The Commitments

Youth, Music, and Authenticity in 1990s Ireland

Nessa Johnston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000526929
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

This book examines The Commitments (Parker, 1991) for the first time as a film, rather than an adaptation of Roddy Doyle's bestselling novel, and as a significant cultural event in 1990s Ireland.

A major hit in Ireland and around the world, the film depicts the short-lived attempts of an ensemble of young working-class Dubliners to achieve success as a soul covers band, playing the hits of Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, and others, on a mission to 'bring soul back to Dublin'. Drawing upon interviews with key figures involved in the film and its music, including Roddy Doyle, Angeline Ball, and Bronagh Gallagher, as well as archival research of director Alan Parker's papers, the book explores questions of authenticity associated with youth, music, class, and culture, and assesses the film's legacy for the Irish film industry, Irish music scenes, and Irish youth. It also examines the film's status as a truly transnational production.

This concise, yet interdisciplinary case study will be of interest to students and researchers in popular music, cultural studies, and sociology, as well as film and media studies.

1 A commitment to Dublin?From transnational co-production to locational specificity

DOI: 10.4324/9780429296048-2

The stark white-on-black opening titles roll along to the upbeat opening number ‘Treat Her Right’, leading into the first shot of The Commitments, a bustling market in a drab, bricked-up graffitied street, accompanied by voiceover narration by Jimmy Rabbitte (Robert Arkins). We are visually introduced to the young man of the voiceover, just one of many in the crowded market, trying and failing to sell bootleg cassettes, videos, and t-shirts. The voiceover recounts ‘how it all began’, as though teleologically justifying an implied later success, asserting that he ‘was always in the music business, but more on the sales side’. Fresh-faced and intense, he is both of the market and slightly detached from it; his dark quiffed hair and black clothes are stylishly retro. The scene is dominated by greys, blues, and browns, and the setting is unquestionably urban. As well as Jimmy’s unmistakable Dublin accent in the voiceover, the soundtrack tells us in the most cliched way possible that this is Ireland – in the background a man scratches out a traditional Irish jig on his fiddle. Jimmy’s voice and perspective is to the fore throughout The Commitments, despite the strong ensemble dynamic and distinct cast of characters. It is he who sets the agenda, and the other band members who riff off his pronouncements, support him, disagree with him. His voice therefore maps most closely onto the authorial voice of the text, emphasised through the use of voiceover narration. The irony that his narration of this success story is a fantasy, sent up vividly in a later scene by the sight of Jimmy sitting in the bath, shower cap on his head, and speaking into the shower head as though it were a microphone (see Figure 1.1), makes his earnestness more palatable. Despite the global success of U2, Bob Geldof, and Sinéad O’Connor, all earnest, serious-minded musical artists, Ireland is not comfortable with this type of seriousness. Jimmy’s pretensions to seriousness in his musical endeavours can never be entirely taken at face value.

Figure 1.1 Jimmy Rabbitte’s ‘interview’

From the opening onwards, it is apparent that we are witnessing an Irish story captured in an Irish location, narrated by a previously unknown Irish actor rather than an established star. Nonetheless, such a cast and setting do not necessarily make The Commitments an Irish film. While it regularly features in polls and lists of ‘best ever’ Irish films, a 1999 BFI poll ranked it 38th out of ‘100 best British films of the century’ (‘Best 100 British Films …’ 1999), highlighting the film’s industrial status as an international co-production despite its Irish cast and recognisable Dublin locations. This chapter explores this paradox at the heart of the film’s Irishness, focussing on two main interlocking themes. It examines the film’s development and financing, highlighting the relevant wider industrial contexts of its production, then analyses its construction of a cinematic Dublin. Running through this chapter is a concern with youth, especially an Irish generational shift; discourses of authenticity; and the mobility of capital, culture, and people.

The tendency of academics and critics to compare the film unfavourably with the book as a ‘dilution’ of Doyle’s text tends to be bolstered by the British and American aspects of the film’s production, or in other words, the notion that authentic Irish stories can only be told by Irish authors. Yet my analysis will demonstrate a subtler (if insidious) logic of ‘trickle down economics’ at work. In my desire to put the film first, the genesis of the characters and story in Doyle’s novel, his involvement with the screenplay, and the relationship between the film and its source novel will be considered. However, this chapter will move beyond a literary conception of authorship which posits the film as ‘mere’ adaptation via a spectre of ‘dilution’ or ‘interference’ (e.g. ‘Hollywood’ or ‘Alan Parker’), without ignoring the adaptation process. Instead, I will demonstrate a number of competing currents at work that contributed to the development and creation of the film, which hinge upon shifting discourses of authenticity, in which questions of authorship are played out. Throughout, I explore The Commitments as a case study of transnational film production, the machinations of which serve to illustrate broader currents in Irish cultural determination. I also discuss the marketability of the film’s conspicuous localism, despite its thematic emphasis upon the globalised Anglo-American popular culture of soul music.

