Hunger
Hungry for a Cause
Writing on the Troubles, Ed Mahooney speaks about the agonising deaths of hunger strikers in 1981, and that within minutes of Bobby Sands’ demise, ‘’the darkened streets of nationalist Belfast were echoing the crash and thump of exploding gasoline bombs tossed by rioters and the shud of plastic bullet guns being fired by police and troops.’’ Mahoney notes that ‘‘Sands’ funeral three days later was the largest political demonstration probably in living memory, as tens of thousands of nationalists poured in from all over Ireland to pay homage to the dead IRA man, by now rapidly assuming an iconic status.’’ (The Secret History of the IRA)
Yet Steve McQueen’s Hunger, co-written by Enda Walsh, isn’t at all a monumental account of an Irish martyr; it is instead an exploration of the body’s fragility, with the director seeking from historical reality, images that can help us understand an inverted resistance, one that seeks in one’s own body the power to destroy a counter-force that it cannot defeat using its body positively, but only negatively. This doesn’t mean, at the same time, that Sands (Michael Fassbinder) and other hunger strikers were starving themselves to death, that others in the Irish Republican Army weren’t using more forceful means. An end credits point out that sixteen prison officers were killed by paramilitaries during this period, and the film shows very brutally one officer, who has temporarily been our leading character, shot in the back of the head while visiting his catatonic mother. While all around scream, yell and rush from the room, there we see the dead son, and the mother covered in blood, as oblivious to events moments before the killing as she is now. Whether depriving oneself of food or taking out your enemy in the most merciless way, these are deemed necessary in the fight for an independent Irish state.
What matters most to McQueen, it seems, isn’t the desire for freedom, but the escape from oppression and, of course, this is central to many nationalist movements that oughtn’t to be confused with ultranationalist ones, with the latter often based on blood and soil beliefs, and the superiority of their race and culture over others. There clearly isn’t a categorial dividing line between one and the other, but to conflate the two is far more troublesome than to assume a distinction. While white supremacists might feel they are put-upon and undermined, evidence usually suggests the contrary. ‘‘Modern white Americans are one of the most powerful groups of people to ever exist on this planet, and yet those very people—or, if you’re white, you people—staunchly believe that the primary victims of modern racism are whites.’’ (Vice) But a ‘’study also notes, ‘by any metric—employment, police treatment, loan rates, education—stats indicate drastically poorer outcomes for black than white Americans.’ White perception and the reality are completely at odds.’’ (Vice) Liam de Paor compares the situation to that of blacks and whites in the USA: 'In Northern Ireland, Catholics are blacks who happen to have a white skin.' (Divided Ulster) Christopher Hewitt quotes de Paor, but insists this comparison was not useful. ‘’The civil rights demonstrators wanted reforms. Yet the violence was not reduced in the slightest by a 'one man one vote' franchise [...]There are two reasons for this: first, since the old system was not particularly inequitable, reforms could not have much impact, second, the nationalists who predominated in the movement were not really interested in reforms.’’ (The British Journal of Sociology) Hewitt ended up in a back-and-forth with another writer, Dennis O’Hearn, and Hewitt claimed that it was Catholic nationalism and not discrimination that led to the Troubles, rather than the other way round. Hewitt reckoned O’Hearn underestimated certain aspects, like the predominance of Catholic unemployment in a country that was far from rich, despite its attachment to the United Kingdom.
To enter into this debate would take us far away from the film, but what we can say is that Hunger is far more interested in personal oppression than nationalist liberation. And while some might see in this a one-sided account of a political situation, with the forces in favour of the Irish cause over the British government, even the Daily Telegraph reviewer acknowledged, ‘Without taking sides or sanctifying terrorism, he [McQueen] successfully plunges us into the psychological landscapes of the early 1980s.’’ But the film appears less an even-handed account – who in the film is likely to see the murdered prison officer’s demise as on the same level of feeling as Sands’? – than an insistently fragile one.
This is evident from the beginning, as McQueen lightly wrong-foots the viewer when he shows us a man’s wounded hands plunged into water. We have no idea why they are bruised and cut, and we don’t know of the man’s political affiliations, his religious inclinations, or his job. A few minutes later, we have a better idea, perhaps, as he checks the underside of his car. Car bombings weren’t the exclusive domain of the IRA; the Ulster Volunteer Force used them as well. Yet they were more often associated with the catholic movement than protestant paramilitaries. Shortly after, we see him in a prison uniform, and not too long after that, we see him mete out the violence that would have been why his hands were damaged. An initial moment of concern for a pair of hands gives way to our dismay later about how Raymond (Stuart Graham) damaged them in the first place. All inferences point in this direction.
