on the ring remake
Aaron Gerow
gerowaaron
Wed Jun 23 03:27:20 EDT 2004
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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