Tony Tracy and Roddy Flynn argue for the need to look again at contemporary Irish film using a transnational lens, and move away from the more traditional preoccupation of Irish film scholars with Irish film as a ‘national cinema’. Using the example of The Lobster (Lanthimos 2015) – a film that is held up as an Irish film industry success despite it not being recognisably ‘Irish’ and only two of the eighteen production entities involved in it being Irish – they demonstrate the limitations of confining analysis of Irish cinema to a narrow preoccupation with textual analysis that maps themes and ideas in films onto an understanding of the Irish nation and its history. In contrast, the transnational approach they advocate:

opens a route out of a narrowly cultural conception of national cinema—a paradigm that was never fully adequate to the complex history of Ireland on screen anyway—while nevertheless maintaining one eye on the shifting status of the nation as a persistent but also multidimensional and dynamic site of identity formation and patron of cultural production.

(Tracy and Flynn 2017: 172)

By using this transnational approach it is possible to retrospectively accommodate The Commitments despite its British-American production contexts and its dismissal as a ‘lesser’ adaptation or populist crowd pleaser. What is perhaps odd about The Commitments’s previous neglect in Irish film studies is that it does in fact exude a strong sense of place, an identifiable Irish setting, and ‘markers of Irishness’ (ibid.), therefore making it ripe for the very type of analysis Tracy and Flynn highlight as overly dominating the field.

A British-American-Irish film: The Commitments and its production contexts

Despite the commercial success of The Commitments, its status as an Irish success has been debated from early on. An article from Newsweek in 1992 referenced a number of ostensibly Irish box office draws of the time, including The Commitments, My Left Foot (1989), The Field (Sheridan 1990), Hear My Song (Chelsom 1991), and The Playboys (MacKinnon 1992), and made the point that as these films were typically financed from outside Ireland, their resulting box office receipts did not enrich Ireland. The same article quotes director Neil Jordan, who sums up such non-Irish Irish productions as follows: ‘They make films that portray this quaint, magical country where everyone is eccentric and lives outside time with no material concerns’ (Foote 1992: 46).

Intriguingly, the article lays the blame on a lack of investment at Irish government level, and quotes by way of explanation David Kavanagh, then head of the Irish Film Institute: ‘The funds don’t exist in Ireland to sustain a film industry […] So this intense interest in things Irish is an opportunity that is exploited by non-Irish filmmakers who have the capital’ (ibid.). The figures presented in this 1992 article are stark, with the Arts Council of Ireland funding the Abbey Theatre (the Irish national theatre) at the time about four times as much as all Irish film production combined. Kavanagh ascribes this to a lack of cultural value attached to film in Ireland: ‘There is a history of film being seen by certain forces in Ireland as a foreign and pernicious influence […] There is still an underlying lack of sympathy for the industry among politicians and civil servants’ (ibid.). Hence, questions around identity are bound up with film finance and cultural value.

Indeed, The Commitments was nominated for, and won, several BAFTAs, and was eligible to do so because it qualifies as a British film, with all the key creative personnel being British. While Doyle wrote an early draft of the screenplay and has a screenwriting credit, it was further adapted by British screenwriters Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, known for Hollywood screenplays as well as quintessentially British TV sitcoms such as The Likely Lads (BBC2, 1964–6) and Porridge (BBC1, 1974–77). The line producer was David Wimbury, the Director of Photography was Gale Tattersall, the costume designer was Penny Rose, the editor was Gerry Hambling – all British. In terms of top-level authorship and upper-level crew, it was a very British production. From the perspective of the young Dubliners appearing in the film, key personnel working on set had a noticeably British identity, all older than Parker, with ‘that Ealing kind of accent, slightly cockney. These were the kind of people who were probably dynastically involved since the time of David Lean in filmmaking’ (Smith 2020).

At the same time, the main financiers were American – the film was executive produced by Marc Abraham and Armyan Bernstein of Beacon Pictures in Los Angeles, and Parker, Clement, and La Frenais were all based in LA. This conspicuously Irish film adapted from a conspicuously Irish novel was, in essence, an American independent film made by LA-based Brits, and distributed by the very Hollywood 20th Century Fox. This is a sensitive issue and as Michael Cronin points out, ‘For an English director to put Ireland on screen in the context of continuing political tensions and violence was not going to be seen as a wholly innocent or neutral engagement’ (Cronin 2006: 17). Cronin refers also to Pettitt’s description of film funding in Ireland after the closure of the Irish Film Board in 1987 as a period of ‘Anglo-American film interests […] mov[-ing] into the gap to support (and profit from) Irish-themed films’ (Pettitt 2000: 124). The film’s British status, therefore, has deeply uneasy colonial connotations, though paradoxically its Hollywood studio backing also makes its British status questionable.

While Parker’s Britishness might be considered a dilution of the film’s Irishness, Doyle is generous in his assessment of Parker and of Stephen Frears (director of The Snapper and The Van) and credits both British directors as ‘sensitive to the fact that they weren’t Irish. Neither of them assumed that Dublin was a British city with a different accent’ (Doyle 2021). Furthermore, Doyle never imagined the film being directed by an Irish director, partly due to their scarcity at the time:

If you threw a stone in Dublin, you wouldn’t have hit a film director, put it that way […] You could admire Thaddeus O’Sullivan without thinking he’s the man for this particular job […] I think I would have been a bit nervous with an Irish director as well […] that somehow they’d mess with it, which is maybe unfair. Or maybe not!

