ISSN: 1705-6411
Volume 5, Number 1 (January 2008)
Author: Marita Ryan
Intermission1 , an Irish film with an entirely Irish cast, exposes the stark reality of urban life in Dublin. A fast-paced film with multiple plot-lines, Brandon Judell describes itas “a hyperkinetic ride through Dublin’s underside”.2 It is also, as Paula Murphy says, “the first high-profile Irish film to accurately reflect the urban and suburban life of Dublin and its lower middle class and working class inhabitants”.3 Ostensibly a comedy drama with wide audience appeal, it comments at a more fundamental level on a postmodern culture of media saturation and loss of collective identity.
The focus of this article is to explore how Intermission is a postmodern film through its plot, style and departure from traditional Irish cinematic representation. A number of key postmodern elements evident in the film are expounded upon. John Crowley, Director, focuses on micro-narratives instead of meta-narratives with his eleven main storylines and fifty characters that are all in a state of flux whether through losing jobs or relationships. Throughout the film over-riding societal and cultural influences are ignored in favour of an examination of the diverse, local narratives of a host of characters. Also examined is the film’s reference to a Baudrillardian hyper-reality and the impact that media culture has on peoples’ lives. Media saturation in the film results in people valuing spectacle and simulation over reality to the point where they come to identify themselves through mediated images. The contest between images takes precedence over the truth. The postmodern use of irony, nostalgia and parody through characters such as Detective Jerry Lynch and the supermarket manager Mr. Henderson is also discussed. The film itself is self-reflexive in nature suggestive of a postmodern style whereby cinematic technique is constantly exposed suggesting a distance from the reality that it is recording and the constant mediation of all ‘live’ events witnessed by the public. A true exploration of Intermission allows us to value its insightful reflection of postmodern culture.
Postmodern cinema allows directors such as Crowley to study the everyday lives of diverse groups of people typically under-represented in film. As Carl Boggs suggests in his analysis of postmodern cinema: “[It] departs from the hegemonic model of the classical studio system where local and diverse (not to mention subversive) ideological and cultural spaces were scarcely allowed to exist”.4 Postmodern cinema articulates the multiplicity of society around us, in much the same way as literature, providing us with that counter-hegemonic voice that departs from the modernist belief in cohesive but ultimately stifling, social, political and religious authorities, among others. It allows us to focus on the specificity of our existence, on the diversity that exists within all stratums of society and cultures affording us the possibility and responsibility of engaging with a reality that must be questioned.
Both Jean François Lyotard’s and Jean Baudrillard’s theories provide substantial evidence for considering Intermission as a postmodern film. Lyotard favours the abandonment of the meta-narrative in favour of the micro-narrative, the triumph of heterogeneity over homogeneity and dissension over consensus. Baudrillard is widely known for his theories on the eroding boundaries between what is real and imagined within postmodern culture resulting in a simulated and hyper-real environment. Boggs suggests that “postmodern cinema focuses our attention on the insidious power of media culture which has effectively brought into being an entirely new kind of public sphere, one not far removed from Jean Baudrillard’s notion of simulations”.5 He also believes that the loss of collective identity and cohesive social units is articulated in postmodern cinema “with its universe of anti-heroes, drifters, outcasts, marginals, and just plain losers”.6 Crowley’s characters in Intermission, while not “just plain losers”, could certainly be seen as anti-heroes and at times marginal figures, as they struggle within a fragmented society and a media saturated culture. The grand narratives of modernity, which tended to value the universal and the absolute and were exclusionary in their focus on homogeneity, have been replaced by micro-narratives, which are inclusive because of their diversity and heterogeneity. Even the tagline to the film “Life is what happens in between” is suggestive of these micro-narratives. All of the storylines interconnect and are presented in quick succession in snappy, short scenes. Each story rejects the familiar style of Irish cinema that used stock characters and juxtaposed the threatening city with the idyllic countryside. Ruth Barton argues that many traditional characters in earlier Irish films were “borrowed from the repertoire of early stage and vaudeville representations – the fighting Irishman, the buffoon, the long-suffering mother, the feisty colleen, the rebel son”.7 Crowley radically moves away from these representations and rejects them in favour of his realistic urban characters. Barton again points out that stock characters actually became “for each new generation of filmmakers, a way of defining their own work, whether they chose to reject them, incorporate them or rework them”.8 In rejecting them, Crowley displays how the old master signifiers of identity that were manifested through religion, politics, and inter-generational conflicts are no longer present. The local narratives are of primary concern. Characters like John and Oscar are on the minimum wage, Oscar is suffering sexual frustration. Sally, Noeleen and John are all in their own way suffering in the aftermath of broken relationships. Mick loses his job because of Philip, the delinquent young boy who smashes people’s windscreens with rocks.
