2.

Cinema, City and Imaginative Space:

'Hip Hedonism' and Recent Irish Cinema

What the hell is all this comedy stuff about? …We had a

slew of Short Cuts that were bubbly and urban.

Everywhere you look you see interweaving young

Dubliners simpering in nice locations. (1)

If Strumpet City represented a particular vision of Dublin and

the Irish city in general the cinema of the twenty-first

century offers a very different city with very different

aspirations. The high seriousness and political commitment

of RTÉ's prestigious drama from the 1980s has given way to a

cinema and television culture that is characterised by

humour, cynicism and individualism. It is no coincidence of

that films such as About Adam (Gerry Stembridge, 2000) and

Goldfish Memory (Liz Gill, 2003), the quintessential films of

'interweaving young Dubliners simpering in nice locations',

should have emerged in such numbers towards the end of the

1990s. Nor is it any surprise that the major drama successes

of recent years have been about the bubbly urbanites of

Bachelor's Walk.

As Ireland has developed rapidly from the kind of fractured

and crisis-ridden culture that spawned Strumpet City to an

affluent, sometimes complacent culture that valorises

conspicuous consumption and wealth, these films represent a

new sensibility. They attempt to construct a new cityscape

for the cinema and their starting point is the changing

cityscapes of affluence and consumption. The drive is to

bring to the screen the city as lived by a new generation of

young urbanites and to represent a lived experience – city

life – that, pace Strumpet City, had not featured to any great

extent in Irish culture until relatively recently. However,

it is not easy to construct a cinematic cityscape in a

culture that has long been dominated by cinematic landscapes

and one reason for the proliferation of a certain type of

city vision is that it emerges from a culture with

significant problems in representing the city at all.

In writing about Joe Lee and Frank Deasy's Dublin thriller,

The Courier (1988) Kevin Rockett observes that the film's

failure was in large measure the result of its inability to

'overcome the visual handicap of the modest scale of Irish

cityscapes'. (2) Rockett correctly identifies one of the

film's major weaknesses – that despite being shot on

location in the city, it lacks the 'cinematic urban-ness' so

characteristic of the kind of American thriller that the

directors attempt to transpose to Dublin. However, the

problem is not so much with the small-scale nature of the

actual cityscape of Dublin but rather with how this is

visualised and shot. Much of the The Courier's characteristic

iconography is achieved through the use of high- and extreme

high-angle shots, the camera looking down from an omniscient

height at the city below. Typical of this style are the

shots of the city seen through the windows of the high rise

office of drug baron Val (Gabriel Byrne), shot from the top

of Liberty Hall, Dublin's only city-centre skyscraper. These

shots actually exaggerate the small-scale nature of Dublin,

rendering its built environment and its inhabitants

insignificant while creating a cityscape that looks distant,

depersonalised and static. The frequent use of telephoto

lenses for the establishing shots of street life, with its

traffic of people and vehicles, has the same effect of

rendering the city depthless and devoid of personality.

Even the film's opening and closing shots, parenthesising

its narrative of vigilante revenge, ignore the inner city

itself in favour of a long shot of the twin chimneys of

Ringsend power station, framed with the waters of Dublin Bay

in front and the hills behind. These chimneys ('the Pigeon

House' to the locals) are a recognisable feature of the real

Dublin and the picturesque seascapes that frame them are

characteristic of a certain type of Dublin tourist imagery.

As establishing shots, therefore, they certainly identify

the real Dublin to those in the know. However, they send out

the wrong signals in terms of genre expectations and are

singularly inappropriate for the kind of urban thriller the

film sets out to emulate. The outraged motorcycle courier of

the film's title is, in a sense, a less unhinged Dublin

version of Scorsese's avenging angel, Travis Bickle. What

might have served the film better, then, was a more dynamic

visual style of low-angle, street-level camerawork, rapidly

edited to achieve the sense of inner-city energy and

dynamism that is as much a part of city life as the crime

and drug problems that the film is concerned with. In this

regard, it is worth considering Baudrillard on the cinematic

city:

The American city seems to have stepped right out of

the movies. …To grasp its secret, you should not, then,

begin with the city and move inwards towards the

screen; you should begin with the screen and move

outwards towards the city. (3)

This is a conceptualisation of cityscape as 'screenscape'

and it is the screenscape of The Courier that is the film's

biggest problem. In Baudrillard's terms, the directors moved

from the real streets of Dublin inwards towards the screen

rather than starting from the screen and moving outwards

towards the Dublin streets.

