Traditional masculinity plays out in its two most common forms – brutally honest and blindly impulsive– in Ian Palmer’s Knuckle, a documentary set amongst the square- (and often broken-) jawed working-class clans of the Emerald Isle.
Over the course of twelve years, Palmer’s camera dips in and out of the family feuds that have festered between the gypsy-like 'traveller’ groups of Irish lore; these days, traveller families are more likely to be found in caravan park-like enclaves within a stone’s throw of major urban centres.
What apparently started many years ago as petty family grievances have grown into social, testosterone-driven roadside brawls that usually lead to smashed noses and dozens of stitches. The combination of fierce pride and a boozy, macho culture, cause many of the rabid participants to punch well beyond their weight in bouts that can last up to two hours, but which are usually over in about six bloody minutes.
At the centre of the film is philosophical hardman James Quinn McDonagh, patriarchal figurehead of one of the largest and most passionately brutal bloodlines in semi-rural Ireland. Enigmatic, emotional and surprisingly forthright , family-man McDonagh (a legitimate businessman when not cracking skulls) is considered a legend by his tightly-knit community but is equally loathed as pure evil by the clans who have fought his kin for decades.
Palmer, through revealing voice-over and in-the-thick-of-it camerawork, becomes a central figure in his own film. It’s an element this critic usually abhors in the modern documentary – factual films that quickly become about the factual filmmakers – but Palmer’s decade-long journey inextricably becomes intertwined with the lives of McDonagh, his wife and young family and brothers, Michael and Paddy. Palmer’s initial exhilaration at being present at the bloody stoushes gives way to disgust and disillusionment (at one point, he abandons the project altogether); his insight provides a level-headed counterpoint to the pig-headed stubbornness of the alpha-male poseurs. Palmer paints them as men who comprehend the madness of their actions yet refuse to compromise their honour and put a stop to the posturing.
And posturing it most certainly has become. One quite hilarious sequence chronicles how, in the early 2000s, the feuding clans would communicate via taped video-cassette messages – burly men hurling abuse and threats into the camera, accompanied by cheesy graphics and what must have seemed like appropriate musical accompaniment at the time. Palmer’s film, while never skimping on the horrible physical toll that these bare-knuckle bouts have on the participants, is also occasionally very funny.
But mostly Knuckle convinces as a statement against the futility of violence, of how keeping alive the petty anger of a single moment only serves to dominate and ruin the life experiences of the next generation. (A fact clearly stated by any woman who manages to get in frame.) To emerge after more than a decade of filming with a message that speaks of the pointlessness of a chosen existence may have been disheartening for Palmer; his narration becomes increasingly despondent as one fight just leads to another. One hopes that the greater good his film achieves offsets any disappointment he may feel.
