THE DUKE ON VISITOR Q
When asked to contribute a film to the ongoing LoveCinema
project, Takashi Miike must’ve sat down and had a good hard
think about it all. Love, he may have pondered. What in the hell
might that all be about, anyroad?
For Shakespeare, love was a many splendored thing. For
Aerosmith, it was something what went on in an elevator. For
Miike, the director of Audition and Ichi The Killer, and who
averages four flicks a year, it involves incest, lactation,
necrophilia and folks getting killed with screwdrivers.
God fucking bless Takashi Miike, is what.
Visitor Q, or LoveCinema Vol.6, is concerned with “the family”,
and through a series of highly inventive vignettes we are
invited to muse upon the radical redefinition of just what
“Family Love” might entail.
The film opens with the question, “Have you ever done it with
your dad?”
Thankfully, the viewer doesn’t have to ponder this too much,
since a second later, a naked woman appears onscreen, captured
via a handheld camcorder, enticing the fella off screen to come
ahead and get it on with her.
The fella yacks about “No, no I can’t, it’s wrong”, but she
wants him to get the trousers off and get on with the sexing.
It is revealed that this young lady is a prostitute, and the
fella in question is her father, a television journalist who is
attempting to make some kind of film about “the youth”.
Simultaneously, the daughter is snapping away with a digital
camera, so the sequence plays out via three mediums; Miike’s
camera, the dad’s camcorder and the daughters digital
photography.
As an opening scene, it’s enough to grab a motherfucker’s
attention, for sure.
We next see the father sitting by a window, when for no apparent
reason a fella leans in and smacks him in the head with a rock.
Next thing we know, this gravel-flinging motherfucker is invited
to the victim’s house, with no discernible motive, and he
wanders around in and out of the various melodramas what ensue,
be it the bullying of the teenage son, or the fact that the
teenage son takes out his anger on his mother, whipping her with
some kind of wooden rod whilst she screams about “I told you,
not the face” and he yells about “This is the wrong kind of
toothbrush! Do you want me to get bleeding gums?”
Ten minutes have scarcely passed, and already you feel like
someone just crawled onto your shoulders and shagged you in the
earhole. It lurches so violently from the deeply disturbing to
the genuinely hilarious that a motherfucker could get whiplash
just from watching the damn thing.
The Visitor proceeds to hang out with various members of the
family, helping the dad to capture footage of the son being
kicked asunder for the ongoing documentary project, and helping
the mum to liberate herself by teaching her how to lactate at
will.
At one point, The Visitor sits on the floor, holding an umbrella
over his head, as milk sprays around the room and, um, sex
fluids drip from between the matriarch’s giddy thighs.
I’m guessing you ain’t never seen no shit like this in a
legitimate feature film before. I know there’s all kinds of porn
flicks about Umbrella Fetish 7 and Lactation Nation 69 and so
on, but this here is a proper cinematic affair, with actors and
a real script and social concerns and everything.
How many social concerns were addressed in Debbie Does Dallas?
About three, I’m guessing, which is a laughably inadequate
number of social addresses.
The rather perplexing point to be made here, is that The Visitor
brings unity to the family not by teaching love or
understanding, but by convincing them to join in the bizarre,
often highly distasteful shenanigans that each member is
involved in.
It’s like some kind of perverted version of The Fantastic Four,
with each member of the family having their own super-power, be
it the Incredible Milk-Squirting Mother or Whip-Boy, The Teenage
Psychopath.
Film Critic Chris Campion has compared the film to Pasolini’s
Theorum, what concerned itself with an outsider infiltrating a
family unit and, via the sexing and seduction, liberating their
repressed libidos.
Visitor Q, however, as Campion notes, heads off in the opposite
direction, with the violent influence of the outsider actually
working towards bringing these folks together, right up to the
stunningly beautiful and yet highly discomforting final
sequence, where the mother breast-feeds her two grown-up
children in a greenhouse.
As ever with Miike, the whole thing has the potential to be
unsettlingly nasty, or even reactionary with both its treatment
of women and also that final notion of the family unit being
repaired.
