‘Hit Men on Holiday Get All Medieval’

Abstract

This article traces a trajectory of medieval allusions in McDonagh's film, beginning with Arthurian aspects, moving on to a context of pilgrimage, and using this as a point of departure for a discussion of film as an artistic medium against the theoretical background of Walter Benjamin's ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’. In claiming for film those very auratic qualities that Benjamin denies it by defining it against an essentialized notion of religious medieval art, ‘In Bruges’ draws attention to the constructedness of the ‘medieval’ experience. The film juxtaposes different media to rethink our relationship with the ‘distant’ past, while charting the role the cinema can play in this rethinking.

Keywords:

• Martin McDonagh's In Bruges
• Walter Benjamin
• multitemporality
• medievalism

Notes

The phrase is spoken by gangster boss Marsellus Wallace after having been raped by two male sado-masochists (Tarantino, 1994: 108). For a medievalist reading of Pulp Fiction and a discussion of the implications of the phrase's entry into popular culture see Dinshaw, 1999: 183–206.

Homophobic utterances in McDonagh's film generally suggest that homosexuality equals (physical) weakness (cf. McDonagh, 2008: 10, 42, 65–66).

All protagonists use the word with non-violent meanings only. Ken quotes a guidebook explaining the city's medieval heritage (McDonagh, 2008: 7); later he lies to Harry that Ray loves the ‘medieval part of town’ (38). Ray tempts Ken outside, suggesting they look at ‘the old medieval buildings’ (12); Harry ironically refers to ‘a medieval fucking bowling alley’ (36). The medieval is otherwise omnipresent through the various sets: churches, art galleries, alleys, canals, etc.

Bowman is one of few reviewers to contemplate the role of the medieval in McDonagh's film, presuming that the setting suggests some ‘thematic interpenetration between the killers’ business and most of their conversation and the cultural heritage all around them.’ Yet he concludes that allusions to the Middle Ages are merely ‘a way of bringing things medieval back into fashion … ; mainly the movie is just a vehicle for Mr McDonagh's witty dialogue and a display … of its maker's way with comically exaggerated villainy’. Manohla Dargis writes that such references ‘suggest that Mr. McDonagh means to say something about the spectacle of violence – they don't add up to anything.’ A frequently expressed view is that the cultural references are little more than ‘an obvious way of referencing Ray's idea of hell’ (Koehler, 2008).

Norman notes that the film's initial setup is particularly indebted to Pinter's play Dumb Waiter, which opens with two hit men finding themselves in a claustrophobic situation, waiting for instructions. After a long wait interspersed with comic banter, the play ends with the older of the two eventually pointing his gun at the younger. By contrast, McDonagh's film explores the aftermath of a similar situation.

The murdered boy clutches a note that reads: ‘1. Being moody. 2. Being bad at maths. 3. Being sad.’ (McDonagh, 2008: 23).

Quotes from In Bruges are taken from the published script. I will draw attention to differences between the script and the digital video disc-release of the film wherever necessary.

Harry and Ken often refer to Ray as ‘the boy’ or ‘the kid’. In several scenes, Ray clearly resembles a hyperactive child. Ken even compares him to ‘some five-year-old who's dropped all his sweets’ (ibid.: 20).

The set description states: ‘We could be in any period of the last five hundred years. We happen to be in the present day’ (ibid.: 3). Incidentally, this would exclude most of the Middle Ages — yet the film clearly evokes the Gothic heritage of Bruges.

On the traditional reception of film as creating the illusion of chronology see Bernau and Bildhauer (2009: 1–19).

The word is repeated several times (McDonagh, 2008; 3, 4, 19, 30).

Using interior details from two different churches, the Basilica scene powerfully draws together ‘sacred’ and ‘gruesome’ medieval artifacts. The script notes the Basilica of the Holy Blood, which indeed holds a relic of Christ's blood, as the scene's location, but the scene was shot in the Jerusalem Church (as noted on several Internet discussion boards), showing a morbid altar depicting Golgatha as an abandoned space of torture.

On temporal heterogeneities understood as attitudes to (medieval) time see Dinshaw 2007, especially at 111.

See Ermarth (2010) on the issue of history in In Bruges. Elizabeth Ermarth discusses notions of temporality but not the film's meta-cinematic self-reflexivity, and the way this is linked to the issue of the Middle Ages' relationship to (post)modernity.

On the centrality of the dead child in McDonagh's theatrical works see Norman (2009).

This is the set description's explanation of the painting (McDonagh, 2008: 24). All paintings shown are reproduced in de Vos (1983).

This is the title of a fictional book shown early in the film; John is its author. The fictional book Ken reads in In Bruges is ‘The Death of Capone’ by ‘K.K. Katurian’; Katurian is a character in McDonagh's play The Pillowman (2003). Katurian, alleged child-murderer, writes stories that often evoke violence against children, stories that reflect, as well as cause, real deaths.

The dwarf is incredibly strong, and the most sexually active of all characters and consumes enormous amounts of hard drugs – his displays of masculinity exceed Ken's and Ray's by far; in fact, the gangsters feel obliged to distance themselves from his excessive machismo and racism (see McDonagh, 2008: 49–52).

McDonagh's use of a tracking shot as a tribute to Welles is noted on several Internet discussion boards and some reviews of In Bruges, e.g. in McCracken (2008).