or any other peril. The fact that this is so is Jordan’s ultimate tribute to him. We do not see him do any killing himself, but he doesn’t hesitate to order others to kill. He may be an assassin in a good cause, but he executes his task with ruthless efficiency. He may hate sending kids like Vinnie Byrne off to kill, but that was never going to stop him. A master of intimidation if he needs to be, we are left in no doubt of the man’s effectiveness as an enforcer. How, though, could it have been otherwise; if he wasn’t a giant among pygmies, he certainly gave a good impression of it. He knew it and so did Dev. [11]  So Jordan would have us believe.

Screening the Truth

Although the bias in the paired portraits may constitute something of an artistic failure, this is not to suggest that Jordan’s film cannot and will not work to perpetuate and promote the myth of Collins the charismatic hero. On the contrary. As propaganda, it can’t but have done damage to de Valera’s reputation – at least in the eyes of those to whom he is already merely another of the ancients. For such is the power of myth: it nullifies history even as it celebrates it.

It should be clear by now that what I am arguing goes beyond a concern with accuracy in the depiction of historical events. The most sensational of these is undoubtedly the depiction of the Croke Park massacre, which has the British using armoured cars to slaughter players and spectators. Yet even more questionable is the emphasis on urban warfare to the detriment of the decisive struggle for control of the countryside. Where Jordan has exercised most licence, though, is in the climactic scenes that seem to implicate de Valera in Collins’s killing. This follows on from de Valera’s earlier manoeuvring to have the opprobrium for negotiating a compromised Treaty fall on Collins. [12]

In regard to such matters I am fully in accord with Crowdus when he argues that

Every narrative filmmaker, of course, must select relevant facts from a dramatically unwieldy mass of historical data, compress the time frame, account for gaps in the historical record, reduce or conflate the number of personalities involved, simplify a complex series of incidents, and otherwise shape historical events into a manageable length and coherent dramatic shape. The point is not that such dramatic devices are used, but whether or not they significantly distort the events and personalities depicted. [13]

It is because they do, in fact, that I cannot, pace Crowdus, endorse Alan Rickman’s de Valera. Need I say I have no quarrel with Rickman’s performance; my argument is with Jordan’s character. [14] Ironically perhaps, but consistent with this, I have no problem with the suggestion that de Valera knew what he was doing when he had Collins be the one who negotiated the Treaty; nor even that, by design or default, he bears some responsibility for Collins’s assassination. These are matters that have long been passionately debated in Ireland, and not only by historians. As a young ethnographer, I soon enough learnt that something rather like Jordan’s account was the received Fine Gael version. By the same token, there were Fianna Fáil supporters who would not hear a word said against Dev, who would maintain to their dying day that the movement couldn’t have risked him going to London to negotiate, that he argued against ambushing Collins. Yet others among them were at least prepared to concede there may possibly have been something in some of it. All this was and will remain essentially contested territory. It is the very stuff of popular memory, historical drama, myth making. Its artistic redemption, I would argue, has to do with the rendering of it. All art is propaganda, Orwell reminds us, not all propaganda art; the one always risks compromising the other.

When Jordan made Michael Collins he misapplied, I think it can be said, the memorable and morally ambiguous message bequeathed to us by that other great filmmaker of Irish persuasion, John Ford. Ford first broaches the subject in his Fort Apache (USA 1948), but it is given its most memorable expression in The Man who Shot Liberty Valance (USA 1962): “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend”. The words are spoken by the editor of a newspaper, and it is significant that Jordan, in effect, assumes his position rather than Ford’s. Whereas Ford presents us with a parable, a conundrum for moral contemplation, Jordan seeks to make the legend fact. Indeed, it could be argued that Jordan actually goes further even than Ford’s journalist: it is one thing to consent to a myth to protect a good man’s reputation, it is surely something else again to so assiduously elaborate one at another’s expense.

According to Gilbert Ryle, a myth is “not a fairy story. It is the presentation of facts belonging to one category in the idioms appropriate to another. To explode a myth is accordingly not to deny the facts but to re-allocate them.” [15] Now if, for the sake of argument, we accept what Ryle has to say, we can surely agree that, by the same token, to make a myth is not to deny the facts, but to re-allocate them.

In the light of what I have already said, one of the things that cinema shows is that this is not merely, or even primarily, a cognitive process. Nor is it, for that matter, primarily a linguistic or discursive process. Myth transubstantiates: it not only sacralises profane history, it makes it what it is – which is to say something other than what it otherwise would have been and could have been. Events are made to mean something above and beyond what they ever could have in themselves. Myths, that is, are made to make us turn from history’s contingency, its messy and ambiguous inadequacy, toward the exceptional within it (the miraculous, the fated, the revelatory) – to leave us in awe not only of individuals and events, but of the honour, the charisma, attached to them. In Weber’s terms, myths rationalise history, but not rationally.

