The Ring — Female Reproduction, Technology & A Desire for Immortality

Title: Ringu (The Ring)
By: Hideo Nakata
Call No.: Other 791.4372 RIN
Location: Film Village, library@esplanade

This essay examines the perspective that both female protagonists Asakawa Reiko (Matsushima Nanako) and Sadako Yamamura (Inou Rie) are mirrors of each other in their subversive performance of the feminine reproductive powers.

Narrative-wise, Reiko’s female presence drives the narrative as the reporter investigating the curse of the video tape even as Sadako’s physical absence dominates the film like an indelible watermark drawing Reiko towards her, as Reiko traces the lineage of deaths from her dead niece all the way to her face-off with the remnants of Sadako’s body in the well.

The desire to procreate can be seen as a defiance of death and ageing, or a desire for immortality. Both women perform their feminine powers of procreation or self-perpetuation in methods that function as a social commentary of the Japanese society and its broken nuclear family configurations (through divorce or murder in the family).

Sadako was pushed down the well by her father and left to die. Though dead for many years, the vengeful Sadako perpetuates herself through “nensha” — the focusing of desire as an imprint and image on film or a medium — and its viral-like properties ensure her self-perpetuation through the cursed videotape.

Reiko is an inverse mirror image of Sadako. She ensures that her own lineage is not terminated by sacrificing her father for her son. Reiko indirectly and directly causes the death of her ex-husband and her father as vicarious replacements for herself and her son respectively when they watch the videotape.

One of the horrors of this film has often been attributed to its modern doomsday message of the ambivalence of technology and its viral-like mechanical reproductive abilities.

But to me, its greatest horror lies in the ending of the film where Reiko copies the videotape and drives her now cursed son Yoichi to his grandfather’s house (her own aged father) with the disturbing implication that she will alleviate the curse from her son by passing it to her father, thus causing his death.

It bespeaks an inarticulate taboo and tension deeply entrenched in the one of the fastest ageing societies in the world — the inability of Japan to reconcile her aversion to ageing and death, with her polarised obsession with youth.

Like a resurgence of the fabled suicide forests and the attendant tradition of abandoning aged parents in the woods to die as a pitiless but efficient means of population control, the final solution by Reiko to choose the next generation (her son) over the previous one (her father) is symptomatic of this social malaise.

When you stare at the television screen; the screen stares back at you. Japan is staring into the abyss of her own collective psyche and she stares back in two ways, firstly through the eye of Sadako staring at each victim who dies in shock. Secondly, she stares back through these subversive performances of female reproductions that interrogate the nature of death, desire for immortality and lastly, gender politics through a violent interruption in a strongly patriarchal society.

Written By: C.C. Wang

Ed: This review was one of the entries for the NLB-SFS Japanese Film Review Contest.