Keywords

Introduction

The film which was released in 1959 as Darby O’Gill and the Little People was a long time in the making. Walt Disney started work on an “Irish-themed project” (McManus 2017, 192) in 1945, kick-started by “an unsolicited original story treatment entitled ‘The Little People’” (ibid).Footnote 1 One of its most striking features is Disney’s level of staged personal involvement with the heritage, the theme and the making of the film. After introducing Darby O’Gill and the Little People and using an approach grounded in imagology whose aim is to deconstruct ethnotypes, or stereotypes applied to groups that are primarily perceived and characterised by their ethnicity (cf. Leerssen 2016), this article will engage with the discursive construct of ‘Irishness’ and its representation in the context of Irish America by analysing the film and identifying how it situates itself in the corresponding intertextual tradition. It will pay special attention to the extensive paratexts which present Disney’s ethnicity as his motivation and special qualification to produce an ‘Irish’ film, as well as the leprechauns in the film—small wily, trickster fairies from Irish folklore—as authentic, living beings. It will show how, by using a range of ethnotypical elements, by employing Self-Other oppositions, and by engaging intertextuality with tropes from popular culture in the Irish-American diaspora, the film both explicitly and implicitly presents Irishness for an American audience of Irish descent. Although Disney is notorious for appropriating cultural traditions from all over the world, first denounced in the influential study by Richard Schickel as someone who “always came as a conquerer […] with know-how instead of sympathy and respect for alien traditions” (Schickel 1968, 227), his presentation of Irishness has so far been absent from scholarship which engages with his appropriation of folklore.

Disney had hoped the film would be a box-office hit, especially in cinemas in the major centres of Irish America, but it did not enjoy the resounding success of other notable US Irish-themed films of the era, reasons for which will be considered here. This will be complemented by a brief account of how Irish audiences responded then and respond now to the representation from an external, diasporic perspective. In conclusion, I will ask how Disney’s appropriation of Irish heritage can be assessed in relation to his appropriation of cultures and stories from all around the world.

Darby O’Gill and the Little People (1959)

Darby O’Gill (played by Albert Sharpe), an elderly Irish caretaker on Lord Fitzpatrick’s estate in the small town of Rathcullen, is a roguish character more interested in poaching rabbits and telling stories in the local pub about his encounters with leprechauns than doing his job. He is replaced by a younger man, Michael McBride (Sean Connery),Footnote 2 who falls in love with Darby’s daughter Katie (Janet Munro). In a series of comic misadventures, Darby is captured by the leprechauns, but manages to trick and kidnap their King Brian (Jimmy O’Dea) in order to get the three wishes a leprechaun must grant if captured by a human being. The dramatic climax of the film occurs when Katie is fatally injured, and a banshee—a female spirit who heralds the death of a family member—summons the cóiste bodhar, or death coach. Darby demands his third and final wish from King Brian, which is that he himself should be taken instead of Katie. King Brian grants it and offers to join him for part of the way. He then tricks Darby into making a fourth wish, in the knowledge that if he makes more than three, the fourth negates all the previous ones. So, King Brian saves Darby’s life, Katie recovers, marries Michael and all ends happily.

The live-action film was directed by Robert Stevenson; Lawrence Edward Watkin wrote the script, adapted from the literary fairy tales of the Irish American Herminie Templeton Kavanagh.Footnote 3 Peter Ellenshaw pushed Disney’s special effects “to the next level” (Kyra 2010), using forced perspective to trick the eye into seeing an average-sized actor playing a tiny leprechaun, and having normal sized sets built for Darby and large ones for the leprechauns. The film was not shot on location in Ireland, but at the Burbank Disney Studio in California.

Darby O’Gill displays many of the features associated with Disney movies. It is a family film which addresses both an adult and a child audience, and it has a bit of something for everyone: humour, sentimentality, romance and some horror. It also includes the all-pervasive family theme with special focus on the father-child relationship. When the leprechaun asks the widower Darby what he wants most of all, it is that his daughter Katie should be happy. And he is prepared to die in order to save her.

