Kristen Lacefield, Ed.: The Scary Screen: Media Anxiety in the Ring
2012; Volume: 23; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0897-0521
Autores Tópico(s)Modern American Literature Studies
ResumoKristen Lacefield, ed. The Scary Screen: Media Anxiety in The Ring. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. 236 pp. Hardback. ISBN 9780754669845. $99.95. The Scary Screen: Media Anxiety in The Ring offers a collection of essays that present thorough and rigorous research of The Ring narrative's multiple incarnations. The contributions investigate the different manifestations of this horror story and the cultural anxieties they (re)produce. Although theoretically rigorous, this set of analyses, unfortunately, presents a rather limited range of perspectives and critical interventions on this multi-platform, transcultural text. Although the range of themes covered is, at times, focused to the point of being repetitive and limited, the essays in this collection nonetheless present readers with interest in The Ring/Ringu texts a number of intellectually stimulating and provocative discussions about the cultural significance of this extremely tenacious narrative, especially insofar as it evokes and stokes intertwined anxieties concerning technology, the sexed body, and human subjectivity. The essays in this collection do an excellent job arguing that questions surrounding technology, reproduction, and bodily integrity are integral facets of human nature, evoking anxieties surrounding the question of what it means to be human. The stories of The Ring/Ringu, the contributors all variously argue, present a highly charged flash point at which these deeply held fears and fantasies converge. As Steven Rawle, Catelin Benson-Allott, Kimberly Jackson, D. Haque remind us, true to a traditional thread in (American/ Western) horror cinema, the ground upon which these anxieties appear is the sexed female body. This collection could serve as a good starting point for those researching projects on cultural histories of horror, gender and horror, and/or the cultural politics of representations of new media technologies. The popularization of found footage type horror in Western supernatural films such as Paranormal Activity (2007), Cloverfield (2008), and The Last Excorcism (2010) is indicative of an emergent relationship among recording technology, new media, and the monstrous in popular film. The organizational scheme of the book is structured around different approaches to the topic of media anxiety in The Ring/Ringu books and films. The first section, Spreading the Word, offers three essays providing ruminations on the viral aspect of the story, including discussions of disease and viral transmission, the notion of brainwashing as a form of contagion, and tensions between technological proliferation and the human subject. Section 2, Loss in Translation, covers issues of translation, both cultural and technological. The essays in this section discuss psychoanalytic concepts of otherness and difference and offer ways to read these themes through metaphoric imagery of vessels and the breaching of boundaries in the Ring stories. The third section, Techno-Human Reproduction, focuses more closely on the intertwined relationship between technology and reproduction, including anxieties surrounding the nature of the maternal body, present in the films and books. The afterword places these issues in a larger cultural context, drawing upon examples from other films and television shows to map a cultural history of anxiety and the supernatural in which The Ring is situated. Although the thematic organization gives the book a coherent structure that aids in its readability, the main drawback of this structure is that the same themes, especially Sadako/Samara as virus and anxiety as discomfort with non-normative sexualities and reproductive practices, begin to feel overstated. Multiple chapters cover both of these topics in depth, often times offering very similar analyses. I began to wonder if the organization of the chapters had something to do with this. The first section, Spreading the Word, seems to, by definition, limit the scope of the articles to the topic of viral contagion. …
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