History may at times be made by the charismatics amongst us, sons (and daughters) of the soil like Michael Collins, but the fields they work and the seeds they sow have been bequeathed to them more often than they are chosen by them, the crops they grow must suffer from forces beyond their control and, as often as not, the harvest they reap is taken from them. The most they are given, and the most they can ever garner, is something like (to re-work a line given to Collins in the film) the freedom to achieve, if not freedom, then something other than its opposite (in his case, not a Republic, but at least a Free State). In the right circumstances, a calling of the kind that motivates freedom fighters can be enough to alter history more than a little, if not divert it altogether. I don’t for a moment doubt that Irish political and cultural history would have been different if Michael Collins hadn’t become a martyr to his cause; then again but for the signing of the Treaty it would also have been different. Possibilities such as these posit fated alternatives, contrary futures, construe the past as something provisional. If myths take us away from history’s contingency, it also has to be said that eventually they also return us to it.

Footnotes:
[1] A fascinating if flawed talent, Jordan is a director I would rather praise than criticise. Whatever my reservations about this or that aspect of most of his films, at his best he can be wonderful – Mona Lisa (1986), The Crying Game (1992), Interview with the Vampire (1994), The Butcher Boy (1997) – who couldn’t be impressed?
[2] Cf. Gary Crowdus, “The screenwriting of Irish history: Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins“, Cineaste, Vol. XXII, No. 4, 1997: 14. This article – which accompanies an interview with Jordan (see Note 9) in an issue of Cineaste that features the film – provides a nicely nuanced treatment of key issues – hence its use here as a convenient reference point for contextualising my own arguments.
[3] Cf. Crowdus, 17. Following presentation of an earlier version of this paper at the Tenth Irish-Australian Conference: Ireland and Australia, 1798-1998, La Trobe University, 28 September – 2 October 1998, I was able to discuss the evidence with Lee and canvas for myself the different ways the remark might be construed.
[4] In this she is following in the very different footsteps of Bela Balázs, Siegfried Kracauer, Edgar Morin, Stanley Cavell, Richard Dyer and Yvette Biró. My exploration of the issues in the following paragraphs derives directly from her detailed engagement with, and synthesisation of, a range of key ideas taken from one or other of these thinkers. Lorraine Mortimer, “Projecting enchantment: social theory, film and the disenchanted world” (Ph.D. Dissertation, La Trobe University, 1987).
[5] Stanley Cavell, “On Makavejev on Bergman”, Critical Enquiry 6, no. 2, Winter (1979): 26.
[6] Le cinéma ou l’homme imaginaire: essai d’anthropologie(Paris: Editions de Minuit,1958): 11. Lorraine Mortimer’s translation.
[7] Max Weber in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, eds. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970): 52-3.
[8] Crowdus, 15.
[9] “Trying to take the gun out of Irish politics: an interview with Neil Jordan” by Séamas McSwiney, Cineaste XXII, no. 4 (1997): 21.
[10] (10) Jordan to McSwiney, 21.
[11] See Crowdus, 17, for a number of other quibbles. He also makes the point that the nickname, the “Big Fella” originally had “more pejorative connotations” deriving from Collins’s “notoriously short temper”, his “insensitivity when making personal criticisms of colleagues”, his “willingness to resort to deception when necessary”, and “a sometimes pompous and overbearing nature”.
[12] See Crowdus, 14-19, for some discussion of these and other key issues. He points out that the events at Croke Park were “equally horrific”: the Black and Tans “sealing the exits” and “firing randomly with rifles and machine-guns, killing thirteen people outright and wounding scores of others”. It is also worth mentioning that, with good reason, he is particularly critical of the car bomb as an unfortunate anachronism.
[13] Crowdus, 16.
[14] Crowdus, 15, 17; It is because delineation of character is indispensable to what Jordan is about in this film that I can’t, unlike Crowdus, give any credence to his specious suggestion that rather than “the inaccuracies”, what people “should take issue with” is “not what I’ve put in, but what I’ve left out”. (Jordan to McSwiney, 20). In “Jordan’s defence”, Crowdus points to the fact that “he has not resorted to” what he calls “some of the even more damning historical evidence against de Valera” (I don’t have space here to deal with the examples he gives, suffice to say that they are arguably rather less than damning).
[15] Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (Harmondsworth: Peregrine, 1963): 10. If Jordan has a different take on the distinction it may, of course, have something to do with his fondness for offering his own interpretation of fairy stories – see The Company of Wolves (UK 1984), Interview with the Vampire (USA 1994), In Dreams (USA 1999).