The White Peril 白禍

So...I'd seen the Japanese movie but didn't remember having read the original Koji Suzuki novel; but as I read, I realized there were familiar passages that didn't match the movie. I must have read it after all, presumably at the behest of a friend, since I usually don't read fiction published after about 1950.

I had definitely not, however, seen the Hollywood adaptation with Naomi Watts. When I got back to Tokyo, the night was suitably rainy and leaden, so I rented it. Not half-bad, but it was probably a mistake to watch it right after having reread the novel.

The intersection of the uncanny with the scientific and technological is a major theme in all the books and movies. In the Hollywood movie, we get the sense that technology has been invaded or appropriated by the evil Samara--you know, boundaries are transgressed and stuff in ways that gladden the hearts of the post-modern audience.

But the novel conveys a more disturbing sense that the turgidness and messiness of primal life is right there inside our technological artifacts already, despite their sleek, clean surfaces. We've never really escaped the ooze. Right on page one, there's a series of descriptions of Tomoko Ooishi's section of Yokohama that set up not only her death but also the whole feel of the story as it unfolds:

Toward the south, the oily sea threw back the glow from the night lights of a factory. To the walls of the factory, innumerable pipes clung; they called to mind blood vessels creeping their way over sinew inside the body. And yet the innumerable lights encasing it looked like fireflies; if it was a grotesque sight, it was also beautiful. The factory cast its shadow, wordless, into the black sea.

The factory is never mentioned again, but its queasy combination of ickiness and pristineness echoes in the important subsequent revelations in the book. One is the fact that Sadako Yamamura, the antagonist, is an uncommonly beautiful woman who turns out to have a Y chromosome and half-male genitals. Or the way that the deadly video tape was created through the collision of sleek modern recording technology, a grudge-nursing shaman's paranormal powers, and the small pox virus's conscienceless drive to replicate. The passages from which we learn these things feel frankly hokey, but they're powerful nonetheless because the ideas underlying them have been simmering since the first chapter.

That fundamental aspect of the puzzle makes Asakawa's salary-man approach to solving it a poor fit. He's ready from the get-go to take the paranormal angle seriously when something can't be rationally explained--the problem is not that he's closed-minded, exactly. It's just that he goes at it like any old Japanese office worker with a project--massaging former colleagues for favors, hunkering down in the library, calling around for information, and trying to make sense of it all in a kind of mental spreadsheet. He gathers facts efficiently, but when figuring out their significance requires imaginative leaps or intuition, he has to rely on Ryuji, his friend and foil.

Asakawa is the more successful of the two in modern Japanese terms. We learn early on that he had a single oddball idea at work a few years ago; it failed, so he's back to basically being an obedient worker. he has a "normal" job, a wife and child, a condminium in a new building, and smooth relationships with his colleagues. But when the men pursue the riddle into a receding pre-industrial Japan of remote villages, threatening seas, and shamans, it's the isolated misfit Ryuji who knows how to navigate through it. Suzuki doesn't press the point as social commentary, but there's a sense that Asakawa has lost something by being cut off from old Japan. (Maybe that's part of what's suggested when the baby Yoko, who hasn't yet been socialized, cringes at the sight of the demon mask. She already "knows" to be afraid of it.)

I think that relationship is far more suggestive than the conventional estranged-ex-spouses complications in the movies, but I can understand why the scriptwriters felt the need to make the switch. One of the main points about Asakawa in the novel is that he's weak-willed and ordinary. The mystery is thrust on him by circumstance, and he's baffled and irritated much of the time. Giving the movie Asakawa more charisma and a prior interest in the video as an urban legend makes it easier for the audience to identify with her, and having her go to her ex-husband for help makes less back-story necessary to explain why their relationship is complicated.

I thought most of the other adjustments in the Japanese movie were wise, too. The novel describes Asakawa's first viewing of the video in detail, almost frame-by-frame, but Suzuki uses verbal sleight of hand so that you don't necessarily know what it is you're envisioning. There's a part, for example, when blood is described as seemingly "sucked toward the camera," when we find out later that the "camera" was looking up and the blood was simply falling onto it. That sort of thing isn't possible in a movie, so the Japanese film adaptation reproduces the panicky sense that you're missing something important through a different method: the evil video is just long enough for each of its images to hit you and be over before you can start to process them. Later, Asakawa and Ryuji go over it in detail, but that initial impression lingers.

Likewise, the death scenes in the book obviously had to be adapted. They're very minimal: each victim feels a pressure in the chest and sees a grotesque reflection of himself in the nearest reflective surface and is very frightened...and then just kind of dies of heart failure. Effective on paper, but not exactly the most thrilling cinematic visual. Having Sadako come crawling out of the well and then out of the television set was a stroke of genius. And the shot of her single, furious, downward-looking eye through a curtain of lank hair is the sort of thing Hitchcock couldn't have done better.

The Hollywood adaptation, however, could have used a Hitchcock. It takes just about every arresting aspect of the Japanese original and coarsens it, hams it up, makes it explicit. The evil video in the Hollywood version of The Ring has different details from the one in Suzuki's novel, but it runs at similar length...and that's why it doesn't work. It goes on and on and gives you time to settle in and think about it, to distance yourself from what you're seeing and try to figure out what it might mean, which deadens the shock. And it's shot like a high-concept Pantene commercial. It just doesn't feel like the way a confused child, even a precocious one, would see the world at moments of high emotional pitch.

High-budget artiness botches the climactic death scene, too. Samara is SFX'ed so she still looks like a grainy television image after she emerges from the screen, which isn't nearly as creepy as seeing a flesh-and-blood Sadako suddenly crawling over Ryuji's tatami. And instead of that one vicious eye, we get a look at Samara full-face. She's probably supposed to look terrifying, but to me she just looked sullen. My Mom totally Ziplocked my head and threw me down this well, okay? And now just look at my hair...split end city! Makes. Me. Want. To. KIIIILLLLLLLLLLL.

So I thought some things were lost in the translation from the Japanese movie to the Hollywood movie that wouldn't have had to be. An unfortunate case of more is less.