I
All you punks and all you teds
National Front and natty dreads
Mods, rockers, hippies and skinheads
Keep on fighting ‘til you’re dead
Who am I to say?
Who am I to say?
Am I just a hypocrite?
Another piece of your bullshit
Am I the dog that bit
The hand of the man that feeds it?
Do the dog, do the dog
Do the dog, not the donkey
Do the dog, don’t be a jerk
Do the dog, watch who you work for
Do the do the do the do the dog
Everybody’s doing the dog
Take your F.A. aggravation
Fight it out on New Street Station
Master racial masturbation
Causes National Front frustration
Who am I to say?
To the IRA
To the UDA
Solider boy from UK
Am I just a hypocrite?
Another piece of your bullshit
Am I the dog that bit
The hand of the man that feeds it?
II
In the spring of 1981, I wore out the grooves on the first of many copies of The Specials debut album. The second song on side one is the infectious “Do the Dog.” Opening with an insistent wall-of-sound drumbeat, the tune fast becomes a skanking bop. But in the tradition of so much ska and reggae, the cavorting sounds mesh with socially pertinent lyrics, a volatile tale of man-made madness surging from Downing Street to war in a Babylon.
The year proved pivotal for director Steve McQueen, who in his first full-length feature film, the profound “Hunger,” chronicles the Maze Prison during the final months in the life of the Irish Republican Army’s Bobby Sands. As noted by Boston Globe journalist Christopher Wallenberg,
1981 is a year that British artist Steve McQueen will never forget, with the Brixton riots erupting in South London and his favorite soccer team, Tottenham, winning the FA Cup. But what he recalls most vividly about that time is sitting at his home in West London as an 11-year-old and watching disturbing news footage flow from the television set. Night after night, an image of a man with a number under his face glowed on the screen, and the number kept escalating with each passing day: 56 . . . 57 . . . 58. The number, McQueen learned, represented the total days since the man had last eaten while on hunger strike at the notorious Maze Prison in Northern Ireland.
III
An artist working most commonly in film since the early 1990s, McQueen won the Turner Prize in 1999. The centerpiece of his Turner collection was “Deadpan,” a 4-minute twist on the Buster Keaton bit where a wall from a barn-like structure crashes around McQueen as a large window cutout passes around his body. In his book on young British artists, “High Art Lite: British Art in the 1990s,” – which Ana Finel Honigman calls “an excoriation of the pop posturing beneath the yBa’s punk exterior” – Julian Stallabrass underscores that McQueen the artist is distinct from many of his contemporaries.
“His slow, hypnotic films, shot from strange angles – echoing early modernist innovations – and showing odd, sometimes ritualistic actions, leavened with issues of race, are a world away from high art lite.”
IV
In 2002, Steven McQueen made “Western Deep,” a 25-minute documentary style film which delved into the suffocating pit of a South African goldmine. He spoke to Libby Brooks of The Guardian about his objective for the audience.
“I’m throwing you right in at the deep end and you have to make your way. That gives people their own power because they are making sense of it by themselves, not being told.”
V
“Hunger” is a primal experience. McQueen retains that languid, hypnotic style. The film begins with very little dialogue as he composes small, delicate impressions: snowflakes on a bruised knuckle; a fly darting over fingertips stuck through a barbed window; and jail cell walls smeared in feces with artistic swirls. Deprivation and melancholy become tactile.
VI
McQueen empowers the audience by quickly documenting political prison life; the furtive transfer of contraband; the fetid blanket and bathing protests; and the violent reaction to dissent. (Perhaps it is not surprising that when a person is deprived, they use their food, their shit, their piss, their nakedness — their very essence — as weapons of disobedience.) Filmed with appropriate bluntness, the scenes of torture and brutality are unflinching.
VII
“Hunger” is reflectively visceral. So when Bobby Sands and Father Moran debate the principles of the hunger strikes in the film’s astounding centerpiece scene, it pierces the movie with brute force. Sands has invited his priest to the prison. But this is no confessional. Filmed in distant profile with the two sitting across from each other at a small table in a bare, antiseptic visitor’s room with diffuse light cutting through frosted windows, Sands and Moran battle verbally. That initial shot is held for no less than 10 minutes. Again, McQueen’s decision thrusts the viewer into the core of the conversation. Without the benefit of edits and varying camera angles, the attention to detail is in the words. Scripted by McQueen and playwright Enda Walsh, the dialogue doesn’t sound like a playwright’s fancy; it’s a defiantly genuine tussle. Michael Fassbender is unretractable steel as Sands while Liam Cunningham is forthright and impassioned.
VIII
The weight loss Fassbender endures for the role is unsettling and not made any easier to digest knowing he was supervised closely by a medical team during the filming. Known most readily for his sly turn as the best thing in the BBC supernatural series “Hex” and also familiar for his role as one of the strapping Spartans in “300,“ he delivers a transfixing and revelatory performance. Fassbender loses a massive amount of weight and the images of a painfully thin Sands in the prison infirmary in his last days are not easy viewing. Like Christian Bale in “The Machinist,” the performance does foment a debate about the extent an artist should go in their quest for realism in a portrayal.
IX
In 1995, McQueen made the short film “Five Easy Pieces.” In one portion of the film, he pisses directly into the camera. Mark Durden recalls in Parachute magazine that McQueen had been quoted as saying, “I wanted a situation where I was peeing while people, the audience, would be under me as it were — the dynamics of that situation.”
In “Hunger,” thankfully, McQueen has refrained from that youthful urge to purposefully antagonize. As a debut director, he has demonstrated a perceptive ability to refrain from the overly manipulative or the strident. Instead, he has molded an emotive subject into a meditative piece where the viewer can determine that the cloak of culpability covers all.
