Jose Saca – Visitor Q (Ninth Post)

Visitor Q is a made-for-TV Japanese film directed by Takashi Miike and released in 2001.

Visitor Q was shot in two weeks on digital video, and it shows. The film has a graininess that becomes a strong trait, primarily because for over eighty minutes the viewer follows and looks at the life of an imploding family in a voyeuristic fashion. Cuts from one scene to the next are few in between. Miike definitely wanted to embrace the “hidden camera” aesthetic of reality based television and verite films, where the camera merely acts like a fly on the wall.

Miike is also known for his prolific output. In 2001 alone, the director completed Visitor Q, Ichi the Killer, The Happiness of the Katakuris, and the Outlaw Souls, among many other projects.

This post, however, will concentrate solely on Visitor Q, and how it serves as an example of Miike as an auteur. It will focus on characteristics, themes, and characters commonly found in Miike films to assert the latter director’s place as a contemporary auteur.

The main characters in many Miike films are usually men with clear flaws that border on exaggeration. Visitor Q continues this trend. The film is about a television producer who gets the idea to do a reality TV show on his own family life. This premise is of interest to the producer because his family life is falling apart. For instance, the film starts with the father of the family having sex with his daughter, who is a prostitute. In a darkly comedic twist, the father climaxes way before his daughter in an extended and bizarre sex scene. The daughter’s playful jibes at her old man are hilarious, especially as the film segues into her chanting of “early bird… early bird…” with the same character, now casually dressed and sitting in a waiting room, early in the morning. It’s this bizarre juxtaposition of phrases, images, themes, and motivations that are apparent when watching and carefully scrutinizing a Miike film.

In the abovementioned scene, the man waits for an unspecified person or thing. Typical of Miike, the audience is treated to an inventive long shot that plays around with background and foreground relationships. The father, small yet focused within the center of the frame, is not aware that a young man, visible to the viewer but not to him, stands outside waiting loitering in the street. The young man, whom I’ll call “the stranger” since he’s not given a name throughout the entire film, comes closer to the frame and, out of the blue, smacks the father in the head with a huge rock. The “rock to the head” will be a motif in the film, clearly a send up of the moments of epiphany characters experience in mainstream films that, in a way, hit the viewer over the head with the message of CHANGE.

Miike furthers this point by quickly cutting from the first blow to the head to the title screen as it pumps techno music and welcomes you to the out of the ordinary filmic world he has created for the viewer.

The film introduces the characters of the mother, the younger son, and a female co-producer the father works with.

The mother moonlights a as a career woman when in fact she also prostitutes herself to older, creepier men and uses the money to buy drugs (I’d say heroin, but the film is not specific, except for showing the mother inject the contents onto her thigh). The mother withstands the verbal and physical abuse of her young son, who is a student in his middle teens. The son is bullied by a group of classmates, and, though not explicitly stated, vents his frustrations out on his mother. The humiliation the son is endures is especially painful. In one key scene, he is forced to defecate in a field while the bullies look on laughing. Miike indeed looks to shock, but he also looks to spark a reaction from the viewer. The latter point is only further once the camera pans to the right and shows the father, the stranger, and the female television producer looking at the humiliation of the producer’s son. The producer has the stranger tape his son’s humiliation because it makes good television.

A scene like the abovementioned begs the viewer to question what is right and wrong. It is also challenges what the viewer’s perception of a protagonist. In most mainstream films, the protagonist is the person the audience roots for, or at least sympathizes with. Miike, ever the sore thumb, does away with the typical protagonist/antagonist storyline and gives the audience a morally bankrupt family. The audience perception of character is challenged throughout the film with scenes like the abovementioned or even in the climactic death of the bullies, a scene and point I’ll get to later.

Miike’s films are known to have bizarre, almost vague morals to them. For instance, the stranger does not provide any clear moments where he gives the family realizations that the life they’re leading is wrong. He hits the father in the head with a rock twice and makes the mother lactate in a most bizarre fashion. Miike, one may argue, is satirizing the moments of epiphany provided by films in general. Those moments where the protagonist realizes the life he or she leads is wrong. Miike, in this film especially, does not provide any clear realization or explanation as to how or why the characters in the family start working together and, by film’s end, change for the better.

Miike’s films are known for their ambiguous endings. Visitor Q ends with the son and father of the family sucking milk out of the mother’s breasts while the daughter, arriving home after receiving her own “rock to the head epiphany,” goes over to the mother, gets on her knees, and prepares to also suck from her mother’s teat. Miike’s shocking images and occurrences combine unorthodox methods of storytelling and experimentation in filmic form combined with old-fashioned morals. By film’s end, the viewer has been treated to incest, sexual abuse, and even Miike’s trademark stylized violence in the the death of the young bullies at the hands of the mother and father, who work as a team in killing off their sons’ aggressors by murdering them with sharp objects. Rather than dwell on the horridness of this violence, Miike presents the scene in as an exaggerated comical interlude, as if the scene itself were separate from the film for those few seconds when it takes place. The scene is presented in the film like a comedy sketch on hyper drive that combines dark humor with Kabuki Theater (the facial expression on the father’s face as he saws the off the head of the head bully is worth the rental price alone).

In many of his films, like Audition, Dead or Alive, and this one, Miike expresses the importance of family. Visitor Q explores this by showing the viewer the morally bankrupt deeds of a television producer and how they indirectly attribute to the near implosion of his family. Indeed, Miike lays out the clues for the audience to investigate. The daughter is a prostitute, but her father and mother are not there to intervene. Heck, the father even pays her for a quickie. The mother, the most likable and humble character in the film, is abused and humiliated by her own son, yet let it continue throughout most of the film. A bit after the first half of the movie, the mother finally stands up for herself. In typical Miike fashion, rather than having the semblance of an emotionally invested scene, the mother shows her change by throwing a knife at her son’s face while the latter verbally berates her. The son dodges the knife, but the message becomes clear. He cannot continue doing this to his mother anymore.

The most difficult characters to sympathize with, and to understand their changes, are the son and the father.

Miike is also known for her absurdist comedy that borders on satire. Visitor Q satirizes reality television and the need to always find a marketable and interesting subject to exploit for ratings. No more is this apparent than in the scene where the television producer, having coffee with his female co-worker, pitches the idea to have his own family as the subject of a documentary show. The scene is both hilarious in its ludicrous premise, yet sad once we see the hopeless reaction given by the female producer. Her rejecting the father and telling him to get help is also something worth taking note.

Miike’s image as a controversial shock-director is used to market his films. A review of Dead or Alive compared the film to Tarentino on overdrive (not the exact quote, but the message is the same). Indeed, of all the Japanese directors to have made a ripple in the American market, Miike still stands as one of the most popular, primarily because he always seems to challenge his audience’s expectations and their perspective on what’s right ad wrong. I challenge anyone to google Miike’s name and NOT find typical words such as “controversial”, “shocking”, “disturbing”, or even a clichéd phrase like “insane genius.” Miike is all of the above and more. He is a filmmaker who does not conform to style, genre, or any other convention found in Cinema Arts textbooks.

Takashi Miike is his own man.