Love in the Time of the Troubles: The Cultural Politics of Tragic Form in Northern Irish Cinema

Abstract

This paper discusses the tragic narratives adopted by the films that depict the Northern Ireland conflict known as the Troubles. It focuses, in particular, on those films that take the form of romantic tragedy with its love-across-the divide structure. A major concern with the tragic narrative in Northern Irish cinema is related to the decontextualizing nature of tragedy on the one hand and the (in)adequacy of tragic form for the cinematic representation of the Troubles. The paper begins with a brief discussion of the formal and narrative constraints that tragedy innately possesses that may debilitate the socio-political contextualization of the tragic hero’s action. It moves on to identify certain tropes and schemes in the Troubles-related films, with special attention to the “love-across-the divide” films. By shifting the emphasis away from its eponymous lovers and focusing on the political and historical contours under which a “little” tragedy unfolds, the tragic narrative of Romeo and Juliet can serve as a useful conduit to help understand the complex cultural politics of the Troubles-related films in both their shortcomings and possibilities. Both sides of the sectarian divide feel that they are a minority, precisely because they see themselves skewered on the geopolitical nexus which is configured by a triangular relationship of the Irish Republic, Britain and Northern Ireland. The cinematic representations of the Northern Ireland conflict have been guilty of obscuring, if not obliterating, this big picture. The problem of omission is further exacerbated by the tragic narratives the Troubles-related films adopt. In the end, Aristotle’s categorial distinction between history and tragedy may turn out to be valid, with history’s move toward specificity and tragedy’s inclination toward universality.