The Courier was an early and wholly admirable attempt to put

Dublin onto the cinema screen and at the same time to

highlight the nature of its growing drugs problem. There may

be several other reasons for its relative artistic failure -

most commentators, for example, would agree with Pettitt

that the main leads were poorly cast and their lack of

personality added to the film's problems. (4) However, as

the shooting style suggests, the film's main problems were

to do with genre and its attempt to play with genre

conventions and iconography. In a way, the film is caught

between two cinematic traditions – the social realism of

documentary (perhaps most associated with British cinema and

television) and the stylised, expressionist aesthetics of

the urban thriller (one of the great achievements of

American cinema). The film attempts to marry these to the

detriment of both so that even the casting of non-

professional leads, explicable in terms of the social-

realist tradition and a characteristic of the cinema of Ken

Loach and Mike Leigh, seriously undermines the more stylised

cinema of the American urban thriller. In many ways, the

artistic failures of The Courier are a reminder that while the

conventions of American popular cinema are ubiquitous, the

meanings they articulate are by no means universal and

timeless. These conventions developed at a very specific

historical moment in a very particular production context –

the studio system of classic Hollywood between roughly 1930

and 1960. They spoke of and to the society and the time that

produced them and while they can certainly be 'quoted' or

referenced and even played with, they cannot be merely

transposed to a very different historical and cultural

context.

Still, The Courier did raise the question of Dublin's

cinematic image (or lack of it) and two decades later, with

the enormous economic and social changes that have happened

in the meantime, it seems timely to revisit this question

and consider how 'cinematic Dublin' has developed since

then.

Dear, Dirty 'Discursive' Dublin

If The Courier marked an early attempt to visualise the city,

it did so with the knowledge that to a large extent, Dublin

(and the city in general) represented something of a

'missing discourse' in Irish visual culture. This is

certainly true in relation to the cinema. As Rockett has

shown, there were precious few cinematic portrayals of

Dublin until the end of the twentieth century so that there

was no recognisable cinematic tradition to oppose, quote

from or develop. (5) There has always, of course, been a

close affinity between the cinema and the city generally and

the relative lack of cinematic imagery of Ireland's capital

city reflects both the lack of indigenous filmmaking in

Ireland right down to the 1980s and the dominance of rural

imagery in the cinematic representations of Ireland than

emanated from elsewhere.

In a way, the situation is similar to that of Glasgow as

described by Colin McArthur. (6) McArthur argues that

Glasgow has no real cinematic image and quotes a passage

from Alasdair Gray's 1981 novel Lanark to emphasise the

point.

'Glasgow is a magnificent city,' said Thaw. '…Think of

Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them

for the first time is a stranger, because he has

already visited them in paintings, novels, history

books and films. But if a city hasn't been used by an

artist, not even the inhabitants live there

imaginatively'.

There is, in other words, a cinematic city of the

imagination that we inhabit and which inhabits us. Through

the close affinity of the city and the cinema we not only

live in the real bricks and mortar of the city, we also live

its imaginative promise through the movies. Gray's point

about Glasgow is that it lacks an artistic presence and

McArthur's that this is especially the case in terms of a

cinematic Glasgow. However, as McArthur goes on to argue,

the emphasis on the cinematic city should not disguise the

fact that Glasgow does have a substantial cultural presence

elsewhere, in a range of material from sociological reports

to photography and even jokes. This, he argues, is the

Glasgow of 'discourse' and this 'discursive Glasgow' has a

significant influence on the way the city was and continues

to be represented. In a similar vein, Dublin may not have

featured much as a cinematic presence until very recently

but it has had a significant discursive presence nonetheless

and this has had an impact on how the city has been

represented visually.

