People make fun of me for hanging on to an old collection of movies on videotape, but I don’t care. They came in handy this week when there was some kind of Google Fiber outage and I was without either television or internet for a whole evening. (It was traumatic)
So I turned to my ancient and unfashionable collection and selected a movie I haven’t viewed in over twenty years, Neil Jordan’s debut film, Angel (or Danny Boy, the title under which it was released in the U.S.) I remembered every line of dialogue. I think it is my favorite Neil Jordan film after The Crying Game. You can rent it on Amazon Prime for $3.99 and it is worth it for the soundtrack alone.
Danny, played by a very young Stephen Rea, is a saxophone player who witnesses two murders outside a music hall in South Armagh, Northern Ireland. His band’s manager is shot down execution style and an innocent deaf mute girl who just wandered into the scene is killed, too, because she is a witness. Danny spirals downward into a crusade of vengeance against the killers.
Although the story is set against the backdrop of the Troubles, in the words of Richard Kearney, writing for Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review
This film does not sponsor any specific ideology; it concentrates on the mentality which produces violence — regardless of whether it is inflicted by Republicans, Loyalists or British law-and-order agents; or by somebody totally non-political. And this concentration on the psychic roots of violence permits Jordan to penetrate to the common core of metaphysical nothingness (what he calls, borrowing from Blake, the ‘nobodaddy’) from which acts of violence ultimately derive.
Although many characters in the film speak of nothingness, the word “nobodaddy” is only spoken by one character. Danny’s Auntie Mae is a fortune teller and she tells Danny about seeing nobodaddy in the cards and when she does, she makes up lies to tell the clients. She tells them they’re going to get married or take a journey. Anything but nobodaddy. “No one wants to hear about him.”
It was something I had never picked up on until I watched the movie again this last week and I got curious. The word is from a poem by William Blake and it is described by Online Etymology Dictionary as “William Blake's derisive name for the anthropomorphic God of Christianity.”
Further searching led me to an essay by L. Edwin Folsom in An Illustrated Quarterly Blake:
The names of Blake’s poetic characters are, of course, vast in their associations, often incorporating puns, conflations and anagrams based upon key words or Biblical, classical, and historical characters. Nobodaddy, the farting, belching “Father of Jealousy” (E 462) who hides himself in clouds and loves “hanging & drawing & quartering / Every bit as well as war & slaughtering,” (E 490) has received general critical agreement as to the significance of his name. “Old daddy Nobody” and “Nobody’s daddy” seem logical expansions of the compact name of this destructive divinity who appears in several of the Notebook poems and who manifests himself elsewhere as Urizen, Winter, the Will, and the Old Testament God. But “Nobodaddy,” it should be noted, is also a close anagram of the name of a character who appears in two of Blake’s favorite Biblical books, Job and Revelation: Abaddon (Hebrew for “destruction”). Anagrammatized, “Abaddon” becomes “Nobadad.” He is “the angel of the bottomless pit” who appears in Revelation 9:11 and is mentioned in Job 26:6.4 [my bold]
I believe that this “angel of the bottomless pit” is the angel of the movie’s original title, not Danny before his fall from innocence or Annie, the girl who was killed. Or maybe it is all three.
The American title, Danny Boy, started me thinking about the song (which is featured in the movie, sung by Honor Heffernan) and the fact that it is generally regarded as an antiwar song started me thinking about the two PBS dramas I’ve been watching, Atlantic Crossing and World on Fire.
Among the many parallels between the two stories is that of Eleanor Roosevelt and Douglas Bennett. Neither is remotely sympathetic to the Nazis or even isolationist in the nativist sense, but both oppose the involvement of their respective countries in the war against Hitler because they are pacifists.
It is difficult to sympathize with their positions, looking back with the wisdom of hindsight. Is pacifism absolute or does true pacifism require vanquishing nobodaddy before he becomes fully manifest and is there a point at which it is too late for pacifism?