The entertainment value of the film is clearly founded in the adversarial relationship between Darby and King Brian. Their encounters, in which they try to trick and outdo each other with music, songs and repartee, are well-paced comic scenes which are still enjoyable today, in contrast to the dated and clichéd romantic and village scenes. The interaction between the Irish actors Sharpe and O’Dea makes the magic and their significant difference in size believable.

A Film for Irish America

Darby O'Gill and the Little People was made for an Irish-American audience; this intention is manifest on both explicit and implicit levels. It is at its most (cynically) explicit in a document circulated in the publicity department at Burbank before the film’s release:

Unlike previous campaigns, Darby O’Gill will have a ready-made market potential of 20 million Irish-Americans. Special attention will be paid to these people with shamrocks in their eyes. Their numbers alone could carry the picture to big box-office earnings (Quoted in McManus 2019).Footnote 4

More implicit is the way in which Irishness is staged (and sold) in the paratextual material, and how its representation in the film itself chimes with the traditions and expectations of the specific Irish-American audience.

Staging (and Selling) Irishness in the Paratexts

The promotional material for the film focuses on two selling points: the Irishness of Walt Disney, and the actual existence of leprechauns. Irishness is taken here to be a discursive construct of an ethnic identity based on features taken to be characteristic of an essential Irish identity. In the article “How I Met the King of the Leprechauns,” published in Walt Disney’s Magazine in February 1959, DisneyFootnote 5 introduces himself as a member of the Irish diaspora and recounts his childhood dream to travel to Ireland to meet a real leprechaun:

Being half Irish myself, I learned about the Leprechauns of Ireland while I was still a small boy on our farm at Marceline, Missouri. I began to believe in Leprechauns, then, because some of my relatives had pretty convincing stories to tell about the magic powers of these Little People, and the tricks they could play when angry.

So, I promised myself that one day, after I had grown up, I would go to the land of the Leprechaun myself, and meet one in person. The opportunity finally came last year when we decided to use real Little People instead of cartoon imitations in a movie we were planning (Disney 1959).

Walt Disney’s paternal grandparents were indeed Irish-born immigrants to the US. But until this film, Disney’s ethnicity hadn’t featured in any significant way. “Walt was an American through and through, but he always had a fondness for the stories of Ireland and its people … especially the little ones,” explains a special 2011 St. Patrick’s Day tribute on the Disney website (Lowery 2011). This fondness is staged as the defining feature of his Irishness when it came to making and publicising Darby O’Gill and the Little People. The only thing Disney stopped short of when reinventing himself as an Irishman, was to rename himself ‘Walt O’Disney.’

A forty-nine-minute television special, I Captured the King of the Leprechauns (Keller/Stevenson 1959), broadcast in May 1959, presents an extensive fictionalised account of the making of the film. It features Disney himself and the two Irish actors Sharpe and O’Dea, blends footage from Darby O’Gill with new footage shot partly in Ireland and partly on the Darby set, and is framed by a conversation between Walt Disney and the American actor Pat O’Brien, also known as “Hollywood’s Irishman in Residence” (Takacs 2021). Disney wants his advice, because “there’s nobody more Irish than Pat O’Brien” (Keller/Stevenson 1959, 00:01:10) and, after much chat and a bit of singing, O’Brien gives Disney his blessing to go to Ireland to capture a real leprechaun for his film.

The leprechaun has occupied a key position in Irish-American popular culture since the late-nineteenth century; its popularity has had a “monopolising effect […] on an Irish-American understanding and appreciation of Irish folklore and culture” (McManus 2017, 278). Leprechauns were especially present in American popular culture since the Broadway hit musical Finian's Rainbow in 1947, starring Albert Sharpe, who would later play the title role in Darby O’Gill.