In ways, Crowley is producing a counter-narrative to the generalised narrative of the success of Ireland’s economy known as the “Celtic Tiger”, which resulted in a dramatic improvement in the welfare of a significant number of the Irish people and became a model for all developing EU countries. What, of course, is omitted from this economic success story is the truth of those whose lives did not improve. Barton quotes Bhabha in her book on Irish cinema:
…counter-narratives of the nation that continually evoke and erase its totalising boundaries – both actual and conceptual – disturb those ideological manoeuvres through which ‘imagined communities’ are given essentialist identities.9
Crowley rejects the notion of any sort of essentialist identity and disavows any attempt to place boundaries on what is the Irish experience. He continues a trend that began with the film adaptation of Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments which Terry Byrne says does not “[portray] to us or to the home audience an image of Irish life the way it ought to be; rather, it seems to be showing us several aspects of the culture as it exists, and making no apology for that”.10
Crowley also reinforces Lyotard’s views on openness to the diversity that resides within any culture, which cannot be assimilated within the idea of a grand narrative and which must be, instead, examined within local narratives. Lyotard is not concerned with the search for universal truths and absolutes as was the tendency in the modern age. The age of modernity stemmed from the Enlightenment that began in Europe and America in the 18th century. Lyotard feels that postmodernity imposes a “severe re-examination…on the thought of the Enlightenment, on the idea of a unitary end of history and of a subject”.11 In light of an end to such unitary thinking, Lyotard is looking for the “incommensurable” and the “unpresentable”. The postmodern is “that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable”.12 That is how he sees a fundamental difference between the age of modernity and the postmodern; the unpresentable in modernity was articulated through its missing contents, its gaps, but yet it still provided some form of “solace and pleasure”.13 The unity of narration and thought still remained intact and was not challenged. Only through challenging the unity of the universal narrative can the postmodern be articulated.
Lyotard’s desire to abandon meta-narratives is depicted in Intermission, especially in one particular storyline, Ben’s documentary “Little Big City” where his boss wants him to tell the stories of the ordinary people of Dublin. While Ben recognises that his boss wants surface stories he wants to make it “a bit darker”,14 and give it “some depth, some complexity”.15 His boss says “find a story and if it’s not too much”16 he will run with it. Ben’s search for depth is really an antithesis of the postmodern era and one that is ultimately rejected by his boss for being too dark. Fredric Jameson believes postmodernism actually erases depth. He says “depth is replaced by surface, or by multiple surfaces”17 Lyotard focuses on this sense of national identity being superseded by a global identity controlled by transnational corporations.18 Graham Allen recognises that for Jameson this means the evolution of a “heterogeneous, rootless culture”.19 This “rootless” culture is portrayed in Intermission where religion and politics provide no overarching influence and the use of HP brown sauce in their tea becomes almost a parody of shared communal experience between certain characters.
