THE BUTCHER BOY
Vilde Chaya
Like other Yiddish expressions of my Philadelphia youth, "vilde chaya" had richer overtones than the literal translation -- "wild animal" -- would suggest. The behavior of the vilde chaya was deemed so brazenly disobedient by one's elders as to locate one beyond human comfort or divine mercy. I was labelled a vilde chaya inter alia for finking out on piano practise, failing to arrive home on the dot of dinner time, and -- summary horror! -- for cracking wise to a petty authoritarian Hebrew school teacher. The latter invoked dire forecasts of the vilde chaya's inevitable kismet -- winding up a "no-good bum" or a "jailbird".
When grownups thought one was beyond earshot, one occasionally heard somber references to the real vilde chayas. They were preponderantly male; youngsters my age who raised true delinquent hell; or older adolescents who had dropped out of school to drink, fight, gamble, so forth. A few actually did wind up on the bum, in the slammer, or in the infinitely more fearsome Byberry, our local madhouse.
The gossip about these unruly Calibans spurred envy rather than much desire to mend my petty derelictions. Chockful of sinister energy, the authentic wilde chaya had exuberantly opted out of the middle-class rules leashing me in. My early sympathies doubtless informed a later vocation in adolescent psychiatry, as well as an enduring affection for a cinematic subgenre devoted to the vilde chaya's life and tough times. Examples across the spectrum of benevolent to malignant acting up include The Kid (l92l), The Strange Ones (Les Enfants Terribles) (l950), Rebel Without A Cause (l955), A Clockwork Orange (l97l), The Forgotten (Los Olividados) (l950), Pixote (l98l) and -- my special favorite -- Francois Truffaut's autobiographical The Four Hundred Blows (Les Quartre Cents Coups) (l959) (the great French director, and Chaplin before him were notable vilde chayas).
I've previously noted director Neil Jordan's affinity for disenfranchised outsiders tormented by impossible loves (notably, Mona Lisa [l986], The Miracle [l99l], and The Crying Game [l992]).(l) His latest picture in this vein, The Butcher Boy, constitutes a sinister bildungsroman, one of the most harrowing, clinically convincing anatomies of the vilde chaya to date.
Astutely adapted by Jordan and Patrick McCabe from the latter's prize winning novel, the film is set in l960s Carn, a tiny hamlet between the Northern and Southern Irish states, of a type clearly familiar to the author (McCabe grew up in the bordertown of Clones, where the movie was shot). The dark, brooding locale captured so adroitly by Jordan refuses the banal Hollywood Hibernianism of productions like The Quiet Man (l952). Febrile religiosity mingles here with backstabbing gossip and petty class prejudice. Social climbers ape their presumed British betters. Townfolk who've spent time in England are envied and admired; the farmers who work the outlying countryside are disdained as loutish "bogmen". The town's suffocating provinciality is not immune to the televised seductions of American and Brit pop culture. The telly also purveys obscure threats of nuclear armeggadon at the hands of the Godless Red Menace.
The Butcher Boy's vilde chaya is Francie Bradie, only child of a horrendous mismatch. His desparately fragile Ma suffers from a severe bipolar or schizoaffective illness. His da, Bennie, has dissolved substantial musical talent in booze; ekes out a marginal living playing trumpet at the local pub. Ma blames Bennie for the ruin of her romantic dreams, while Bennie bears his wife an alcoholic's bitter rancor, obscurely cursing her for the cause of his perennial failures (it's inferred that his rage and despair are rooted in childhood abuse at an orphanage). Their household is squalid and exorbitantly dysfunctional.
The film, like the novel, is narrated by Francie's adult self (Stephen Rea, who also appears as Benny Bradie) forty years after the gruesome facts. Young Francie is impersonated by Eamonn Owens, an amazing young newcomer with no previous professional experience. The local dialect spoken so eloquently by Owens and Rea strains the ear with a texture more knotted and dense than central casting's standard Irish brogue (like The Full Monty (l997), one often yearns for subtitles). Francie's discourse is oddly captivating, reminiscent of Alex's boisterous utterance in Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange. It's raucously profane; salted with idiosyncratic alliterations and allusions; informed by a grandiose good humor which sorts ever more ill with the desperation of his external circumstances and inner turmoil.
"I was hiding out by
the river in a hole under a tangle of
briars. It was a hide
me and Joe made. Death to all dogs
who enter here, we said.
Except us of course... You could
see plenty from the
inside but no one could see you. Weeds
and driftwood and everything
floating downstream under the
dark archway of the
bridge. Sailing away to Timbuctoo. Good
luck now weeds, I said..."