Disney and his team made the trip to Ireland in November 1946, where they received extensive support from the Irish Folklore Commission both during and long after this trip. The Commission was set up in 1935, a little more than ten years after Ireland gained its independence from the UK, to promote Irish folklore in an academic fashion. The leprechaun—and its association with stereotypes of the colonial era—“might have been seen as a deviation from that work” (Tracy 2010, 58), and the folklorists tried to interest Disney in one of the great Irish heroic sagas instead. But in vain. The archivist Bríd Mahon wrote in her memoir: “[N]o; nothing but leprechauns would do the man who had set his heart on meeting one and had travelled across the Atlantic in the hope that his wish might come true” (Doohan 2017).

Although Disney passed over the material of the Irish folklorists, he “cannily incorporated them into his origin myth of the Darby O’Gill film” (Taaffe 2016) in the form of “an elderly scholar” (Disney 1959) who tells Disney the story of how the leprechauns came to Ireland. This story is not based on any academic sources, but on a literary fairy tale by Herminie Templeton Kavanagh (1903), and its Irish-American perspective is clearly evident. In the story, the leprechauns chose to live in Ireland because it was the “place most like heaven,” and because they wanted to live among people fond of dancing and singing, and who were poor: “[W]e like to have them poor, for when a man gets rich there’s no fun in him at all” (Keller/Stevenson 1959, 00:13:27–00:13:32). As it was only from a distance “that the poverty of the old country could be imagined with such fond nostalgia” (Taaffe 2016), this is clearly a tale from the Irish-American diaspora. Contrasting the poverty of the ‘homeland’ with the implied prosperity of the diaspora is a Self-Other opposition common in ethnotypical discourse (cf. Leerssen 2016, 17). It presents a purportedly typical feature of a hetero-image or image of the other (‘they are poor’) against the implied background of how it differs from an auto-image or image of the self (‘we are prosperous’). This particular opposition also has the stabilising function of serving to legitimise and validate the emigration of the Irish Americans. The ‘old scholar’ directs Disney to Darby O’Gill who brings him to meet King Brian, and when Disney tells him “I’m making a film about Ireland. The real thing” (Keller/Stevenson 1959, 00:22:30–00:22:44), King Brian graciously agrees to come to Hollywood with one hundred and fifty leprechauns to make it possible.

The myth that Disney recruited real leprechauns for his film becomes the mainstay of the publicity campaign. John Conner of the publicity department wrote in summary of a meeting in March 1958:

Walt expressed great enthusiasm for attempting to keep the DARBY O’GILL publicity campaign on the fanciful side […]. He made it clear he understands that, of course, no one among the press would be entirely taken in by any pretense that actual “Leprechauns” will be used in our cast, but suggested we do our utmost to keep the newsmen with us in a tongue-in-cheek campaign where our “Little People” are concerned (quoted in McManus 2017, 281–282).

A final paratext which kept up the myth is the title card in the film, a personal statement in celtic font by Walt Disney himself thanking the leprechauns for their cooperation, and bearing his familiar trademark signature (see Fig. 1). Disney was obviously prepared to go to great lengths to preserve his audience’s suspension of disbelief. His own ‘belief’ in the leprechauns was sold as part of his ‘Irish’ identity, but it was also in line both with the company’s business strategy that extolled “the virtues of the imaginary as an escape from the limits of the ‘real’” and Disney’s own “fascination with, and belief in, pre-modern cultures of enchantment” (Tracy 2010, 46).

Fig. 1
figure 1

Opening credit from Darby O’Gill and the Little People (Stevenson 1959)

Full size image

Irishness in Darby O’Gill and the Little People

The way in which Irishness is discursively constructed and represented in the film itself is, next to the paratextual strategies, a further implicit indication of the addressed audience and its expectations. The film is grounded in backward-looking images of Ireland which mirror the tendency in twentieth-century American popular culture to encourage the Irish American “to envisage contemporary Ireland as exactly the same as the land from which their ancestors set sail” (McManus 2017, 202).

