BEFORE: Well, this one sort of fits in with my running theme for this year's documentaries - which is basically "I'll watch the documentary about them, even if I'm not a big fan of them, because at this point, I've watched all the docs about my favorite entertainers, so why not?"
OK, it's a loose theme, but it's a theme. I'm not a big fan of tennis, basketball or boxing, or blues music or jazz or Sheryl Crow or Idina Menzel, or even Val Kilmer (honestly, I think his career peaked with "Top Secret!", prove me wrong...). But I brought this problem on myself, by watching so many docs last year, and the year before that. What is left to watch at this point? Documentaries about people I can take or leave, that's what.
The exception, of course - Kurt Vonnegut. There's a guy who warranted my attention - maybe I learned a little TOO much about Mr. Captain Crankypants, but hey, that was part of his charm. Maybe he laughed a bit too loud about inappropriate things, but I think that was a coping mechanism. The guy had a hard road, there's no denying. Hey, so did Sinead O'Connor, from what I know about her. How's that for a segue?
George H.W. Bush and Barbara Bush carry over from "Scandalous: The Untold Story of the National Enquirer" via archive footage.
THE PLOT: Following the career of singer Sinead O'Connor through her rise to fame and how her iconoclastic personality led to her exile from the pop mainstream.
AFTER: Boy, it's kind of tough to get a handle on Sinead O'Connor. You could probably do five documentaries about her and never really fully understand what she's all about, what she stands for, because she's had so many opinions over the years, the quiet girl who is somehow also very outspoken, the loud singer who just doesn't seem to want any attention, but then why become a recording star if not for fame and fortune? She's been married four times, what's the deal there?
I remember when she hit the scene in 1987, that was a different time in so many ways - pop stars had been really hitting the gender fluidity thing for a few years, and suddenly in the mid-80's it was "cool" to be gay, even if you weren't out. George Michael, Boy George, Freddie Mercury, Elton John were all at the top of the charts, and then you had pretty boys like Duran Duran, OK, not gay, but put it all together, the boys were wearing more make-up than the girls. On the female side you had Melissa Etheridge, Michelle Shocked, Indigo Girls, people who generally speaking wore sensible shoes and had spiky or shaved hair, so of course when Sinead came along with her nearly bald head, the first thing that came to most people's minds was, "Duh, lesbian." I'm not saying all lesbians had crewcuts or all women with crewcuts were lesbians, but certainly the odds were greater in both cases. Getting a buzz-cut was a short-cut to playing with the feminine norms, messing with the conformity of gender roles, or showing solidarity with the dyke community.
Again, she's been married four times, so there goes that lesbian theory, right out the window, right? Not so fast, if you scroll down her Wikipedia page, you'll see that in a 2000 interview, she called herself a "dyke", but then soon after that interview, she kind of recanted on that point. Bu then in a 2003 interview, she revealed that she's had many relationships with men, but also three relationships with women. Ah, now we're getting somewhere - not that it really matters, she can do whatever (and whoever) she wants. But why not just go with "bisexual" or "pansexual" if that better reflects her reality and experience. OK, so maybe she's just not into labels, I get it, but you've got two choices, really - keep your private life private, or be totally honest about it, you can't really live in the in-between. And anyone who saw her in 1987 with her shaved head and said, "Duh, lesbian..." well, they weren't really wrong, were they? Look, if I knew then what I know now about women with shaved heads, well, I probably wouldn't have gotten married to a lesbian back then (even if she didn't know it at the time, or wasn't honest about it, or whatever it was. We live, we learn, we make mistakes, we move forward.)
The other big theme that's been running through this year's DocBlock is that so many of the people profiled have been activists, in one form or another. Arthur Ashe, Muhammad Ali, Nina Simone, all fought for African-American civil rights in their own ways, some marched with MLK and were friends with Malcolm X, Ashe integrated tennis as the pre-cursor to Venus and Serena Williams. Willie Mays joined major-league baseball a few years after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier. Norman Lear was a Jewish activist who fought against the Moral Majority and for the separation of church and state. And Roy Cohn... OK, Roy was pretty messed up, a gay man who denied being gay and supported all kinds of conservative clients - I think that's the opposite of activism. But let's welcome Sinead O'Connor to the club, because she had a lot of axes to grind, mostly against the Catholic Church and the effect it had on her home country of Ireland. They don't believe in the separation of church and state there, the Catholics ran the country, set the rules, and even their constitution makes it clear that a woman's place in is the home, taking care of the chores while the men are meant to be in charge of important matters.
But you tear up ONE photo of the Pope on Saturday Night Live to make your point, and look what happens - Sinead got blacklisted for a few years, but she was trying to make a point about the dangers of the patriarchal and racist nature of the Catholic Church, not to mention the practice of covering up sexual abuses against children - so she wasn't wrong, she just picked a terrible way of making her point, one that rubbed everyone the wrong way. They asked Sinead what she was rebelling against, and she said, "What have you got?" Human rights, child abuse, racism, organized religion, and women's rights, and she always managed to tie it back to Ireland or the Catholics. This documentary opens with her appearance at Madison Square Garden, the Bob Dylan 30th Anniversary tribute concert, which took place shortly after her infamous SNL incident, and the whole crowd in MSG tried to boo her off the stage. Well, you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, I guess. Kris Kristofferson came to her defense but I remember he wasn't really able to convince the crowd that she meant well.
