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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
As last year's addictive horror hit reaches DVD, a critic probes its reflective surfaces, its murky depths and its icy postmodern core. (You now have seven days!)
Mar 18, 2003 | "Horror beyond psychological tolerance cancels enjoyment and nullifies catharsis. The film becomes a nightmare from which it is impossible to awaken after leaving the safety of the theater, an unmastered trauma that continues to plague the mind. Pictures like 'The Exorcist' or 'Night of the Living Dead' have been extremely effective in spawning raw panic, but they also irrevocably violate our childlike faith in the movies not to harm us."
-- Harvey Greenberg, "Movies on Your Mind"
Earlier this month "The Ring" reached video stores nationwide, and despite a persistent buzzing in the ears from Peter Jackson's latest "Lord of the Rings" fly-by and the throatier rumbles of the dogs of war, thousands will catch the strains of its lethal siren song. If nothing else, this collective mobilization of die-hards and dark-side junkies serves notice that some horror films can thrive in any cultural climate, even an anti-terror campaign extending to Middle-earth.
A remake of the 1998 Japanese release "Ringu," itself an adaptation of Kôji Suzuki's 1989 novel "The Ring," has crossed media and continents in its successive incarnations, proving to be an irresistible force. Despite mixed reviews, "The Ring" belongs to the class of horror film that becomes part of our cultural vocabulary, like "Psycho" or "The Exorcist," and marks a major leap forward for the genre. Yes, this film delivers an all-ages scare within the confines of a PG-13 rating, and yes, it features masterfully orchestrated effects that can blanch even the heartiest filmgoers. It also might be the first instance in the history of American cinema in which audiences are urged to become publicists under the threat of death.
But what separates Gore Verbinski's "The Ring" from the usual genre dreck is a sophisticated and sustained assault on the viewer's imagination, informed by a radical strain of postmodern thought. Let's put it this way: If "Jaws" tapped into the instinctual font of the medulla oblongata, this film stabs slightly higher in the cerebral cortex, conveying a charge no less dreadful for being heady.
The premise of the film should be familiar by now: There's a videotape that metes out indiscriminate death to viewers, and finally one's only recourse is to propagate the tape's existence and add to the death toll. After the "Scream" films established the popularity of self-reflexivity in the genre (Ehren Kruger, screenwriter of "The Ring," also wrote "Scream 3"), it was only a matter of time before the truly sinister applications of hype were discovered. But the film's theoretical underpinnings are less surprising than we might assume; at least since Immanuel Kant, discerning audiences have acknowledged the close proximity between the terrible (or the terrifying) and the sublime, and what we have in "The Ring" is a film that smartly plays both sides of the divide.
As such, "The Ring" deserves an in-depth look at its treacherous surface. While it's customary to preface such a tell-all analysis with a disclaimer -- to spare the folks who haven't yet (cue the ominous music) seen the video -- in this case I don't think it makes any difference. You can settle in for a screening fully knowing what's in store and "The Ring" will still burrow into your brain, destabilizing the cozy experience, and usher you finally to the limit of endurance. This is a film that retains its bite, no matter what rational precautions we might take.
Simply for the purposes of orientation, a quick recap of the players is in order. First, there are Katie Nurick (Amber Tamblyn) and Rebecca Kotler (Rachael Bella), two teens victimized at the outset. Our heroine and Katie's aunt, Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts), assumes the role of sleuth, unraveling the tape's murky origin, in no small part because her son, Aidan (David Dorfman), is also at risk: He's been channeling messages related to the mystery, and his eyes, looking ever so slightly digitally enhanced, convey an acute terror at what he knows. There's Noah (Martin Henderson), primarily a hunky A-V expert and secondarily Aidan's father, who does his best to help Rachel but ultimately can't. Finally, there are the Morgans, a family of horse breeders on remote Moesko Island: Richard (Brian Cox) is the somewhat irascible, sole surviving member. His wife, Anna (Shannon Cochran), immortalized on the offending video, has thrown herself off a cliff; Samara (Daveigh Chase), the daughter, we learn, had an adverse effect on horse breeding, served a brief stint in a psychiatric institution, was murdered by her mother (who shoved her, partly asphyxiated, into a well, thereby serving up the film's trademark image), and is currently enjoying an active afterlife as the generator of murderous art-house videos.
A Profile in Terror
In part, the unusual power of "The Ring" stems from its studied manipulation of the genre's conventions, both old and new. The opening scene, for example, positively oozes with clichés -- two sacrificial teen girls, home alone and clad in school uniforms that expose plenty of bare flesh. Much later, once Rachel has followed the clues to the bottom of Samara's well, airing her story and (she thinks) putting Samara's spirit to rest, we're treated to the played-out survivor scene -- Rachel huddled in an Emergency Services blanket while the guardians of civilization exhume the petite remains. In general, the film rivals recent predecessors like "The Sixth Sense" and "Stir of Echoes" in its liberal doses of therapeutic concern for a middle-class family in distress.
What distinguishes such moments in "The Ring" might best be illustrated by a single vignette that is at once homage to and commentary on such genre standbys. As Rachel closes in on the mysterious origin of the videotape, she arrives on Richard Morgan's doorstep, plying her reportorial know-how to get Morgan to talk. In the course of the interview, Rachel reveals her irrational suspicions about the videotape, at which point Morgan's standoffish façade visibly erodes. He begins to encroach on Rachel's personal space, clutching a telltale meat hook in his hand -- the butcher's trademark from "I Know What You Did Last Summer."
Before delivering the bloody coup de grace, however, Morgan asks her if she's shown the tape to anyone else. As soon as he learns about her bootleg copy, the threat he poses dissipates and he puts down the hook. The implication here is that Morgan knows the rules of Samara's evil game (Rachel will be spared), and that the slasher-film death he proposes to deliver would be a kindness compared to the horror that Samara dispenses.
