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Intimate strangers
Venice alley
"Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends."
This second epigraph plays out in the Comfort of Strangers in an extremely disturbing way. Colin and Mary continually get lost in Venice with or without their street maps, preoccupied with their relationship and disoriented by unfamiliarity. They have trouble fulfilling even their most basic needs, like hunger, when they are not in the hotel. After the first night they spend with Robert, they can't find their way back to the hotel so they sleep on the street, and can't even find a glass of water in the morning. In this context Robert invites them back to his house: they are comforted by beds and water and intrigued by the couple's mysteriousness. They seem to lose their intuition in this scene. They are still totally submissive and don't begin to distrust Robert and Caroline even when they see the razors and whips, when Robert punches Colin in the stomach, when Caroline admits to watching them while they slept.
Colin and Mary make no effort to go back, but frighteningly enough end up at the house again through coincidence. Conversely, Caroline and Robert have been sinisterly preparing for the visit. The pivotal moment on the boat underlines the chanciness of the encounter: "There was a momentary pause, when everyone around them seemed poised between actions, like children at a game of grandmother's footsteps." In this moment they step off. When they see Caroline waving at them, they walk over in silent obedience. Why don't they stay away? They know from the photo of Colin that Robert may have been stalking them. Perhaps they want to help Caroline. But they don't ever try to exert control, they are susceptible to being overpowered by others, and that submissiveness is a large part of Caroline and Robert's attraction to them. Nothing is familiar to them in this setting, and this along with the security they feel with each other causes them to disregard the utter otherness of Caroline and Robert until it turns into a nightmare. Traveling blurs the line between intimacy and strangers. In this case misguided trust has the most brutal of consequences.
to learn or not learn the customs?
Is this the danger of not knowing the customs of a destination before you arrive? By not studying their customs, anything could be perceived as "normal" or "natural" while in a country other than your own. Instead of showing us the enticing "destination video" on an airplane with beautiful scenic clips and happy tourists frolicking around town, should they use this video to summarize some of the customs? If they did, would it make some tourists too timid or cautious upon arrival? What is the right amount of knowledge to let you enjoy your destination in a safe way while maintaining a sense of discovery, passion and excitement?
It is definitely very creepy
It is indeed very unsettling how compliant Mary and Colin are to whatever comes their way. Their thought processes seem almost blank as they are moved (or encouraged?) from place to place. This makes one wonder, too, what subtle things in their environment were guiding and ushering them along.
Who Can You Trust Anymore?
That really is a scary part of the travel scene. You really are helpless, being foreigners as Mary and Colin were, and they have no other way to turn but follow Robert’s lead from the beginning. It is this blind faith in the goodness of another human being, especially of a native, and the expectation that they would want to come to the aid of an innocent foreigner. There is a certain naivety of the traveler that makes them very vulnerable, which is true of anything leaving their own social sphere into a foreign dimension. The traveler, unintentionally or not (especially if they don’t have any maps and have no idea where they are going whenever they step outdoors), is thus always at the mercy of “the comfort of strangers”. For, who are they, as outsiders, to say what is right or wrong in their new society, what is authentic and customary and authentic or staged and fake? Like how were Mary and Colin to know, at first, that Robert’s eagerness to show them around was something darker than just local pride? I suppose it all can relate back to the tourist’s previous experience and how much their starry eyes are willing to believe in the “authentic”, and whether they will be skeptical, constantly questioning and comparing their surroundings to their home, or give into the magic of the authentic experience, but like Mary and Colin, running the risk of their safety