Darby O’Gill and the Little People, 1959. by Dave Lee

When I was eight, my dad took me to the pictures to see this film. It was the earliest representation of magic I can remember.

So I re-watched it on YouTube recently. It’s not a great film. Even allowing for the sourness of age, I wasn’t charmed by its ‘charm’. These days you couldn’t get away with that degree of, as an Irish friend called an Irish theme pub – ‘diddly-I.’

We are launched into a misty postcard happy rural Ireland. Smiling singing poor people. A heartless landlord (who really is a Lord). The prying priest, who nonetheless smiles indulgently on human frailty. And Janet Munro and Sean Connery providing the looks and the romance interest.

Initially, it’s just tall tales in the pub from old Darby. Then he takes on a challenge and it gets real – he negotiates with the 5,000 year old nonhumans. Many of the tropes of the Hero’s Journey are here – Darby falls down the well, into an amazing scene in fairyland, with a couple of minutes of some very far out music before the schmaltz tap is gushing again. He’s supposed to stay in the Underworld, but he is a fierce negotiator and beats the King of the Little People in what would these days no doubt be called a rap contest.

So we have a number of genuine Irish mythic inclusions and other related tropes – the Elder Folk in the rocks, the Wild Hunt, the Death Carriage and, the bit I remember most vividly after all these years, the Banshee.

It is acknowledged by the wise that folk tales with fearful elements can prepare children, give them some core mythic structures with which to negotiate the horrors of life. But they also provide a reminder, via fantastical and magical elements, that magical thinking is one of the basic ways humans apprehend and structure experience. Modern culture explicitly denies this, and banishes magical thinking to the fringes, as a symptom of insanity (in an insane world).

So we can dismiss this film and its ilk as capitalistic cultural appropriation, but maybe from the point of view of the nourishment to be obtained from a narrative, it doesn’t matter. Myth is a virus – it doesn’t have to replicate itself solely through respectable routes. As long as it gets out there, it’s done its job. Darby O’Gill was a gateway drug for me, kindling a half-conscious interest. I got infected, and I’m glad I did.