The problem with the traditional hero, villain, and victim breakdown utilized by many films to categorize the IRA is not limited to historical inaccuracy. The Northern Irish situation remains poorly understood by many audiences, which in some cases makes film the viewer’s first exposure to the IRA. Thus, as Connelly argues, “Film has largely informed the world about the Irish Republican Army.” This phenomenon can be seen elsewhere in American film, in the long-running obsession with crime films that led to the mafia movies Goodfellas and The Godfather trilogy. In much the same way as these films helped to define America’s understanding of the mafia, so too did film shape America’s understanding of the IRA.
Recognizing that film has played a significant role in defining the IRA for American audiences, the portrayals of the IRA in film then become valuable tools in mapping American understanding. For a nation with significant ties to a British government that dismissed the IRA as a band of criminal thugs and terrorists, the American response in film does not match up. Instead, the tendency is for American film to support the liberation movement the IRA stands in for, but renounce the violent means of attaining it. America, the nation absorbed in popular fantasies of independence and national self-determination, found a suitable target for these fantasies in the IRA. This is made possible by the “us vs. them” structure of many IRA films. In keeping with the American ideals of freedom from oppression and liberty for all, the IRA is set up in direct opposition to a foreign occupying authority. America is predisposed to sympathisize with this kind of struggle because it’s reminiscient of the early nation’s struggle under the thumb of it’s British oppressors. It’s easy for American audiences to view the British as villains when American history textbooks perpetuate that image. “American motion pictures never criticize ‘the Cause,’ only the use of violence which is usually attributed to renegades or lone terrorists condemned by the IRA.” The question is not in the nobility of the cause, but in the methods used.
This move on the part of American filmmakers has done little to try to understand the conflict, instead focusing on repackaging it to fit within “us vs. them” style scripts. The American crime drama can again serve as a counter-example here. “A gangster picture typically focuses on the clash between cops and robbers. The audience, however, intuitively understands that outside the scope of the drama there are millions of law abiding citizens relying on the police for protection.” This “intuitive understanding” is absent in the foreigner’s vision of Northern Ireland influenced by American cinema. The urban warzone depicted in countless IRA films creates the “illusion that the majority of those living in Northern Ireland belong to an indigenous people resisting an unwanted British occupation.”
This, however, is by no means the only portrayal of the IRA. Two major factors influencing the portrayal of the IRA have shown to be country of production and time. Early American representation pigeonholed the IRA as a convenient plot device, with very little attention paid to historical accuracy or detail. As popular understanding of the conflict increased alongside increased American involvement in Northern Irish politics in the 1990’s, this representation began to change. Further, representations within Irish film take a different direction when representing the IRA, opting for an emphasis on their local presence rather than the grand construction of the resistance army, good or bad, contrived by foreign films.
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