It starts with a glance, eyes cast carefully across the floor of a dingy dance hall from the safe shelter of the high stool. The stare in return a defiant declaration of reciprocal interest, an overt answer to that first furtive look’s longing. Then to the bar: intent eyes lock the contract, one last glug of Guinness, and the question posed with the simplicity of statement: “We go?” Only the most steadfastly straight of viewers could mistake these cues. We have just witnessed Irish cinema’s first cruise.
With its aesthetic excess of burning cars and crumbling buildings, relentlessly dark and dismal lighting, and sly soundtrack evocation of the dystopian then-present of 1984, Cathal Black’s Pigs staked a solid claim to the competitive honour of Ireland’s most pessimistic picture. Black’s is a nightmare vision of early ‘80s Ireland, its sights trained on society’s peripheries and the dismal outlook for and of those who struggle to survive in them. Its opening shot could hardly be more overt in its visual literalisation of a country crippled by economic decline and political paralysis: as the camera cranes from a blaze in the street to the peeling wallpaper of apartment interiors exposed by fallen facades, so too will Black take us into the marginalised lives left to fend for themselves at the neoliberal frontier.
That’s the concept invoked with western iconography as these grimy streets, perpetually suffused in a dank mist, play host to horse-mounted youths; this Dublin, in Black’s nihilistic eye, seems a lawless land left to look after itself. It’s an apt imagining for a country fresh off the circuitous circus of three general elections in eighteen months, struggling with an accelerating unemployment rate, and fraught with the tensions of inequality. “It’s well for you people,” a social welfare inspector spitefully says at one juncture to a character of
Cathal Black's Pigs
Words: Ronan Doyle
20 CinÉireann / June 2018