Ringu

I will preface this with the admission that I know very well that you all think my taste in movies is crap. I'm willing to accept this and move on.

Yesterday I bought and watched the movie "Ringu," the original Japanese movie that the Hollywood movie "The Ring" was based on. This in itself is a pretty remarkable thing. I can tolerate about 1% of the movies I've seen, but I really enjoyed "The Ring" and I read that "Ringu" was even more intense and that it avoided what at least one reviewer considered affectation and commonplaces that plague Hollywood's usual offerings. For what it's worth, "The Ring" is the better movie. The performances are better, the additions to the plot really filled in the glaring gaps in the plot of "Ringu"; maybe these things were in the novel, I haven't read that, but probably will now.

But I thought about "Ringu" and wondered why I didn't find it stranger than "The Ring." I expected to be impressed by cultural and aesthetic differences represented by a culture, a nation that has a history so different from our own, that the difference between Japanese and modern American culture might combine somehow with the strangeness of the narrative and produce a truly different experience for me. This didn't happen.

Much of the movie could have occurred anywhere in urban America. There were a few incidents that utilized traditional dress/settings/themes, but not enough, and from my perspective, keeping in mind that I am no expert in Japanese culture, the moments where traditional Japanese culture and modern Japanese culture (post-WWII, post-Hiroshima/Nagasaki, post-Coca Cola) met were not really handled as features of the movie. The clashes between rural and urban, tradition and modernity, personal fulfillment and social position, were all suggested but not presented explicitely or at length in "Ringu." None of that mattered in "The Ring." There it's just a bunch of Americans dealing with their problems. But as a cultural document, "Ringu" is really troubling. For most of "Ringu," it might as well be a bunch of Americans. The modern Japanese culture presented in "Ringu" makes strange visual claims, and the movie would have benefitted from making the collision between traditional culture and modern culture explicit. What kind of movies will they be making in Iraq and Afghanistan 60 years from now? Will they fail to consider that somewhere in the unique aesthetic claims they present, there is a cultural component that was set in motion 60 years before and contributes to whatever unity we see in these movies? I'd like to think that these sorts of concerns are the true content of "Ringu." I'll watch it again and read the book. I'll post again if I come up with anything new. Rock and roll.