(2)
Harry Stack Sullivan once wrote so enthusiastically about the delights of latency-age male bonding as to make one wonder if he didn't long for it himself. Sullivan was especially enamored about the desexualized altruism of the "chum" relationship. A few years down the arduous road towards self-sufficiency, and chumship takes on the peculiar shimmer of the adolescent ego-ideal described by Peter Blos. Here, an overvalued object -- in Francie's case, a same-sexed friend -- is perceived as the possessor of attributes a youngster supposes he lacks, which he then hopes to obtain by proxy from his Ideal.
The townfolk already view Francie as a bit daft, with a ineffable whiff of brimstone clinging to him. His best and only friend, Joe Purcell, offers escape from the Bradie family's tumult and outsider status. A colorless, rather ratty little boy with a stodgy home life, Joe is nevertheless firmly installed in Francie's bruised heart as his Ideal, a charismatic blood brother. Their romps involve scenarios of shared pleasures and perils cribbed from lurid comic strips, Western and sci-fi flicks. Joe plays a child Horatio to Francie's harebrained Hamlet; his delight in Francie's dangerous prankishness is matched by the solace Francie finds in his buddy's steadying influence.
Francie's expulsion from his boyhood eden literally involves apples: the friends are first seen shaking them from a tree near the house of Mrs. Nugent (Fiona Shaw), a snobbish Anglophile matron with a faint resemblance to the younger Queen Elizabeth and -- by a stretch -- to Margaret Hamilton's Wicked Witch of The Wizard of Oz (l939). Francie is surprised by her goody-two-shoes son, Philip, and bullies him into yielding up his precious comic collection. Philip rats Francie out; Mrs. Nugent promptly marches over to the Bradie home and furiously denounces Francie's addled Ma in his presence. It's not the child who's at fault, she shrills, but the parents who've have raised him "no better than a pig...", who live like pigs themselves.
Her tirade, backgrounded by a nuclear detonation on the Bradie's flickering TV, strikes strange, potent resonances from the strings of Francie's jangled psyche. Hereafter Mrs. Nugent evolves into the delusional prime-mover of the cascando of ills which will subvert Francie's ever more tenuous hold on reality. He turns "Mrs Nooge"'s cruel taunts about his family's supposed swinishness against her with bizarre concretized vengeance, commencing with demands that she pay a "pig toll" to get past him on the street. Francie runs away from his parents' savage quarrels to sojurn briefly in Dublin; returns to find Ma dead by her own hand. He assuages his grief and guilt by piggishly trashing Mrs. Nugent's immaculate home, and is hauled off to a dreary Catholic reform school. Letters from Joe alarmingly intimate his growing friendship with the nerdish Philip. Francie assumes an altar-boy identity to hasten his exit; draws the admiration and abuse of a dotty pedophile priest -- quite possibly replicating Da's traumatized history. Under the threat of exposure, the fathers send him back home.
Joe hangs out halfheartedly with Francie, but is soon put off by Francie's aggressive tantrums. Normal pubertal development -- including an identification with Philip Nugent's diligent conformism -- is taking Joe down a more wholesome, if lackluster path. Francie is alternately oblivious to Joe's retreat, or obscurely blames Mrs. Nugent's baleful influence. He consolidates his estrangement from Carn's drab quotidian by becoming the butcher's assistant, the town's lowest caste job, and perversely revels in the stench of offal. Repeating his father's history, he takes up drinking and extravagant public altercations.
Bennie falls mortally ill. With his impliict collusion, Francie thrusts aside medical care to nurse him into his grave. Da's death provokes a florid psychosis of a type perched diagnostically between acute mania and paranoid schizophrenia. He hallucinates an alien nuclear attack that turns the townspeople into incinerated pigs, with Joe and he its sole survivors. Francie is again exiled, this time to imperfect healing at an asylum from which he soon escapes. Still regressively consumed with Joe, he discovers that his erstwhile chum has left Carn with Philip to attend a school near the seaside town of Bundoran. Here, according to Da's oft-repeated tale, his parents had idylically honeymooned before Da's boozing, and their troubles began.
In Bundoran his prelapsarian fantasies are utterly shattered. Joe definitively rejects Francie. The elderly manager of the roominghouse where his parents stayed on the fabled honeymoon reveals Da had actually made an inebriated spectacle of himself to his mother's humiliation. The devastated Francie journeys for the last time to Carn, to find the town in an uproar over the Cuban missile crisis. In a moment of psychotic insight, frightening geopolitical reality melds with the previous world destruction fantasies occasioned by his terrible losses. He concludes aliens have been using Mrs. Nugent to take over Carn, and exacts horrible retribution in the slaughterhouse coinage of his trade.