The irony about Dublin's relative lack of a visual presence

in post-independence Ireland is that it was the inspiration

and location of the one of century's most influential works

of art, and literature's most celebrated peon to urban-ness,

James Joyce's Ulysses. Dublin's literary presence is immense,

of course and 'literary Dublin' is a key motif in tourist

literature about the city. So, for example, the re-birth of

Dublin as a major European tourist destination over the last

two decades of the twentieth century can be traced back

through the marking of Bloomsday (June 16, 1904, the day the

narrative of Ulysses unfolds). This marriage of the literary

word and the tourist dollar developed in increments between

the celebration of Joyce's centenary in 1982 and the

elaborate, extensive and expensive centenary of the original

'Bloomsday' which dominated both literary and tourist Dublin

in 2004.

There is a gentle satirical sideswipe at this industry in

David Keating's 1996 comedy, Last of the High Kings, alerting us

to the fact that the elevation of 'literary Dublin' to the

level of national myth has not gone unchallenged. Belfast-

born Stephen Rea gives a hilarious cameo performance as a

taxi driver with an inner city Dublin accent only just the

right side of parody (Dublin 'born, bred and buttered', he

describes himself). 'Dublin is the finest city in the world,

bar none', he tells his wide-eyed American teenage

passenger, Erin (Christina Ricci) 'with all them writers,

playwriters and novelists'. He tells her that most of them

have been passengers in the back of the cab at some time or

other and that Joyce was the most celebrated, if the most

miserly of them all. 'He used to sit in the back there,

scribbling away. I says to him, "What are you writing,

Jimmy?". "A book", says he. "What class of a book?" says I.

"A big book", says he. He could be very Jesuitical in his

responses.'

Joyce's 'big book' certainly dominates discursive Dublin and

this passage of dialogue has echoes of similar sentiments

expressed by Ferdia MacAnna, writer of the original novel on

which the film of Last of the High Kings is based. In an earlier

article, MacAnna argues that by the end of the 1980s, Joyce

had become a myth which was inhibiting Dublin's artistic and

literary development. 'In effect, the great man – the

colossus of Irish writing, the writer of "dirty bukes", the

jejune jesuit – had hijacked the city and imprisoned it in

his writings, out of the reach of ordinary people and other

writers'. (7) Dublin, however, does have other literary

epithets.

One of the more interesting and more connotative of these is

'Strumpet City'. This is the title, of course, of James

Plunkett's 1969 novel set in Dublin between 1907 and 1914

and detailing the class conflict and ideological tensions

that culminated in the 1913 lock-out of Dublin trade

unionists. The novel was adapted in 1980 by RTÉ as a seven-

part television drama, the most ambitious drama undertaken

by the broadcaster until that point (discussed in detail in

chapter one). Plunkett got his title originally from Denis

Johnston's 1929 play, The Old Lady Says 'No' and quotes a passage

from the play as a dedication to his novel ('Strumpet City

in the sunset/So old, so sick with memories/Old Mother; …'

Johnston's play and Plunkett's novel are both concerned with

the negative aspects of Irish cultural nationalism and both

offer a bitter critique of the rural Catholic nationalist

ideology that underpinned the foundation of the Irish state.

Plunkett was particularly concerned to reinstate the

struggles of working class Dublin into the narrative of the

nation and his angry and passionate novel was a polemical

broadside against those ideologies that consigned the city,

its history, its politics and its citizens to relative

obscurity in the first place. The RTÉ production, scripted

by playwright Hugh Leonard, retains Plunkett's angry

denunciation of militant Catholicism and here, the epithet

'strumpet city' is particularly important. It is in fact

doubly coded.

On one level, it refers directly to a characteristic aspect

of the modern metropolis in general and one much commented

on by urban chroniclers down the years - the presence of the

streetwalker or prostitute. To that extent, all cities, with

their red light districts, are 'strumpet' cities and in

those anti-city prejudices that often characterised Irish

Catholic ideology, the city is condemned as the site of low

moral values and loose sexual morality. Dublin was

particularly stigmatised in this way. By the early twentieth

century, it was acknowledged as a city in crisis, with some

of the worst slums in Europe. A government Committee of

Inquiry reported in 1914 that of the 400,000 odd population

of the city, some 87,305 lived in tenement houses in the

city centre and eighty per cent of the families living in

these tenements occupied only one room each. As Kieran

Keohane has argued, talking about the slightly earlier

period of the 1890s:

This teeming cauldron was dangerously charged with

crime and sedition, and as the garrison expanded so the

brothels and prostitutes did a roaring trade. Dublin's

'Monto' (Nighttown in Joyce's Ulysses) had more

prostitutes per head than any other European city, and

Dublin was to the British Army in the 1890s what Saigon

was to American troops in the 1960s. (8)

This may or may not be overstating the facts but it does

indicate another level of meaning in the 'strumpet' epithet

– the strumpet is the city itself, England's whore,

prostituting itself for centuries to the colonial invader.

