Abstract
Like American Beauty, Gore Verbinski’s The Ring (2002), a remake of Ringu (1998), Hideo Nakata’s adaptation of Koji Suzuki’s novel Ring (2004),1 dramatizes how incest functions as a predominant, though not exclusive, mark of the refusal to embrace a fundamental alterity that productively forms and deforms the contours of the subject and in turn helps sustain psychic life. Although specifically focusing on the troubling, varying maternal response to the profoundly Other in psychic life, Verbinski’s film never loses sight of how this response evinces a relation to a broader understanding of the paternal. It is precisely the rejection of the so-called paternal function— understood as the exclusive province of neither the mother nor the father—that binds the estranged couple, Rachel (Naomi Watts) and Noah (Martin Henderson), to their son, Adan (David Dorfman), and brings the couple’s stance close to Lester’s problematic refusal, until late in his life, to acknowledge Symbolic castration and accept the exigencies of being (dis)placed in language.
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Notes
Koji Suzuki, Ring, trans. Robert Rohmer, Glynne Walley (New York: Vertical, 2004).
See Judith Feher-Gurewich’s “Lacan and American Feminism: Who Is the Analyst?,” in Beyond French Feminisms: Debates on Women, Politics, and Culture in France, 1981–2001, ed. Roger Célestin, Eliane dal Molin, Isabelle de Courtivron (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006): 239–46.
Judith Butler’s “The End of Sexual Difference,” in Feminist Consequences, Theories for a New Century, ed. Elisabeth Bronfen and Misha Kavka (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000): 414–34.
Julia Kristeva, “Interview with Elaine Hoffman Baruch,” in The Portable Kristeva, ed. Kelly Oliver (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).
André Green, “The Dead Mother Complex,” in Parent-Infant Psychodynamics: Wild Things, Mirrors, and Ghosts, ed. Joan Raphael-Leff (Philadelphia: Whurr Publishers, 2003): 162–74 (hereafter cited as DMC).
See Virginia Woolf’s “Professions for Women,” in Collected Essays, vol. 2 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1967).
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, 236–37, quoted in Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 117.
Amy Lawrence, “Counterfeit Motion: The Animated Films of Eadweard Muybridge,” Film Quarterly 57, no. 2 (Winter 2003–04): 19 (hereafter cited as CM).
Constance Penley’s “The Imaginary of the Photograph,” reprinted in The Cinematic, ed. David Campany (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007): 114–18.
See especially The Visible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Gender, and Science, ed. Paula Treichler, Lisa Cartwright, Constance Penley (New York: New York University Press, 1997).
Amit Prasad’s “Making Images/Making Bodies: Visibility and Disciplining through Magnetic Resonance Imaging,” Science, Technology, and Human Values 30, no. 2 (2005): 291–316.
R. Bowling Barnes, “Thermography of the Human Body,” Science, 140 no. 3569 (May 24, 1963): 870–77.
Douglas Kash, “Prewarrant Thermal Imaging as a Fourth Amendment Violation in the Making,” Albany Law Review 60, no. 4 (Summer 1997): 1296.
Shuntaro Hida, “The Day Hiroshima Disappeared,” in Hiroshima’s Shadow, ed. Kai Bird and Lawrence Lifshultz (Stony Creek, CT: Pamphleteer’s Press, 1998), 417–18.
Brian Masaru Hayashi, Democratizing the Enemy: The Japanese American Internment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 86.
Greg Robinson, By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 4.
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© 2011 Vincent J. Hausmann
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Hausmann, V.J. (2011). Burning Transmission: Stilling Psychic Space in Gore Verbinski’s The Ring. In: Cinema, Technologies of Visibility, and the Reanimation of Desire. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118508_3
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