There is no haunted ring in The Ring.
That was my axe when we talked about the movie on Sitting in the Dark. Kynan and Tommy immediately produced exhibits. The telephone rings. The view from the bottom of the well is a ring. The curse keeps moving in a ring. Copy, repeat. Production designer Tom Duffield put rings in the carpet, the wallpaper, and the kitchen knobs. The horse’s eye is a ring. The kid on the island spins in a ring. The poor DreamWorks kid is sitting on one before the movie even starts. Tommy brought numbered stills and still briefly lost track of which ring he was showing us. This was not good for my case.
I understand the title. I still wanted jewelry.
The irritating part is that Gore Verbinski built the movie to reward exactly this kind of nonsense. He said the images on the cursed tape had to work as shocks at first and clues later. Every abstract thing needed a reason to be there. Fine. The horse matters. The ladder comes back in the barn. I am less persuaded by the old man who appears long enough to warn Rachel not to walk under one. Come on. Go eat a cigar.
Rachel is a reporter, so almost anything can become a clue once she starts working it. Every image looks like it has an answer waiting at the end of a sexy sexy records search. In Ringu, psychic ability handles some of that discovery. Verbinski makes Rachel do paperwork. Moesko Island, the lighthouse, the bent frame, the library. The Ring actually avoids the horror movie move of just locking everybody in a cabin. The Ring does have a cabin. But it also has library cards and a ferry!
They started shooting without a locked script. Verbinski later said he concentrated more on his visual book because a lot of what was on the page did not work once they tried to film it. That should have made a mess. Somehow, the movie never looks uncertain about a damned thing.
Duffield took the palette from Andrew Wyeth: dormant trees, dirty browns, gray fabric, almost no color. Cinematographer Bojan Bazelli tried to eliminate the shadows cast by the actors because he wanted the world to feel slightly wrong at the outset. The Pacific Northwest did its part by raining nearly every day. Tommy called the result all-the-time overcast. Even outdoors, the light never seems to come from anywhere. I call it home.
Except for that Japanese maple. It was artificial, made from steel tubing, plaster, and painted silk, and the crew called it Lucille. Wind knocked it over three times in Washington and once more in Los Angeles. Lucille had two jobs: be red and remain vertical, and she was excellent at one.
That flat environmental light keeps the remake related to Ringu. Verbinski first saw the Japanese film on a VHS tape that was about seven generations down and looked terrible. He thought the damage made it creepier. Of course he did. The American movie began with a degraded copy of a Japanese movie passed to an American director, who made another copy and handed it to millions of people. Kynan can have that ring, too.
DreamWorks kept going on the original DVD. Move the cursor off the menu and press enter and the full cursed tape plays. The remote stops working until it is over. Then the phone rings. Outstanding. A streaming service would just autoplay The Ring Two, which is a dumber kind of threat.
I was a latchkey kid. I came home to an empty house and watched He-Man and ThunderCats until somebody got home. On the show I said they might as well have been the ring. That was not entirely fair to ThunderCats. Television is the emotional babysitter all over this movie. A tired mother sneaks a smoke on the balcony while her kid watches. Aidan can tie his own tie because of course he can. Every adult has already reached the point where the child can handle himself for a while. Aidan does handle himself, which is worse. Samara does not have to break into the house. She is already in the television, waiting for somebody to leave the kid alone.
Our tape was Faces of Death. We copied it. We watched because we were not supposed to. Then we made sure the next kid saw it. We were worse humans as a result, and our first move was to share. That was our ring.
Fine. Kynan wins.
For a minute, the movie is over. Dark house, blanket, warm drink, cheesy score. Done. Then Aidan asks what happens to the person who gets the next copy.
She does not answer even though she knows that saving Aidan means feeding somebody else to Samara. The mother who spent the movie leaving her kid alone with the television is now sitting right beside him while he makes a recording that may kill somebody else’s kid. Technically, I guess this counts as more engaged parenting.
Rachel is a reporter, too. Richard Morgan told her what reporters do: take one person’s tragedy and force the world to experience it. She ends the movie doing exactly that with two VCRs.
Have a second VCR ready, I guess.