In Catholic nationalist ideology, the real Ireland was rural

Ireland and the purest sense of Irish identity was to be

found the further away one moved from the city. The

combination here of a general anti-urban prejudice – the

result ultimately of a romantic sensibility – and the anti-

Dublin prejudice of Catholic nationalism remained the

dominant factor impeding the development of a cinematic

image of Dublin that was sympathetic and relevant. Thus the

perfectly understandable desire to reveal the problems of

urban life, emanating from a social realist impulse to

ameliorate them or to provide a political context for

understanding them, ran foul of the overweening prejudices

of nationalism so that the very act of revealing urban

problems merely confirmed dominant anti-urban prejudices.

This proved to be a formidable problem for both Irish

television from the 1960s on and for the emerging film

industry from the 1970s on. It helps to explain the relative

lack of a social realist tradition in Ireland (though one of

RTÉ's first major drama successes, 1971's study of

contemporary inner-city life A Week in the Life of Martin Cluxton,

was a substantial critical and popular success). Those few

cinematic representations that did emerge in the 1980s, like

The Courier or Cathal Black's Pigs (1984) presented the

problems of urban Ireland in a cultural vacuum so that their

social and political agendas had no context in which to work

– no traditions of urban-ness to contain, balance, colour

and thus give weight to their representational thrust.

Discursive Dublin has its sympathetic elements, of course,

ranging from the passionate and sentimental folk songs of

The Dubliners (including an element of ribald celebration in

songs such as 'Going up to Monto') or the international

acclaim of its vibrant pub culture now copied in ersatz in

the ubiquitous 'Irish pub' to be found in most major cities

throughout the world. (Thus in a 'McCallister' cartoon from

the New Yorker in 1978 a simple line drawing of a flying

saucer heading off into the clouds is accompanied with the

caption 'With the possible exception of that pub crawl in

Dublin, I found the entire planet a bore.') In general,

though, the cultural representation of Dublin was badly in

need of a boost.

Looking back from today, we can now see that by the early

1980s, the economic factors that would fuel prosperity for

the whole of 'Celtic Tiger' Ireland and turn Dublin into

something of a boomtown were already well in place. It is

apparent now as well that the cultural and political forces

that would bring about a cultural rebirth for the

beleaguered capital were also mobilising. Thus the

destruction of Dublin's Georgian architecture that had

continued apace throughout the 1960s and early 1970s gave

rise in the 1980s to a more robust campaign to preserve

historic buildings and to curb the worst excesses of the

planning blight. The result was a new awareness among

Dubliners themselves of the city's rich architectural

heritage and a growing sense of pride in Dublin's cityscape.

As we have seen in the previous chapter, this growing urban

pride was originally signposted in January, 1980 when over

700,000 taxpayers, contributing to the State through one of

urban modernity's most characteristic inventions, the PAYE

system of taxation, marched in protest through all of

Ireland's urban centres at the inequity of a tax system that

still favoured the small farmer at the expense of the urban

worker. In retrospect, one can now see that this march

marked the passing of one era of Ireland's post-colonial

development and the beginning of another.

The City Re-imagined

The centenary celebrations of the birth of James Joyce (2

February, 1882) occupied a large part of the literary,

commercial and tourist life of Dublin in the first half of

1982. However, during July of that year a much smaller,

community-based festival took place in Joyce's city, the

'Inner City Looking-On Festival'. This was focused on

Dublin's decaying and disappearing inner north city area and

its activities – exhibitions, plays, open-air music

(including community gigs by an ambitious young U2) – were

designed to mark the passing of the old inner city culture

and the demolition of Dublin's remaining slum tenements.

