Sinead O’Connor documentary at SIFF

This is based on a journal entry following two music documentaries I saw in April this year at the SIFF/Egyptian Theater. 

“Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story” was fun, but very commercial and white oriented. It seemed designed as marketing to white people over middle age, to make them want to go to Jazz Fest. I was following along and thinking, yeah, that looks fun, that looks fun, and then I thought, I bet it’s way more crowded than it looks and I’d just be too hot and overwhelmed. I’m not much of a festival goer in any case, so I knew my judgment was a bit cranky. Then I picked up on the movie’s marketing agenda, realized it was aimed right at me, and pretty much lost interest in the festival. The musicians were interesting, and musical families and longtime ensembles are always inspiring.

We also saw “Nothing Compares,” a female-directed documentary about Sinead O’Connor. Wow! It was intense. She is the kind of outspoken feminist I would like to be.

The movie covered, among other things, an instance where Sinead would not allow the national anthem to be played before her show in the US. A furor erupted and she was condemned in the media. Then came the 1992 Saturday Night Live appearance when, as part of a statement on child abuse inside and outside the Catholic Church, she ripped up a photo of the Pope. (Watching at the time, I didn’t catch her statement, but I found the gesture bold and electrifying.) Soon after that she appeared at a Bob Dylan tribute concert. When she was introduced, a lot of supposedly rebellious or iconoclastic rock and roll hypocrites (who probably hadn’t thought twice about the Pope until then) booed and jeered at her. Many headlines state that she was “booed offstage,” but that’s untrue. She remained standing, stopped her band from playing, and performed Bob Marley’s “War” acapella. 

Sinead O’Connor has lived out the fact that people can’t resist mocking a woman; people relish seeing a woman mocked. She calls it out for what it is, a distraction from having to look at the issues raised. Her career disappeared out of the pop atmosphere. She had good allies in her husband, her publicist, her manager, and (I think) her band, and she has had a career after all. The film didn’t address her changes nor the ups and downs of her life post-1992, but the director did have one three-hour interview with Sinead and used parts of it to anchor the movie onto today’s perspective. It was very effective.

I thought Sinead was so sexy and cool when I first saw her video in 1988, wished I could look like her, had in fact tried to look that way two years earlier, with ultra-short hair and baggy androgynous clothes. And I tried to be an outspoken feminist. I was told to be quiet — via more or less mild dismissals from male friends, acquaintances, and relatives. I got the same arguments over and over from my feminist awakening in 1983 through maybe 1988 when I gave up — I quit talking about the sexism, objectification and misogyny I continued to observe. Most men thought it was imaginary, and most women offered strategies to accustom oneself to it or leverage it.

Sinead O’Connor could not be quiet and felt she had nothing to lose, that no one could hurt her. She found out she was wrong, she was hurt badly, but she could not be anything other than herself. Kris Kristofferson introduced her at the Dylan thing as an emblem of courage and integrity. Good for him, he was right and he was one of few to see her that way.

The issues Sinead calls out, which she experienced directly or saw in her surroundings, are the abuse of women by the Church, the generational abuse by women of their daughters down the generations, the abuse of children by priests, and child abuse in general.

The Prince estate would not license the song “Nothing Compares 2 U” for this movie, so Sinead’s performance of it isn’t shown, despite the title of the movie.