Bruce LaBruce outstrips his contemporary political-film allies.
In The Visitor, Bruce LaBruce’s brazen update of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1968 Teorema, the illegal-immigration issue is tackled head-on. It also demolishes Hollywood’s ongoing trend of lazy remakes. LaBruce is a radical who critiques radicalism and does so radically — offending the roots of social and cultural progress so that the liberal mania for revolution can no longer be taken for granted.
Despite the liberal and progressive stances of modern filmmakers, their lack of creativity and originality reveals a fundamental contempt behind the many remakes assaulting the marketplace, from Dune to Snow White. LaBruce avoids such family-movie fraud by adapting a political art movie about the destruction of a family that’s also an analogy for the dismantling of society.
The Visitor shows how an illegal immigrant, the Visitor (Bishop Black), who washes up on the shores of Great Britain inside a suitcase, destroys everything from family structure to sexual roles and individual consciousness: The bald, pansexual black man with earrings and blue eye shadow seduces and transforms the identity of Father (Macklin Kowal), Mother (Amy Kingsmill), Son (Kurtis Lincoln), Daughter (Ray Filar), and the Maid (Luca Federici) who functions as the family’s retainer.
LaBruce’s scandalous, profane, sexually graphic style uses pornographic tropes yet challenges the creative and political crises of conventional mainstream filmmakers (Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn was a trite rip-off of Teorema). His remake is shocking in the best, truest sense; it forces viewers to re-examine cinema history, exposing contemporary political clichés.
An anonymous narrator, speaking in a voice that’s both Churchillian and Orwellian, sets the stage of global immigration’s debacle: “As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. I see the river Thames foaming with much blood. We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of such dangerous aliens. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.”
Talk about épater la bourgeoisie! Leftist ideologues Michael Moore, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, George Clooney, Darren Aronofsky, Yorgos Lanthimos, and Sean Baker wouldn’t dare such a pronouncement. LaBruce continues the singular skepticism of Gerontophilia, The Misandrists, and Saint-Narcisse, all uniquely perverse social visions. LaBruce’s idiosyncrasy is connected to the fearless audacity of his brave, tragic inspiration, Pasolini.
Pasolini, cinema’s avant-garde poet and rebel, made Teorema (which means “thesis”) following the theoretical practice of Marxist linguist Antonio Gramsci, valiantly exposing the effect of those revolutionary ideas on an upper-class family, a metaphor for Italy’s crumbling social and Catholic foundation.
LaBruce’s remake respects Pasolini’s ambivalence about liberal politics. Working outside the Hollywood mainstream, LaBruce moves on from his gay-radical normalization of porn and arrives at political outrage. That’s how he could reveal hypocrisy in The Misandrists and Gerontophilia and now sensibly equate illegal immigration with destruction of family and national ideals.
The prototype family’s fall to sexual temptation (and its lack of moral foundation) shows LaBruce parodying Globalist World Order. The broken family exults in its own debasement just like the protesters and activist judges who pursue self-annihilation as liberation. (The maid privately flagellates herself, seeking redemption, and, in a stunning last-supper confession, each radicalized, sexually transitioned family member expresses gratitude for their newly embraced degradation — according to a radical political schematic.)
Note, the only time the Visitor smiles is during sessions when he destroys the bourgeois family norms — through blasphemous acts of sexual depravity. By the climactic sequence of disrobed family members, LaBruce achieves the effect of a transgressive ouroboros or Möbius strip — the New World Order seen in a loop of self-devouring lust and vanity.
This is new territory even for a rule-breaker like LaBruce, which may explain his excessive imitation of Godardian intertitles (more like madcap graffiti than epigraphs). A parody of Cardi B or Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club” might match Pasolini’s critique of modern artist narcissism, but the lack costs LaBruce the cultural force that made Pasolini undeniable in such masterpieces as Accattone, The Hawks and the Sparrows, The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, Mamma Roma, The Canterbury Tales, Arabian Nights, The Decameron, and Salò.
The major difference between LaBruce’s remake and Pasolini’s original shows in the perceived indecency of its sex scenes as performed by little-known actors, some from the world of performance art and radical academics. These porn academicians cannot possibly bring the authenticity and legitimacy of Teorema’s professional cast — Terence Stamp, Massimo Girotti, Laura Betti, Silvana Mangano, and Anne Wiazemsky, who all came from the world of legitimate art cinema and thus legitimized Pasolini’s project challenging the respectable world.
Instead, LaBruce’s remake reveals to us the hidden pathologies of the transtifa and trans-terrorists that mainstream media endorse.
Unexpectedly ethical, The Visitor teaches a strange-bedfellows lesson for both conservatives and progressives.