(ibid.)

It might seem paradoxical, but both Doyle and Scottish producer Lynda Myles felt that an Irish director might have been less loyal to Doyle’s creation than Parker, despite his Britishness (Myles 2020; Doyle 2021). And although Doyle did not choose Parker as a director, he was not resistant to the idea:

To find out the guy who directed Birdy [1984] – which I thought was brilliant – and Mississippi Burning [1988] was going to be directing The Commitments, I wasn’t going to say, I’d much rather it was directed by such-and-such who’d done a short […] When you look at the variety of things that he did, creatively successfully, it’s extraordinary really.

(Doyle 2021)

Moreover, crew in more junior roles were Irish, with notable examples including location assistants Robert Walpole (now a film and TV producer, The Stag [Butler 2013], Shrooms [Breathnach 2007]) and Hugh Linehan (now a senior Irish Times arts journalist). A teenage actor in the minor role of ‘Kid with Harmonica’, Lance Daly, is now an acclaimed director himself. Paul Bushnell and Kevin Killen, who were heavily involved with the film’s music, were both young Dubliners who went on to establish themselves in Los Angeles and New York and have significant international music careers. The generational aspects of the film’s production are striking and in parallel with the trajectory of the youthful cast and characters; many involved in making The Commitments were young Irish getting their ‘break’. There is an element of paternalism mapped onto the colonial connotations of this stratification, but it would be reductive to think of this entirely in such terms. While the cast have given many interviews looking back on their career trajectories since the film, there has been less acknowledgement made of others who got their start behind the scenes or in minor roles.

Furthermore, the pre-production and financing of The Commitments demonstrate a very specific dynamic that was at work in late 1980s/early 1990s Hollywood and its relationship with Britain and Ireland, centred upon Los Angeles, London, and Dublin. As mentioned in the Introduction, the lack of a fully fledged film and TV drama industry in Ireland at that time meant that Doyle’s earlier ideas for comedy-drama such as Brownbread (1987) had been produced for theatre, and any attempts at film production necessitated collaboration with UK- and US-based industry professionals. The eventual success of the films of The Commitments, The Snapper, and The Van, alongside Doyle’s Booker nomination for his novel The Van, demonstrate how Doyle required some engagement with British cultural industries in order to get his ‘break’. This idea of fame in Irish cultural terms being bound up with a British cultural and entertainment ecosystem is just as prevalent as the mythologised idea of ‘Hollywood’, and is reflected in the film itself through Jimmy’s fantasy interviews – he addresses the interviewer as ‘Terry’, a clear reference to Terry Wogan, the Irish-born BBC broadcaster.

The genesis of the film preceded Alan Parker’s involvement by several years. Initially, it was Lynda Myles who was interested in a film of Doyle’s book, as early as 1988, after two different people had sent it to her. She contacted another producer, Roger Randall-Cutler, suggesting they collaborate on it. After a meeting with Doyle in London in which he was ‘sort of auditioning people for it’, Doyle agreed they could option it (Myles 2020). Doyle credits Myles with pivotal support and professional development, while articulating a strong sense of his ownership of the work from early on.

I didn’t see the book as a film until other people came to me really […] There was interest, even when the book was self-published. It quickly made me a bit cagey, but one Irish producer was going to superimpose the band onto New York, and I thought that was a hideous idea […] I had a very strong sense that I owned it.

(Doyle 2021)

When on a tour of the UK organised by his publisher Heinemann (during mid-term break, given that Doyle was still teaching full time), the publishers set up a meeting with four sets of producers in the Groucho Club. ‘I didn’t like what they [the producers] were saying. And the last person I met was Lynda Myles, and it was different immediately’ (ibid.). Doyle describes a meeting of minds with Myles, regarding authenticity of language, absence of stars, and a Dublin setting.

Myles and Randall-Cutler were turned down for script development money by agencies in Britain, including the National Film Development Fund, and eventually secured some money privately from Souter Harris, a commercials producer, for Doyle to draft a screenplay, which gave Harris an executive producer credit on The Commitments. Myles mentored Doyle, inspiring his reinterpretation of the book in cinematic terms:

I remember Lynda strongly recommended that I watch The Big Chill [1983]. It...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Series editors’ introduction
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Beyond text, beyond film: The Commitments as event
• 1 A commitment to Dublin?: From transnational co-production to locational specificity
• 2 ‘Say it loud, I’m black an’ I’m proud’: Intersections of race, class, gender, and youth on screen and soundtrack
• 3 Youth culture and music scenes in 1980s and 1990s Dublin
• 4 Songs and sonic authenticity: Mediating musical performance
• 5 Conclusion: The legacy of The Commitments
• Bibliography
• Index