Big Trouble in Little Ireland
Steve McQueen's Hunger a masterfully stubborn anti-narrative
by John Packman
The bloody history between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, to which I shall refer hereafter as ‘the Troubles’, has served as dramatic inspiration for filmmakers like Neil Jordan, Ken Loach and Paul Greengrass, with varying degrees of success. One of the primary problems faced by any filmmaker attempting to compress the Troubles into a standard narrative feature is the multiplicity of ideologies and personalities involved; the biopic. genre, by its nature, deals in sentimentality and binary narrativization, qualities to which such a politically charged conflict is inherently resistant.
It seems fitting, then, that the best film that I’ve seen so far about the Troubles was not made by an established narrative filmmaker but by an installation artist previously best known for his experimental shorts. His name is Steve McQueen — not that Steve McQueen, Dad — and the film is called Hunger.
Hunger focuses on the Irish hunger strike of 1981, an event that galvanized the republican movement in Northern Ireland and brought it international attention. As the film progresses, the focus is further narrowed to Bobby Sands (played with an unsettling conviction by Michael Fassbender), the former IRA officer who organized the hunger strike while in prison.
McQueen seems intent on reclaiming the Troubles from the clutches of narrative homogenization by making a film that is stubbornly anti-narrative. Hunger is organized like a triptych of paintings, with three distinct sections, reinforcing its crypto-religious overtones, and Sands himself is not introduced to the audience until roughly halfway into the film.
The first section is a mostly dialogue-free examination of the daily routines of both republican prisoners and loyalist prison guards, and this is where McQueen really flexes his video-art credentials. The comfy sterility of public life and the squalor of prison life are examined with a chilly equanimity and a subdued editing rhythm that juxtaposes brutal violence and shit-smeared cell walls with smoke breaks and trips to see Mom at the old folks’ home; these repeated but slightly modified patterns of behavior have the same hypnotic quality as a Maya Deren film.
We learn very little about the prisoners or the guards, apart from a few revealing words and behaviours. McQueen is less interested in his characters as people than as signifiers, essentially reducing them to parts in a machine, and consequently reflecting the dehumanization experienced by sufferers of the Troubles back onto the audience itself.
Just when it seems Hunger has stretched this austere motif about as far as it can go, however, the film completely shifts gears, introducing us to Sands and showing us a lengthy argument between him and his priest (Liam Cunningham) about the morality and necessity of the hunger strike, the majority of which is shot in one unbroken take and contains the bulk of the film’s dialogue.
McQueen’s decision to omit Sands from the proceedings until this scene is crucial to the film’s success. While the other prisoners are characterized almost entirely by their physicality and its subsequent manipulation, Sands’ own suffering is heretofore unseen, reducing our impulse to immediately identify him as a righteous martyr; we are forced to evaluate him by his own words and little else. In this way, McQueen divorces the concrete elements of political martyrdom from its abstract ones; we see both the rhetoric and the physical reality of the republican protests, but the two are not commingled until Hunger’s final section, in which the meaning of the film’s title becomes gruesomely clear. (I should mention at this point that Hunger is not a very good date movie.)
While the film is less than perfect, occasionally veering towards hagiography in its visual representation of Sands’ suffering, McQueen’s formal rigor and sangfroid succeed in forcing his audience to see the Troubles in a new light. It’s not a particularly enjoyable experience, but it would be a failure if it were.
