Observation is exploitation is violence is sex is disease is annihilation. When we’re told that our gaze is its own engine of destructive virality what does it say that we absolutely cannot put the vessel of that message down? Eminently readable. I read this like a cannibal devouring himself. “This is about you and your love is contributing to it no matter how smug your second-order knowledge on the issue is.” A samizdat imbued with its own curse and proliferation is its only cure.

Novelized neo-noir late-80’s Tokyo. Can’t help myself from drawing parallels to Kurosawa’s Cure. But where Cure shows you the horrific violence of your soul in the reflection of a pair of questioning eyes, Ring shows you the bleak unfeeling abstraction of a screen, of the perspective of another. What your filthy gaze looks like from a corpse that you’ve killed. Ring has no cathartic puppeteered violence. Where Cure proffers the struggle to rid oneself of the screaming void that lies within, Ring has the mud-covered howls of “why me” shouted into a sky that offers only blackness. Outside of you there is no arcane knowledge meant to elicit your Will. There is only Nothing and it can do nothing but stare until you tear yourself apart under its gaze.