Boggs attests that this culture which is seeing a breakdown in homogenous narratives and cultures, results in “a pluralizing and decentering of human life experiences in a way that corresponds to those new modes of consumption now so integral to media culture – and to the increasingly significant terrain of postmodern cinema”.20 Martin McLoone describes perfectly the dilemma that contemporary Ireland finds itself in, one that has left behind the roots of the past and its ideologies only to be faced with other grand narratives that seem to function primarily to alienate rather than include people. He says:
Having abandoned the imagined community of nationalism for an ideology of national progress, there is a sense of displacement about contemporary Irish life that increasing affluence only exacerbates… Ireland now inhabits a cultural space somewhere between its nationalist past, its European future and its American imagination. This space, though culturally rich in potential, can be, at the same time, a lonely, displaced and unsettling in between-ness that so far has failed to offer either emotional commitment or a new imagining of collective identity.21
Perhaps our aim should not be to create a new collective identity but rather to examine the presence of diversity as Crowley does in Intermission. Postmodernism is characterised by its emphasis on reproduction. No longer are things valued for their production qualities but rather for their reproducible qualities. Art is accessible everywhere in a reproduced form, through what Baudrillard calls a simulacrum, where there is no existing original for that which is reproduced. For Baudrillard our whole system could refer to a simulacrum “never again exchanging for what is real, but exchanging in itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference”.22 In other words signs are referring to other signs instead of an underlying reality. All around us, the media constructs our reality, framing and editing it for us so that what we see cannot be challenged as we do not have access to the reality, only the copy.23 Baudrillard speaks of the culture of “hyper-reality” that is more real than reality itself. “The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced, the hyperreal”.24 This hyper-reality is evident in Detective Jerry Lynch’s approach to life. Jerry sees himself as the self-appointed hard-man who will single-handedly confront and deal with Dublin’s criminals, its “scumbags”.25 He views his life and work through the image of Celtic mysticism where he is the heroic figure who misguidedly equates his violence with natural bravery. He is nostalgic for a past world that in its reproduction through music has become ever closer to the present. Douglas Kellner suggests that Baudrillard’s mass media culture has resulted in people valuing spectacle and simulation over reality and in fact not being able to determine the difference. He says this culture: “[traps] them in a universe of simulacra in which it is impossible to distinguish between the spectacle and the real and in which individuals come to prefer spectacle to ‘reality’”.26 In addition to this, Lynch is also nostalgic for a past that is only an imagined one, whose reproductions bear little or no resemblance to the reality of that past. The real becomes hyper-real and the model replaces reality.
When Ben attempts to sell his documentary, “On the streets with Detective Jerry Lynch”, to his boss, he uses the phrase “it’s real, it’s true”,27 yet when he becomes the maverick and independently makes the documentary with Jerry’s encouragement we are shown just how staged and “unreal” the documentary is. Jerry initiates a fight with a drug addict, which can then be captured on camera. The story becomes a contest between images and Jerry is determined to produce the right scenes that will correspond to his constructed image of himself. His subjectivity is based on his attempt to emulate the idealised myth of the Celtic hero. When his peers suggest he is to be the subject of this documentary, he says “A subject! I’m going to be a leading man!”28 As ‘leading man’ in the documentary Jerry’s assumed identity will be validated, it will make it real. Reality and simulation are brought into question. In another scene Sally’s mother refers to Sally’s “Ronnie” (moustache) as “hardly in the Burt Reynolds league”29 and when Sally asks Mick if she has one, he says “you’re no Tom Selleck”.30 Life is seen through mediated images. Sally herself doesn’t recognise that she has a moustache until she sees the interview on TV after the bus accident. Only through this manufactured medium does she identify her real self but still through another mediated image: “I am like Burt Reynolds… I knew I had it but I didn’t care ‘cos I didn’t see it, now I see it’”.31
Baudrillard draws our attention to the fact that the consequences of a simulated event are just as real as an actual event. His example of this is a simulated theft that could pertain to Intermission. Lehiff is serious in his theft but John sees it more as a simulated event allowing him to avenge Deirdre and her new boyfriend Sam. The boundary between simulation and reality overlap because the victims are unaware of the simulation. As Baudrillard says: “There is no ‘objective’ difference: the same gestures and the same signs exist as for a real theft”.32 Lehiff hits Deirdre in a real action that upsets John and in an ensuing argument Lehiff shoots him. The consequences are real and what has been mere play for John up to this suddenly becomes a disturbing reality. Yet Baudrillard insists that it is impossible to isolate simulation from reality or vice versa and so events become hyper-real and signs refer to signs. The boundary between simulation and reality implodes. In a similar way Boggs looks at this aspect of film saying: “While media culture saturates more and more of daily life so too does daily life saturate the media while ‘life,’ as Neal Gabler suggests, becomes itself a kind of ‘movie’ engulfing larger zones of popular consciousness”.33