The setting of the film is the ‘quaint,’ pre-modern Irish village of Rathcullen, introduced as a timeless idyll in the opening shots. Geese, cows and horses move slowly across the sparsely populated village square, in its centre a huge stone Celtic cross. The two significant buildings are the Catholic Church and the pub (see the background in Fig. 1). A large estate owned by a mainly absent, titled landlord, would seem to situate the film before 1922, in pre-independent Ireland, but no political or social markers are referenced. Temporal signifiers in clothing, appearance and means of transport—Lord Fitzpatrick’s extravagant mutton chop sideburns, the women’s long woollen skirts and shawls, the horse-drawn carriage—seem to point to the mid- to late-nineteenth century. The simple, poor conditions of the Irish who, in the film are what imagology calls the spected or the group represented (cf. O’Sullivan 2011, 4), again serve as an implicit contrast to the modern comforts of diasporic Irish America, the spectant through whose perspective the spected are cast.

The folklore, especially the purported Irish ‘belief’ in the existence of leprechauns, implies a proximity of the Irish to the ‘pre-modern cultures of enchantment’ which fascinated Disney. This ethnotypical element of Irishness is closely connected to the romantic, Ossianic image of the ‘Celt.’ Emotional rather than rational, removed from practical reality, the Celts were seen as “visionary, often endowed with second Sight, prone to superstition; with a rich, often fantastical imagination full of fairies and miracles” (Leerssen 2007a, 123).Footnote 6 These characteristics featured largely in the work of authors of the Irish Renaissance at the end of the nineteenth century, especially in the poetic vision of William Butler Yeats, and were adopted by authors of American Celticism such as Kavanagh. Hollywood’s tendency to cast Ireland as a whimsical rather than worldly place follows in this tradition.

An ethnotype with a literary tradition in the film is that of the Irish rogue hero. This flawed but ultimately positive figure is clever and mischievous, but can also be noble and brave (cf. McManus 2017, 42). It is a positive spin on the century-old trope of the Stage Irishman, drunken, stupid and violent, a demeaning figure of fun created for English theatre audiences as a counterpart to the idealised Englishman. By emphasising character traits that signalled political incompetence, the English, from the twelfth century on, stressed Irish inferiority as a justification for the English Crown’s claim to supremacy over Ireland, and cast their “hegemonial expansion as a civilizing mission” (Leerssen 2007b, 191). The Irish dramatist Dion Boucicault (1820–1890) ‘wrote back’ by reinventing the Stage Irishman as “drunken, clever, and charming” (Cullingford 1997, 287).

The language of the film, apart from some phrases in the Irish (Gaelic) language, is Hiberno English, or Irish English with exaggerated use of accent (brogue) by the non-Irish actors and supposed Irish characteristics in speech. One of these is the cliché top of the morning, an archaic phrase formerly used throughout Great Britain and Ireland which mid-twentieth century American film makers mistakenly “picked up as an Irish colloquialism” (TaliesinMerlin 2021), as in the title of the film Top O’ the Morning (1949). It is, therefore “an American Irish film stereotype based on an archaism” (ibid.).

The late 1940s and early 1950s saw a number of popular Hollywood romantic comedies set in Ireland: The Luck of the Irish (dir. Henry Koster, 1948), Top O’ the Morning (dir. David Miller, 1949) and The Quiet Man (dir. John Ford, 1952), which won two Academy Awards and was one of the top ten highest-grossing films domestically that year. Darby O’Gill seeks to place itself in the tradition of these films by using music and elements of folklore which originate in them rather than in Disney’s research in Ireland. When the leprechauns in Darby O’Gill claim that their copious gold and jewel possessions were recovered from ships of the Spanish Armada wrecked off the Irish coast in 1588, it is a piece of information taken directly, as McManus shows, from The Luck of the Irish. And the polka they dance to, The Rakes of Mallow, features prominently on the soundtrack of The Quiet Man; it would therefore have been familiar to and popular amongst Disney’s targeted audience (cf. McManus 2017, 311). The intertextual origin of these elements shows how Irish-American films generated and perpetuated their own specific Irish folklore and images of Irishness; Disney aligned his film intertextually to these, and, given their huge success, it was not unreasonable for him to be optimistic about its prospects. He aimed Darby O’Gill at the same audience, the one “with shamrocks in their eyes” (McManus 2019). But, as McManus says, “he missed” (ibid.). Why did he miss, and is Darby O’Gill to be written off as an unsuccessful excursion by Disney to ‘the homeland’?

