Careless Thought: A Mothers Day Visit with "The Visitor"

Careless Thought: A Mothers’ Day Visit to “The Visitor”

So today has been Mothers Day all day, and I take it to mean a celebration of all people since we all come from mothers in some shape and form and we all are trying to parent ourselves if not children per se.

And it was a day to see the film “The Visitor”, to truly visit with a transforming experience. “The Visitor” was released on April 18, 2008; it was written and directed by Thomas McCarthy and stars Richard Jenkins (the dead and haunting father in the HBO series “Six Feet Under”) with an exquisite cast of characters and actors. In the film/Mothers Day gift, the professor who “pretends to be busy”, meets the young Syrian drummer and his Senegalese girlfriend who had taken up roots in his own apartment without knowing he existed until he opened the door with is own key. There is the surprise and suspicious meeting of strangers/landlord and fleeting tenants on the run. The smiles and the music give a new heartbeat to the professor’s deadened and mechanical spirit. The stiff and lost professor without conviction about his essence and work, is transfixed by the warm and excited world of friendship and the drumming...the drumming which ignites his dead fingers and heart and begin to make him come to life. The continued surprises consist of love and warmth and connection which perhaps might seem unusual in the world outside the film, in which prejudice runs so much of life.

The professor awakens/is awakened to feeling without which thinking in and of itself takes on a cold and senseless purpose and context. He awakens to the sensual and tender mother of his tenant and the love is true--just that. Thought without caring, as we see so vividly here in this film, becomes demeaning, debasing and faceless. We become reminded that illegal immigrants, the spectre of terrorists in any Arab face, have become to us as people without humanity; the sense of justice and freedom becomes blurred as we see faces we have come to care about within an hour's time, faces and beings that still seem dim and negligible to strangers--the "strangers" withing the film itself.

We find ourselves loving our neighbor...how strange, to see the human part of those who might on any other day and in another context lose their similarity to us. It is not mushy but rather smart and deep and subtle and the direction has a choreography within it that is profound without playing with us. And when one of the main characters "gets it" and says, "Either you belong or you don't belong" we have now come to feel so connected to those who can be treated with dread and disgust, perhaps most of the audience will feel that in both political and personal ways...After all, who among us has never felt the sting of not "belonging". When we see people sent to us to warm our hearts and give us true physical rhythm, we want to jump and stop it, only to leave the theatre with the awareness that this "deportation" of fellow humans on so many levels, is the order of most days.

When we think about ecology, it seems we can use to be reminded that without people and without connection, we never see or experience a resemblance to --and kinship with--ourselves. We only see just other people who are remote; we see “the other” rather than people who may be different but whose touch and touching parts might make us come closer in feeling rather that stay in the distance of distraction from our humanity.

The movie should be seen and felt, as much as talked about. It needs to penetrate our insides so we can be reminded that thought without feeling is truly without caring and is truly careless.

Today, after having seen this movie, I am changed or so I feel; and I sense the audience is changed as well. There is a sense here and now that we are all people and that if our hearts are still beating both in body and feeling, a person--any of us--might be touched and moved to sense a connection between all of us.

The poster outside the theater has a strikingly beautiful picture that depicts an image of the film. It contains some credits, and underneath the image, the words “Connection is everything”.

The words hit me and I am taken.

I am taken because I realize once again that a lack of connection makes thinking a cold act without compassion and without a sense of human ecology. And I am reminded that I really think that ecology without the human part is way too isolated....the humans who are deported, detained, killed or dehumanized are as important as any species of animal or plant. I don't think we should so easily forget that.

I am grateful to the movie--all of it--all who made it and brought it to a theatre near me on a day on which it became so important.

A Visit with “The Visitor”: Just Words for the Beating of the Heart

Heartless
Transforming
Connection
Lonely
Detention
Deportation
Justice
Caring
Careless
Love
Music
Open
Heart
Warm
Smile
Change
Play
Sad