The Visitor

There are moments, profoundly mirrored in The Visitor, where “The Fatal Shore”, Robert Hughes’ treatise on the antecedents of Australia’s foundation as a penal colony, cuts to the chord of not only the early sated need for criminal castigation in Georgian Britain, but also to the very essence of what multiculturalism is, and what it can potentially become in the modern post-9/11 era. The formative chapters of “The Fatal Shore,” describe the worth attached to law as concept, as well as the various offshoot legal precepts held in such high esteem during criminal proceedings. Hughes talks about the tremendous power that the law held over the British imagination, particularly during cases where judges would weep in the docks when sentencing men to death, having reluctantly surrendered to the imperative of legal statutes. Law was obdurate in its demand for obeisance; callous, mute and indifferent towards any supplication to consider the value of earnest penitence. The law was, as Hughes puts it, “The God in the Codex.” Had The Visitor been conceived under a more cerebral philosophical orientation, this dictum might well have doubled up neatly as the film’s alternative title.

The Visitor catalogues the experience of Walter, a middle-aged man teaching Economics at university in Connecticut. Numbed by the loss of his wife, he spends his time vainly attempting to live vicariously in her visage, desperately clinging to the hope of learning to play a piano, an instrument we are to assume she so deftly mastered as a concert pianist. Walter’s first exchanges with his piano teacher are by means of stunted, withdrawn interjections, lending him qualities that are both introspective and awkward, but equally amiable and affable. Straight-laced and considerate, we are invited to feel initial compassion towards Walter, presumably so that this warmth can be used a platform through which to propel his monumental transformation of character as the film progresses. Invited to New York for a conference, he stumbles across a couple of Senegalese and Syrian origin living illegally in his Manhattan apartment. Following some initially testing moments of interaction, expected given the circumstances within which these three characters are acquainted, Walter becomes gradually more attached to Tarek, the Syrian Muslim who eventually teaches Walter to play the African drums.

By placing three characters, whose quotidian interaction may predictably amount to little more than an exchange of pleasantries under normal circumstances, The Visitor has much to say about the forces that drive multiculturalism and the language by which it can most effectively communicate. The poignancy of thrusting Walter’s character (a development economist), between two individuals living under the spy cloud of illegality, is a subtle way of adding a uniquely personal edge to the nature of Walter’s academic convictions. By way of his submission to all situations of slightly unnerving ambivalence, it also has much to say about the way in which reactionary media can strike timidity and anxiety into a society that, by virtue of the respective boundaries of upbringing, has some intrinsic sense of wariness towards ostensibly strange customs and cultural practices. In a society where the legitimacy of someone’s countenance is defined by a constricted and tightly bound set of moral and religious constructs, rather than by virtue of disposition, The Visitor is a beautiful ailment, finding common ground in the template of humanity itself. For what is it that draws society into harmonious co-existence? Is it respect for boundaries or acceptance via citizenry and obedience to the symbol of nationhood? Or is it something to be found more closely in the detail – the common ritual of breaking bread, the unanimously perceived virtue of the arts? And what of language, the notorious segregator? In The Visitor, music is the global language and there is a deep-rooted recognition and nod toward the transformative and transcendent power of music – its ability to tie the forces that bind, an irrepressible force that in its whirlwind energy, dutifully embraces all who fall under its aural spell.

There are moments of fuzzy tinted cultural ignorance throughout the movie, lightly scattered amidst verbal interchanges between various characters. However, these comments are largely borne out of loose-minded lapses in social judgement and rather than punishing with stern tone, the words are delivered with comedic edge. The overall effect is one that demonstrates how tactless observations are the result of the instinctive frailty of the human condition, rather than the verbal manifestation of a deeply lodged and incurable prejudice caused by the severity of the human design. The Visitor highlights the ease with which ersatz pretension or superiority can be cast aside, if only man himself can realise the unnatural investment in lettered tradition and the senselessness of steadfast adherence to its every implication.

“The failure of language – the tyranny of moral generalization over social inspection – fed the ruling class’ belief that it was endangered from below,” said Hughes when passing comment over Britain’s old criminal underbelly. Replace the “ruling class” with Western society and “below” with “unknown nefarious forces” and you are left with The Visitor’s message, a modern-day parallel to Hughes’ words. The Visitor is, in essence, asking how we can kick-start this aforementioned stage of “social inspection,” how best to brush aside the cobwebs and soot that are the cause of the current cultural myopia. Or perhaps in even more brusque terms, how can we get back to humanity? The answer to that question is in the eye of the beholder, but the mere fact the question is gradually being raised above a whisper on American shores, shows we are in some small way starting to get to grips with the real lessons of post-9/11 life.