[NoboruWataya]

The Civil War connection is obvious (it's explicitly referenced at several points in the movie) but my interpretation was that the Civil War was a mirror for the characters' interactions, not the other way around. To me the movie was more a commentary on various aspects of Irish society which can exacerbate problems and inhibit progress and healing - lack of communication, holding of grudges, a tendency towards self-punishment. Even though the main characters were pretty much all mad they were also oddly familiar.

I liked it more than Three Billboards, but not as much as the excellent In Bruges.

[spywaregorilla]

Yeh, I made a similar comment. It didn't really connect with me. Like, Parasite went hard on the Korean life allusions, and it felt very clear even to foreign audiences what it was trying to say.

Banshees felt distant. Was it about Irish society specifically? I don't know much about Ireland but I got the feeling that this was a really fringe island community and probably not representative of Ireland realistically or figuratively. I don't really feel like the themes it was presenting were universal. Perhaps the timeliness was an issue. idk.

In Bruges is like peak black comedy. the themes itself, on some level, are pretty damn funny, which isn't a thing you really see in many works.

[somenameforme]

The nice thing about unclarified metaphors is that you can often find meaning in things from your own perspective, experience, and life. And most importantly - you're not just seeing shapes in the clouds. Many metaphors are not really about what happened in some situation, even when they literally are, but about humanity. And we tend to repeat the exact same behaviors over and over again, with little but technology providing a change of scenery.

As an example of this, much (and probably most) of good modern Russian cinema is a completely unexpressed metaphor between "old Russia" and "new Russia." What that actually means, oddly enough, isn't especially relevant. In America one could easily see it as a metaphor between religion and secularism, urban and rural, woke or not, liberal and conservative, and so on endlessly. You can even see it as an internal metaphor of our younger selves vs our older selves.

And the great thing is - is that it, in many ways, fits all of these contrasts perfectly. Because the details of the exact change that's "really" being contrasted, aren't nearly as relevant as how we, as humans, handle change and conflict. Or in this specific metaphor, how both sides of some issue may one another as wrong/inferior/flawed/etc from their own perspective. And how both are simultaneously right and wrong.

A movie that's absolutely excellent on this front is, "How I Ended This Summer." Even the title of the movie itself is a metaphor. The first time I watched that movie I did not especially like (nor dislike) it, but when you stop watching it literally, and as a broad unclarified metaphor it morphs into an excellent piece of art - even with 0 personal context of what the metaphor is "really" about.

[NoboruWataya]

I should clarify that I did like Banshees a lot (just not as much as In Bruges). I am Irish and I am (positively) surprised it has received the international acclaim that it has, for the exact reason that a lot of it felt quite Irish-specific to me and I didn't think it would travel well.

I would say the island community was more like a caricature of rural Irish society than an accurate representation. I feel like there was a universality to the themes explored but I agree that they are viewed through a very local lens.