Advertising produces idealised images suggestive of Baudrillard’s simulacra. In the scene where John and Oscar are going to the dance they walk in front of a massive window advertisement. It depicts the face of a blonde female, a beautiful but evasive character, softly lit and smiling benevolently but without depth. Oscar and John become darkened out characters, faceless in the shadow of this simulated image of perfection. Oscar says about the dance as a place to meet women, “it’s the best place to go”, John replies, “if you’re desperate” to which Oscar responds “but I am”.34 The women Oscar is referring to are all much older than him and far removed from the image of the woman depicted behind them. The disparity between their lives and the image evoked by the advertisement is starkly portrayed by Crowley. This darker aspect of the Celtic Tiger where people feel alienated and excluded from the progress that is happening around them is considered by McLoone as being part of many new Irish films. He comments that in many new productions the youth’s:
milieu is the bar and their culture is that of drink. Their obsession with getting laid is matched only by their complete inadequacy at achieving it. They encounter aspects of American life – sex, drugs, individualism, survival, crime and personal responsibility – that Ireland has ill-prepared them for.35
All of the above are key concerns for the individual characters of Intermission who are often at a loss in coping with these issues. A pervasive media culture does nothing to alleviate some of these concerns, rather it functions only to emphasise the difference between the characters’ realities and that of the advertised reality. A scene depicting this occurs when John and Oscar are walking towards Deirdre’s house when John has discovered she is seeing someone else. As they walk we see billboards declaring empty, meaningless slogans, “Time dedicated to you”, “Life is good” and “King of Beers” suggesting surface images of reality that is purely simulated. In a sense film, as Boggs analyses Gabler’s argument on media culture, finds within itself:
a transformation of popular consciousness into its own theatrical image of illusions, fantasies, myths, and spectacles, giving rise to a situation where life indeed has become a ‘movie’ and vice-versa. Thus: ‘the total cinema world exists in and consists of reality’.36
Intermission is a rare breed of high profile Irish film where nostalgia for the idyllic rural past and the land of a thousand welcomes is omitted in favour of the reality of urban life. Crowley has achieved something that McLoone saw Doyle do in the early 90s and that is:
In a country like Ireland, so committed to a romantic rural identity, there was always the likelihood that to show urban reality was to confirm rural prejudice. The problem, therefore, with representing the city in Irish cinema is that there has not been a realist tradition which it can then tap into.37
Crowley, like Doyle, has successfully produced a realist Irish film that pays little attention to idyllic fantasies of the past, and where it does, he uses them to portray their complete incompatibility with postmodern life. In that sense he portrays a postmodern form of nostalgia tempered with irony in the character Jerry Lynch. Lynch’s nostalgia for a past of Celtic mysticism is redolent more of nationalist endeavours and a vigilante form of justice. Linda Hutcheon says of nostalgia:
[It] exiles us from the present as it brings the imagined past near. The simple, pure, ordered, easy, beautiful, or harmonious past is constructed (and then experienced emotionally) in conjunction with the present – which, in turn, is constructed as complicated, contaminated, anarchic, difficult, ugly, and confrontational.38
What is interesting to note is that the postmodern era with its ability to reproduce images actually facilitates the re-creation of this past in the present. Hutcheon suggests that for nostalgia to take place we require some evidence of the past and she says: “Thanks to CD ROM technology and, before that, audio and video reproduction, nostalgia no longer has to rely on individual memory or desire: it can be fed forever by quick access to an infinitely recyclable past”.39 This is exactly what happens for Jerry, each time he wants to evoke the past he puts on his “sounds” and plays his favourite “artistes”, “Fáinne Lasta, Rainneach and Clannad”.40 When he arrests a drug dealer in an early part of the film we see him in his stakeout with the music urging him on. These artists become the background music to his own life-story, a life he now wants played out in front of the camera, with him as “the leading man”.41 The past for Jerry is more real than the present because it is through the myths of the past that he constructs his everyday reality.
However, I would argue this sense of nostalgia evoked in Intermission is a very postmodern nostalgia because it is ironized. Hutcheon says the postmodern parts of contemporary culture “are aware of the risks and lures of nostalgia, and seek to expose those through irony”.42 For Hutcheon, irony and nostalgia go hand in hand in the postmodern because they create “a small part of the distance necessary for reflective thought about the present as well as the past”.43 The irony of Jerry’s nostalgia for Celtic mysticism is that it doesn’t function within contemporary Ireland and it is only he who is abiding by its code of honour. In this matter Crowley echoes Doyle’s work as described by McLoone: “The urban working class is changing because society is changing and it is welcome that in the Doyle adaptations there is no collapse into a kind of working class nostalgia evidenced in Agnes Browne (1999)”.44 Crowley avoids this collapse also as we see when Jerry challenges Lehiff in a duel scene redolent of the American West, another myth that is dead. He believes Lehiff will abide by this code but once he has laid down his weapon Lehiff takes out his gun and shoots Jerry. It is Ben who recognises the futility of Jerry’s fantasised showdown with Lehiff, in his supposedly spiritual homeland and saves Jerry by killing Lehiff. Ben, who was looking for “something darker”45 to portray in his documentary, has become an active protagonist in the drama he has been filming. The boundaries between reality and fiction are blurred and we only see the true events as they enfold through the lens of the camera, a technology that also has the power to edit, cut and simulate reality begging the question of what is real and what is not. Jerry tells Ben at the end of the film, “the way it’s told is the way it has to be”46 suggesting that story is more important than reality. It is the story that has the power and Jerry has been depicted as the hero in this story. Ben is the only one with access to the truth, but he can control its dissemination.
