The Scary Screen

Media Anxiety in The Ring

Kristen Lacefield, Kristen Lacefield

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317016656
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Historia y crítica cinematográficas

In 1991, the publication of Koji Suzuki's Ring, the first novel of a bestselling trilogy, inaugurated a tremendous outpouring of cultural production in Japan, Korea, and the United States. Just as the subject of the book is the deadly viral reproduction of a VHS tape, so, too, is the vast proliferation of text and cinematic productions suggestive of an airborne contagion with a life of its own. Analyzing the extraordinary trans-cultural popularity of the Ring phenomenon, The Scary Screen locates much of its power in the ways in which the books and films astutely graft contemporary cultural preoccupations onto the generic elements of the ghost story"in particular, the Japanese ghost story. At the same time, the contributors demonstrate, these cultural concerns are themselves underwritten by a range of anxieties triggered by the advent of new communications and media technologies, perhaps most significantly, the shift from analog to digital. Mimicking the phenomenon it seeks to understand, the collection's power comes from its commitment to the full range of Ring-related output and its embrace of a wide variety of interpretive approaches, as the contributors chart the mutations of the Ring narrative from author to author, from medium to medium, and from Japan to Korea to the United States.

PART I
Spreading the Word

Chapter 1
The Horror of Media: Technology and Spirituality in the Ringu Films

Anthony Enns

It could be argued rather easily that the rise of modern spiritualism was inherently linked to the emergence of new media technologies in the nineteenth century. The origin of this movement, for example, is often identified as the famous “Hydesville rappings” in 1848, when the Fox sisters began channeling spirits who answered questions by shaking furniture and rapping or knocking on walls—a practice that was directly inspired by the invention of the telegraph.1 The ability of spiritual mediums to communicate with the dead thus paralleled the ways in which new media technologies enabled disembodied communication across vast distances; their ability to convey pictures and voices of the dead during séances also paralleled the ways in which new optical and sound technologies like photography and phonography allowed for the proliferation of spectral images and sounds. In other words, spiritual mediums essentially functioned as media technologies for transmitting and receiving acoustic, optical, and written information. Indeed, as Friedrich Kittler has noted, “There is no difference between occult and technological media.”2 Furthermore, such links between occult and technological media also reveal deeper anxieties about the integrity and autonomy of the individual subject. Because mediums could only communicate with the dead while in a trance—a liminal state in which they surrendered their own identity and agency—séances effectively bridged the psychic apparatus and the electric media environment. The term “channeling,” which was employed for both occult and technological media, provided a means of articulating this process of automating the body, evacuating the self, and dispersing consciousness through the media network.

We should not be surprised then, as Kittler also notes, that the concept of the self was itself a product of an earlier medial shift. Following Eric Havelock’s claim that the notion of self-hood was inspired by the invention of writing— “as the inscribed language and thought and the person who spoke it became separated from each other”3—Kittler concludes that “[t]he soul, the inner self, the individual … were only the effects of an illusion, neutralized through the hallucination of reading and widespread literacy.”4 Accordingly, media technologies such as cinema expose this illusion because “films anatomize the imaginary picture of the body that endows humans … with a borrowed I.”5 While Kittler primarily supports this claim through close readings of early silent films, such as The Student of Prague (1913),6 critics such as Arno Meteling have argued that modern horror films provide even more vivid depictions of the threat that media technologies pose to the integrity and autonomy of the individual subject. For Meteling, films such as Poltergeist (1982), The Sixth Sense (1999), The Mothman Prophecies (2002), White Noise (2005), and Paranormal Activity (2009) frequently incorporate media technologies into their supernatural narratives in order to illustrate the dehumanizing impact of technology:

The ghost film internalizes the allegorical iconography of electronic media and presents a system of things that gives shape to a clandestine realm of communication. The spirits no longer come from hell, the realm of the dead, or the unconscious, but rather from a limbo state that can be called the invisible realm of media or the universe of technological images.7

Instead of presenting modern versions of traditional ghost stories, in other words, these films effectively replace older notions of the spirit realm with the new realm of electric communication.