She also created controversy in 1990 when she toured the U.S., and refused to play in venues that opened every concert with the Star-Spangled Banner. I guess her reasoning was that she wasn't a U.S. citizen, so why start the concert of an Irish woman with the U.S. anthem? She was right, of course, but again, she didn't pick the best way to make her point - Colin Kaepernick would make a similar mistake years later. If you mess with the anthem, you're only going to make the rednecks in Middle America angry, because they don't really understand the subtleties of complex arguments. I get why we want to start a baseball game with the anthem, but why do we need it to kick off a rock concert? Sure, if the band wants it, that's fine, but the anthem stands for FREEDOM, and that includes the freedom to NOT play the anthem or salute the flag if you don't want to. The opposite of freedom is, in fact, enforced blind loyalty. But seeing has how O'Connor's desire to not play the anthem at her concerts was more trouble than it was worth, how it made her lose more fans in the end, perhaps she should have just let the anthem play and gotten over it.
So this seems to be a common theme in Sinead's life - she's got strong opinions about something, she goes a bit too far to make a point, then there are calls for her to apologize, so she maybe recants her statements a bit, because it's good to be controversial, but being TOO controversial gets you boycotted, so she disappears for a while, but then a few years later, it's another album, another set of strong opinions, she goes a bit too far, and the whole cycle repeats. The documentary doesn't even get into her medical history, which is also all over the place - mental health struggles due to child abuse, dealing with divorced parents, 18 months in an asylum, then dealing with the death of her mother, then there was a suicide attempt in 1999, a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, then that got revised to borderline personality disorder, mixed with complex PTSD. After a hysterectomy in 2015 she claimed that the hospital refused to give her hormonal replacement therapy, and this led to more mental health issues. She also sought rehab for addiction to cannabis, and is an agoraphobic.
Then when we get to religion, she considers herself a Christian, but she's asked three different popes to excommunicate her. She converted to Islam in 2018 - yeah, that should fix it - and she changed her name to Shuhada' Davitt, though for a while before that, she was going by Magda Davitt, but still performing under the name Sinead O'Connor. Yeah, it's a lot - I can only conclude that it's a tough job being her, just even figuring out what to call her and what she believes is doing a number on me, it seems to involve a fair amount of work. I'm just not sure it's worth all the trouble.
And through it all, the biggest hit she ever had was her cover of Prince's song "Nothing Compares 2 U" - and there's a whole story there about her and Prince, and him not being happy with her having a bigger success with his song than he had. But the documentary chose to NOT tell that story - perhaps because they couldn't secure the rights to have that song appear in the film. Yeah, that's a tough one, especially if you came to the movie hoping to hear that song or see footage from the music video for it.
Also starring Sinead O'Connor (last seen in "Wuthering Heights"), Eileen Byrne, Jeannette Byrne, Paul Byrne, Victoria Chick, Mike Clowes, Bill Coleman, Daisy Connor, Chuck D, Kate Garner, John Grant, Dagmar Grogan-Baar, Kathleen Hanna, Margo Harkin, Roisin Ingle, Sinead Kennedy, Ronan Kelly, Ella Kerslake, Clodagh Latimer, Claire Lewis, John Maybury, Maia McGovern, Mavis McGovern, Faye Moody, Denise Marie O'Connor, Aifric O'Donnell, Mairin O'Donovan, Veronica O'Reilly, Peaches, Marco Pirroni, Adam Redmond, Donna Reilly-Parrish, John Reynolds, Elaine Schock, Skin, Jerry Stafford, Danil Tsepilev, Donncha Tynan,
with archive footage of Gay Byrne, Cher (also carrying over from "Scandalous"), Charlie Rose (ditto), Kurt Cobain (last seen in "Jagged"), Dave Grohl (ditto), Courtney Love (ditto), Bob Dylan (last seen in "Sheryl"), Joe Pesci (ditto), Billie Eilish, Sherilyn Fenn, Peter Gabriel (last seen in "Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band"), Mikhail Gorbachev (last seen in "Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump"), Ariana Grande (last seen in "Don't Look Up"), Phil Hartman (last seen in "Listening to Kenny G"), Jan Hooks (last seen in "The Eyes of Tammy Faye"), John F. Kennedy (last seen in "Summer of Soul"), Enda Kenny, Kris Kristofferson (last seen in "Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind"), Joni Mitchell (ditto), David Letterman (last seen in "Miles Davis; Birth of the Cool"), Kyle MacLachlan (last seen in "Val"), Tim Robbins (ditto), Madonna (last seen in "An Accidental Studio"), Bob Marley, Megan Thee Stallion, Camille Paglia, Pope Benedict (last seen in "The Two Popes"), Pope John Paul II (last seen in "What's My Name: Muhammad Ali"), Dan Quayle, Phil Ramone, Haile Selassie, Sue Simmons, Margaret Thatcher (last seen in "McEnroe").
RATING: 5 out of 10 MTV Video Music Awards nominations
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