What keeps all this at bay, however, is the deeply uncomfortable
vein of black humour running throughout. It’s impossible not to
laugh when one character gets, ahem, “stuck” during a bout of
necrophilia, but you feel a bit naughty for doing so. I mean,
come on, man, this is rape, murder and gross-violation we’re
talking about here, but oh look, he thought she was getting
turned on but no, the corpse just shit over his leg.
Visitor Q has a lot to say about the relationships between
family members, be it when the mother injects herself with
heroin after the beatings at the hand of her son, instead of
facing up to her responsibilities and doing something about it,
or when the dad gets over-familiar with his daughter by way of
rescuing his failing career.
He talks also about journalistic codes of conduct, as the dad
stands smiling whilst his son is being forced to take a shit by
the bullies on the other end of the camera lens. There’s
something else going on there, something about the artificiality
of life through the lens, if you like, how the dad has no
emotional contact to the events he is capturing, seeing it only
as “great footage”.
Which is especially ironic given that the subject of his
documentary is how he feels about his son being bullied.
It mirrors that other classic of extreme satire, Man Bites Dog,
most notably in a sequence wherein one character maps out bits
to dismember from a corpse, whilst another chap captures it all
on video, like it were a Blue Peter project or something.
And here’s one we made earlier, motherfucker.
Whether or not you “get” it, I guess, depends upon your
tolerance for the kinds of mayhem depicted. Even nudity puts me
off a film, and yet here I am, thoroughly fascinated and
laughing out loud at a film featuring reporters being raped with
their microphones or people sawing a kids head open with a
kitchen knife.
It talks about hypocrisy, and like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,
it seeks to subvert the notion of the family as the ultimate
achievement for civilised society. Here, family members beat
each other, fuck each other and help each other get their
willies prised from rigor-mortis stricken corpses, and the
“love” that is expressed in the films conclusion is simply a
result of rewriting the accepted etiquette for familiar bonding
and getting right back to the animalistic desire to feed on one
another.
Holy shit, man. What a fucked up barrel of malcontents.
Good work, Takashi Miike.
Thanks folks.
Drop The Duke A Line
project, Takashi Miike must’ve sat down and had a good hard
think about it all. Love, he may have pondered. What in the hell
might that all be about, anyroad?
For Shakespeare, love was a many splendored thing. For
Aerosmith, it was something what went on in an elevator. For
Miike, the director of Audition and Ichi The Killer, and who
averages four flicks a year, it involves incest, lactation,
necrophilia and folks getting killed with screwdrivers.
God fucking bless Takashi Miike, is what.
Visitor Q, or LoveCinema Vol.6, is concerned with “the family”,
and through a series of highly inventive vignettes we are
invited to muse upon the radical redefinition of just what
“Family Love” might entail.
The film opens with the question, “Have you ever done it with
your dad?”
Thankfully, the viewer doesn’t have to ponder this too much,
since a second later, a naked woman appears onscreen, captured
via a handheld camcorder, enticing the fella off screen to come
ahead and get it on with her.
The fella yacks about “No, no I can’t, it’s wrong”, but she
wants him to get the trousers off and get on with the sexing.
It is revealed that this young lady is a prostitute, and the
fella in question is her father, a television journalist who is
attempting to make some kind of film about “the youth”.
Simultaneously, the daughter is snapping away with a digital
camera, so the sequence plays out via three mediums; Miike’s
camera, the dad’s camcorder and the daughters digital
photography.
As an opening scene, it’s enough to grab a motherfucker’s
attention, for sure.
We next see the father sitting by a window, when for no apparent
reason a fella leans in and smacks him in the head with a rock.
Next thing we know, this gravel-flinging motherfucker is invited
to the victim’s house, with no discernible motive, and he
wanders around in and out of the various melodramas what ensue,
be it the bullying of the teenage son, or the fact that the
teenage son takes out his anger on his mother, whipping her with
some kind of wooden rod whilst she screams about “I told you,
not the face” and he yells about “This is the wrong kind of
toothbrush! Do you want me to get bleeding gums?”
