Everything about British artist Steve McQueen's extraordinary film Hunger holds surprises. For one there's the filmmaker himself and his famous doppelganger; it's hard not to banish the popular movie icon of The Getaway or any number of other action flicks. And after watching Hunger, it's tempting to assume or at least wonder if its author might be Irish.But Hunger is no easy work of art. (And whatever his name's origins, McQueen's visage immediately places him within the Grenadian and Trinidadian continuum that is his heritage.)
Whatever drove McQueen to focus on IRA prison protestor Bobby Sands and his infamous hunger strike at the Maze prison in 1981 remains mysterious. Yet the film — as much as the history that inspired it — is compelling, and horrific; distasteful to watch — depictions of the "dirty" protest prison cells smeared with excrement start early in the film — yet riveting and unforgettable. The uncompromising, deliberate attention to details reveals its strategy in one brief scene where prison guards in riot gear are brought in by the regular guards who spit on a mirror and polish it. McQueen seems to be doing much the same throughout the film: despoiling a looking glass and holding it up for both self-reflection and see-through perception. He invites the audience to look at the often gut-wrenching images he stages, at the actors in them, and at the responses the actors and images give rise to. The images of the prisoners — extremely thin, often naked, beaten — contrasts with the neatness of the prison guards.
McQueen's guards are not strutting sadists; they are grimly methodical. McQueen's empathy for the guards — his complicity with them — is revealed during a particularly harrowing sequence of beatings when one of the guards in riot gear is shown out of his helmet, tears streaming down his face. (In a 2009 interview in W magazine, McQueen revealed that he found himself in tears during this scene, experiencing the very real impact of the brutality enacted for the sake of verisimilitude.) In a rare sequence outside the prison, the guard who opens the film visits his mother in a nursing home. As he tries in vain to make contact with the person imprisoned within her immobile physical form, a man with a gun enters and without ceremony shoots and kills him. Nothing wakes the mother, nor does anyone interfere with the murderer. In another sequence, a guard wearing a dust mask dumps liquid on a floor oozing urine dumped out of their cells by the prisoners. As the guard systematically pushes the liquid along the hallway floor — sometimes choosing to shove it back under a cell door or two — the brutal conditions of the prison and its impact on guards and prisoners both are inescapable.
As for Bobby Sands, he is played by Michael Fassbender in a performance that makes Mickey Rourke's comeback in The Wrestler appear breezy by comparison. Fassbender's gaunt skeletal physique recalls images of Holocaust survivors. In a bath after starting the hunger strike that ends his life, he summons up David's famous depiction of Jean-Paul Marat. As A.O. Scott has noted in his New York Times review, Hunger calls up images from Renaissance artists. Yet it comes by its artistic and filmic references honestly. (Unlike the New Yorker's David Denby, I found neither creepiness nor preening aestheticization in Hunger's relentless gaze.) The squalor of the "dirty" protest — its dehumanizing effects — are depicted vividly enough to incite real outrage and discomfort.
