Sinead O’Connor’s Refusal To Be Shamed For What She Believed In Made Her The Ideal Avatar For Neil Jordan’s Uniquely Irish Worldview

I was fourteen years old when Sinéad O’Connor’s debut album The Lion and the Cobra dropped in 1987 and, well, I wasn’t ready to hear it. When a track from that LP, “A Drink Before the War,” doom-laden and haunted, scored the early courtship between undercover cop and prodigal son Terry Noonan (Sean Penn) and his childhood sweetheart Kathleen (Robin Wright) in Phil Joanou’s Irish mob neo-noir State of Grace three years later, well, I was ready then. I was seventeen that year, a year removed from a suicide attempt I’m still recovering from more than 30 years later. As the film ended, I sat in the theater through the credits to find out who sang that song, the one that encapsulated all of the film’s melancholy and sense of doom, lurking there even in the bloom of youth and love, theirs and mine. I walked from the theater a few blocks to a record store and bought O’Connor’s album and listened to it the rest of that fall into winter. The theater is gone now, the record store, too, and now so is O’Connor, who died this week at the age of 56. She deserved better from us, this poet of the end of things even at the beginning. 

There is inspiration in how she demanded better for herself, and tragedy in how she was always ahead of the curve on issues like the rampant sex abuse in the Catholic Church, the Palestinian genocide, Black Lives Matter, gender and sexuality, religiosity and spirituality and states of grace — ahead enough, outspoken enough, to frame her for many as eternal dissident and dismissed as “crazy.” I’m hearing a lot of descriptions of her now as “fragile,” too — but I don’t think that’s right. She spoke openly of her mental health crises—- in the last video she posted in the days leading up to her death, she talks about her appearance and wonders aloud what could be expected of a mother who’s lost her son so recently (eighteen months ago) to suicide. Her music is defiant, a flag planted in ground that’s ever-shifting. She knew, the hard way, what speaking and living her truth would take from her. She seemed to predict what would happen to her three years before she ripped up a photo of the Pope on Saturday Night Live when she shaved Public Enemy’s crosshairs logo above her left ear for the 1989 Grammy Awards ceremony in solidarity with rap and hip-hop artists being left out of awards consideration. She was the best kind of ally: the one that platformed others and lived her beliefs, publicly, passionately, and at her own great expense. Very few, almost none, with her status and power stood up for her the way, without a thought, she stood up for them.

Irish filmmaker Neil Jordan understood the cultural weight of O’Connor’s art at a gut-level: the profundity of her sadness married to the enormous power of her righteousness. The story of Ireland, its oppression and blight, its reverence for poetry and the expressions of the human heart, is in every phrase of her art. She was a Cassandra: gifted with song, but doomed to speak truth before people were ready to hear it. Jordan uses her song “She Moved Through the Fair” to add a mythological resonance to the assassination of Michael Collins in his film about the Irish revolutionary leader. Starting the sequence with Collins’ motorcade winding through the countryside before encountering a roadblock where an ambush has been laid, he cross-cuts between this impending death to Collins’ beloved Kitty (Julia Roberts) trying on a wedding dress at the end of a road he’ll never reach. O’Connor’s dirge is both plaintive and traditional, simplifying this particular story of Irish independence into a universal, an archetypal lament about the fate of angels of just causes at the mercy of lesser men who are driven by venal self-interests. They are temporary, these thought leaders, but their inspiration lingers on for generations. There is no other artist better suited to tell it.

