Remember how to look at a film through a feminist lens? Choose a five-minute scene in Ringu and examine the role of woman and how they are portrayed in your selected scene and the film as a whole. Be sure to discuss this topic CINEMATICALLY. How does the director show us? Do this in 3 well developed paragraphs. You might want to look up essays by such big names as Tania Modleski, Laura Mulvey, and Molly Haskell--extra credit for reference to any of their essays. You must state the title of the essay and use at least one quote. I have some books in the library that could help you with this.
DUE: Monday, October 8
Women in this film are extremely important. They play the majority of all pinnacle characters and are portrayed both as independent and as vulnerable, strong and weak. This is done through a multitude of cinematic elements and Asakawa is a single mother who tries to solve a mysterious group of deaths. I chose 23:52 (when she enters the house where the children stayed) to about 30:00 when the phone rings and she finds out she has a week to live.
ReplyDeleteWhen she enters, she is big on screen. The focus is on her. She seems powerful and courageous, because she is not afraid to enter the room where those children watched the video. She is in the foreground while the man looks through the records for her, the man who offers to find the school the dead teenagers went to was small on screen as she left. This shows her power and authority. She is not told to stay in the kitchen and let the men handle things. She is handling things herself. She is also weak and vulnerable though, which is evident through the almost bird’s eye view of her on the couch, which seems to suggest vulnerability, as if some greater being is watching her. Also, the TV is more in the foreground when she watches the video and same with the phone when it rings. She is vulnerable due to the fact that she is now at the mercy of the being in the video. She is shot at a high angle as she looks at the clock and realizes that she has a week left to live. She may authority over males, but not the supernatural and time.
The lighting helps to show how women are both independent and vulnerable. The lighting is very bright when she first arrives at her point of investigation, but gradually becomes darker. This represents Asakawa’s increasing vulnerability. She was not cautious enough to believe the stories about the video, so she watched it and now has put her life on the line. She was independent as she tried to solve these deaths, she did not need a man to accompany her. The lighting was dark when she watched the video though, to represent how little she knew about the subject at hand (how weak in knowledge she was).
The costumes help to achieve this as well. Asakawa is very professional looking. She looks independent, not the ‘eye candy’ with a gorgeous body, but an average looking woman who is also a single mother. She does not look for men’s approval either or looks for love, but focuses on her job and her son. The costume of Sadako shows the independence and innocence of women. She is extremely ‘un-glamorous’ and scares the life out people (literally). She was wronged by her father, who killed her, but now is taking revenge on the world by killing the people who watch the video. She is shown briefly in the video, but it had a lot of static, which shows her instability and her anger boiling inside her.
Tomoko is a Medusa-esque figure, with long hair that seems to reference Medusa’s snakes and the same “evil eye” that turns her victims to stone. As she crawls across the carpet towards Takano, the camera cuts to a close-up of her hands, fingernail-less from Tomoko’s attempts to climb out of the well. They are “the bleeding wound,” a reminder of the phallic cruelty of her “father.” The camera angles in this scene remark on the effectual castration of the male figure, Takano (representing Tomoko’s father) and the transformation of the female from object to subject: Takano is at first standing in a low angle shot as Tomoko crawls across the carpet in a high-angle shot. As she stands, she is then shown exclusively in eye-level or low-angle shots while Takano is generally in high-angle shots. Tomoko’s face freezes in terror and the scene cuts to a shot of his son. The suggestion is that Asakawa’s transformation into the phallic mother in protecting her son is to compensate for Tomoko’s death.
ReplyDeleteHere the man is castrated by the monstrous feminine: Takano switches places with Asakawa the original victim. It was vaguely suggested at several points that Takano might be immune to Tomoko’s curse because of his own supernatural abilities and throughout the film he has a more thorough understanding of Tomoko’s curse than Asakawa does; it is to him she turns for answers and comfort. In the end though, he is the one to die while Asakawa survives. She is last seen driving off to rid her son of the video’s curse. The relationship of the mother with her child validates her, Creed says, and Asakawa has been transformed into the phallic mother.