Central to Meteling’s research and analysis is Hideo Nakata’s Ringu (1998), which provides perhaps the most perfect example of the emergence of spirits from the technological realm. Meteling notes, for example, that this film represents the convergence of various technologies, such as televisions and telephones, into an “uncanny media coupling,”8 and anyone who comes into contact with this network is immediately infected by a media virus that absorbs them directly into the new channels of electric communication. Ringu thus illustrates not only the parallels between occult and technological media, as spectral images and voices repeatedly manifest themselves through media technologies, but also the threat that these technologies pose to the integrity and autonomy of the subject. This threat is most clearly embodied in the notion of a transmitted signal that actually kills its recipients, but even the characters who manage to survive this viral contagion by copying and transmitting it to other victims (a process that essentially mirrors the effects of media technologies themselves by replicating and disseminating spectral data) remain indelibly transformed by their exposure to the signal. Like spiritual mediums, such transformations are also frequently represented as altered states of consciousness, ones in which bodies function as technologies for receiving, storing, and transmitting information; ultimately, their spirits merge with the media network itself, thus blurring the boundaries between human and machine, materiality and immateriality, and interiority and exteriority.

Critics such as Eric White have similarly agued that Ringu is distinctly modern because it “associates ubiquitous technological mediation—that is, the cameras, television sets, videocassette recorders, telephones and other such hardware foregrounded throughout the film—with the intrusion of ‘posthuman’ otherness into contemporary cultural life.”9 The concept of “posthuman” identity refers to “a state of perpetual flux,” in which “the self consequently becomes a contingent assemblage, a bundle of provisional identifications rather than a cohesive unity, a composite copy of randomly encountered psychic dispositions and fragments of personality.”10 White thus concludes that the Ringu films “articulate a troubled … vision of a future in which … contemporary information technology ceaselessly reconstitutes individual identity.”11 Other critics, such as Jui-hua Tseng, have echoed such assertions, claiming that the Ringu films reflect “the collective anxiety of our time” by representing the ways in which “inhuman technology and machines dominate our lives and beings.”12

Some evidence for this interpretative approach to Ringu may be found in interviews with Hideo Nakata and Koji Suzuki, who have argued that they were more influenced by American horror films than Japanese folklore. Suzuki has acknowledged, for example, that his 1991 novel Ring, from which Nakata’s film was adapted, was actually inspired by American films such as Poltergeist, and Nakata acknowledges The Haunting (1963), The Exorcist (1973), The Omen (1976), and Videodrome (1983) as influences in his approach to making the film.13 It is important to note, however, that Ringu was also inspired by the history of Japanese parapsychology. This field of study first emerged in the early twentieth century, when Japan was being dramatically transformed into a modern state, and it appealed to a marginalized group of Japanese psychologists primarily because it challenged the western humanist tradition, which was gradually infiltrating Japanese institutions and academic discourses. Professor Tomokichi Fukurai, for example, was particularly interested in the psychic manipulation of new media technologies like photography because these phenomena seemed to connect modern technology with older concepts of spirituality, and the deployment of technology for psychic or spiritual purposes was intended to divest these technologies of their westernizing and dehumanizing impact. Although the Ringu films clearly represent the perceived threat that these new media technologies seemed to pose to the traditional notion of the liberal humanist subject, a closer examination of the history of Japanese parapsychology reveals the ways in which the integration of the psychic apparatus and the media network was also embraced and encouraged as a means of preserving older notions of spirituality and resisting the relentless progress of modernity. By incorporating elements of this history, the Ringu films express the tensions not only between humans and machines but also between the mechanization of the soul and the potential spiritualization of technology, yet they ultimately seem to suggest that the merging of consciousness and the electric media environment represents the very source of the threat posed by new media technologies. In the following essay I will thus explore how the history of Japanese parapsychology and its efforts to spiritualize technology are represented in the Ringu films, and I will pay close attention to how these films illustrate the horrors of modern media as a way of paradoxically embracing modernity and renouncing any resistance to western intellectual expansionism.

