Taking no prisoners

“Visceral: 1: felt in or as if in the viscera, deep, 2: not intellectual : instinctive , unreasoning, 3: dealing with crude or elemental emotions, 4: earthy."

I seem to use the word “visceral” a lot more lately. If someone had asked me what it meant, I think I would have said “bloody, tangible, of the body” with an edge of violence. But maybe this is because it is often used about violent scenarios. Brainyquote has a number of examples of ways that other people have used the word including Penn Jillette who said “When you're watching Psycho, there's that moment when you have a visceral reaction to watching someone being stabbed. And then you have the intellectual revelation that you're not, and that's where the celebration comes in.” Then I was kind of surprised when I looked up the Macquarie and their definition related solely to the biological: “soft interior organs in the cavities of the body, eg the brain, lungs, heart, stomach and intestines”.

The word certainly came to mind a lot when I was watching the film Hunger. Seeing this film is like been run over. In a very sophisticated way. It is very, very violent, as you would expect in a film about a prison. It’s about the decision of IRA prisoner Bobby Sands to go on a hunger strike in 1981 to protest the fact that IRA prisoners were being treated like the criminal class of prisoners by the prison authorities.

I vaguely remember this in the news but little about the story. It is just one large fragment in the very long and fuzzy set of news clips that form my understanding of Northern Ireland’s politics. A 31 year-old colleague had never heard of the IRA. She’s not uneducated; it‘s just that “the troubles” have been sorted to some extent and Northern Ireland is no longer a key part of daily news bulletins. When Bobby Sands was starving himself to death, I was learning to teach in Swan Hill; I had other things on my mind.

The film opens with a set of images and sounds that take the viewer right into the guts of the prison. (Guts- visceral!!!) You hear rather than see a rattling of pots and pans in a protest rally. The noise becomes deafening, nearly unbearable, even as the close-ups of the items being banged look like pieces in a factory assembly line, then we experience some of the daily rituals through a prison officer who soaks his bloody knuckles in water and checks the undercarriage of his car for bombs before leaving for work. This is the almost the only time we experience events outside the prison except for voice-overs by Maggie Thatcher that contextualise the British Government’s position and one other challenging scene that helps to further unsettle us.

The film is very claustrophobic; the action is both internal to the prison and internal to the body. It’s a film which seeks to explore what happened at one historical point in time, to one person, without providing much surrounding context. This is a very interesting strategy. We learn almost nothing about the larger context except that both the IRA and the British authorities were extremely violent in pursuit of their conflicting goals. I like the fact that it is so concentrated but wonder how it might be interpreted by people who know nothing about the politics. In this case it becomes almost solely a film about the decision to use your body as a tool for political activism. Does a man have the right to kill himself and lead others to their own suicides? Will it accomplish anything? Won't this just play into the hands of Margaret Thatcher? The broader range of questions which we might now apply to suicide bombers or to asylum seekers who sew their lips together etc.

The visceral part? The hunger strikers had tried a “no wash” campaign which included smearing their own shit on the walls of the cells and flooding the hallways with urine. They are forcibly washed by guards. There are maggots. The feeling of being in this with them is intensifies by the lack of dialogue which pervades the first third of the film. There is a lot of silence which heightens the impact for other senses.

This is the first film for director Steve McQueen who is apparently an accomplished and well known visual artist. The visuals are really compelling. He pictures the inmates in one scene as a large group of Jesus like figures – they have long hair, beards and bare chest and their gauntness reminds me of the many, many images of Christ on the cross. This image is reinforced towards the end of the film when Bobby Sands collapses in the bathroom and is carried back to bed by a guard, Pieta style. And towards the end of the film, we begin to occupy Sand’s body, maybe devouring it in the way that some organs might be cannibalising other parts of the body in a kind of hideous and desperate attempt to stay alive. We hear and see the world in a fuzzy disconnected way as Sands is dying. His body is covered with suppurating sores. It’s pretty ghastly and hard to sit through.

Many reviewers have commented on the set-up of the film- in 3 acts with an extraordinary dialogue in the middle between Sands and a priest. It’s not necessary for me to describe that here except that it’s brave to expect an audience to stay the distance. This part enables us to understand why Sands has decided to take this course of action. "Putting my life on the line isn't the only thing I can do—it's the right thing." It tells us a little of Sands’ background; from an early age, he has been able to make tough decisions.

This long scene is characteristic of the whole film in that I felt for Sands but not in a deep emotional way- I was horrified by what happened to him, by the choice that he felt he had to make, horrified by the conditions in the prison, by the brutality of life for everyone in the prison (guards and prisoners) but film style is extremely dispassionate. Because of the sort of person I am, I usually like to connect with the characters – this enables me to feel things deeply and I don’t think the film provides this opportunity to any extent. It doesn’t diminish the film but has made me reflect about how film–makers get into your psyche and what the most effective techniques are.

For me, the film Wendy and Lucy, which I saw at the film festival, does this best. That film forced the viewer to experience the same anxieties and tension as the main character, by moving slowly through her emotional landscape, feeling her vulnerability and the strength of character. Maybe in Hunger, we just experience the strength of character and not the vulnerability and this is why I am not as emotionally connected. WE can see that their bodies are vulnerable but they are so tough in the face of the brutality that it's hard to feel the emotional force of the experience.

Despite this, I admire the film and the director. It’s powerful and interesting. It takes no prisoners. It's worth the difficulty of sitting through.