Ten minutes have scarcely passed, and already you feel like
someone just crawled onto your shoulders and shagged you in the
earhole. It lurches so violently from the deeply disturbing to
the genuinely hilarious that a motherfucker could get whiplash
just from watching the damn thing.
The Visitor proceeds to hang out with various members of the
family, helping the dad to capture footage of the son being
kicked asunder for the ongoing documentary project, and helping
the mum to liberate herself by teaching her how to lactate at
will.
At one point, The Visitor sits on the floor, holding an umbrella
over his head, as milk sprays around the room and, um, sex
fluids drip from between the matriarch’s giddy thighs.
I’m guessing you ain’t never seen no shit like this in a
legitimate feature film before. I know there’s all kinds of porn
flicks about Umbrella Fetish 7 and Lactation Nation 69 and so
on, but this here is a proper cinematic affair, with actors and
a real script and social concerns and everything.
How many social concerns were addressed in Debbie Does Dallas?
About three, I’m guessing, which is a laughably inadequate
number of social addresses.
The rather perplexing point to be made here, is that The Visitor
brings unity to the family not by teaching love or
understanding, but by convincing them to join in the bizarre,
often highly distasteful shenanigans that each member is
involved in.
It’s like some kind of perverted version of The Fantastic Four,
with each member of the family having their own super-power, be
it the Incredible Milk-Squirting Mother or Whip-Boy, The Teenage
Psychopath.
Film Critic Chris Campion has compared the film to Pasolini’s
Theorum, what concerned itself with an outsider infiltrating a
family unit and, via the sexing and seduction, liberating their
repressed libidos.
Visitor Q, however, as Campion notes, heads off in the opposite
direction, with the violent influence of the outsider actually
working towards bringing these folks together, right up to the
stunningly beautiful and yet highly discomforting final
sequence, where the mother breast-feeds her two grown-up
children in a greenhouse.
As ever with Miike, the whole thing has the potential to be
unsettlingly nasty, or even reactionary with both its treatment
of women and also that final notion of the family unit being
repaired.
What keeps all this at bay, however, is the deeply uncomfortable
vein of black humour running throughout. It’s impossible not to
laugh when one character gets, ahem, “stuck” during a bout of
necrophilia, but you feel a bit naughty for doing so. I mean,
come on, man, this is rape, murder and gross-violation we’re
talking about here, but oh look, he thought she was getting
turned on but no, the corpse just shit over his leg.
Visitor Q has a lot to say about the relationships between
family members, be it when the mother injects herself with
heroin after the beatings at the hand of her son, instead of
facing up to her responsibilities and doing something about it,
or when the dad gets over-familiar with his daughter by way of
rescuing his failing career.
He talks also about journalistic codes of conduct, as the dad
stands smiling whilst his son is being forced to take a shit by
the bullies on the other end of the camera lens. There’s
something else going on there, something about the artificiality
of life through the lens, if you like, how the dad has no
emotional contact to the events he is capturing, seeing it only
as “great footage”.
Which is especially ironic given that the subject of his
documentary is how he feels about his son being bullied.
It mirrors that other classic of extreme satire, Man Bites Dog,
most notably in a sequence wherein one character maps out bits
to dismember from a corpse, whilst another chap captures it all
on video, like it were a Blue Peter project or something.
And here’s one we made earlier, motherfucker.
Whether or not you “get” it, I guess, depends upon your
tolerance for the kinds of mayhem depicted. Even nudity puts me
off a film, and yet here I am, thoroughly fascinated and
laughing out loud at a film featuring reporters being raped with
their microphones or people sawing a kids head open with a
kitchen knife.
It talks about hypocrisy, and like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,
it seeks to subvert the notion of the family as the ultimate
achievement for civilised society. Here, family members beat
each other, fuck each other and help each other get their
willies prised from rigor-mortis stricken corpses, and the
“love” that is expressed in the films conclusion is simply a
result of rewriting the accepted etiquette for familiar bonding
and getting right back to the animalistic desire to feed on one
another.
Holy shit, man. What a fucked up barrel of malcontents.
Good work, Takashi Miike.
Thanks folks.
Drop The Duke A Line