This Festival, therefore, was marked by a peculiar

combination of nostalgia for the close-knit community that

was being redeveloped and relocated and yet relief that the

slums were at long last being eradicated. The coincidence of

both these events – the marriage of art and commerce that

marked the Joyce celebrations, the combination of radical

politics and urban nostalgia that characterised the inner

city festival – represented all the forces that were to come

together to complete the cultural rebirth of Dublin.

In 1988, Dublin celebrated its millennium. The historical

evidence for this was rather flimsy – the official reason

was that 988 AD was the year that the Irish finally took

control of the old Viking city (actually, it was 989 AD) -

but it provided a good excuse to have a party and to

celebrate the city itself. In 1992, Dublin was awarded the

accolade of European Capital of Culture and by year's end

the cultural rebirth of the city was well underway. This was

considerably enhanced by the marriage of finance capital,

State funding and corporate planning which resulted in the

redevelopment of Dublin's Temple Bar district as a centre of

art, entertainment and leisure. The re-branding of this

formerly derelict area of warehouses, abandoned buildings

and struggling artists was so successful during the 1990s

that by turn of the century, Kieran Keohane could observe:

And 'dear old dirty Dublin', Europe's worst slum in

1900, the squalid backward capital of Europe's Third

World country throughout the 20th century, is a brash,

bustling, trendy city that boasts that it is 'the new

Paris'. (9)

The Temple Bar development represents a triumph of re-

imagining that encompasses a whole plethora of contradictory

forces coalescing improbably to bring about economic and

cultural rebirth – the radical and sometimes oppositional

dynamics of the original bohemian artistic cluster that grew

up in an era of cheap rents and the neo-liberal,

entrepreneurial spirit of the 1980s that recognised a

business opportunity when it presented itself. The cinematic

rebirth of Dublin followed a similar pattern - the neo-

liberal economics and global aesthetics of Celtic Tiger

cinema gradually replacing the low-budget, radical and

oppositional cinema of the 1970s and 1980s. This more

commercial and populist cinema has begun to reconfigure the

image of Dublin in quite fundamental ways.

City, Cinema and 'modernity'

The economic development of Ireland is best seen in terms of

the triumph of a capitalist modernity linked economically to

the booming American economy and based on Ireland's central

position within the single European market. In the new

Ireland that emerged in the 1990s, the city and urban-ness

in general has finally assumed the kind of cultural and

ideological dominance that its economic importance would

warrant. A characteristic of this new ideological hegemony

has been the emergence of more celebratory invocations of

the city and none more so than in the utopian imaginary that

is reflected in the theme and style of some recent cinema.

These films celebrate and even glorify a certain kind of

urban lifestyle, dressed in the signifiers of contemporary

global youth culture and populated by the beautiful people

of Celtic Tiger Ireland. They are Irish, certainly, but

they epitomize a kind of transglobal 'cool.' These films are

much lighter in tone than the more political films of an

earlier era (like The Courier or like Strumpet City) and are

driven by an infectious and deliberately irreverent humour.

The Dublin that is portrayed here is a city of luxurious

apartments and well-appointed offices, their beautifully

decorated rooms looking out onto spectacular cityscapes; a

city of conspicuous consumption conducted in contemporary

art galleries, trendy restaurants, stylish coffee and wine

bars, and modernist pubs. Above all, this is a Dublin of

promiscuous sexual abandon, the new cinema's final affront

to the values of the old Ireland. The films seem to suggest

that Catholic, Nationalist Ireland is now merely a faded

memory passed down to Ireland's young population from their

grandparents (or, ironically, gleaned from those Irish films

that seem to be obsessed by this dead past).

Three films in particular epitomize this new hip hedonism:

About Adam, Goldfish Memory and John Crowley's Intermission

(2003). (Many more Dublin-based films display some, if not

quite all, of the same characteristics as these films,

constituting a significant and identifiable trend in recent

Irish cinema). Interestingly, all three films work through

multiple story lines and circular plots, the films' events

depicted through the experiences of a group of characters

who meet and interact (sometimes accidentally) in various

carefully stylised Dublin locations. In these films, the

multiple characters play games with one another in pursuit

of love and sex.