Reception of Darby O’Gill

Reception in the USA

Darby O’Gill received mixed reviews in the US. The direction, special effects, music and acting was praised. The New York Times called it an “overpoweringly charming concoction of standard Gaelic tall stories, fantasy and romance” (Weiler 1959), but The Monthly Film Bulletin found “all attempts at Irish charm […] pretty synthetic.” Audiences were not accommodating, particularly when it came to the heavy Irish accents (cf. Motamayor 2019), and Disney had the film redubbed for reissue, also replacing Gaelic dialogue with English (cf. Samson 2008). Disney himself believed the film would have been more popular if the better-known actor Barry Fitzgerald, whom he originally wanted to cast, had played the title role (ibid.).

Brian McManus points to the paratexts to explain the lack of success. The popular Irish-themed films of the 1940s and 1950s utilised what is known as the ‘return narrative,’ a “diasporic wish-fulfilment fantasy” (2019), in which the male Irish-American protagonist grapples with a major problem which can only be solved by returning to “the homeland” (ibid.). Disney also utilises this popular narrative, not in Darby O’Gill, but in the promotional film in which he himself becomes the Irish American with a problem: he desperately needs real leprechauns. And he finds a solution by returning to the ‘homeland.’ However, this publicity campaign obviously did not persuade twenty million Irish Americans to go to see the film, and McManus believes that Disney may have mis-assessed his audience: in the diasporic fantasy of many Irish Americans, leprechauns belong firmly in the Celtic Twilight of a pre-modern Ireland, so Disney’s tales of King Brian and his leprechauns “travelling over to glamorous, urbane and […] modern California to star in a Hollywood film may have proven too bizarre to be borne” (ibid.).

Was that the end of Darby O’Gill and the Little People? It is one of the lesser-known Disney films and it is barely named in major studies of Disney’s films (cf. McManus 2017, 20–21). However, the film does enjoy a certain degree of popularity in the US today, with several recent websites and blogs devoted to its analysis, many of which include positive comments and memories by viewers who enjoyed it as children (cf. Lane 2013; Samson 2008; Fanning 2019; Motamayor 2019; Foley 2020; Baia/Blake 2021; Walker 2015; Kyra 2010; Starkey et al. 2020). Viewing the film has become a ritual for many Irish Americans, especially on St. Patrick’s Day. In the 2008 St. Patrick’s Day list of ten great Irish movies by the review-aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, Darby O’Gill turns up as the third most popular, and as one of the few Irish-themed movies that has a one hundred percent score on their “Tomatometer” (Rotten Tomatoes 2021). Now that the film has been divested of the tall tale surrounding its genesis, people can apparently enjoy it.

Reception in Ireland

The American critic Doug Walker who positively reviewed Darby O’Gill in 2015 finished by apologising to the Irish, saying they probably saw it differently from Americans. This sparked a great number of responses from Irish viewers saying that wasn’t the case: “Irish guy here, no we are not offended. This movies [sic] great!” (Walker 2015). But that is only one side of the reception in Ireland. It is seen by many as the quintessential representation of ‘Oirishness’ and a touchstone for Paddywhackery.Footnote 7 In a much-quoted anecdote, the casting director for the Irish-American film The Secret of Roan Inish (dir. John Sayles, 1994) noted “‘DOG’ next to certain actors’ names […] [S]he said it stood for ‘Darby O'Gill’ meaning that that actor tended toward a stage-Irish character, especially when an American is looking at them” (Quoted in Tracy 2010, 45).