A Brief History of Japanese Parapsychology

During the Meiji period (1868–1912) western scientific methods were gradually being transplanted into Japan. While parapsychology was one of the first research topics studied by Japanese psychologists, its original function was to challenge the authority of ancient customs and traditions.14 When Enryo Inoue founded the Philosophical Institute or “Tetsugaku Kan” (the predecessor of Tokyo University), he was firmly committed to eliminating superstitious thought. In 1888 he also established the Research Society for Supernormal Phenomena, which attempted to provide rational explanations for allegedly supernatural phenomena.15 Many Japanese intellectuals were disappointed by western rationalism, however, and they looked instead for alternative ways to explain the conditions of human existence. Tomokichi Fukurai was one of the first researchers to study parapsychology in Japan, and his research methods were directly opposed to those of Inoue. As historian Lisette Gebhardt explains:

Fukurai began with a modern western understanding of science, but he was gradually led to a critique of rationality through the irrational, which emerged within a certain niche of western society, that is, spiritualism. Spiritualism provided an opportunity for him to pursue a “spiritual” way that did not exclude premodern ways of thinking.16

The institutional resistance that Fukurai experienced throughout his career illustrates the degree to which academic institutions in Japan had become westernized by the turn of the century, and his struggles closely resemble those of the British Society for Psychical Research (S.P.R.), whose members were often forced to suppress their research due to pressure from the scientific community.17

Fukurai graduated from Tokyo Imperial University in 1898, and he attended graduate school under Yujiro Motora, who is considered the founder of psychology in Japan. Fukurai primarily studied the work of William James, and he was particularly interested in abnormal psychology and hypnotism. He translated James’ Psychology: A Briefer Course into Japanese and graduated in 1905 with a dissertation on ‘The Psychology of Hypnotism,’ which was published in two volumes: An Overview of the Psychology of Hypnotism in 1905 and The Psychology of Hypnotism in 1906. Fukurai also began lecturing on abnormal psychology at Tokyo University in 1905, eventually accepting an associate professorship of abnormal psychology under Motora in 1908. Nevertheless, his research interests gradually shifted from abnormal psychology to parapsychology. Historians speculate that James’ interest in psychical research (James assumed the third presidency of the S.P.R. in 1894) may have inspired Fukurai. Moreover, because he never studied in the west he may have been oblivious to the disrespect of most western scholars to this field of study.18

In 1910 a colleague named Shinkichi Imamura, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Kyoto, introduced Fukurai to a clairvoyant named Chizuko Mifune. At the age of 23 Mifune allegedly developed powers of foresight through a series of breathing and meditation exercises. Fukurai and Imamura visited Mifune together in March of that year, and they conducted a series of tests that reportedly provided scientific proof of her extra-sensory perception. Because he was under heavy criticism from the press and many of his other colleagues, particularly Kenjiro Yamakawa, professor of physics and president of Tokyo University, Fukurai arranged a public demonstration on September 15, 1910. During this presentation Mifune was asked to read written messages contained in sealed envelopes. Although Mifune’s predictions were accurate, many of the professors who attended the demonstration claimed that she was a fraud. Seiji Nakamura, for example, reported to several newspapers that Mifune had falsified the results by secretly switching Fukurai’s envelopes with her own. Fukurai’s mentor, Motora, was also skeptical of such research, and he strongly urged Fuku...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Media Anxiety and the Ring Phenomenon
• Part I Spreading The Word
• Part II Loss In Translation
• Part III Techno-Human Reproductions
• Part Iv Afterword
• Further Reading
• Index