2.Main Content
Hunger
Steve McQueen's Hunger
Wed, 12 Nov 2008
Our regular Review column sees Trevor Johnston pulling apart a film every month to see how the script has made it work. This month he explores what it takes to make a 5-star award-winning Brit movie, and one that’s perhaps not as unconventionally drawn as it seems at first sight.
Steve McQueen’s Hunger
There are plenty of gurus with a recipe for screen storytelling. You know their names, and if you don’t a quick shufty at the screenwriting section of your bookshop or online emporium will tell you them. Their advice is that you need to learn the rules of film story before you break them. To wit the options are almost dizzying in their variety. Three-act or five-act structure? Seven-step or twenty-two step story? A mythic journey or a sequence-based approach?
There’s a wealth of valuable information and insight here, but anyone who rails against the very notion of formulae for artistry will be cheered to see Steve McQueen’s Hunger, a film which appears to take the celluloid rule book, eat it, shit it out, then smear it in a spiral pattern over a prison cell wall. Perhaps for those very reasons, it won the prestigious Camera ‘D’Or for best first feature in Cannes last May, and has been among the most loudly acclaimed and feverishly debated British films of the year. It’s undoubtedly a potent and provocative piece of cinema, but what does its unconventional form tell us about alternative modes of screen storytelling? And just how far outside the conventions does it actually stand?
Well, the usual wisdom would tell you to introduce the story’s central character rather earlier than the 20-minute mark of a 95-minute feature. It would also advise you not to place a 20-minute two-hander dialogue scene in the middle of the film. It might even hint of the dramatic devices you could call on to get the audience to identify with the protagonist’s dilemma, possibly suggesting the need for historical stories to be set within a carefully laid out dramatic context so the viewer can grasp the issues at stake. Director Steve McQueen and his co-writer Enda Walsh (one of Ireland’s most distinguished contemporary playwrights, as it happens) choose to ignore most of this, yet their film is still a communicative and compelling viewing experience. How come?
It all boils down to the fact that drama is conflict, and the film’s subject matter is a conflict with such high stakes that it doesn’t require over-dramatisation. It’s 1981, the Troubles are raging in Northern Ireland, Republican prisoners are engaged in a ‘dirty’ protest to achieve ‘political’ status, but the Thatcher government in Westminster will not budge. The Republicans may see themselves as Prisoners of War, but in the eyes of the authorities murder is murder and they are common criminals to be treated as such. Something has to give – enter Bobby Sands, an IRA man determined to break British will by starving himself to death. The outline of the situation is inscribed via a series of opening captions, followed by archive voiceover of those unmistakable Thatcherite tones. There’s undoubtedly less scene-setting here than a more conventional approach might provide, but we get enough information to understand the essence of the battle lines, and we’re off.
Michael Fassbender as Bobby SandsWhat then unfolds breaks down into three distinct sections:
(i) The Republican prisoners’ lot in the Maze, as experienced by new arrival Davey Gillen. The shit-smearing dirty protest is met by the prison officers’ programme of body searches, washing and hair-cutting, enacted with the assistance of baton-wielding riot police. One prisoner is particularly staunch in his protest and gets a beating for it – we then learn that he is Bobby Sands, a leader among the internees. The mental toll on the prison officers is explored too, as they face the possibility of IRA assassination. A brutal impasse.
(ii) Sands meets with Father Dominic Moran. Their lengthy dialogue begins with banter about the priest’s country upbringing and Sands’ own memories as a school cross-country runner on a trip to rugged Donegal. The mid-section of their conversation brings Sands’ announcement that he’s going on hunger strike, which the cleric decries because it appears a deliberate act of suicidal martyrdom rather than a serious gesture towards breaking the deadlock, yet Sand then reaffirms his certitude. After confrontation ebbs away, Sands returns to memories of the cross-country competition in Donegal and the strength of will he showed in the mercy killing of a stricken foal, an act he knew was instinctively justified even though it brought him blame from the supervising Christian Brothers.
(iii) Sands’ physical deterioration, and his treatment by prison staff – some compassionate, others not. His demise is followed by a caption outlining subsequent historical events, both the deaths of nine further hunger strikers and the sixteen prison officers murdered in the course of the overall ‘dirty’ protest.
