We live the death aesthetic

Sometimes it’s necessary to be manipulated by a film, to be creased and folded into submission; to be shocked and awed; to be emotionally terrorized. Hunger does all of these and then some.

If you choose to see this powerful movie—and you should—it will shake you to your core.

The debut film by renowned British video artist Steve McQueen explores the space inside the infamous “Maze” prison of 1981. At the time, the building housed arrested revolutionaries of the Irish Republican Army, who were vying for political recognition through massive and self-mutilating “strikes,” which were a response to the dehumanizing conditions already at play in the prison.

As the film opens we are presented with a man soaking his hands in water. On closer inspection we see that his knuckles are scabbed and rough. Later, we learn why. Beating prisoners, it turns out, is tough on one’s hands. That too is why he checks for car bombs.

Eventually, the story of the guard, told in tightly arranged and edited shots that are almost entirely free of dialogue, transitions into the life of a new prison inmate, told in much the same way. He refuses to wear prison clothing, so goes naked with only a blanket. As he enters his cell, we see the effects of another “strike.” His longhaired, bearded cellmate has smeared the walls with feces, and instructs him to save urine to use as raw material for protest.

The message: They can’t take way our humanity if we do it first.

In these first two segments, McQueen does an amazing thing: He uses painterly detail and careful composition to aestheticize suffering. Normally, I abhor this instinct, but here, it makes Hunger richer and more engaging.

Instead of just prodding us with the question, “Is torture ever acceptable?” it confronts: “Is watching this movie acceptable?”

It’s a testament to McQueen’s skill as a conceptual artist and filmmaker that he never answers the question, supporting the tension of his narrative with the tension of his ideas.

As the last half of the movie surfaces, this feeling is amplified. First, though, is a long conversation between the leader of prison resistance, Bobby Sands, and a priest. Shot in one 23-minute take, this expertly crafted conversation is the climax and moral center of the film.

The themes are complex: Sands (Michael Fassbender) is planning a hunger strike with the knowledge that he must die in order for it to be effective. Suicide, basically. The priest (Liam Cunningham) tries to talk him out of it, and what ensues is one of the best philosophical discussions ever put to film, prescient in this time of suicide bombers and torture. Sands doesn’t change his mind: “Freedom means everything to me. … Taking my life is not just the only thing I can do, it is the right thing.”

From there, as the movie carries on in silence, we watch in excruciating detail as Sands’ body withers away and eventually dies. We leave on his steely gaze surrounded by sallow, yellow skin.

Because McQueen gives very little political context for the film, and chooses no moral position (the guards and prisoners are both fallible humans) he leaves the audience with the essential truth of this real-life situation.

I can imagine that those more familiar or connected to the events of the IRA feel differently about the film, but that ignores the fact that Hunger is not really about politics. Or at least not those politics. Instead, it’s about something at once more profound and more troubling.