Parody is used in Intermission particularly through the character of Henderson, the supermarket manager. As a parody of authority Henderson’s role is significant in the film, as Murphy would suggest. She says: “His relationship with John and Oscar shows the reality of life on the minimum wage in Celtic Tiger Ireland, and the frustration of working in jobs without satisfaction, respect, or even appreciation”.47 Henderson himself uses an American style of management that is constructed through images from television48 more than any real management style. He ends all of his encounters with John with what he considers effective one-liners used in the United States. He concludes a threat to John with “I shit you not, as they say in the States”.49 During another acrimonious meeting he says “one more incident like this and I will TCB, as they say in the States: I will take care of business”.50 He is borrowing his identity from a postmodern simulacrum and attempting to pass it off as his authentic self. Parody in postmodernism is used to challenge dominant ideologies or historical representations through a type of irony, thus allowing us to subvert those ideologies and represent our distance from them.51 Parody also successfully raises questions as to how unique a representation is, it heightens our awareness of the fact that everything has once been produced or presented and we are now in an age of mere representation or reproduction. Hutcheon says of this:
Parody is a perfect postmodern form, in some senses, for it paradoxically both incorporates and challenges that which it parodies. It also forces a reconsideration of the idea of origin or originality that is compatible with other postmodern interrogations of liberal humanist assumptions.52
Henderson’s identity is not rooted in any original characteristics of the man but rather in his representation of what he would like to be based on a distorted media image that has little grounding in reality. Of course this raises a whole other issue of what is authentic identity if we are borrowing always from the past.
Postmodernism in film is self-reflexive in that “it calls our attention to the way it has come into existence and to its own constructed nature”.53 The film constantly calls into question the technique of film-making itself. In Ben’s initial documentary he is attempting to film, live, the racing rabbits that fail to perform in spite of the amount of times “they have rehearsed this”.54 This is, supposedly, a documentary of real-life events but it results in a mediated view of reality that ultimately collapses. Jerry Lynch when he is walking the streets in his documentary speaks to a drug addict, asking him a question. When he responds directly to Jerry, Jerry snaps at him “speak to the camera”.55 Jerry also pauses to look into the camera prior to his duel with Lehiff to tell Ben that this episode will be entitled, “Personal Justice”.56 The film techniques used even in “real” events are described in the film when Ben and the cameramen are setting up the “mythic shot” when interviewing Sally and her mother after the bus accident. These references remind us what we are seeing is mediated and simulated. There is also a nice twist with Colin Farrell parodying his role as Lehiff when, over the final credits, he performs a rendition of The Clash’s “I Fought the Law and the Law Won” in his best Dublin accent. We are aware that it is Colin Farrell who is singing this, not Lehiff, and that is the attraction for the audience.
Crowley has managed to succeed in doing two things with Intermission. Firstly he has made a commercial film that shows the often hidden side of Ireland, as far as cinema is concerned, to an international audience. Secondly, at a national level he has given a voice and a presence to an urban reality that Irish film has often chosen to ignore. Neil Jordan in 1995 stated: “It strikes me that one could imagine a conspiracy of forces at work at the moment, to build a picture of contemporary Ireland that is safe, modern, very European, and more specifically, middle-class, embarrassed about certain aspects of its past”.57 It is easy to understand then why Jordan would have produced this film with Stephen Woolley and Alan Moloney. Also Crowley proves that a representation of urban reality can be translated into commercial success rather than just being relegated to art house cinemas. We have now reached a point, as Byrne says, where: “For the first time in centuries, the restrictions to self-expression are coming off, and people with the requisite talents are moving to take advantage of that”.58
Intermission uses many postmodern elements in Crowley’s examination of a stratum of society that exists somewhat on the margins. While the ending of the film may fall too much within the mainstream where the bad guy is killed, and the good guy gets his girl, Intermission still focuses on heterogeneity, fragmentation and dissension. It gives voice to the local narratives that are of greater meaning to a group of individuals living the flipside of the Celtic Tiger dream in a way only a postmodernist approach can facilitate.
