Earlier this week (Tuesday) I watched the feature film Hunger on Channel 4. Directed by Steve McQueen, it had good reviews when it came out in 2008. The film is a study of the 1981 IRA hunger strike.
Although it had some exceptional moments, ultimately I found the film disappointing. I was hoping it would help to explain (even in a small way) what happened in Northern Ireland during the period 1968 to 1997. Unfortunately Steve McQueen seems to have settled for a work of propaganda.
I suppose I have worked in advertising too long, so that I know instantly when I am being sold to.
For instance, in a film that was effectively about bodies, we saw a shower scene which displayed the naked flabby bodies of the prison warders (a Union Jack keyring establishing that they were Unionists). A little later we saw the naked superbly-toned bodies of the IRA prisoners. This is, I'm afraid, dishonest characterisation.
In the film's powerful focal scene Bobby Sands and a Roman Catholic priest take it in turns to soliloquise (they are hardly talking to each other) the sunlight from the window behind them creating a beautiful golden nimbus around each of their heads. This is rubbishy cheap symbolism. Effective rubbish, but rubbish nevertheless.
More interesting (because more subtle) was the end scene. At the culmination of his hunger strike we saw Bobby Sands on the point of death - the bathos of sunlight on the prison bed, the crows calling, Bobby Sands seeing his 12-year-old self waiting for him to expire. The mysticism and references to the Death of Cu Chulainn were well done, although possibly owing a debt to Rosemary Sutcliff.
The film hinted at the probable narcissism of the hunger strikers, but left this unexplored. The scenes of violence were unconvincing (if you turned the sound down you could see how stylised they were). The film's emphasis on bodily excretions (tears, blood, ordure) reminded me of the medieval obsession with relics.
In the commercial breaks the bleak hunger strike was alternated with Jamie Oliver cheerfully advertising Sainsbury's range of Christmas food.
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