Thick-necked, booze-loving and angry men beat each other with their naked fists: so far, so Irish. But the feuding clans in the documentary “Knuckle” actually think their habits of antagonizing one another can be fixed by just one more problem-solving brawl.
Filmmaker Ian Palmer spent more than a decade collecting images of raw street fights, mostly between the Irish tribes the Quinn McDonaghs and the Joyces. A couple of Joyce boys wound up dead after mixing it up with the Quinn McDonaghs, and starting in the 1990s each side began circulating insulting videos that served as fight kindling. Both sides call themselves “travelers,” sometimes known as Irish gypsies, a subculture given fictional treatment in the Guy Ritchie film “Snatch,” in which Brad Pitt played a traveler.
How tough are these tattooed cousin-marriers? A line of dialogue like “drinking last night, fighting this morning, doesn’t give a damn” amounts to a résumé. Some of these guys make Kid Rock look like Colin Firth.
Palmer’s film is brutally compelling to look at, as the lads get down to face-rearranging, but it also carries a lot of tragic historical freight. The fighters themselves see the essential absurdity as they say things like, “I want to fight James because he thinks he’s better than us.” On one level, these disputes are as silly as the fight in “Anchorman” (“That really got out of hand fast!”), but, writ large, you can see how team pride taken to extremes eventually yields miles of Frenchmen and Germans facing off in trenches. “At least wars are about something,” notes another feud participant. When war looks relatively good to you, it’s time to rethink your culture.