On Saturday, I went to see the film Kneecap. I’m not sure why.
There had been publicity about it winning awards, about it possibly receiving a nomination for an Academy Award. It seemed the sort of thing about which people might talk. Perhaps students at school would mention it.
It was advertised as a biopic on the Belfast hip-hop group of the same name. Then I read a review that said it was a fictionalised version of the story of the band. It was hard to discern what element of truth it may have contained.
It was hard even to know what it was about. It seemed to chart the rise of the band and included much rap music. But it also included a lot of drugs and sex and drugs and violence and drugs. The fact that it was in Irish seemed to excuse what might otherwise been have regarded as a story of a criminal sub-culture.
Of course, my opinion is jaded by the fact that I am a grumpy old git, that I am a middle class Protestant, that I am not an Irish speaker, that I watched the grief of families whose loved ones were killed by characters depicted in the film as slapstick comics, that I do not understand youth culture, that I do not take drugs, that I could not possibly understand the culture from which the band comes.
The film highlights the campaign for Irish language rights in the North. One character in the film declares that every word of Irish spoken is a bullet for Irish freedom. Having lived through the times of bullets and bombs, it seemed an extraordinarily crass analogy. If the survival of the Irish language depends upon sectarian confrontation, then its future is bleak
Perhaps the worst part was not the gratuitous sex or violence, it was the trivialisation of drug abuse. The ingestion of cocaine and other chemicals was seen as humorous, as a sociable activity, as the sort of behaviour that would only be disliked by the peelers and the paramilitaries.
I have no doubt that the film will make a big splash with the sort of people who give out film awards, that it will be seen as a cry for liberation from an oppressed community.
It is hard to imagine that many of those whom I teach will go to see the film. Anything from Belfast tends to be perceived as ‘uncool’, anything in Irish tends to prompt sighs, and anything that presents a young woman as little more than a sexual object will definitely not be popular.