When Darby O’Gill was released in 1959, relatively newly-independent Ireland was, on the one hand grappling, “sometimes hesitantly, and sometimes ineptly, with its role or place in the modern world” (Fallon 1998, 2). On the other, Irish culture as a historical, mythological artefact with its associations of anti-materialism and whimsy was a hugely popular export article, making the relatively young country a heritage attraction. But rather than being the victims of theme-parking, the Irish were complicit in this packaging of their culture, a complicity which was, historically, often dictated by economic circumstances.Footnote 8

From the outset, the tourist industry was vital to the Irish economy, and post-war Ireland worked to position itself as a tourist destination for American visitors. The Irish, with dollars in their eyes, very much wanted to attract the (Irish) Americans with shamrocks in theirs, and played up to the American gaze. Recognising the potential economic benefits for the country, the Department of External Affairs cooperated with US companies who filmed in Ireland. The exasperation of contemporary Irish critics at the kinds of Irish-themed films being turned out by Hollywood is evident in a review of John Ford’s Three Leaves of a Shamrock (1957) in the Evening Herald of June 1st, 1957:

It parades about every theatrical and cinematic cliche and absurdity—in both dialogue and action—that has ever been perpetuated against the country […] I fail to see how the makers of this film can possibly hope to realise their dream of putting Irish on the film map, encourage tourism, or help to acquire for the nation the badly-needed international recognition of growing maturity and progressiveness that would be of such enormous advantage to our critical economy (Quoted in Irish Film & TV Research Online 2006).

Darby O’Gill had its world premiere in Dublin on June 24th, 1959 with screenings in the US a few days later. Disney was greeted in Dublin Airport by six pipe bands, and was joined by the president of Ireland, Sean T. O’Kelly, for a special screening of Darby O’Gill attended by hundreds of under-privileged children from hospitals and orphanages (cf. Samson 2008). This was followed by a lavish state reception for the actors and Irish dignitaries, all with widespread coverage in the Irish media. Disney was feted by Ireland with an eye to reception on the other side of the Atlantic.

The critic Fintan O’Toole talks about the “strange unease” (2009) that Darby O’Gill still induced in Irish culture fifty years on, and refers to legends about famous Irish actors and politicians who picketed the film’s launch in Dublin due to what they felt was ridiculous stereotyping of the Irish people. However, there is no record of any such protests. O’Toole thinks the Irish

would like to think that we kicked up a fuss about Darby O’Gill, that we found it deeply offensive. I don’t think we did. A Dublin workshop for people with disabilities, in an early example of merchandising, churned out Darby O’Gill dolls. When Jimmy O’Dea, one of the film’s stars and an immensely popular figure, got married later in 1959, he had, on top of his three-tiered wedding cake, a little Darby O’Gill leprechaun. There’s not much evidence that Irish people regarded him as a traitor to the race (Ibid.).

The Irish ambivalence was also evident at the sixtieth anniversary of the film in 2019. Slated by a critic in The Irish Times as “the notoriously icky Oirish fantasy” (Clarke 2019), the anniversary was nonetheless celebrated in Ireland with special screenings and exhibitions like From Ireland to Hollywood: Darby O’Gill and the Little People: The World Premiere, and talks about the making of the film, with Jimmy O’Dea’s godson showing memorabilia from the film, including the original leprechaun suit (cf. Magnier 2019).