Just as admiration of my childhood vilde chayas blinded me to their troubles, less canny vilde chaya novels and pictures (e.g., Rebel Without A Cause) have glamorized the hero's outlaw behavior, often in context of a misguided social critique, while overlooking his chaotic or downright menacing side. (R.D. Laing was similarly seduced during the Sixties into idealizing schizophrenics as prophetic rebels against a stifling bourgeois status quo.)
Set against Carn's gray conformity, Francie Bradie's feral energy and manic wit are indeed attractive. However, to the credit of its creators, The Butcher Boy never puts Francie's madness and badness on any sort of pedestal. With a compassionate balance worthy of Chekhov, Jordan/McCabe permit one to understand, but never condone the lunatic logic that inexorably motivates Francie's grisly crime; to sympathize with the agony concealed by his facade of jaunty denial; and to empathize with the townfolk who are variously mystified or amused, moved to pity or terrorized by his aberrant course.
The film's affecting conclusion is hallmarked by Jordan's singular psychological acuteness and assured cinematic rhetoric. The adult Francie is about to be released to a halfway house from the hospital where he has spent decades weaving "a million, trillion baskets". Time and treatment have leeched away his manic sizzle, dulled the edge of his torment. Whether he's been healed or burnt out is moot. It is quite possible that he's been lobotimized.
He hallucinates the Virgin Mary (played by Sinead O'Connor, in her younger days, herself formerly no mean vilde chaya). She's been comforting him since his reform school days. As always, She addresses him in his own peculiar lingo, now offering the rough insights one intuits that he's pieced out over the long years: Joe loves him, (presumably, the internalized Joe of their best days); God loves us all, but -- "the world goes one way...we go another."
The camera's last shot irises in on the wildflower She has given him -- or he has unknowingly plucked in a still partly deluded state. Francie has expiated his grim deed and -- in however flawed a fashion -- surmounted the frightful sundering of his psyche. His flamboyant incorrigibility poignantly tamed, he can now accept with an unperturbed heart his irretrievable exile from common sorrows and ordinary joys.
The Butcher Boy's many pleasures include its sharply observed mise-en-scene; its fine cast, aside from Rea largely unknown in this country; and Elliot Goldenthal's exemplary music. Goldenthal diversely deploys his own compositions, which honorably evoke the bittersweet nostalgia of Nino Rota's work for Fellini; Fifties/Sixties pop classics in their original format or aptly rescored, and Irish folk tunes (3). The citation of Mack The Knife is mordantly apposite to Francie's cutthroat career. Frank Sinatra's magisterial version of "Where Are You?", evoked in connection with Francie's search for blissful reunion with his idol/Ideal Joe, renders that bootless quest all the more heartbreaking.
REFERENCES
l. Greenberg, Harvey: The
Gender Game: Review of The Crying Game. Psychiatric Times, Vol. l0, #4,
April l993, p. 34.
2. McCabe, Patrick: The Butcher Boy, New York: Delta/Dell, l997, p.l.
3. Notably, the eponymous "Butcher Boy", which describes the suicide by hanging of a pregnant maid after her faithless lover's desertion. The ballad possesses overdetermined significations for the entire Bradie clan. Francie's mother becomes smitten with a recording of it during her psychiatric hospitalization (probably not her first). Her obsessively playing it upon her return home enrages Da, as it becomes ever more indeliibly imprinted upon Francie's vulnerable sensibility. One speculates that Ma identifies with the song's heroine because she herself became pregnant with Francie during an adolescent romance with Bennie, precipitating a shotgun marriage and his enduring resentment. As a result, Bennie abandoned her and Francie -- to drink.
One also theorizes that Francie identified as a child with his mother as the bruised object of his father's alcoholic abuse; then goes on to guiltily identify with Bennie's "Butcher Boy" persona, after Ma kills herself during his runaway to Dublin. Becoming a real butcher boy conflates penance for his imagined role in her death with defiance of the town's censure -- personified by Mrs. Nugent's vilification, as noted above. The circle comes full round when Joe rejects him, and his reverie of his parents' blissful Bundoran idyll is demolished. Consonant with a more paranoid disposition than Ma Bradie, Francie's mode of redeeming his monumental psychic trauma is homicidal, rather than self-destructive.