About the Author
Marita Ryan is in the Doctoral Program, Department of English Language and Literature, Mary Immaculate College, Limerick, Ireland.
Endnotes
1 – Intermission is directed by John Crowley and written by Mark O’Rowe. It is produced by Stephen Woolley, Neil Jordan and Alan Moloney and is a 2003 Company of Wolves Production. It is distributed by Portman Film.
Synopsis: Intermission tells the story of a host of characters that are all inter-connected and living in urban and suburban Dublin. All are in a state of flux in terms of their personal and working relationships. This drives them to engage in activities and affairs that are at times both comic and disastrous. Its opening sees Lehiff (Colin Farrell), a petty criminal, committing a theft that sets up the fast-paced action of the film. The eleven main storylines all hinge on the relationship between John (Cillian Murphy) and Deirdre (Kelly MacDonald). Following their split as a couple Deirdre begins seeing a bank manager Sam (Michael Elhatton) who subsequently leaves his wife Noeleen (Deirdre O’Kane) of fourteen years. Noeleen in turn questions her life following the breakdown of her marriage and engages in a hilarious affair with a younger man, Oscar (David Wilmot) who is John’s best friend. Both John and Oscar work at a local supermarket where they are constantly berated by the manager Mr. Henderson (Owen Roe) who sees himself as an exemplar of an American management style gleaned from the movies. John becomes desperate at the loss of Deirdre and in the process is persuaded by Lehiff to take part in a kidnap and theft revolving around Sam’s bank as an act of revenge. Also involved in this heist is Mick (Brian F. O’Byrne), a bus-driver who has lost his job after he crashes his vehicle following a stone being thrown at his windscreen by a young delinquent boy Philip (Taylor Molloy). Sally (Shirley Henderson), Deirdre’s sister, and their mother (Ger Ryan) are at the scene of the bus accident and assist passengers. They are interviewed by the film-maker Ben Campion (Tomás O’Suilleabháin) regarding their part in the rescue but Ben would rather be filming something darker. He is prevented from doing so by his boss who wants personal interest stories from ordinary people. He has originally attempted to use the rather nasty Detective Jerry Lynch (Colm Meaney), who is Lehiff’s nemesis, as a subject for a documentary as Lynch continues his personal crusade to rid Dublin of its “scumbags”. Lynch is a self-proclaimed vigilante type detective with his own breed of justice. His ego drives him to persuade Ben to become a renegade film-maker and make the documentary of his fight against crime. This results in their tracking of Lehiff, which culminates in a chase to the countryside and a fascinating confrontation. Intermission is an intelligent film portraying the comedy, compassion and, at times, violence of everyday life in an absorbing and realist fashion.
2 – Brandon Judell. “Ireland’s Son of Altman: John Crowley takes no Shortcuts with Intermission”.in Indiewire. 2004: http://www.indiewire.com/people/people_040322crowley.html (link no longer active 2019).
3 – Paula Murphy. “Interrogating Intermission”in Kritikos: A Journal of Postmodern Cultural Sound, Text and Image, Volume 3, 2006: http://garnet.acns.fsu.edu/%7Enr03/interrogating%20intermission.htm (link no longer active 2019).
4 – Carl Boggs. “Postmodernism The Movie” in New Political Science Volume 23, Number 3, 2001:5.
5 – Ibid.:19.
6 – Ibid.:13.
7 – Ruth Barton Irish National Cinema. London: Routledge, 2004:7
8 – Ibid.:7.
9 – Hommi Bhabha (1990:300). Cited in Ibid.:9.
10 – Terry Byrne. Power in the Eye: An Introduction to Contemporary Irish Film London: The Scarecrow Press Inc 1997:148
11 – Jean-François Lyotard. The Postmodern Condition: A report on Knowledge. Manchester University Press, 1984:73.
12 – Ibid.:81.
13 – Ibid.
14 – Intermission Directed by John Crowley. Performers. Colin Farrell, Shirley Henderson, Kelly McDonald, Colm Meaney and Cillian Murphy. Portman Film 2003.