This anniversary coincided with the film being made available on the Disney + streaming platform, with the on-screen content warning Disney appended to a number of their films: “This programme is presented as originally created. It may contain outdated cultural depictions.” Irish responses to these outdated depictions range today between offence and nostalgia, tempered by irony. In a documentary on Irish cinema by Donald Taylor Black, contemporary Irish filmmakers, who only since the late 1980s have been in a position to tell Irish stories themselves, reminisce about having seen Hollywood ‘Irish’ films in their childhood; they found the “bad impressions of being Irish people” very funny (Black 1995). Some criticisms are laid-back: although Darby O’Gill “must surely be one of the cringiest cases of cinematic paddywhackery that’s ever been committed to celluloid, it’s really more of a colourful fantasy, and is only as offensive as we allow it to be” (Wasser 2020). The postmodern use of ethnotypes in popular culture (the comedy-drama series Emily in Paris [Netflix 2020] is a prime example), encourages a type of ironic viewing unencumbered by outrage. Even the historical, demeaning stereotype of the Stage Irishman is now alive and well and present in many Irish self-presentations in a comic, ironic mode (cf. Leerssen 2016, 23). All of this permits a kind of relaxed, amused enjoyment of Darby O’Gill in Ireland today which wouldn’t have been possible in the late 1950s.Footnote 9

Conclusion

Disney staged his own diasporic Irish identity in the service of Darby O’Gill, and he employed tropes and elements of Irishness then dominant in Irish America such as the idyllic, timeless setting, the familiar ‘rogue hero’ figure, Irish music and dance, exaggerated Irish English, and above all else, in his origin myth, purportedly authentic leprechauns. The film (and the ‘folklore’ in the paratexts) was based on Irish-American literary fairy tales, and aligned intertextually to the hugely popular post-war US Irish-themed films. Disney aimed Darby O’Gill at the same audience who guaranteed their success. Ultimately, he was intent on selling an entertaining story to Americans for massive profit. How can we assess Disney’s exploitation of Irishness in light of his notorious exploitation of disparate native traditions from all around the world, of his lack of “respect for alien traditions” (Schickel 1968, 227)? Was the tradition that Disney exploited actually an alien one?

The source for the leprechaun folklore was Irish-American literary fairytales, the authority on Ireland in the paratexts the American Pat O’Brien, ‘Hollywood’s Irishman in Residence.’ These were not elements of an alien tradition for Disney, but part of diasporic Irish-American culture, a hybrid culture (cf. Smith/Leavy 2008) which developed in Irish immigrant communities in the USA and has been maintained over generations.Footnote 10 The relationship between the construction of Irishness in an emigration context and in the homeland is never as simple as the Self-Other binaries commonly found in imagological studies, for while diasporic images are often informed by (sometimes anachronistic) auto-images of the homeland, they can also have a feedback effect in helping to define the ‘homeland.’ Declan Kiberd (1996) has shown how the definition of ‘Ireland’ was shaped in some ways by its diaspora, and the complexity of the relationship is also illustrated by the complicity of the Irish in the widespread commodification of Irishness (cf. Negra 2006). Discussing identity constructs in a diasporic or global context within a traditional imagological framework reveals what Zrinka Blažević has called imagology’s “unforgettable theoretical sin […,] its implicit fostering of the so-called container model of culture, which presupposes that cultures are ethnically and socially homogeneous entities with firm and impermeable boundaries” (2014, 356). Blažević argues for a new, transcultural imagology which adopts a heterogenising approach to properly account for creole, hybrid and translocal notions of culture.

The issue at stake here is not so much that Disney’s product was Irish American, but that he sold it as an original, genuine Irish article. “I’m making a film about Ireland. The real thing” (Keller/Stevenson 1959, 00:22:30–00:22:44), was his claim, and he went to untold lengths to insist on its veracity. Darby O’Gill poses the question of perspective, and the external, American perspective on Ireland in the film is particularly manifest in the title of the love song, sung by Michael (Sean Connery) to Katie, called Pretty Irish Girl. If, in an Irish film set in Ireland, both characters were Irish, their nationality or ethnicity would be the unmarked form, and would not need to be made explicit. Marking the national adjective makes it evident that the film’s perspective wasn’t, ultimately, an Irish one.