McQueen isn’t showing sympathy towards this prison officer; he is showing concern for a pair of hands that we then accept belong to someone who damages them by beating prisoners up. It is a Bressonian touch, of course, with the great French director Robert Bresson, both a master of hands and no less interested in inference. He often wanted the viewer to build a scene with elliptical images that the viewer will complete in their mind. As Bresson says when speaking on the importance of fragmentation: ‘‘See beings and things in their separate parts. Render them independent in order to give them a new dependence.’’ (Notes on the Cinematographer) McQueen asks us to muse over the images empathically, at first, and then later removes that initial compassion as Raymond shows none towards the prisoners, and uses those hands as fists. When he goes on to lose his life, it isn’t much of a loss to the viewer, even if it isn’t quite the same as insisting this is a vengefully satisfying moment.
Whatever one’s personal response to a given work ethically, there are plenty of films that aim to put us in a vengeful mood because of the mode of narrative that insists upon it. Nobody doubts that Mad Max, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and Django Unchained offer identificatory vengeance, and the film’s cause-and-effect system insists we identify with the characters seeking it. In Hunger, when the hitman goes into the retirement home and plugs the prison officer, the viewer has no idea whether this is specifically because of the beatings he has been administering, or because he happens to be supporting, generally by his job, a side that is antithetical to the IRA cause. If we knew it was the former, we might see understandable vengeance; if the latter, fret over its randomness. After all, we see one young officer who is horrified by a very orchestrated abuse, and the film shows in two very deliberate framings this figure retreating from committing the brutal acts. In the first, the film shows us the young officer in the frame on the right against a blue wall, the wall on the left white, with the colour contrast creating a perfectly symmetrically blocked frame. In the second. McQueen shows us a prisoner getting beaten, screen left, while the young man is behind the wall, screen right. The abuse takes up about two-thirds of the frame, and the wall and the sobbing officer the remaining third. Within the framing, McQueen wants to make it clear this is an innocent man in an abstract system, and we might have felt rather more for him had he been the one the hitman takes out.
These framings might seem like overly aestheticised images within a film that is looking at a particularly terrible time in Northern Irish history, but better perhaps to see the attention to framing, and the editing fragmentation, as the director’s attempt to understand the vulnerable, without denying the political. Bobby Sands wasn’t dying for anything less than a very strong purpose, but this is secondary to what the film focuses upon: the fragility of bodies in their various political and religious manifestations. McQueen may not go so far as Alan Clarke in Elephant, who reduces the political to the narratively abstract and the emotional to the distressing, as he bluntly shows a series of hits, a little like the one we see in Hunger. But this is all we see, shooting after shooting, with Clarke taking full advantage of the Troubles, often being a struggle fought by people in civilian clothing. Watching Elephant, we have no idea who the Catholics are, who the Protestants are, who the IRA are, or who the UDA are. In Hunger, the killer’s clothing gives no indication of his loyalties, and he isn’t even wearing a mask as he carries out the hit. But he is shooting a prison officer, and most prison officers were protestant.
If we might believe that the officer’s death is a consequence of his actions, it rests on inferential causality rather than categorical causality. When Django seeks to avenge the slave owner and rescue his beloved, the viewer is in no doubt why he is doing it; hence, categorical causality. But the killer in this scene hasn’t been seen before and won’t be seen again, and we have no idea whether he shoots Raymond for his brutal treatment of prisoners, or more generally because Raymond is working for the British government. Yet what is often central to inferential causality is that the audience will see a cause and effect where we don’t know for sure that characters have the same access. The officer’s death follows the sequence where the prisoners are beaten, so that as viewers we can feel the murder is ‘deserved’. But we don’t know if it is causal, and in feeling it is justified as revenge for what has happened to the prisoners, then we will perhaps infer causality as well, even though we are doing so because of the construction of images, not the construction of motives, to which we aren’t privy.
