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.

Lemon Tree

Yesterday, in the course of my work, I stopped to think about why the olive branch is a symbol of peace. Fortunately, at least for workplace efficiency, Wikipedia is at hand to respond to idle thoughts like this and it came up with the following; “In Western culture, derived from the customs of Ancient Greece, it (the olive branch) symbolizes peace or goodwill. The original link between olive branches and peace is unknown. Some explanations center on that olive trees take a very long time to bear fruit. Thus the cultivation of olives is something that is generally impossible in time of war.” So there. Not known. And then I thought a bit about Lemon Tree, a film that I saw last week.

The film, made by Israeli director Eran Riklis, explores what happens when the Israeli Minister of Defense and his wife move to a new housing development which is right next to an old grove of lemon trees owned by a Palestinian woman who has inherited the block from her father. The issue becomes one of security – how can a government minister be safe when it is so easy for terrorists to sneak through the grove and lob a grenade into his property? The lemon trees must go. So it’s about property, boundaries, rights, history, fences, large imposing fences, safety and also what happens to the little people in this large historical struggle. Riklis said somewhere that one of his inspirations for making the film was hearing the stories of Palestinian people who had taken their legal issues to the Israeli High Court. The article I read said that he thought that was a tribute to the Israeli justice system. Anyone watching the film will have their own views about that.

The film starts with the domestic. Widowed Salma, played by Hiam Abbass, is making preserved lemons. The camera pans in close as she chops the lemons and adds chilli and liquid. It’s a beautiful, intimate scene. Outside there is the clanking of furniture as two men deliver the furniture belonging to the Minister of Defence, confusingly named Israel, into their new house, overseen by his wife, Mira. By morning, a watchtower has been built, overlooking Salma’s grove and soon after, she receives a letter telling her that the trees must be cut down.

The plot around the receipt of the letter is particularly poignant. The letter is in Hebrew so she can’t read it. She must go to a Palestinian café to have it translated and we see her entering the all-male café, the resultant hush in the room, the offhand treatment from the Palestinian men who are drinking coffee, who let her know that she will lose her trees and also, that she must not accept the compensation offered by Israeli authorities – “We don’t accept their money.” Salma is alone.

Hiam Abbass’ portrayal of this woman is one of the most interesting things about the film. Abbass has a very beautiful strong face and it’s just wonderful seeing an older woman in a really strong role. She conveys strength, hurt, resilience and yearning so so well. I loved watching her. Riklis said that one of the reasons he made this film was his desire to find a good role for this actress – may she be in many more films. Terrible things happen to Abbass but I never felt emotionally manipulated by the film-maker. I felt for her without thinking of her as a victim because she does fight back against the order to lose her lemon grove.

At one stage, in court, she says ”I am a real person” and this is possibly the crux of the larger message; that for too long, people on both sides of this debate have demonised each other. The film also explores the experiences of Mira, the wife of the Minister. Both women are lonely; both have children in the United States and have seemingly little in their lives apart from their respective work. We sympathise with both women who have little power or input in the larger politics of this world.

The ending is particularly dramatic so I won’t give it away. It’s really powerful as a metaphor for what is happening in Israel at present. Maybe it’s naff to think about that Seekers song – “the fruit of the poor lemon – it’s impossible to eat” but somehow that fits with the ending. The fruit of this particular conflict does no one any favours. And is not likely to in the immediate future.

Rabbit, Run

What comes to mind when you think about the characteristics of a rabbit? For me the quality of timidity is uppermost so when John Updike talks about using the rabbit as a metaphor for his young protagonist in Rabbit Run, it’s not quite what I expected.

Rabbit, AKA Harry Angstrom, is 26. He feels like his life has already peaked. As Updike puts it; “You get the feeling you’re in your coffin before they’ve taken your blood out.” At school Rabbit was a basketball star but now he is a has-been, earning a living demonstrating a kitchen appliance, married to a girl who he feels little for and father of a child who figures little in his thinking.

It’s a brave book because the main protagonist is so rarely likable and we develop sympathy for, but no strong liking for most of the rest of the cast of characters. It’s a book written by a young man, about the life of a young man who is filled with impulse and a yearning for something that he can’t even articulate but it’s something like “Life’s gotta be better than this.”

The first part of the novel is a road movie. It feels like a movie, the camera sliding all over the place under a big starry sky and Rabbit ventures further out beyond his comfort zone although it is clear that the “comfort zone” of the town of Brewer is now a discomfit zone for him. I was scared reading it; I so wanted Harry to go home. He was so adrift in the universe and consequently ungrounded and vulnerable. Eventually he returns to Brewer but not to his wife and child. He hooks up with the first woman he meets, Ruth. He is hapless rather than opportunist but frustrating. I waited for him to begin to miss his little boy but 100 pages go by without a moment’s reflection about his son. John Updike said that he wrote Rabbit, Run in response to Jack Kerouac's On the Road, and tried to depict "what happens when a young American family man goes on the road – the people left behind get hurt.”

The novel is also brave, for the time period, in the way it depicts the character Ruth, who, of course, is the character I most responded to. She struggles to identify what is good for her and to stand up for herself; Updike depicts her internal battles really well even though she gets only a limited amount of time in the book. Harry is dangerous and even though she is pregnant, she does not readily let him back into her life. I found myself desperately wanting them to get together but this would be such a bad deal for Ruth. Harry is a very bad bargain. Why did I want this “happy ending”? The following sentence says it all – Ruth has told Harry that she is pregnant to him and that she thinks he would be bad news back in her life and yet there seems to be a slim opening – and all he can think about is food; “He nervously felt her watching him for some sign of resolution inspired by her speech. In fact he has hardly listened; it is too complicated and, compared to the vision of a sandwich, unreal.”

Updike's novel is noted as being one of several well regarded, early usages of the present tense. Updike stated that "in Rabbit, Run, I liked writing in the present tense. You can move between minds, between thoughts and objects and events with a curious ease not available to the past tense. I don't know if it is clear to the reader as it is to the person writing, but there are kinds of poetry, kinds of music you can strike off in the present tense." He also writes “At one point Rabbit is literally lost, and tears up a map he cannot read; but the present tense, to me as I began to write it, felt not so much ominous as exhilaratingly speedy and free – free of the grammatical bonds of the traditional past tense and of the subtly dead, muffling hand it lays on every action. To write “he says” instead of “he said" rebellious and liberating in 1959.”

I very much like Updike’s prose as well as his exploration of the domestic. American society is undergoing a quiet revolution but Rabbit, Run is preoccupied with the struggle with domesticity, with the familiar, the unsexy, the predictable, the honest, the true, the respectable. And maybe that’s what the larger changes in US society are about too but they don’t impinge on this novel except that we can see, from the contrast in generations, from the aging Springers and Angstroms, from Coach Tothero, that the next generation is yearning for something different.

His prose? Here is another example ”He comes onto the porch to find the boy between his grandmother’s legs, his face buried in her belly. In worming against her warmth he has pulled her dress up from her knees and their repulsive breadth and pallor, laid bare defensively, superimposed upon the tiny gamely gritted teeth the boy exposed for him, this old whiteness strained through this fine mesh, make a milk that feels to Eccles like his own blood.” (p136) David Boroff, in a review written in 1960, described it as “a tender and discerning study of the desperate and the hungering in our midst.” Updike is perhaps a little soft on Rabbit but he was young too when he wrote it.

I read a lot of the "Rabbit" books in my early 20's and it's a great pleasure coming back to them: I am hungry for the next one.