In Goldfish Memory, all possible combinations of sexual

coupling are explored--straight, gay, lesbian, and

bisexual--played out against a highly stylized Dublin that

was shot originally on digital video and then considerably

enhanced through post-production computer imaging. This

post-production process suffuses the final film with

enhanced colours--oranges, soft blues, and warm greens.

This creates an almost subliminal sense of well-being, a

visual 'feel good' factor that makes the city of Dublin

appear uncharacteristically bright and attractive. Just as

the film explores alternative love possibilities, so too the

stylized cinematography re-imagines an alternative Dublin,

providing an almost impossibly attractive contemporary

milieu for the film's daring sexual politics.

The film is punctuated by a series of high-angle shots of

the city taken from a variety of perspectives and at various

time of the day or night. In this way the film becomes a

celebration, not just of Dublin, but of urban life itself –

its secret and exciting spaces of sexual freedom and

exploration. These cityscapes become screenscapes and act as

a kind of punctuation throughout the film, locating the

action, of course, but also envisioning a new imagining of

Dublin, turning the old pre-modernist city into a

postmodernist playground. These screenscapes are also

rendered as 'nightscapes': the city centre spaces of eating,

drinking, dancing and general socialising. The camera

becomes a kind of 'flâneur', wandering the nightscapes

looking for the spaces where these activities are happening

and can be indulged in. In Goldfish Memory the main characters

are lesbian women and gay men and their pursuit of

uncluttered sexual encounters amount to a re-working of the

very notion of love and family. The spaces being looked at –

being discovered and indulged - are both 'queer' spaces and

feminine spaces or they are the formerly hetero-masculine

spaces of discursive Dublin now being opened up to the

formerly disguised and dispossessed. This image of Dublin is

a remarkable revision of the accepted viewpoint, even if

there is an ironic conservatism in the film’s ultimate

message. The gay men become the fathers for the lesbian

couple’s children so that the family is reinstated, albeit

in a radically different and extended form. This is the city

as utopia.

This utopian view of the city was articulated in a famous

passage from Lewis Mumford's study of city life:

The city in its complete sense … is a geographic

plexus, an economic organization, an institutional

process, a theatre of social action, and an aesthetic

symbol of collective unity'. (10)

This 'social utopianism' is as much a part of the culture of

the city as the more obvious dystopian visions associated

with either the rural romanticism of Catholic nationalism or

the anti-modernist and anti-industrial impulses of some

studio-set visions of the city, most famously encapsulated

in Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927). Goldfish Memory especially

tries to capture the utopian feel of the city – its

imaginative geography as well as its collective unity – in a

re-imagined cityscape of sexual promise and endless sexual

diversity. The fact that most of the main characters are gay

men, lesbian women or bisexuals of both genders makes this

utopian city a particularly 'queer' space. It is a visual

confirmation of Michael Sibalis' observation that

urbanisation was a precondition to the emergence of a

significant gay culture. (11) The utopianism of Goldfish

Memory is a reflection of a newly-emerged (or recently re-

emerged) urban culture that is increasingly confident and

daring it its self-image. It is also an intensely cinematic

vision and James Donald has articulated well this

utopianism: '… it is in cinematic cities that we hear the

quiet yet insistent rhythm of the wings of desire'. (12) In

the sexual repression of rural Catholic Ireland, the wings

of desire were the preserve of imported culture, heavily

regulated by Church and State through draconian censorship.

Goldfish Memory and similar films represent the response from

the Celtic Tiger's urban Ireland.

There is, however, a problem with all of this. The city in

reality is no more essentially utopian than it is

essentially dystopian. In fact it is both at the same time

and herein lies the complexity of the modern city. It is

what Foucault called a heterotopia, 'juxtaposing in a

single real place several spaces, several sites that are in

themselves incompatible'. (13) In writing about the

country/city divide, Raymond Williams once observed: 'It is

significant … that the common image of the country is now an

image of the past, and the common image of the city an image

of the future. That leaves, if we isolate them, an undefined

present'. (14) And yet, in Foucault's sense, the past, the

present and the future can all co-exist in the same space

and the 'undefined present' is merely the concatenation of

contradictory forces. Indeed, as we have seen, the future

represented by the city can be both utopian and dystopian

and the cinematic city has certainly been represented as

both. Williams argued further, 'The pull of the idea of the

country is towards old ways, human ways, natural ways. The

pull of the idea of the city is towards progress,

modernization, development'. Yet even in this duality,

Williams underestimates the force of the negatives of each

'pull'. Thus the 'old ways' and the 'natural ways' can be as

restrictive and oppressive as the city's progress can be

alienating and disabling.