When we say that the officer deserves it, this isn’t to embroil ourselves in the politics of Northern Ireland, nor to agree with murdering fellow human beings. It is a question of film grammar meeting assumption, not too far removed from the questions film has asked for much of its history. When someone gets off a train and, in the next shot, we see them wandering around London, we will assume that this is where the train arrived, even though it could have been in Birmingham, and days later, they took another train to the English capital. Even if all the evidence suggested the train station was in Birmingham (with numerous Brummie accents), the viewer would still be likely to ignore this, as the cut from someone getting off the train to crossing Westminster Bridge, or looking at Big Ben, will allow conventional inferences to prove stronger than observational acuity. Our point is to say that how images are constructed dictate how we might have a belief concerning them. Nobody may deserve to die, but in filmic terms, Raymond deserves his, even if nobody within the film may have deliberately arranged to have him killed because of his immediately preceding actions.
It gives the film a fragility of meaning that can ally itself to the vulnerability of the bodies. If we insist the film isn’t an account chiefly of Irish martyrdom, this isn’t only because it doesn’t call itself Bobby Sands (as Neil Jordan called Michael Collins by that name), but it also doesn’t introduce us to Sands until twenty-five minutes into the film. Other films about the Troubles, like Cal and In the Name of the Father, might focus on minor or innocent figures, yet they are still central to the narrative. When we see Bobby, he is promptly given perhaps the most brutal haircut in cinema, even more so than the famous opening in Full Metal Jacket, where Stanley Kubrick shows us head after head having hair removed. Here, Raymond grabs a large pair of scissors, and while another man pins Sands’ head to a stool, the officer hacks away at his lengthy locks. In Kubrick’s film, it registers that these men’s identities no longer belong to them, they belong to the army, while Sands and the other prisoners’ long hair runs contrary to the generally shorter cuts of the prison officers. These prisoners are army men too, but their long hair is a sign of their identities allied to the Irish Republican Army, and their actions within the film are predicated on seeing themselves as political prisoners, while the British government insists they are instead common criminals. Thatcher says ‘‘There is no such thing as political murder, political bombing or political violence. There is only criminal murder, criminal bombing and criminal violence. We will not compromise on this. There will be no political status.’’ McQueen doesn’t show us footage of the prime minister Margaret Thatcher in parliament: we hear her voice over three empty shots: one, showing the bathroom where soon Bobby will have his hair shorn; another as the snow falls in the prison courtyard, a third showing trees at night.
While Thatcher insists these are no more than criminals, one might insist that while the typical felon is selfish, as they take from others in one form or another what doesn’t belong to them, the political prisoner is usually self-sacrificing: seeing in a cause something greater than their own self-interest. (Hence the possibility of martyrdom) Thatcher fails to make this distinction, and while self-interest may have on occasion been at work, or at least payment for political action, this still seems far away from the criminal. Interviewing those involved in the struggle, Peter Taylor notes that money came from the south of Ireland to the north and was used, for example, to pay people who were on the frontline. ‘‘Most of the money went to pay the men manning the barricades [...] People at the time couldn’t draw the dole who were on the dole because the situation that existed in Belfast. They had no other means of keeping bread on the table other than getting moneys in that way.’’(States of Terror) This then might contain an element of self-interest for the purposes of self-preservation, but stealing from the fund would have been criminal activity, not manning the barricades and receiving a stipend for doing so. Whether Sands and others were criminals, the film makes clear they weren’t self-interested, and not only did Sands die for the cause of Irish nationalism, but he was made an MP during his hunger strike. Thatcher may have regarded him as a criminal, but the people voted democratically to suggest he was not.
Thatcher’s nickname was, of course, The Iron Lady, and McQueen thinks the steeliness was evident enough without her physical presence. ‘‘The voice is so powerful, so you didn’t need to show her face. I wanted to remain in the prison and I didn’t want the situation where there were punctures in that concentrated situation. To have her voice – the voice is almost like vapour – is very strong.’’ (Tate) Her role here is to contribute to the impassive force of the state, not singularize her into a personality. The purpose of the film is to show two opposing forces: the abstract body of the state apparatus and the actual bodies of the prisoners. If Raymond’s shooting is so brutal, it doesn’t just rest on seeing the blood spattered over his mother, and the elderly guests screaming and scrambling in all directions. It is also because the film shows that the violence towards the prisoners is expected; towards the officers, unexpected, no matter that both are equally foreshadowed. Whether it is Raymond looking under his car to see if there is a bomb, or the prison officers standing lined up against both walls in full riot gear, ready to batter and bruise the passing, naked prisoners as they are forced to run the gauntlet, McQueen tells us that violence is possible in the first instance and imminent in the second. But while the prisoners’ beatings will be expected, given the harsh environment McQueen presents to us, and where other abuses have already been meted out, the retirement home is a benign environment. The prison is harsh, with stark blocks of colour and echoey corridors. The home is carpeted and hushed, and Raymond is presented at his most gentle while speaking to a mum with whom he cannot interact. If he wants silence from the prisoners, he hopes for sound from his mother. Instead, all he gets, moments after arriving, is the sound of a gunshot as a bullet enters the back of his head.
