[COLUMN] In Say Nothing, Words Can Be Weapons | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for Say Nothing, which is currently available on FX and Hulu in the States and Disney+ internationally. It’s well worth a watch, but you didn’t hear it from me.

Across the nine episodes of Say Nothing, the show develops its own distinct visual language, particularly around the interviews that provide the series’ narrative framework.

Historian “Mackers” (Seamus O'Hara), loosely modelled on Anthony McIntyre, is constructing an oral history of the campaign of terror and violence in Northern Ireland known colloquially as “the Troubles.” The show, adapted from Patrick Radden Keefe’s book of the same name, is built around accounts of that period from veterans of the Irish Republican Army (the IRA), particularly Brendan Hughes (Anthony Boyle, Tom Vaughn-Lawlor) and Dolours Price (Lola Petticrew, Maxine Peake).

Brendan and Dolours tell stories that involve murder, kidnapping, bank robbery and torture. The show opens with a depiction of the abduction of Jean McConville (Judith Roddy), a sequence that involves a group of masked men and women breaking into a family flat and kidnapping the matriarch at gunpoint. Throughout Say Nothing, characters exist under constant threat, whether from the British armed forces or from the terrorist organization they ostensibly serve.

However, Say Nothing layers these interview scenes with a pervasive sense of menace and tension. The show’s directors - Michael Lennox, Mary Nighy, Anthony Byrne and Alice Seabright – shoot the interviews in a decidedly unsettling manner. A cassette is loaded into the digital recorder like a magazine into an assault rifle. Once it starts recording, the red light blinks ominously, as if the device has been armed. Mackers slides the microphone across the table, as if it were dangerous.

At a couple of points across the season, Say Nothing puts the audience in the perspective of Brendan or Dolours, staring at the microphone moving across the table towards the camera. These shots are in shallow focus, so the microphone becomes clearer as it moves closer. As the blur resolves into a shape, the microphone doesn’t look unlike a gun. There is also a sense that nothing exists beyond the microphone, which will take Brendan and Dolours’ words, and record them permanently.

It is perhaps reductive and redundant to suggest that a show titled Say Nothing is preoccupied with the power – and the limits – of speech as a mode of personal or political expression. From the series’ earliest moments, Dolours characterizes silence as strength and speech as weakness. She laments that the Irish people have “been arguing over the same shite for 800 years.” She contrasts the ineffectiveness of words with the direct power of action.

In such an environment, quietness is a virtue. Her father, Albert (Stuart Graham), recalls his own time in British custody. “What did you tell them, da?” his daughters ask. “Nothing,” he replies. “I said nothin’, girls.” Indeed, Dolours and her sister Marian (Hazel Doupe, Helen Behan) do not embrace political violence by default. They are converted to the cause when their attempt at peaceful civil rights protest meets with a horrific and brutal response, supported by local law enforcement.

In the world of Say Nothing, silence is the rule. The terrorists are beset with leaks, like Kevin McKee (Paddy Towers) and Seamus Wright (Frank Blake). These “touts” represent an existential risk to the organization, and so are executed. Some of Dolours’ earliest work as a member of the IRA is shepherding these informants across the border to their execution. The show explains that the real threat isn’t just individual informants, but the fear that such informants create in a community.

This is a tactic cynically employed by British Brigadier Frank Kitson (Rory Kinnear) in sewing disruption among the insurgents. “So, you see, we're either being fed vital information or driving them to murder their own men,” Kitson boasts. “Either way, we win.” McConville’s execution was justified on the grounds that she colluded with the British – accusations that the show acknowledges remain unsubstantiated. “Say Nothing” is not just the title of the show, it’s a survival mechanism.

However, this silence makes communication impossible. For there to be peace, there must be dialogue. People must be able to talk to one another. Early in the season, a young Gerry Adams (Josh Finan, Michael Colgan) accompanies a delegation to peace talks in Downing Street that end abruptly when IRA Chief of Staff Seán Mac Stíofáin (Ian Beattie) opts to read “a statement”, rather than entering a discussion. “Gerry’s career as a negotiator was over before it even began,” Dolours reflects. “The killing resumed the next day.”

The British refuse to acknowledge the humanity of the rebellion that they are trying to suppress. For years, Adams’s voice was banned from British television, making it impossible for the British population to hear his arguments. In a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction twist that the show ignores, enterprising television broadcasters got around this ban by hiring actors to perform his quotes, including Price’s ex-husband, Oscar nominee Stephen Rea (Damien Molony).

When Dolours and Marian are arrested for their part in the bombing of the Old Bailey in London, the British government refuses to recognize the pair as political prisoners. The pair go on hunger strike to protest their treatment. Say Nothing depicts the brutality of their experience in unsettling detail. It’s powerful and evocative imagery – at a time when the authorities would not listen to what these people had to say, they would pull their mouths open to force feed them.

