THE IRISHMAN: THE SONG, THE FILM AND CHRISTMAS

Time for a very different blog this week. My head has been full of Christmas, and of the anniversaries of my dad’s and sister’s deaths last year. This is a Christmas meditation, if you like, on a favourite song, and on a newly favourite film. There is nothing here about my work as a wedding photographer – or other work as a Bromley-based photographer – if you want to contact me about any of that, click here.

An image by G_Masters on Pexels – I couldn’t resist it – a kid using the same Russian Cosmic camera that my dad passed on to me in about 1972

The only song on the Christmas radio playlists that I never tire of is Fairytale of New York by the Pogues. The Kent-born chronicler of the Irish emigrant experience, Shane MacGowan died at the end of last month. The song is once again high in the end of year charts as we mourn one of the finest but most self-destructive songwriters of his generation. Kirsty MacColl, the other vocalist on the track, died even younger and heroically, protecting her son from a speedboat back in 2000.

The singer takes us into the cells of a New York police station on Christmas Eve as assorted drunks sleep and sing off the excesses of the evening. As another Irishman breaks into “Rare Old Mountain Dew” our man turns his face away and dreams of the girl he brought to the city. He is feeling lucky – won a bit on the horses and hopes for a better year with her.

Then Kirsty sings, reminiscing about their early days in America – times of opportunity even if it could be tough. Then they duet about those days, when they were young and good-looking and New York was a great place to be.

But that isn’t where they are now. The fifth stanza is one of the nastiest and most notorious couple rows in music – the words slut, faggot and arse all getting censored over the years and making debate over the homophobic slur as much a regular Christmas feature as the song itself. But just taking that raging argument at face value: drink and drugs have done for this immigrant couple’s hopes and all but destroyed their lives. They are the kind of people Shane sang about elsewhere,

We watched our friends grow up together
And we saw them as they fell
Some of them fell into Heaven
Some of them fell into Hell

After the next chorus, with its fictional NYPD choir, the tone becomes less abusive, more maudlin. He sings – then she sings – and as ever in that kind of scenario, it is the woman who speaks the truth. This verse for me is the crux of the song. “I could have been someone” he croaks, and she sings back like a sweet hammer, “but so could anyone!” McColl’s own double-tracked harmony on the line is sublime, as is her emotional intensity which hovers between spite and affection as she slaps him down. I always cry as I hear her.

At that point the song becomes a universal anthem. You may never have been an Irish immigrant, feeling English hostility or indifference in London, or drunk in a New York police cell, but you have had shattered dreams, harsh disappointments, still-born possibilities. Or if you haven’t, you will.

The Irishman is the 2019 gangster masterpiece by Martin Scorsese. I have just got round to watching it. It ranks with the best of the genre, and pulls together outstanding performances by Robert de Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci. Insanely long, at nearly three and a half hours, it is actually brilliantly paced, never drags and leaves you feeling that you have just seen a work that is really weighty, raising some of the greatest questions.

De Niro plays the Irishman – Frank Sheeran, an Irish-American hard man whose life runs close to the senior leadership of East Coast mafia and the Teamsters Union. He appears to be a sociopath, if not a psychopath, killing to order – “painting houses” – almost casually and with no sign of felt guilt or remorse.

The film starts and ends with Frank as an old man in a nursing home. In the lengthy final section we see him interacting with various people: FBI agents, a priest (who desperately tries to provoke some sign of regret in him, and staff in the home. No family members visit him.

Frank has lived his life as a somebody, and as an enforcer for some of the biggest Somebodys in his world. But now he has nothing and nobody. All the people he was closest to are dead – which shouldn’t be a total surprise to him as he killed a fair number of them. His daughter hasn’t spoken to him in years. The young woman who makes his bed in the home not only has no clue who he is, but doesn’t even know who his closest, biggest and deadest employer – Jimmy Hoffa – was. It’s all gone.

In the very final scene, the priest visits. He tells Frank that he won’t see him again until after Christmas. “It’s Christmas?!” says Frank. He asks for the door to be left ajar, and through it we have our final glimpse of him: alone, out of touch with dates and events, the world moving on without him. The Somebody has become a Nobody, not through humility but through simple mortality and the repulsive power of a certain kind of success.

It’s Christmas. We celebrate the birth of Jesus. The Bible gives us a lot of angles (some of them brought by angels!) on that birth. Both his parents’ hometown and his actual place of birth were little places, middle-of-nowhere places. The fact that he was born in Bethlehem and not at home in Nazareth was down to some bureaucratic decisions made in the real big city, Rome, many miles away. He is born in a Travelodge car park, in today’s money. His first cry is that of just another displaced newborn.

But all of those familiar aspects of the story – the “no room”, the manger, the humble shepherds and all – are really just detail (though appropriate pointers) to the great displacement that was really going on. As Paul wrote a few decades later to a church in northern Greece:

…. Christ Jesus, who,
though he was in the form of God,
did not count equality with God
a thing to be clung to,
but emptied himself,
by taking the form of a servant,
being born in the likeness of men.

He could have been someone – in fact, he was Someone. He was not just anyone. In his own person, in his essence, he was a Someone above all other someones, he was God. But he laid aside his majesty, he veiled his glory, he became a Nobody. He came not to a feather bed but to a manger, not to a palace but to the car park of a cheap hotel, not to strut but to serve, not to lord it on the pavements but to sweep them.

Of course, the story didn’t end there. From the manger it carried on – down – down – down to death. What the manger was to a feather bed, so was the cross to most people’s idea of a decent passing. Betrayed, abandoned, rejected, abused, beaten, tortured, killed – that is how the Servant completed his service.