To call him Raymond as we call Bobby Bobby might seem an error of critical judgement, as though we are emphasising his personal qualities when the film’s purpose is chiefly to give him an impersonal aspect. But to offer his full name, Raymond Lohan, would risk elevating him to the same status as Bobby Sands. The former is a fictional composite; the latter, a name that has entered history. Yet within the film’s context, Bobby is very much on first-name terms with his own bodily reality, while Raymond looks alienated from his and can feel only anger and pain: anger as he takes it out on the prisoners, and pain while he nurses those hands that have no cause beyond immediate irritation. He may have a Union Jack key ring, which we see when he opens his locker, but this hardly suggests a sense of political purpose that Sands possesses.
Early in the film, Raymond is at home and his off screen wife plonks in front of him a full English breakfast: two rashers of bacon, two sausages, a fried egg. On one side is a cup of weak tea with milk; on the other, toasted white bread. It might not be the most appetising of dishes, and far from the healthiest, but it will satiate the officer’s hunger with its protein-rich focus as he later goes and uses a bit of muscle on the prisoners. Yet it also reflects a twofold lack of hunger in Raymond that is evident in Bobby. Raymond’s home environment seems sterile, empty and fearful. There is no suggestion that he and his wife have kids; the streets are empty when he goes to get into his car, and his wife looks on fearfully behind net curtains as he gets into it and turns the ignition. Another day that blends the horribly mundane with the frighteningly unpredictable.
In contrast, Bobby’s hunger is for a cause he believes in, and the absence of sustenance is a necessary deprivation that allows him to protest for prisoners’ rights with so little other means of power at his disposal. If the biblical injunction insists that man must not live by bread alone, this is usually couched within the context of higher spiritual values accompanying that bread. But Sands and other hunger strikers decide to live without that bread, and for a purpose best expressed just after the well-known single take sequence where Bobby talks with a priest, as the film moves from a side-elevation medium-length two-shot to close-ups. Bobby is speaking about a trip he took to the south, and while there, he went down to the stream with other kids. Lying in the water is a foal several days old, and clearly in a lot of pain and barely alive. Some kids suggest dropping a rock on its head, but Bobby looks in their eyes and sees they are either very scared or completely clueless. They think they are leaders, but they are not. A priest arrives and tells them to get away and leave the foal alone, but Bobby takes the foal’s head, pushes it under water and as it thrashes beneath him, dies. The priest grabs him by the hair and promises him a proper thrashing. Yet Bobby doesn’t care. He knows he has done the right thing by the foal, and knows too that he can take the punishment, aware that, from his perspective, he took responsibility.
All this is offered in a further, lengthy close-up, with Fassbinder speaking through gritted teeth, a phrase often enough used but rarely quite containing the will behind such a notion. Fassbinder’s face indicates that will, just as he went through his own hunger pangs while acting the role. He lost 40lbs from an already slim position, and was eating initially 900 calories before imbibing 600, as he needed to push the weight down still farther. Discussing this on the DVD extras, he has, of course, survived to tell the tale, and it was necessary he did, just as it was almost equally necessary that he lost the weight. After shooting for a month, the film shut down for ten weeks as Fassbinder pursued his diet plan.
Obviously, Fassbinder didn’t need to die for a cause that is no more (nor no less) than an art work, but he did have to convey in his emaciated body a will towards this possibility, just as the actor playing Raymond needed to do no more than don a prison uniform and look like he was happy to tuck into some bacon, sausage and eggs (and Graham does it very well. It isn’t a negligible performance.) Saying just a word about the respective actors’ commitment allows us to say something about the different expectations in the situation in Northern Ireland. One may come away from the film with the same political beliefs one possessed going into it, but few could come out believing that the Iron Lady’s will was as strong as Bobby Sands’, and no matter how many beating Lohan doles out before his demise, that the risks Lohan took as he would look under his car each day, were for a cause he probably wouldn’t have been able to articulate with the eloquence Sands offers here. Bodily, we are with Sands, and the sacrifices he makes for a cause he will die for, under the assumption that bread alone cannot sustain him, even if its absence will be the death of him too.
© Tony McKibbin