Such silence takes a toll. Dolours insists repeatedly she has no regrets about what she has done, even as she refuses to even acknowledge her actions. The show suggests that Dolours fell in love with Rea in part because of Rea’s ability as a theatre actor to externalize and dramatize the emotional baggage that she cannot articulate. “I saw your play,” she confesses before their first kiss. “You were wonderful. You made me cry.” It’s hard not to get a sense that Dolours longs for that catharsis. Of course, the truth that Rea offers is more abstract than literal, communicating something without necessarily saying it.

As Say Nothing develops, there is a palpable tension between the need for silence and necessity of candor. In order to move forward, the communities involved in the Trouble need to be able to put the past behind them. “Gerry made it very clear,” Dolours tells Mackers. “He said it to the press. He said it to the lads. He even said it to the victims. You know, if Ireland is ever to be at peace, there's a price to be paid, you know...” Mackers presses her, “What was that?” She answers, “Our silence.”

At the same time, any true progress must be rooted in honesty about what happened. Platitudes about the peace process are unsatisfying to Helen McConville (Emily Healy, Laura Donnelly) and her family, who cannot even mourn their mother without a body to bury. Justice requires truth. “How likely are you to find out who killed her?” Helen asks a detective (Richard McFerran). “Depends,” he replies. “Forensics, these old cases, really won't do us much good. Someone has to talk.”

No character in Say Nothing embodies this tension more than Gerry Adams. A fixture of Irish politics, Adams is a savvy media operator, often engaged with his own image. He has advocated for (and makes a cameo in) Kneecap, this year’s jocular comedy (and Irish Oscar hopeful) set in contemporary Belfast in the wake of the Troubles. He reacted to the casting of Pierce Brosnan as an obvious Adams surrogate in The Foreigner by opining, “I never knew Pierce Brosnan was so good looking.”

There has always been a huge divide between Adams’ public-facing persona and the longstanding rumors of his involvement in the Irish Republican Army. The politician exists in a weird limbo, where it is both widely accepted that he led the IRA in Belfast during the Troubles and he has strenuously denied any ties to the organization. Depending on how one looks at this inherent contradiction, it is either tragic or absurd. Maybe it is both.

Say Nothing acknowledges this surreality. Every episode of the series ends with a titlecard assuring the viewer that “Gerry Adams has always denied being a member of the IRA or participating in any IRA-related violence.” As the show goes on, the titlecards grow increasingly specific. However, in every episode of the series, Adams is also shown to be a central part of the Irish Republican Army, dictating orders to both Brendan and Dolours. How can one reconcile these two ideas?

On public television, as Brendan and Dolours languish behind bars, Adams strenuously denies membership of the IRA. This causes a rift between the trio. “I seen some of the TV appearances,” Brendan admits. Adams tries to wave it off. “It's just, you know...,” Adams begins. “It's just a lot of theater.” Adams is just as much a performer as Rea. Brendan replies, “Well, it's hard to tell what's real and what's not, you know.” There is a sense that Adams is less a person than he is a concept, an expression of political paradox.

Say Nothing works as well as it does because it maintains a moral ambivalence. It doesn’t offer easy answers to these very complicated contradictions. The show is sympathetic to Brendan and Dolours’ feelings of betrayal at Adams’ disavowal of a terror campaign in which they all participated. “What it is is selfish, Dolours,” Brendan argues. “It's selfish. Because it means you, me, we gotta carry all of it. All the responsibility by ourselves.” Even beyond this, the McConville family deserves closure.

However, the show also understands that Dolours and Brendan’s participation in the Belfast Project, their willingness to identify Adams as leader of the IRA, is not motivated by altruism, but instead out of bitterness and resentment. As Dolours boasts to Marion, these recordings are a way to “get to Gerry” and to “take down Gerry Adams.” These confessions run the risk of derailing the entire peace process. Aimed carefully enough, words become almost as dangerous as bullets.

If anything, Say Nothing somewhat glosses over the intensive legal battle inspired by the Belfast Project. The recordings were originally gathered with the understanding that they would not be released to the public until after all participants had died, to minimize the risk of recrimination. However, a United States appeal court ordered Boston College to turn the tapes over to the Police Service of Northern Ireland, which led to the court case against Ivor Bell and the arrest of Adams.

Say Nothing handles an incredibly delicate subject with considerable care. It is a show that understands the necessity for silence as part of a sustained insurgent campaign in response to a colonial oppressor which refuses to enter dialogue. It also accepts that silence about those same actions serves a pragmatic political purpose in attempting to move past such violence. However, it also concedes the limits of such silence, the scars that it leaves, the wounds that fester.

Silence is golden – but it is also deadly.