Oct 9, 2024 7:21 PM
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.
4 Comments
1 year ago
Just watched Cure the other day, was wondering if there were books like it. Glad to have a rec!
1 year ago
Thanks for the rec! Just downloaded the first four books of the series (I'm a bit of an eBook hoarder haha)... The Ring was my very first horror movie and it really freaked me out at the time, so I'm looking forward to this as a spooky and perhaps nostalgic October read :D
1 year ago
Thoughts on the American remake vs the Japanese original?
1 year ago
So I rewatched the American remake a few years ago, and thought it was a pretty okay horror movie. The horse scene was hilarious to me and took me out of it a bit lmfao. I saw about half of the Japanese version a while back, and I can recall liking it more than the American remake. I really need to get back into it.