“Come out ye Black and Tans,” the Irish rebel song adjures, in response to the British Army’s occupation of Ireland and the barbarity suffered by many at the hands of British jurisdiction over centuries. The struggle to regain their status as a republic was a long, bloody, and tempestuous road.
Beginning with the Anglo-Norman invasion in the 12th century, the British constitution oversaw the great famine in the mid-1800s where over one million people perished due to starvation and the forced export of Irish produce, before culminating in the Irish War of Independence in 1921. After the Irish republic was founded, and the land of Saints and Scholars was freed from the shackles of British rule, attention turned to Northern Ireland and the civil unrest between loyalists and republicans, Catholics and Protestants.
The Legacy of Bobby Sands
Bobby Sandsis a name often revered; he is to the Irish what Che Guevara is to Cubans. A revolutionary and freedom fighter, politician, and poet, Sands became a political prisoner, incarcerated by the British state and by the system that had historically persecuted his people. Having fought arduously for the reunification of the republic and Northern Ireland, Sands led the 1981 hunger strike, which resulted in his death and subsequent martyrdom.
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Following the recent census in Northern Ireland, for the first time in the country’s history, the number of Catholics outweighs the number of Protestants. It’s a statistic that certainly strengthens the hopes for a referendum toward independence, and is in no small part owed to the tireless protestations of Sands and men similar to him. In Steve McQueen’s 2008 political dramaHunger,starringMichael Fassbenderas Sands, we are given an unembellished portrayal of the reality of the ‘81 hunger strikes at the Maze prison in County Down.
Hunger Tells Sands' Story in a Painful Way
Director Steve McQueenhas an avidity for exposing the horrors of humanity, exploring the utter depravity of certain, prominent historical events. From12 Years a SlaveandShametoSmall AxeandHunger, McQueen seldom shy’s away from portraying life’s grim realities and utilizes extreme techniques to get his point across on-screen.
Hungeris a tangibly harrowing tale, a sensory overload that you can practically smell, touch, and taste, from the human excrement wallpapered on the cell’s interior to the prolonged sound of this deafening silence that erodes away at your ears as the trauma unfolds in front of disbelieving eyes.
Hungerisn’t a film that only exists to offer an exploration of the treatment of political prisoners, and the lengths the prisoners went to in order to protest; no, it’s a movie thatincarcerates its audience too. It locks us up and throws away the key. We are starved, beaten, humiliated, and mocked in the most undignified, grotesque manner imaginable. Dragged naked along freezing corridors, subjected to the brutalist regime of the prison guards, and forced to endure the hardship experienced by Sands himself.
Michael Fassbender Gives a Perfect Tribute to Bobby Sands
Fassbender’s illustration of Sands as a man guided by the strictest virtuosity in the face of such adversity is both compelling and hauntingly unforgettable. Consuming a meager 900 calories a day in preparation for the role, the German-born andbrilliantly multilingual actorunderwent one of the mostextreme body transformations any actorcould, shedding a staggering 40lbs. He cut a skeletal figure onscreen, and it emphasizes so viscerally the level of self-torture the real Sands had the will power to endure.
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In a film littered with symbols and iconography of the stark degradation of the situation the hunger strikers had felt so strongly to place themselves in, the most distressing element of McQueen’s gritty portrait is watching the starving Sands as he wastes away into this feeble, gaunt, and malnourished shell: unresponsive and energy-deprived, he was essentially the walking dead. Plates of uneaten food were placed near what would become his deathbed, in the hope he would succumb to his own temptation. He never did.
In an act of absolute defiance and unbending resistance, the film documents his final days as a man prepared to forsake his own life, which was still so full of hope, to salvage the hopes of his people and fighting for a better future, even if it meant ending his own.
Hunger’s 17-Minute Shot Reflects its Staggering Achievements
Hungerincorporates a series of sequences in its essentially tripartite structure, each more momentously haunting than the last. Yet, aside from the dirty protests, and Sands’ violent haircut, the scene halfway through the film in which Sands sits opposite Father Dominic Moran (Liam Cunningham) is arguably one of the most poignant. “A little break from smoking the Bible… you worked out which bit is the best smoke?” Moran jovially says to a topless Bobby, awaiting a proper cigarette after rolling so many of his own with the only paper he had.
The verbal jousting between the pair in an under-lit visitation room is the only real let-up of the entire film. Yet, even in the face of a man with more experience and ostensibly a greater social position, Sands somehow manages to hold the priest’s attention and even earn his amazement. Theone-take scene doesn’t breakfrom the atmospheric wide shot for an unprecedented 17-minutes until Sands begins his monologue on the dying foal, and the genesis story of his steadfast belief to always do what is right.
Hungerisn’t a film you’ll probably ever want to watch again; you’ll never forget it anyway, so it almost seems unnecessary. An important film about an important man, it makes its point, it shocks you, and it is so indelible that, like the fecal-stained walls in its grimy prisons, it remains permanently etched on the walls of your memory.
