‘The Hunger’ Is Not Only A Masterpiece Of Erotic Cinema, It’s Also A Masterpiece of Modern Existential Cinema

The Hunger is glorious. It paves the way for dozens of deeply-Romanticist genre films to follow, for the trend of ’80s eroticism shepherded by a group of commercial directors making their transitions into feature filmmaking all at around the same time, and for how its sense of style and attitude fed into the Gen X “waver” clique of goth teens coming of age during the Reagan administration. Largely because of this film, my friends and I wore out our Bauhaus vinyl and our silver ankh necklaces a full seven years before Neil Gaiman introduced his Robert Smith-looking The Sandman with his ankh-wearing sister, Death. Moreover, The Hunger is a gateway drug to the films of French director Jean Rollin, who is best known for a series of erotic, lesbian vampire films throughout the ’70s, all of them shot in a gauzy, sometimes hallucinogenic way to the approval of a very small audience of devotees.

Tony Scott was never considered the artist his older brother Ridley was thought to be. It probably had to do with his choice of projects — like Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop 2, and Days of Thunder — while brother Ridley was bringing in plaudits, and eventually Oscars, with headier (if still broadly-appealing) fare like Alien, The Duellists, Thelma & Louise and Gladiator. Tony had his own, recognizable aesthetic, though, and I think The Hunger, his first film, is not only his best film but it’s not too much to say that it’s a masterpiece of modern existential cinema.

The Hunger tips that it’s a vampire movie from the start with a banger of a montage set to Bauhaus lead singer Peter Murphy, on-screen, breaking the fourth wall, singing the band’s breakthrough single “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” from behind a metal grid. Scott cuts in shots of two lab monkeys and then our heroes Miriam (Catherine Deneuve) and John Blaylock (David Bowie) looking impossibly beautiful, cutting through the black-clad crowd and spotting a swinging young couple (Ann Magnuson and John Stephen Hill) they’ll invite back to their cavernous home for a little private afterparty. Dual seductions take place. Both are shot in a posh, stylized, hungry way countryman Adrian Lyne would later bring to the mainstream with his 9 ½ Weeks and Fatal Attraction  — both incredibly sexy, both ending in bloodletting as the Blaylocks reveal themselves to be a kind of vampire, bathing (it’s not clear they drink unless they’re “turning” their quarry) in the blood of their victims Elizabeth Bathory-like in order to achieve immortality. There will be flashbacks throughout the film of Miriam and John at various points in the far past; suggestions they’ve been around for a long time and as they shower off their night’s deeds they promise one another “forever, forever and ever.”

At the moment of their attack, coordinated it seems with each other and with the sexual climax of their partner/prey, Scott shows one lab monkey attacking its mate and ripping it to pieces. It’s aberrant, of course, and draws the attention of Dr. Sarah Roberts (Susan Sarandon), investigating the potential link between sleep and aging. The monkeys are subjects in her study and Scott, in drawing a line between the actions of Miriam and John and of Sarah’s monkeys, makes clear that the vampires are the subjects of his study of primate behavior. For the Blaylocks, their days between feedings are spent playing chamber music with one another and with a little girl Miriam is tutoring in the violin, Alice (Beth Ehlers), but John has been having trouble sleeping lately and notices crows feet in the mirror. He becomes sullen, hiding himself away in their bedroom to watch Tom & Jerry cartoons. He’s dying. Scott shoots him in long shots, lost almost in the lush production design, to maximize his isolation. In his rapid aging and the equation of it with a disease, The Hunger presages David Cronenberg’s The Fly remake in how poetically a horror movie twist can become a metaphor for the labor of love. Every love story is a tragedy because every love story, with very few exceptions, ends with one partner watching the other wasting away and dying.

Visually, compositionally, The Hunger is a marvel. It’s easily one of the most beautiful-looking American films of the 1980s. A scene where John tries to get answers about his rapidly-disintegrating condition from Sarah reminds a great deal in its look of Federico Fellini’s Toby Dammit, awash with nurses and religious imagery, deep noir lighting in an institutional setting, iconographic stars passing like gods through these concrete and glass halls. As John walks back home, the streets are populated by more nurses — similar to the way Jane Campion would eventually shoot In the Cut — a city as hospital word haunted by phantoms, beset by ghouls.

It would bear fascinating fruit to watch The Hunger with brother Ridley’s Blade Runner from the same year: both unmatched works of visual art; both derided by critics at the time for being impenetrable and pretentious; both engaged in a conversation about incept dates and raging against the dying of the light. John’s visit to Sarah is like Roy Batty’s visit to Tyrell with a young man suffering the same kind of aging-disease as John. They all want more life, but time, if it’s a disease, is an invariably fatal one. In his desperation, John, now at an advanced age courtesy the great Dick Smith’s superlative makeup effects, harvests young Alice either to stall his end or just as an act of perversity before he’s too weak to do it anymore. It’s an atrocity made the more so because it manages nothing. He asks Miriam to kiss him like she used to (just the day before) and she can’t. He’s repulsive to her now and there’s extraordinary sadness in how our bodies fail us. Miriam doesn’t like to be alone, though, so she seduces Sarah in a sequence shot among blowing curtains like a scene plucked from a Jean Cocteau picture. Miriam plays Delibes on the piano and describes it as a love song between two women. “Are you making a pass at me, Mrs. Blaylock?” Sarah asks. “Miriam,” Miriam says, and then the soundtrack goes from Miriam’s diegetic playing to sopranos continuing the tune like an angelic choir winging them to the bedroom. An entire volume could be dedicated to how the sex is shot in this scene: strange, self-aware, not unlike the rhythms of Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock in which school girls at the cusp of their adolescence are swallowed whole by nature. Miriam wants company and it will be the question of the last half of the film if Sarah will agree to a half-life of addiction to be at Miriam’s side, or if she will reject that kind of existence as not really living at all.

I saw The Hunger as one thing when I was first introduced to it in high school. Already a depressed kid fond of bands like The Cure and Siouxsie and the Banshees and given to wearing Doc Martens and black trenchcoats, Scott’s film became a focal point for me and my friends’ grandiose romantic melodrama. We moved through the world imagining we were immortal things, mysterious and powerful, and filled with longing to be known and to be not alone.

Its ending has been debated as confusing. Sarandon has said it was studio-imposed and unfortunate because it undermines Sarah’s decision to kill herself rather than become a vampire. But I don’t think it does that. I don’t think the wordless final few images are definitive at all. When Sarah rejects Miriam’s invitation to the dark, Miriam is swallowed up by a room of crumbling, reanimated cadavers — Miriam’s past lovers whom she’s entombed in her attic. In Freud, this would be the part of her unconscious where she’s decided to repress her losses. She’s chased to a stairwell and thrown down the middle of it to her presumed death. I don’t think it’s literal, any of it. I think, like much of the rest of the film, it’s a dream or hallucination representing not the seduction of a Byronic eternity, but the pain of rejection and abandonment of that kind of solitary existence. At the moment Miriam finds herself left to her own devices, she is left with the shades of all of her past disappointments. Before you find the one you’re meant to be with, every time you break up with the person who was supposed to be The One can feel like missing the last train of a fast-approaching night. I don’t think Sarah is alive at the end as anything other than a projection of Miriam’s grief or self-loathing. When she appears, thriving and gorgeous, kissing her new girlfriend, I think it’s Miriam’s fantasy of the world continuing on without her. The Hunger is about how time stretches when your emotions are heightened. It’s about how fleeting beauty is, and how vital love is. It’s about growing old and if you’re not careful, doing it all by yourself. It’s incredible.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is now available.