The moment Asakawa embraces Tomoko’s skeleton, it is the realization of the relationship between the female subject and Oedipal mother. Asakawa is initially driven to the legend of the video by some unspecified fixation that prompts her to even risk watching the video, fully aware of the curse it’s said to bear. The embrace suggests that on some level her inherent fascination with Tomoko is maternal in nature, and thus she serves as a replacement of Tomoko’s mother.
“Governing Lesbian Desire” by Patricia White
“Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine” by Barbara Creed
My scene starts at 1 hour and 27 minutes into the film and goes until the end credits. In the film, Tomoko serves as the antithesis to the female character that exists solely for visual pleasure, as described in Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" essay. Tomoko is made to look so terrifying through her appearance, and looks so threatening in part because of the use of low angles in this scene, that it is impossible for a male viewer, or the character in this scene, to perform the "complete disavowal of castration by the substitution of a fetish
ReplyDeleteobject." Tomoko symbolically becomes the fear of castration of the male viewers, through her final murder of Ryuji, the once seemingly powerful male character.
Mulvey's essay also states that "voyeurism [...] has associations with sadism." This is extremely evident throughout the course of the film. Viewing the videotape is a form of voyeurism. Everyone who views it does so because they are curious about its contents, and the supernatural forces it possesses. It is definitely also a form of sadism because everyone who watches it does so with the knowledge that it is supposed to kill them. While many believe that this is just a rumor, it is nevertheless a form of sadism because they are setting themselves up for potential pain and death.
At the end of the film, Asakawa is very powerful. Though she has been very independent throughout the duration of the film, she did need to rely on Ryuji at times. Seemingly, this would put her into the position of a woman who needs a man's help to succeed. However, at the end of the film, Ryuji dies and Asakawa ends up surviving, without his help. Moreover, she is able to take her fate into her own hands, rather than having to rely on anyone else, when she drives away at the end of the film.
The women of Hideo Nakata's Ringu are depicted as powerful, independent, and driven. The protagonist, Reiko Asakawa, is a female reporter who willfully risks her life in the pursuit of justice after involving herself in a case involving a mysterious videotape with a curse. The "monster" of the film, Sadako, is a female spirit whose mere presence causes people to perish in fear. Though the characters are depicted as under the control of men at points - Reiko solicits the aid of her former husband Ryuji, and Sadako was viciously murdered by her villainous father - the female characters are the driving forces behind the narrative and ultimately the most strong-willed and powerful characters in the film.
ReplyDeleteThe ultimate depiction of Reiko's power is found in the last scene of the film (1:29:15). Reiko comes by Ryuji's apartment only to discover that he is gone and that the curse has fallen upon him. As the scene starts she bursts through the doors of the apartment. As she ponders the logic of his demise the camera ascends upward, creating a high-angle shot portraying her as confused and scared. Wandering the apartment, she does not understand why Ryuji is dead and does not know what will happen next. She feels vulnerable without Ryuji and does not know what to do. When she discovers the videotape in Ryuji's television she gasps, and throws herself down on the couch in abject hopelessness. The shot is filmed from a complete high-angle, depicting her as completely vulnerable. She has no way of defending herself from the mysterious forces against her. She sobs and contemplates the confusion of the curse.
When she discovers the key to survival - copying the film and showing it to someone else - Reiko is depicted differently. The high angle shots are replaced with mid-angle mid shots and close-ups, symbolizing her newfound power. Her vulnerability and sadness for Ryuji are replaced with an all-encompassing need to protect her son from danger. The near-silence of the sound design earlier in the scene is replaced with pumping non-diegetic music as she copies the video. Suddenly she is on the road, looking driven and intent. Ryuji is ready to do anything for her child. She stands as ultimately more strong-willed without Ryuji, an inversion of Laura Mulvey's theory that traditional narrative film "supports the man's role as the active one of forwarding the story, making things happen (Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema)." Without Ryuji Reiko is ready to fight for her son on her own, and appears more empowered than ever. Director Hideo Nakata depicts the women of Ringu as powerful enough to fight the battles for themselves.