on the ring remake

[Aaron Gerow]

Just on another track, I find Nakata's Ring much more interesting than 
Suzuki Koji's original novel, especially in terms of such issues as 
explaining the image, if not the horror itself. Suzuki works through 
the traditional horror opposition between rational explanation and the 
irrational fantastic, arguing, as the genre often must, for the need 
for expansion of the rational to account for the unusual. But 
ultimately the work is only offering a rational explanation of the 
supernatural, not a real acknowledgment of the fantastic. I wonder if 
this doesn't have something to do with the fact that the 
self-reflexivity in the novel comes from the fact the hero is a writer, 
with the novel thus valorizing the word over the image. Nakata, who has 
made a number of films about cinema, from documentaries on Losey and 
Konuma to Last Scene and Joyurei, does a much better job of exploring 
the image as a realm of the fantastic. Switching the protagonist from a 
male to a female, which gets rid of some of the annoying "a father must 
protect his family" ideology in the novel, also sat better with me. 
Though then one does get Nakata's ideas about the motherly, which go a 
bit overboard in Dark Waters.

Has anyone else thought about the film in relation to the novel?

Aaron Gerow
KineJapan owner

Assistant Professor
Film Studies Program/East Asian Languages and Literatures
Yale University

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