The heterotopia, therefore, implies that the new ways of the

city represent progress, modernity, education, culture and

opportunity and at the same time, represent disharmony,

individualism, materialism, alienation and conflict. The

city might well represent freedom and sexual liberation but

it can also signify enslavement, exploitation and vice. The

idea of heterotopia suggests that Goldfish Memory's wine bars

and queer spaces inhabit the same cityscape as The Courier's

gangsters and dope addicts but if this is so, then the

camera in the hip hedonist movie avoids looking in the

conflicted spaces. Rather, the camera itself seems to have

become obsessed by good looks and designer clothes, lovingly

dwelling on the beautiful and handsome faces and bodies that

inhabit the reconfigured city. The cast of Goldfish Memory in

particular is uniformly young and attractive, but the same

is true of About Adam, dominated by charismatic performances

from Stuart Townsend as the film's handsome serial seducer

and Kate Hudson and Frances O'Connor as two of his

attractive lovers.

The centrality of designer good looks is also evident in

Fintan Connolly's Flick (1999), another film that explores a

lifestyle of hedonistic excess, even if this view of

contemporary Dublin has more rough edges than About Adam and

Goldfish Memory. The film is centred on middle-class drug

dealer Jack Flinter, played by David Murray, and the camera

seems at times to be mesmerised by Murray's presence. There

are long sequences in the film that follow Jack through the

clubs and pubs of contemporary Dublin as he buys, sells, and

imbibes his drugs and the camera seems to prowl along,

eyeing him with almost voyeuristic zeal. The (young)

audience is invited to look and to empathize. To some

extent, then, these are films of self-obsessed narcissism

and designer-label chic, and, as such, maybe they are a true

reflection of one aspect of Celtic Tiger Ireland - the

rampant consumerism that comes from economic success and

greater affluence.

For all their imaginative and seductive style, in other

words, the films could be accused of smug complacency. The

social problems that global consumerism throws up cannot

simply be imagined out of existence. The ugliness of the

real world cannot be digitally enhanced or removed like a

post-production video image. Not everyone is a winner in

Celtic Tiger Ireland but in the films that have attempted to

reconfigure the cinematic image of the city in Irish culture

the camera seems to have had time only for the conspicuous

winners.

Notes

1. Tony Keily, 'Editorial ', Film Ireland, no. 95,

November/December, 2003, p. 5.

2. Kevin Rockett, '(Mis-)Representing the Irish Urban

Landscape' in Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice (eds.) Cinema

and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context (Oxford:

Blackwell, 2001), pp. 217-29.

3. Quoted in David B. Clarke, The Cinematic City (London:

Routledge, 1997), p. 1.

4 Lance Pettitt, Screening Ireland (Manchester: Manchester

University Press, 2000), p. 108.

5. Rockett, '(Mis-)Representing the Irish Urban Landscape',

pp. 217-28.

6. Colin McArthur, 'Chinese Boxes and Russian Dolls:

Tracking the Elusive Cinematic City' in David B. Clarke

(ed.) The Cinematic City (London: Routledge, 1997), 19-45.

7. Ferdia MacAnna, 'The Dublin Renaissance', The Irish Review,

no. 10, Spring, 1991, pp. 14-30.

8. Kieran Keohane, 'The Revitalization of the City and the

Demise of Joyce's Utopian Modern Subject', Theory, Culture and

Society, vol. 19(3), 2002, pp. 29-49.

9. Kieran Keohane, 'The Revitalization of the City and the

Demise of Joyce's Utopian Modern Subject', p. 29.

10. Lewis Mumford, 'What is a City?' in R. LeGates and F.

Stout (eds.) The City Reader (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 93-

6.

11. Sibalis

12. James Donald

13. Quoted in Anthony Easthope, 'Cinécities in the Sixties'

in David B. Clarke (ed.) The Cinematic City (London: Routledge,

1997), pp. 129-40.

14. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Hogarth

Press, 1985), pp. 296-7.