The Hunger

Is it really so misleading to reduce the rock star, as a moving image, to the music video? Its magnetism, most visible in three minutes of chorus and glamour, contaminates any feature film with a whiff of MTV? The conclusion hardly matters; we have already surpassed the dogma of the music video as the poor, hormonal cousin of cinema, for which it was and ultimately remains a laboratory and a sandbox. The diva harmonizes the forms, long and short; she provides a minimum shared grammar, especially the verb of action, which the star knows how to conjugate in no other way. It is the sine qua non: the close-up on her face, penetrating the lens or the reverse shot, barely choking on her own bluster. If that were a prerogative of the music video, how would we explain the figures of James Dean and Mae West?

This thesis short-circuits if we take into account David Bowie’s videography during the Let’s Dance era (an album freshly released when North American theatres received The Hunger), less focused on pop seduction: just the music video for the title track—a treatise on the marginalization of Australian Aboriginals. But that’s fine: Bowie isn’t even the first rock star featured in The Hunger (in Portuguese: Fome de Viver). That role is claimed by Brian Murphy, the demonic leader of Bauhaus: always on the edge of glory, always worn. Hair slicked in every direction; shadowed eyes and monstrous poses, all to the sound of “Bela Lugosi’s Dead.” The smoky nightclub, tinged with a matte blue, seems like a liminal space (similar to those conquered by Tina Turner, Pete Burns, Kate Bush, Billy Idol). To complete the 1980s music video card and call bingo, all that remained was hypersaturated lighting and freeze frames… Ah, there they are. The editing is fierce and anticlimactic throughout the film, ripped apart by the types of arbitrary violence and aesthetic daring found only in the obscure A One Man Show (1982) by Grace Jones and Jean-Paul Goude, somewhere between concert film, music video, and video art.

In his directorial debut (shortly before helming Top Gun and Beverly Hills Cop II), Tony Scott paid little attention to the film’s similarities with musical television—and these parallels weren’t confined to the opening sequence. Consider, for instance, the dramatic flashback of Catherine Deneuve’s character (and the psychosexual tension of her servant). A brief rhapsody of lateral tracking shots, wind-blown curtains, the solitary marble mansion, nearly noir lighting: a description that applies both to The Hunger and to the expressionist music video for Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” (1983, directed by Russell Mulcahy, who also directed Highlander). In 2013, Grant Singer brought these music video references to life, citing The Hunger in the first music video he directed for Sky Ferreira: “You’re Not the One” recreates the shot in which the first victim is projected onto a cold blue wall—a colour dominating the film, rivalled only in 1986 by Michael Mann’s Manhunter.

Even so, in 1983, Scott dodged comparisons to the then-new MTV—a critique repeatedly aimed at Flashdance, also released that year, as the researcher Marco Calavita notes. If the “bulls” were given different names, the truth is that the criticisms shared a common ground: the notion of a cinema as stylized as it was hollow (and, implicitly, subordinated to the biorhythm of a mechanical pop culture). Critic Roger Ebert loathed both Flashdance and The Hunger, yet gave top marks to Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Diva (1981), founder of the later-called Cinéma du Look, bastion of the hollow, of the most ridiculously plastic visual style. Tony Scott does not grant us such (mindless) comforts: the allegory is right there, within reach, however telegraphic everything else may be, threading its way through lace veils and drafts of air.

Deneuve, as the vampire Miriam, seduces humans only to recondition them through blood transfusion: she is Pygmalion. In the role of the cellist John, Bowie ceases to be Bowie in the blink of an eye, revealing himself as a decaying corpse: the statue collapsing, condemned by dying love. The Hunger is schematic in its portrayal of a sour romance, yet it does not villainize Miriam, whom Deneuve embodies with a certain allowance for error. It’s all in the posture. A vampire without being vampy; drawn to blood without fanfare (as seen in the masterful sex scene with Susan Sarandon, diametrically opposed to the sexploitation of Vampyres (1974), an earlier example of sapphic vampires). If she lacks the grace to aid the doomed, perhaps it is simply because she does not know how to deliver the mercy stroke.

This is the elegy of corrupted lovers, the ballad of a romance turned ghost, an incurable curse. It is doubly unsettling for giving David Bowie the most defenceless role, drained of himself, stripped of his rock star potential (more evident in The Man Who Fell to Earth or even Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence). Despite its tremulous ending, The Hunger stands as the best rebuttal to a certain pop philosophy that only a music video could defend: after this, no one wants to live forever.