In the Flesh: Visiting Hours

Curiously situated after Black Christmas, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and Halloween but before Single White Female and the wave of nebulously feminist slashers that came out in the early nineties, Jean-Claude Lord’s Visiting Hours is a brutally cynical exploration of cultural ambivalence toward feminine pain. Starring Michael Ironside as Colt Hawker, a misogynistic killer groomed and beaten by his father and witness to the domestically violent older man’s mutilation at his mother’s hands, the film trades in ideas ranging from the smothering paternalism of journalistic, police, and medical systems to the hypothesis that extreme misogyny is a sublimation of repressed homosexuality. No matter how outmoded the psychology, though, Ironside is incandescent, slick with sweat and alternatingly reptilian and pitifully human. His silent, childlike breakdown in the hospital laundry room as he recalls his father’s sexualized and cruelly playful abuse and conflates it visually with the domestic violence his mother suffered and her own violent act of retaliation is a wonderful showcase both for his facial subtlety and Lord’s intrusive, almost voyeuristic camera.

Visiting Hours is largely unscored, a decision which frequently leaves us alone with Hawker’s desperate, single-minded ingenuity as he repeatedly penetrates the security in the hospital where journalist Deborah Ballin (Lee Grant) is recuperating from an earlier attack. There is a cloying sense of claustrophobia to these hospital sets, full of interchangeable rooms and hallways, interchangeable nurses and police officers, visitors and doctors, all of them more intent on keeping things business as usual than on keeping Ballin safe. The only people who really care about her are other battered women and, paradoxically, Hawker himself, who risks his life half a dozen times in pursuit of hers. “You talk and talk,” he snarls to her as he pins her against her hospital room’s sink with his bulk. “Now you’re gonna listen.” He despises her so powerfully it drives him to murder, but without her he can’t achieve catharsis — he’s impotent in bed but can’t stay away from women. His assaults on men are much more sudden and vicious, as when he ball-gags and murders a friendly patient or in his terrifying attack from behind on a city cop, whose mouth he seizes hold of and pries open with both hands. There are clear homosexual overtones to his acts of violence, an otherizing of his brutality which undermines the film’s thesis on the culturally instilled masculine need for domination and control.

Gender stereotypes and signaling play heavily into Lord’s film, as in the climactic scene in which a dying Hawker attempts to seize Ballin by the leg but instead snatches her high-heeled shoe, which she slips out of to escape. Men mistake the social construct of womanhood for the thing itself and, lizardlike, the woman sheds her tail and lives to fight another day. Even the characters’ names play heavily into gendered ideas. A “colt” is both a gun, the ultimate Western symbol of masculine violence and brutality, and a newborn horse, unsteady on its legs, in need of care and guidance. Colt and Ballin (her own last name a portmanteau of Hawker’s preferred method of murder, popping a stress ball into his victim’s mouth and then stabbing them to death) are both victims of the bleak social wasteland of patriarchal society, and neither has a reliable way out. Ballin’s crusade to exonerate a woman who killed her violent husband in self-defense gives the thinnest possible thread of hope for a better future, but even that rests in the claws of the same system that leaves her fleeing for her life through the maze of the hospital’s bowels.