New Classics: Videodrome and The Ring
At 17, Videodrome shocked me. In the first few minutes a talk show host asks if violence and stimulation on television are linked to violence in social culture, an idea which gets James Woods’ Max Renn so hot for his co-interviewee that he asks her out on national television. Nicki brand, played by the surprisingly sublime Debbie “Blondie” Harry, in turn, is turned on by everything from being pierced mid-intercourse to hanging out watching snuff porn while being cut with a knife. Watching these tender moments of the first fifteen minutes with my father was certainly one of the more uncomfortable experiences of my moviegoing adulthood.
David Cronenberg directs this fantastic tale of 80′s media obsession with all the surreal mania one would expect from him. He has a very peculair love of the physicality of media, allowing videotapes to turn into human flesh on the one hand and controlling one’s mind on the other. The characters slip in and out of multiple layers of reality, through the permeable membrane of the television screen. Hallucination is reality after watching Videodrome, and ideas take hold and turn your stomach into an oriface; these extreme metaphors provoke some seriously stimulating cinema. It foresaw the rise of media culture looming a decade over the horizon. While it seems oblivious of the digital transformation about to take hold, it starkly predicts the advent of the internet / YouTube video craze. Investigating the elusive hints of a “pirate signal” broadcasting extreme snuff videos through cable lines, James Woods slowly becomes obsessed with the feed, searching for the creators of what is essentially a webisode, existing as short snippets of poorly produced, handheld, amateur video. It blurs the lines between fiction and reality, and simultaneously, it anticipates the national craving for reality television which still grips the airwaves with its slimy claws.
Nicki Brand is a self-help talk-radio host by day, and a sex-craved femme fatale by night. Debbie Harry plays her so sensuously, she makes burning oneself with a cigarette look sexy. Seeing the movie for the third or fourth time with a lesbian friend of mine my final year in college, we both became so enamored of her gauzy beauty and sexual energy that it provoked – quite literally – a brief, but spicy erotic encounter between us. This is the power of videodrome for true movie lovers, to turn even gay men and lesbians onto each other; it crosses my wires and fries my circuits, so boldly linking violence and film and media and sexuality as only Cronenberg could convinvingly do. Long live the new flesh.
The Ring
The Ring introduced a generation of American moviegoers to J-Horror, a new genre of horror cinema from Japan. In reaction to the gore-driven American horror movies of the eighties, diverse influences across Japan, China and Korea began forging an artistic aesthetic for pitch-black horror films, at once minimalistic and deeply psychological, produced with an ominous mood and understated acting, eschewing torrents of fake blood and plastic face masks for sinister appliances and the iconic cloak of long, black hair. The industry was, and still is, extremely prolific, with surprisingly derivative themes, plots, and characters, but it wasn’t until The Ring that mainstream American audiences could catch a taste of this uniquely Eastern cinema. While The Ring does pay homage to the original, Ringu, it also updates it through and for American eyes. Without a doubt, screenwriter Erin Krugher does a better job of reinterpreting the genre than we have seen of an American remake since.
I think what’s especially memorable about The Ring is it’s iconography. The updates Gore Verbinski and crew made to the short film-within-the-film (the one that kills you!) really tighten its’ brief, but powerful emotional resonance – it possesses a fantastic subconscious logic, even just as a threatening series of overlapping images … Bees, horses, flies, and endless rings – it feels like we’re watching a pirate video, hacked from one of Satan’s more random nightmares, or maybe something David Lynch could have cooked up in his earlier years. Sunara, the psychic progeny of criminally negligent parents, is just as horrifying a villain as Freddy or Jason, with her chique backwards walk and mask of soggy black hair. Who cares that what she represents is now completely cliche? At the time she was certainly scary. Coughing up hair, horses like deranged lemmings, warped photographic images — these are extremely memorable visuals that ramp up the disturbing atmosphere J-Horror excels at. The cinematography, and editing, are particularly effective at creating a distance from the characters, isolating Rachel and Aiden from everyone around them cinematographically, as the narrative drives them further and further from humanity.
I’m not going to make the case that Ring 2 is nearly as fantastic a movie as the first, but the short film Rings (included with the DVD) is certainly worth watching, if nothing else but to simulate the effect of what watching all four original Ringu movies might be like. Rings is a prequel to The Ring 2 and meant to be played right before watching it. It expands on the most horrifying part of Sunara’s videotape madness, that in order to save yourself, you must make a copy of her tape and have another person watch it; in this way, you are forced to perpetuate the murder in order to save yourself. Rings takes this idea to the logical extreme, and explores a fictional community that has developed online to track the effects and spread of the tape. Given that the debilitating insanity that ensues in the 7 days after you watch the tape is much like a hallucination, teenagers have become addicted to the thrill the tape provides, pushing themselves to see how far they can go before having their “backup” watch their copy of the tape. It’s an interesting take on the idea of viral media, how an idea can spread from one person to another in the culture, and ties in a provocative metaphor about drug addiction and overdosing.
Overall, Ringu is far from the most powerful Asian horror film of recent years, but I do find it fitting that, for a horror film whose most obsessive anxiety is the spread of media as a kind of lethal disease, an American remake of it just might be.
