Hunger

Roland Barthes has written about the "readerly text" vs. the "writerly text" -- the "readerly text" is written with an imagined reader that is a passive consumer of the text, whereas the "writerly text" attempts to invite interpretation and challenge the reader. I think that idea is binarized and flawed -- it certainly draws a false dichotomy between the two without considering whether they are truly mutually exclusive. 

But ignoring that flaw, it feels to me as though some popular reviews on this website are approaching this very obvious writerly text as if it were a readerly one. You are not asked to be a passive observer, to just "consume" the image on the screen and give opinions about whether what you see is pleasurable. The film is challenging you and asks you to immanently ask "why?" To watch a writerly text through a readerly framework just feels dishonest and unaligned with the spirit of the film, and it's a bit odd to see so many evaluate the film in this very asinine fashion.

Yes, it is disgusting and hard to watch and difficult to get through. But it is inviting interpretation -- there is a clear purpose to these details that I think McQueen has included. It is, I think, to give the viewer an encounter with the lived material realities of state violence, of reducing bios to zoe, the way the sovereign state debilitates and produces the stateless individual through a state of exception/state of suspension, where anything goes insofar as it can be said to be done "in the name of" something. That stuff is hard to sit through, but the discomforts perhaps say more about the viewer than they do about the film. 

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The relationship between sabotage and revolution is very historically interesting to me. There is the famous image of Thích Quảng Đức, the Vietnamese monk who protested against the persecution of Vietnamese Bhuddists by setting himself on fire at a busy intersection. The most famous historical and celebrated example perhaps being Mahatma Ghandi's hunger strike. There are many examples of sabotage that I could list off, both of the self and of structures, both peaceful and violent, quiet and loud, from people all across the world in very different periods of time -- in Bangladesh, Algeria, 1920s Chicago, 1950s Detroit -- political resistance via sabotage constitutes a very complex historical archive.

When I was in debate, I was reading this very edgy argument that drew from Jasbir Puar's book Terrorist Assemblages with a focus on her idea of the "queer suicide bomber". I still don't really know what it means but it won me some debate rounds I shouldn't have won. In any case, the premise of the argument was that instead of being dogmatically opposed to the image of this barbarized "queer suicide bomber", what would it mean to deconstruct how we imagine that figure? How might we use that figure as a point of departure for understanding how we concieve of politically exceptional subjects? How might we use that image as the figure that is the looming Other upon which the self is constructed? In other words, it was an argument about contesting how we imagine those groups of people deemed "Other", "threats", or "deficient" -- that maybe, in order to hurl the phrase "terrorist" at someone, it might involve depending on an entire symbolic and discursive economy that rests upon historically contingent myths and ideas about some constructed Other, myths that might be questionable to believe in. 

To be clear, this is wasn't an attempt to perform some sort of "The Drama"-esque glorification of violence. That would be a gross oversimplification of the argument. Puar certainly has a poor choice of words and the argument wasn't to "affirm that the queer suicide bomber should be celebrated". But the point of the argument was to suggest that in order to understand the self, it requires some understanding of the other, the figure that is "not the self", that is the logical negation of the self -- and, Puar's argument was that the queer suicide bomber was precisely that Other that is negated in order to construct an understanding of the self in the post 9/11 moment. And, that maybe, the discourse and imagination we have of this Other is unstable and potentially arbitrary, like how many Otherized peoples are imagined throughout history.

That is all to say: I think Steve McQueen is doing something similar to what Puar was doing. He takes Bobby Sands, a political terrorist who goes on a hunger strike in protest of Thatcher's Britain, and asks us: what would it mean to consider this figure in a new light? To consider him in the historically contingent position he occupied? When considering of his own lived material reality in relation to the world? What could we learn about the way we assign labels like "terrorist" when considering the whole contextual field these individuals reside and endure through? About the way we might depend upon symbolic economies and languages that already presume from the outset the Other's deficiency?

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Another film that I believe might satisfy the conditions for what feels like "Oscar bait" cinema, but it's another opportunity for me to note that just because a film is "Oscar bait," that doesn't therefore mean that film is "bad." Sure, the perceived intentions underlying the film feel gross. One could perhaps validly argue that the depictions of gratuitous and dehumanizing violence against prisoners here are mechanized to achieve a trophy or to earn box office profits. 