15 – Ibid.
16 – Ibid.
17 – Fredric Jameson. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, London: Verso, 1991:12.
18 – Graham Allen. Intertextuality London: Routledge, 2000:183.
19 – Ibid.:183.
20 – Carl Boggs. “Postmodernism The Movie” in New Political Science Volume 23, Number 3, 2001:3.
21 – Martin McLoone. Irish Film – The Emergence of a Contemporary Cinema. London: British Film Institute, 2000:7.
22 – Jean Baudrillard. “Simulacra and Simulations” In: Mark Poster (Editor) Jean Baudrillard – Selected Writings. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001:173.
23 – Graham Allen. Intertextuality London: Routledge, 2000:182.
24 – Jean Baudrillard. “Symbolic Exchange and Death” In: Mark Poster (Editor). Jean Baudrillard – Selected Writings. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001:149.
25 – Intermission Directed by John Crowley. Performers. Colin Farrell, Shirley Henderson, Kelly McDonald, Colm Meaney and Cillian Murphy. Portman Film 2003.
26 – Douglas Kellner. Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers 1989:70-71.
27 – Intermission Directed by John Crowley. Performers. Colin Farrell, Shirley Henderson, Kelly McDonald, Colm Meaney and Cillian Murphy. Portman Film 2003.
28 – Ibid.
29 – Ibid.
30 – Ibid.
31 – Ibid.
32 – Jean Baudrillard. “Simulacra and Simulations” In Mark Poster (Editor). Jean Baudrillard – Selected Writings. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001:181.
33 – Carl Boggs. “Postmodernism The Movie” in New Political Science Volume 23, Number 3, 2001:6.
34 – Intermission Directed by John Crowley. Performers. Colin Farrell, Shirley Henderson, Kelly McDonald, Colm Meaney and Cillian Murphy. Portman Film 2003.
35 – Martin McLoone. Irish Film – The Emergence of a Contemporary Cinema. London: British Film Institute, 2000:186.
36 – Carl Boggs. “Postmodernism The Movie” in New Political Science Volume 23, Number 3, 2001:19.
37 – Martin McLoone. Irish Film – The Emergence of a Contemporary Cinema. London: British Film Institute, 2000:203.
38 – Linda Hutcheon. “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern”: www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/criticism/hutchinp.html (link no longer active 2019).
39 – Ibid.
40 – Intermission Directed by John Crowley. Performers. Colin Farrell, Shirley Henderson, Kelly McDonald, Colm Meaney and Cillian Murphy. Portman Film 2003.
41 – Ibid.
42 – Linda Hutcheon. “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern”: www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/criticism/hutchinp.html (link no longer active 2019).
43 – Ibid.
44 – Martin McLoone. Irish Film – The Emergence of a Contemporary Cinema. London: British Film Institute, 2000:203.
45 – Intermission Directed by John Crowley. Performers. Colin Farrell, Shirley Henderson, Kelly McDonald, Colm Meaney and Cillian Murphy. Portman Film 2003.
46 – Intermission Directed by John Crowley. Performers. Colin Farrell, Shirley Henderson, Kelly McDonald, Colm Meaney and Cillian Murphy. Portman Film 2003.
47 – Paula Murphy. “Interrogating Intermission”in Kritikos: A Journal of Postmodern Cultural Sound, Text and Image, Volume 3, 2006: http://garnet.acns.fsu.edu/%7Enr03/interrogating%20intermission.htm (link no longer active 2019).
48 – Ibid.
49 – Intermission Directed by John Crowley. Performers. Colin Farrell, Shirley Henderson, Kelly McDonald, Colm Meaney and Cillian Murphy. Portman Film 2003.
50 – Ibid.
51 – Linda Hutcheon. “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern”: www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/criticism/hutchinp.html (link no longer active 2019)
52 – Linda Hutcheon. A Poetics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1988:11.
53 – Hans Bertens. Literary Theory: The Basics. London and New York: Routledge, 2001:141.
54 – Intermission Directed by John Crowley. Performers. Colin Farrell, Shirley Henderson, Kelly McDonald, Colm Meaney and Cillian Murphy. Portman Film 2003.
55 – Ibid.
56 – Ibid.
57 – Terry Byrne. Power in the Eye: An Introduction to Contemporary Irish Film. London: The Scarecrow Press Inc. 1997:198.
58 – Ibid.:201.