After Michael Collins (1995), Jordan uses O’Connor again in his explosive adaptation of Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy (1998) — a film infernal in its energy and indelible for it. A companion piece in feeling and madness to Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures (1994), The Butcher Boy follows demonic Francie Brady (Eamonn Owens), a red-headed 12-year-old who serves as the manifestation of all of the paranoid apocalyptic dysfunction of the dawn of the Atomic Age. He cuts a violent, foul swath through his small town with a glint in his eye and a bounce to his step, landing him in reform school where he’s promptly molested by kindly old Father Sullivan (Milo O’Shea). While collecting peat in the bog one day, Francie is visited by a holy vision of the Virgin Mary — of course, Jordan cast Sinéad O’Connor to play the role. “Hello, Francie. How are things? Worried, Francie? What were you worried about?” Her tone is so kind and countenance so gentle it’s possible to forget for a moment what she represents as the single most visible and uncompromising critic of the Catholic Church in the world playing one of its most profound objects of worship.  Reunited on the outside with his friend, Joe (Alan Boyle), Francie hallucinates an atomic attack, in the aftermath of which he sees the burnt corpses of the town as blackened pigs and the Virgin Mary in a destroyed television set, cooing an Irish song (“Beautiful Bonduran by the silvery sea/your golden strand charms so grand”) from the wreckage of the world. When he talks with her again, now as a grown man doing his best to act the right way after a lifetime of persecution and injury, failed psychiatric treatments and occasional forced institutionalizations, she says “the world goes one way, we go another, do you get my meaning?” I’m not sure Francie does get her meaning. But I do.

In defense of those without a voice, Sinéad O’Connor made herself the target of sexist, ignorant, vile attacks that continued for her entire life. After her protest of centuries of systemic Catholic horror people both predictable (Joe Pesci and Frank Sinatra) and depressing (Madonna) came after her with threats of physical violence and taunts about her choice of outrage. Before she scuttled her stardom entirely, she wrote “As artists, I believe our function is to express the feelings of the human race – to always speak the truth and never keep it hidden even though we are operating in a world which does not like the sound of the truth.“ She caught death threats for her defense of Palestinians, more for her defense of African-Americans, and again when in the last years of her life she converted to Islam after years of ecclesiastical study and yearning. She released ten albums in her life and was working on her eleventh upon her death. After a couple of stumbling attempts at the end of the millennium (culminating in the poignantly named Faith and Courage in 2000), each of her last five albums have been revelations: wise, spare, and gorgeously-realized documents of her journey through life. I am haunted by this passage from her song “Black Boys on Mopeds”:

I’ve said this before now

Remember what I told you

If they hated me, they will hate you

England’s not the mythical land of Madame George and roses

It’s the home of police who kill black boys on mopeds

And I love my boy, that’s why I’m leaving

I don’t want him to be aware that there’s

Any such thing as grieving

And she wrote an astonishing memoir in 2021 (Rememberings) detailing her struggles and the simplicity of her worldview: “Everyone wants a pop star, see? But I am a protest singer. I just had stuff to get off my chest. I had no desire for fame.” I will always be moved by her refusal to submit to the hard fact that maybe the only thing there is for us in our lives is the promise of grieving. In her last video she says “anyway, let’s not dwell on that,” and, okay. I’ll try.

She lived her truth. She lived out loud. She refused to be shamed for what she believed in: that people deserved respect and dignity, a life without persecution, and acceptance for the ways they diverge from arbitrary norms. “I never signed anything that said I would be a good girl,” she said. In her memoir, a must-read, she does call herself fragile a time or two, describing how the carefully-weighted jabs of her detractors would send her into terrible spirals of despair and self-imposed isolation before she would gather herself up again to stand up and sing. When I heard she had died, I thought immediately of this passage from T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” in which the poet refers to Philomela, turned into a nightingale at the moment of her trauma, to sing the truth of her persecution into eternity, “…yet there the nightingale/Filled all the desert with inviolable voice/And still she cried, and still the world pursues,/”Jug Jug” to dirty ears.” She called herself “fragile,” but when I listen to her music, when I was finally ready to hear her, smart enough to reel from the force of it and the unrepentant outrage of her lyrics, marvel at the heedlessness with which she threw her entire self into her performances and her steadfast refusal to be ashamed of her warts and fissures — well, that’s not fragility. She was many things: betrayed, broken, beaten by the how in a world in such dire need of heroes, there are so passing few of them — but she was never fragile. She was fierce and I hear her now, all the time but loudest when I am afraid and ashamed. She had so many more years of incandescent brilliance. This one hurts.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is now available.