And through that Service he became a Somebody again. As Paul continued,

Therefore God has highly exalted him
and given him the name
that is above every name,
so that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bow,
in heaven
and on earth
and under the earth,
and every tongue confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord…

He is The Someone. He is the Man who will rule over all people, everywhere, forever. He will judge the living and the dead. He is the real King.

Homeless in a London winter – one of my shots for the Salvation Army

I could have been someone!
But so could anyone!

Many are born into a world of opportunity and of possibility, though many are not. The resilience and creativity of those who carve out some possibility from the most unlikely clay is astounding.

But all too often it is our own propensity for not using opportunity, for waste and self-destruction that is astounding. It is like we have a sheet-anchor holding us back, keeping us dead in the water, preventing  the realisation of dreams. Piaf and Sinatra claim to have regretted nothing, or to have had too few regrets to mention – but who are they kidding? In our honest moments, perhaps in the small hours when I am writing this, we know we have thrown away more than we ever really succeeded at. Life is no fairytale, not really.

And if we have made good – if we have been someone, what of it? Where does it go? Greatness slips through our fingers. Achievements are devalued by time. At the end those who care for us may never have even heard of the people we once knew – or were.

Peter quotes the Old Testament prophet Isaiah in one of his letters:

 “All flesh is like grass 
and all its glory like the flower of grass.
The grass withers,
and the flower falls…”

The Ozymandias Collossos

Isaiah is stating the same truth as Shelley does in Ozymandias:

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . .
Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies,
whose frown, and wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains.
Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck,
boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

The name Ozymandias has come back into popular culture through Breaking Bad – the Netflix epic which shows a man rising to great heights, only to come crashing down. Through human history this has been a truism: There is no level of human success, no height of Somebodyship, no glory, power or wealth, that will last forever. Some names last longer than others, but ultimately, oblivion beckons to us all. The lone and level sands of time will take possession of your proudest monuments and greatest glories. Shelley offers no hope of another outcome.

But Isaiah and Peter do. The quote goes on:

“The grass withers,
and the flower falls, 
but the word of the Lord remains forever.”

In a world of transience, of grass and falling  flower, of missed opportunities and the guarantee only of decay coming to our successes, our best, there is one thing that lasts. The word of the Lord.

And we are not told about this lasting “word of the Lord” merely to mock our grassiness. Peter goes on:

“And this word is the good news that was preached to you.”

Into this world of disappointments and pain, of theft and moth and mould and inflation and the forgetfulness of time, of aging and senility and death, something has come which lasts. The word of the Lord has come – Jesus Christ and the preached gospel which flows from his mouth, which speaks of him and leads us to him and joins us to him and through which we receive the eternal life he came to bring. Into our world of grassiness a seed of eternity has come. It has come right to us, to whoever hears the Word.

Peter is writing to scattered Christians under increasingly hostile Roman administration. All around them are the architectural and sculptural trappings of one of the greatest and long-lasting human empires. And Peter dares his readers to look at all the glory of Rome and see it as grass-clippings on a bonfire. And to realise that they have something already taking root in them which is eternally lasting and significant and glorious and which outweighs everything that Rome can show them.

His purpose is twofold. Aside from generally getting some perspective on the grassy glory of Rome that is all around them, he wants them to hunger for yet more of this word that has saved them – craving it with the focussed aggression of a newborn wanting milk (1 Pet 2:2) – and to nurture in their lives the organic qualities of the eternal life that the word has sown in them – real love for others (1 Pet 1:22).

As they grow in love (and faith and hope) so they are being built into a real, eternal temple which will outlast every Roman building, monument or statue by an infinite margin. Greatness, significance, Somebodyness beckon – for those who have the eternal Word creating lasting qualities in them.

You could have been someone – but now you feel that life has passed you by. Perhaps you invested in the hopes of another person, who took your own dreams away, only to squander them in a haze of alcohol or betrayal or simple failure. Perhaps you did that to someone else. Perhaps you built your little empire of success – and Covid or inflation or a changing market has left you with the worthless husk of your once-flourishing business. Perhaps you feel it’s too late to build anything of value now.

The vision of significance and value that Peter gives us is of indescribable comfort. The Word from eternity comes to people of all ages, cultures and backgrounds. The challenge to believe the gospel of Jesus comes to rich and poor, haves and have-nots, successful people and those whose life is a wasteland. It challenges us to let go of what we think we have that is significant, and to invest in what really lasts – The word of Jesus and the love that grows where his word takes root.

It is never too late to find significance – to be someone – in this sense. The money may have gone, the fame may have passed, but you could be at the very beginning of the life that really matters. Eternity beckons and offers you not oblivion but a role in the kingdom that will outlast every earthly empire.

You can be someone. Yes – so can anyone! You can accrue qualities that have value beyond the grave. You can be part of something that lasts forever. You can know the King, the Judge of the living and the dead, as your Saviour and friend. And you can have hope and significance and a place and a purpose because of him. You may have been a factory worker, an office dogsbody, a drunken singer, a gangster’s enforcer – but your real life could be about to begin.

That is real hope and joy this Christmas!

I’m Andrew, Bromley wedding photographer, serving the whole of London, Kent, Surrey and Sussex. To contact me to enquire about my wedding photography use my Contact Form or just text (07983 787889) or email me at Andrew@AndrewKingPhotography.co.uk

If you are in my area and would like to explore how meeting Jesus through the Bible gives hope and significance and purpose, I can recommend coming along to Hayes Lane Baptist Church on a Sunday. As ever, other churches are available!

Photos © copyright Andrew King Photography, from Pexels or from the Internet on what I hope is a fair-use basis. Please shout if this is not reasonable use for any of them.