Introduction

A specter is haunting Europe. (And not only Europe!)

This specter stalks the land and invades our hearts. It shapes our fears and whispers from our darkest corners. For we are - every single one of us - haunted by the ghost of ghosting.

At a certain age, we have all been ghosted at some point in our lives. Indeed, we've all likely ghosted somebody in turn.1 Depending on our sensibility, we may wince and grieve over such abrupt partings. Or we may simply shrug, rationalizing such behavior - whether perpetrator or victim - as an inevitable by-product of an overly social world. Indeed, given the number of personal connections we are obliged to maintain in modern times, in contrast to the classic tribe or village of yore, it is no surprise that some of these relationships will become burdensome. And the easiest option is to simply let some of them fall by the wayside. Like spinning plates, some will inevitably crash to the ground.

The sociologist Robin Dunbar famously suggested a specific number corresponding to the maximum amount of people that the average person can interact with in any meaningful, reciprocal sense. That number is 150. Beyond this figure, we ostensibly cannot maintain friendships or collegial ties with any true traction, and things dissolve into empty para-social gestures. Indeed, as I myself move past the milestone of fifty summers, I sometimes find it challenging to nurture any more than fifteen relationships at any given time. The older we get, the more we cherish and value those who have helped us along the way. And yet, the older we get, the more we may feel the weight of those we have helped carry us through life.

Such is the premise for the 2022 film, The Banshees of Inisherin, which asks what happens when we tire of friendships even in a small community of a few dozen souls. (In this case, in rural Ireland of the 1920s, which for all intents and purposes resembles the rural Ireland of the early 1800s.) The protagonist of the film, an amiable and simple fellow by the name of Pádraic Súilleabháin (played by Colin Farrell), finds himself suddenly ignored by his life-long friend, the grizzled fiddle-player, Colm Doherty (played by Brendan Gleeson). The latter has reached a point in life where he wants to spend his remaining time composing music that people will remember, rather than frittering away the day with a man who, while perfectly pleasant, is not exactly inspiring company. Colm becomes so exasperated by his former friend's attempts to restore the relationship that he threatens to cut off his own fingers, one for every time Pádraic approaches him with a view to conversation. The offended party presumes this threat is hyperbole. He quickly learns, however, that the determined would-be ghoster is as good as his word. By the time the scandal reaches its peak - with Pádraic setting fire to Colm's house in exasperation - the latter has lost all the fingers on one hand. (Clearly a disaster for someone whose sole purpose seems to be playing the fiddle.)

This scenario - equally masochistic and sadistic - seemed to resonate with audiences, still reeling from the social upheaval of the Covid lockdowns, and The Banshees of Inisherin became a controversial litmus test for various understandings of friendship, and its limits. The film, moreover, struck a chord with a populace still dealing with the ongoing fallout from Covid's intense impact on so many relationships: some fused into a deeper intimacy by the pressures of claustrophobic living arrangements, and others fractured beyond repair by these very same pressures. Something about seeing this rather heartless drama unfold on such an intimate scale, without the complications of social media and smartphones, felt like a sobering x-ray for a population already bruised by an especially intense period of reassessment, especially when it came to interpersonal relationships vis-à-vis personal priorities.

In the circumscribed community depicted in The Banshees of Inisherin, no one remains unaffected by Colm's decision to ghost Pádraic, since both would still be - awkwardly - present in the same handful of public places. (Especially the lone pub that serves the village.) In this case, we have a ghoster and ghostee haunted by an ongoing fleshy presence, even as one of these presences sacrifices at least a few ounces of flesh in order to force the deed to completion. Such completion is elusive, however, when the ghost remains and when the haunted person clings. (First clinging to the former friend, and then to his own resentment at being rejected.) The film stirred such feelings because it's difficult to blame either man for their motivations and reactions. (Though the violence of self-mutilation certainly tests our sympathies for the tortured artist.) Depending on our own experience - and depending on the direction we look, in terms of ongoing social obligation - it's possible to identify with the man hoping to focus on what really matters to him, just as we can also easily share in the pain of the man who discovers his best friend no longer has a single minute to spare for him. Such are the complex motivations and conflicting experiences of ghosting.

Remarkably, a very different Irish film, The Quiet Girl, also made a global cultural impression in the same year of 2022, and explored the psychic and emotional violence of a sudden refusal of presence: an unexpected tearing up of the social contract. This film - as quiet as its title suggests - follows the fate of a nine-year-old girl, Cáit, neglected by her parents, and then handed off to distant relatives in the summer of 1981. Here, Cáit is doubly abandoned: first by her parents' life-long chilly demeanor toward her, and second by their apparent attempt to foster her out to another family. Cáit has clearly grown up in an environment that taught her never to take love or attention for granted. And while her new home has its own sadness and hesitations, she begins to finally get an inkling of what it is like to feel a warm kind of familial company and care. ("Many's the person missed the opportunity to say nothing, and lost much because of it.") Being an Irish art film, however, the story cannot simply end on this happier note, as the messiness of life leaks into the frame.

Both these scenarios pose fundamental questions about social ties: especially the extent to which these bind too tightly, or, conversely, the extent to which they can be loosened altogether. Parents today are expected to "be there" for their child, although this is in some ways a relatively recent cultural imperative. Family, in any case, is supposed to represent a life-long bond. There is no shortage, however, of exceptions: children running away from home and, in some cases, parents doing the same. (As happens for comic effect in an episode of Ripping Yarns, when mother and father are driven to abscond from the family home to avoid their son, Eric, deemed "the most boring man in England.") Marriage - in contrast to blood kinship - is underwritten by a legal contract, supposedly guaranteeing life-long commitment, "through sickness and in health." The statistics, however, tell a different story. Friendships are more ambiguous, in the sense that any contract is unwritten, and usually unspoken. We cherish friends for "sticking with us," even when there is no legal pressure to do so. This does not mean, however, that the hurt of a friend suddenly breaking all contact is any less than the pain of a divorce or family icing. The murky moral of The Banshees of Inisherin is that no-one owes anyone else their presence, painful as that truth is to hear. Nonetheless, ghosting is a cruel act. In a world of atomized, liquified, symptomatic, and transactional relations, it can also - perversely - be a merciful one. Of which more in later chapters.

Sigmund Freud famously claimed that the first trauma an infant experiences is the withdrawal of the breast. When something so nourishing and comforting is taken away from us, we learn to scream in full fury. In the midst of the pure howl of this shriek, we also begin to learn something crucial about the world: the fact that what we want, and what we need, is not going to be provided on demand (or on tap, as it were). Presently, when the infant has figured out the harsh truth that the breast is not just a magic soothing machine, but a part of the mother's body, we learn to cherish the mother's holistic presence. By the same token, we begin to fear her absence. Freud calls this the fort/da experience, which can be summarized as a dawning recognition that anything and everything we value may be "here one moment, gone the next." Henceforth, and for the rest of our lives, we are obliged to devise coping strategies for not being a blessed solar center around which heavenly bodies constantly and dutifully orbit. Instead, we each have our own Copernican awakening; we each learn that we aren't the center of the universe. Consequently, we must learn to reconcile ourselves with the fact that people we are profoundly bonded with, or attached to, have their own lives and movements.2

In his patients, Freud certainly encountered cases of maternal neglect, and of what today we would call "emotional withdrawal." Yet a child of even the most doting mother tends to be haunted by the possibility of her...