But I think, first, it is impossible to ever really know what a filmmaker's intentions are - the label "Oscar bait" carries within it an idea that the filmmaker or studio company deliberately crafted the film in order to achieve awards; if we maintain that definition of "Oscar bait", then we would necessarily have to take for granted that it is possible to securely infer the filmmakers intention for creating the film -- but, we can never truly know intentions, it would require entering the mind of another human being, which is impossible. Our brains only exist in our own heads, and it is impossible to ever know with pure certainty what another human being is thinking. So, by reductio ad absurdum, the "Oscar-bait" concept, to me, feels like it takes for granted something highly questionable: that we can know why any filmmaker made a film in the first place. Insofar as we can never truly know why anyone in the world does anything, the concept of a film being "Oscar-bait" seems to be internally incoherent in my view, because it rests on the idea that we can validly infer the thoughts and intentions that exist in other people's heads.

But holding constant the problems with the definition of the phrase "Oscar-bait", I think there are also some questionable assumptions being made about the relationship between depicting poverty, hardship, or dehumanization, and the perceived exploitation of these in order to achieve awards. The argument, as I've heard it, goes something like, "this film depicts the violence done to marginalized communities and commodifies and objectifies said violence in order to win awards, so therefore, the film is morally bankrupt". This may be a strawman, but I've tried to phrase it in a way that is charitable to the spirit of the argument. While it can certainly be ethically suspect for a film or any artistic work to use the experiences of the marginalized to achieve profits, I think this sidesteps the fact that every film under capitalism, regardless of whether or not it depicts the experiences of those enduring hardship, engages in some sort of objectification or alienation of the subjects that are depicted. It's a contradiction inherent to film: it must take some sort of subject and rob it of its subjecthood and ask the audience to treat this Other as an object through an objectifying gaze. Regardless of whether we are watching The Avengers or Pather Panchali, the inherent contradiction of film is that, as viewers, we are asked to understand the images we see on the screen as objects rather than subjects. Otherwise, the magic trick of cinema fails -- viewing Dr. Strange with a full conscious awareness that Benedict Cumberbatch is not Dr. Strange but the subject Benedict Cumberbatch would mean we are not blurring the line between the object on the screen and the subjective individual that performs the character, and the magic trick of film rests on the conflation of Benedict Cumberbatch as Dr. Strange and Dr. Strange as Benedict Cumberbatch, not the two as wholly seperate subjectivities. But moreover, every film is, to some extent, resting upon an implicit demand that the viewer of these subjects-turned-objects exploit them as vehicles for deriving pleasure from viewing the film. In the charge forwarded by those that argue an "Oscar-bait" film is "bad" on the grounds that it rests on the exploitation of hardship, then, we find that it is failing to recognize a principle that is characteristic of every film -- that every film requires the exploitation of some form of image to deliver pleasure to the audience. It's emblematic of a contradiction that haunts film -- that there is a narcissistic form of pleasure to be found in looking at anything, in casting an objectifying gaze at anything.

And the depiction of poverty for pleasure, or "poverty porn" as it is referred to these days, has a lengthy genealogy, dating back to Jacob Riis' pictures of Jewish and Italian immigrants in New York's slums. I recognize that the claim that "there is an exploitative and narcissistic pleasure-seeking act involved in viewing every film" still fails to address the fact that the Oscar-bait film is not just depicting "anything" but something very specific that deserves special consideration -- hardship, dehumanization, impoverishment, and social strife. Yet here, I think, there is another contradiction not fully accounted for in the claim that the Oscar-bait film is "ethically suspect" on the grounds that it depicts structurally violent conditions. What if just because you depict structurally violent conditions, that doesn't necessarily mean that you are licensed to conclude that a film is "ethically suspect"? The contradiction in depicting difficult human experiences is that, while it rests on the exploitation of the impoverished subject on the screen, it simultaneously broadens the aperture through which the audience comprehends the world and material strife. Consider the counterfactual -- the film doesn't exist. On the one hand, we do not participate in objectifying and commodifying the harrowing images we see on a screen for personal satisfaction or pleasure; however, "pleasure" is defined. However, we are also torn away from the visual, photographic, and artistic interpretation of state-inflicted violence, the ability to reveal and unveil the ways in which structural conditions touch upon and constrain the daily material existence of communities. I hope that doesn't come across as this kind of reactionary impulse that operates on some binarized "this is both good and bad", but rather, isolates the contradictory engine powering depictions of human strife -- a simultaneous unveiling and objectification. The question is -- how would one sublate that contradiction? I'm not entirely sure, but I am also not willing to think that just because something is contradictory, it is therefore "bad" either -- everything is in contradiction, and Nietzsche's critique of the genealogical and historical contingency of the phrase "bad"/"evil" reveals an innate instability that exists in calling anything "bad" or "evil".