Abstract: Myth and Murder in The Daisy Chain (Aisling Walsh, 2009) Aisling Walsh's latest film The Daisy Chain (Walsh 2008) is a complex exploration of the human potential for evil. Martha (Samantha Morton) and Tomas Conroy (Steven Mackintosh), an urbanite English couple, return to his birthplace in an isolated village on the west coast of Ireland to set up home. They take in Daisy Gahan (Mhairi Anderson), a child whose family has just died, even though locals suspect that she might be possessed by a demonic fairy changeling. Those who try to control the child or get close to her surrogate mother Martha, die. The villagers ostracise and try to kill the young girl, convinced she is a fairy and hoping to bring back the real child. The Daisy Chain explores the figure of the disturbed child as folk monster, alternately suggesting the child's antisocial behaviour as the result of autism, abuse or evil. Mirroring life, the film is imbued with post-Celtic Tiger notions on the importance of prioritising simple pleasures and community life, and the obsession with appropriating culpability for the problems with which we are faced. The problems of a small town are projected onto a girl who is viewed as a supernatural devil, responsible for the ills of a society too blind to see that it is they who have created them. It is a clear lesson for a society that often blames the media for the evils of children who kill and mame, and which is still coming to terms with a long history of institutional abuse. Martha is undergoing a difficult pregnancy following the loss of her first baby through cot death. She attaches huge importance to caring for Daisy, perhaps because she is still mourning her child, perhaps because she recognises how much this troubled child needs love. If we read her through concepts such as the 'archaic mother' and the 'monstrous-feminine' (see Creed 1993), perhaps her own memories of hysteria and abuse give her the desire to open her heart to Daisy. By contrast her husband rejects the child, perhaps out of jealousy, and yet his fears appear justified at the end of the film. The final sequence takes on an otherwordly nightmare-fantasy element as the myths become 'real'. We see the fairy/child force Martha into birth and then take the baby for herself while Martha lies, presumably dead, in a pool of blood. Tomas takes the baby away and the film ends. Here, as in Changeling (Eastwood 2008), missing children take on a supernatural quality, and the boundaries of truth and fiction are blurred. In Walsh's film Celtic notions compound the confusion as the child evokes pagan ideas of the changeling, a fairy who replaces a kidnapped child, identifiable by her screaming, estrangement and destructive actions. As Martha flicks through a fairy book for children early on in the film, it is clear to see the similarity between this elfin child Daisy and the mythical creatures. The film thus uses the power of suggestion to challenge our modern/Christian rejection of such elements and speaks to our subconscious, pre-historic suspicion that there's more here than meets the eye. The trope of rural Ireland as the romantic or the sublime and the idea of the freedom of the wild is undermined here. Most scenes are filmed indoors in the cramped confines of a labourer's cottage, a doctor's surgery, a hospital waiting room. Once the locals come to the conclusion that Daisy is spreading disease and death, the police tell the family to send Daisy to an institution to be looked after by specialists, or risk their lives. This makes the great outdoors a place to fear and evade, and leaves the protagonists confined to an emotionally and physically claustrophobic space. The encircling imagery of the enclosed cottage, faced on one side by a murderous old man (who tries to kill the fairy), and on others by the wild west coast, evokes the mystery and tragedy of the remote space in which this drama unfolds. The theatrical tableau of the space is reinforced by the observational camerawork which both obscures and constructs our view of this world, just as the picturesque view of the rural is itself a construction. …
Publication Year: 2010
Publication Date: 2010-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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