On closer scrutiny, although this is by no means a drama scripted along classic lines, it does adhere to the fundamentals of three-act construction: problem – reaction – resolution. The conflict is set up for us from there we follow one man’s part in it to the bitter end. You might ask why the writers don’t follow Sands right from the start, yet as an already-established leader inside the Maze he doesn’t have newcomer Gillen’s same intensity of experience in realising what daily life on the ‘dirty’ protest actually entails. Moreover, it also appears that the writers want to keep us at some distance from the Sands character, preferring to restrict our emotional involvement with him in order that we can rationally assess the arguments he puts forth in the dialogue-driven mid-section – which comes as a much-needed moment to take stock after the pulverising physicality of the opening sequences.
Another relatively traditional device the writers employ is the sub-plot which throws light on the plight of the protagonist. The image of a man bathing his hands is our point of entry into the dilemma faced by prison officer Raymond Lohan, who loses his temper on a prisoner (we later realise it’s Sands) and punches a wall, hence making sense of the earlier shot of bleeding knuckles, now revealed to have been a flashforward. We see Lohan obviously broken up by the unleashing of this inner violence, and realise the stress he and his colleagues face when he’s brutally shot dead while visiting his mother in an old folks’ home. He made his choice as a public servant – is he a thug acting as the dupe of a failed state? Or is he a flawed human working for the betterment of his society? Either way, these questions are virtually the same for Sands and his chosen path – a thug acting as the dupe of a terrorist organisation? Or a brave individual working towards the betterment of his vision of society? McQueen and Walsh leave us to find our own answers, backing up its undoubted visceral effect with a thought-provoking absence of thematic resolution.
In a film which portions out most of its dialogue into one central chunk, the imagery acquires even more importance. The cycle of life inside is broken down into key units, shocking and to-the-point. Although part of the film’s impact derives from the spare potency of these scenes, it’s also enriched by a vein of nature imagery which both sets in context the value of a single human life, and highlights tensions between release and imprisonment. A rat, a cell-block fly, crows and the aforementioned foal spotlight the animal essence of living and breathing on this planet, while the sky imagery ties into the childhood memories of freedom in the Donegal countryside, and also prompts associations with resurrection – no coincidence, given the scenes of Christ-like scourging elsewhere. Whether this is pushed so far as to suggest that Sands somehow died to save his people is a leap that not all viewers will make, but the very provocation involved in such images puts the question on the agenda. A question for our own troubled times too, it hardly needs adding.
Whatever the individual viewer might conclude, it’s obvious that the film uses this image scheme to help tie together its constituent dramatic sections, which, for all the film’s eschewal of familiar audience/protagonist identification, still adheres to the traditional notion of working out a conflict through a linear narrative progression. Skeletal it might be, if extraordinary leading man Michael Fassbender can excuse the pun, but there is traditional storytelling here providing a foundation for the film’s otherwise intuitively particular approach.
Hints and Tips
You might think that Hunger is too idiosyncratic a project to offer much in the way of inspiration for would-be screenwriters following a more conventional path, but…
• Audiences quickly grasp the outlines of institutional conflicts, in which case the astute selection of images can carry the story forward to powerfully expressive effect. The crunch of a baton on human skin or the crack of bone against a wall says more than any outpouring of dialogue.
• When constructing a drama which is about ideas, you need the space to let those ideas out, in which case there’s a need to cool down the emotional temperature to create a context where the head can again rule the heart. The contrasts in ‘Hunger’ are certainly more extreme than you’ll find elsewhere, but the principles still apply.
• Don’t be frightened to write scenes where the imagery may not necessarily take the plot forward but contributes to an ongoing pattern of meaningful pictorial connections adding to the overall richness of the piece. If the images and ideas are strong enough, they should pay their way in the end.
©Trevor Johnston/The Script Factory 2008
If you'd like to discuss this review with Trevor Johnston you can email him at info@scriptfactory.co.uk - and to read other reviews by Trevor click here.
HungerThe extraordinary Hunger was produced by Laura Hastings-Smith who, in addition to being an award-winning producer, is also one of The Script Factory's current 'Friendly Producers'. For a chance to have a development meeting with Laura as part of the scheme, click here.