Hunger

I’ve a film to recommend. It's called Hunger, and it is the first cinematic feature from a British visual and video installation artist named Steve McQueen. (Ah, the irony of such a name when attached to such a film!) Hunger examines the existential condition of IRA prisoners in a Northern Irish prison in 1981. The prisoners, seeking political status, are in the midst of a no wash, no clothing strike; their prison behavior, not unlike their lives on the outside, are governed by a single principle: absolute defiance of authority. McQueen retains the consecration of image and visual composition that befits an artist, while largely jettisoning the experimentation at the heart of video installation. The result is a haunting, beautiful, and deeply affecting portrait of brutality and disobedience that both ennobles and critiques the spirit of men who elevated resistance and intransigence to the level of religious observance.

The film is replete with austere and revelatory imagery: a guard canted against an exterior prison wall, smoking a cigarette while snow swirls about, his face betraying the moral ambivalence he feels toward his work; an inmate anchored in the wan light of a broken window, languidly fretting a fly with his index finger, desperate for contact beyond the confines of his cell; the same guard’s hands, livid and swollen by administered beatings, plunged into a sinkful of hot water, a thin cumulus of red rising in the water as he exhales with pain.

McQueen creates an aesthetic of discomfort and degradation that registers every instance of suffering and indignity in the prison as both affront to conscience and celebration of endurance. The inmates, through their capacity for suffering and refusal to be demoralized, hope to convince prison officials to grant them de facto political status (only Margaret Thatcher held that authority in the real world), thereby sanctioning the legitimacy of the IRA’s violent campaign. McQueen, perhaps, hoped to have a similar effect on viewers, forcing degradation upon them so as to inspire outrage—few films seek so plainly to upset their audiences. McQueen’s camera flinches at nothing, and Hunger walks a fine edge between the sort of strict realism where every detail, no matter how gruesome, must be documented and a fetishization of the grotesque and repellent.

At some point in the film, however, one begins to question the actions and motivations of the prisoners. Their defiance, so ingrained, becomes a sort of pathology, and the fundamental dignity of their resistance is degraded by an anarchical spirit. They seem to forfeit some measure of their humanity: smearing excrement on the walls, bestially reveling in squalor and filth and nakedness, and resorting to a reflexive violence in every encounter with prison staff. Did the prison reduce them to this state, or does the absolute rejection of human authority demand reversion to an animal consciousness?

If the prisoners’ defiance becomes a sort of disease that gradually rots their center, then Bobby Sands is that center, an apotheosis of the pathology that afflicts them. He is their leader: when prison officials agree to permit the IRA prisoners to wear civilian clothes, it is Sands who first bellows disapproval when the clothes they are handed prove to be a garishly colored and patterned mockery. His bellow ignites an orgy of destruction in the prisoners’ new, bargained for, clean quarters; they trash the cells in a scene of kinetic fury reminiscent of Samuel Fuller’s Shock Corridor, another film about the violence of institutions. The prisoners return to nakedness and squalor.

Sands, frustrated with the ineffectiveness of other methods, calls, and is the first casualty of the hunger strike that inspired the film’s title and ultimately claimed the lives of nine other prisoners before its termination. He lasts sixty-six days before succumbing; in the last third of the movie, McQueen dutifully documents the excruciating decline of his corpus. Michael Fassbender, the actor portraying Sands, required both a doctor and dietician to monitor his condition as he attempted to physically reproduce, onscreen, the effect of starvation on the human body. We watch Fassbender, as Sands, waste to a sunken, semi-conscious shadow. His breathing is labored, his backside mottled with oozing bedsores. A doctor rubs ointment into his sores, and he convulses with the pain. We convulse too, understanding the pain to be real.

Some critics have suggested that the film’s treatment of Sands is a sort of deification or canonization; in reality, McQueen casts a sober eye on his conduct. He is both sympathetic and skeptical of Sands’ decision; it is heroic in its courage and infuriating in its obstinacy and selfishness. Sands’ parents are given quarters in the prison hospital in his last days. In the end they watch him die, baffled and devastated. Ultimately, Sands death proved politically futile, his grand statement doomed from the start. Though the deaths of the ten prisoners inspired international outrage, their compatriots were never granted political status, and few in the world needed further evidence that the British were bastards. It took eighteen more years to reach an agreement to end “The Troubles,” and another six to implement it. Sands, who demanded an independent Northern Ireland, would not have supported the agreement, which left his country in British hands.

Is a man blindly devoted to principle, willing to die for that principle, a hero or a fool or worse? It is a question Hunger dramatizes poignantly: Are Sands and his fellow IRA inmates paragons of resolution and devotion, or dangerously deluded in their steadfastness? Their spirit and commitment to their tactics in the face of unspeakable brutality and repression is undeniably admirable and even inspiring; one wonders how their Protestant keepers can hold out any hope of ever subduing a movement so irrepressible and unshakably centered in its conviction. We are accustomed to the gilding of our cinematic men of principle; however, through Hunger we see the man of principle darkly. Sands didn’t understand or appreciate that political battles aren’t won through force of will, by single acts, no matter how impressive. They are won, rather, by compromise, and Sands was constitutionally incapable of acknowledging this. Gandhi, no stranger to the protracted fast, understood it, and he got an independent India, albeit a compromised one. Sands, courageous to the last, got streets named in his honor, but Northern Ireland is still part of the UK.