6th
Hunger (2008)
Hunger is mostly technique and provocation, but I would not discourage you from seeing it. I walked out after the film telling my friends that “I might hate it.” The more time I place between myself and the film, the more certain I am that that sentiment was correct. “Hate” is what I feel for this film. But at least that’s a reaction; a much more potent, valuable one than ambivalence. Steve McQueen’s film may have bristled my nape, but one can’t actively dislike a thing without considering, pondering, and puzzling over it. The film, unlovable though I find it, is impossible to ignore. Ostensibly concerning Bobby Sands’ hunger strike in Her Majesty’s Gulag the Maze Prison, the film is really about dolly tracks and rigid focus pulls. McQueen very coolly, with a young pharmacist’s accuracy, records the decay and destruction of men’s bodies. Bleeding prisoners moan and yell; crying guards inflict deep wounds; noble Sands wastes from skeleton, to leather sack, to dust. All these actions are recorded with a professional delicacy, the camera standing rigid next to suffering like a mortician next to a grieving widow. We see the content very clearly, but the lighting, the melodic camera movements, and the Quality color timing all conspire to remove from us any capacity for empathetic response. Little of the movie registers as at all human. Some of it is shocking, like a fallen tree appearing in headlights before a speeding car, but it is rarely human. The acts of brutality and suffering are like medical indecencies done to test animals: we care in an abstract, viscerally instinctive way, but never in a specific, personal one. This is of course McQueen’s goal, and he achieves it near totally. He has done what he set out to do: render bodies under duress, no more and no less. While I can applaud his achievement, I cannot support his artistic intentions. See the film and decide for yourself. You may love it, and think it important. Good. You may hate it, and hope to forget it. Better. Either way, I expect you’ll have something better to talk about at lunch than the latest episode of the Biggest Loser.
