A Copy of a Copy of a Copy

Continuing along with the idea of strange correspondences: The mysterious video footage in Ringu/The Ring, and in Mark Danielewski's novel House of Leaves (2000). The novel revolves around "The Five and a Half Minute Hallway," where in "one continuous shot, Navidson, whom we never actually see, momentarily focuses on a doorway on the north wall of his living room . . ." (4). "Dissemination of 'The Five and a Half Minute Hallway' seemed driven by curiosity alone. No one ever officially distributed it and do it never appeared in film festivals or commercial film circles. Rather, VHS copies were passed around by hand, a series of progressively degenerating dubs of a home video recording revealing a truly bizarre house with notably very few details about the owners or for that matterthe author of the piece" (5).

And The Ring? The novel upon which the film versions of The Ring were based--Ringu, by Koji Suzuki--was originally published in Japan in 1991 (translated and published in the US by Vertical Press in 2003): "The tape had been rewound. It was an ordinary 120 minute tape, the sort you could get anywhere. . . .Random sounds and distorted images flickered on the screen, but once he had selected the right channel, the picture steadied. Then the screen went black as ink. This was the video's first scene. There was no sound" (75). And later: "Reproduction. Reproduction. Reproduction. Reproduction. A virus's instinct is to reproduce. A virus usurps living structures in order to reproduce itself" (281).

The degradation-free reproduction of the digital code puts an end to the quaint nostalgia of the fuzzy, third, forth, fifth generation copies of VHS; the beauty of analogue degradation is now an "effect" I can create in my digital editing suite. Marshall McLuhan's notion that any new medium takes as its content the form of the previous medium is clear here: digital media makes visible and reprocesses the very form of analogue media. Works like House of Leaves and Ringu/The Ring are, in a deeply sad and nostalgic way, about the lost and fading analogue world, where perfect and endless reproduction was still a dream, still a myth, and therefore still terrifying.

A few images, from House of Leaves, and from The Ring:

Comments

[Stuart Willis]

Although, you can create multiple generate degredation by reencoding and reencoding footage.

That's kind of given me an idea. Setting up a small image sequence - influenced by the Ring mb? - and just re-encoding with mpeg multiple times... perhaps 10-20 generations? It'd be an interesting aesthetic!

[dvd]

I'm so glad you brought up House Of Leaves. Although it's literary merit was somewhat overshadowed by the rock-star style hype that it eventually accrued, it's one of the most interesting experiments in prose since Burrough's cut-up novels. What's more, it truly functions almost as another medium, one that's trying to exceed the margins of the traditional page. It's not surprising at all to learn that Danielowski originally started the novel on the internet - although it still works beautifully (formally, at least) in print.

While I was first reading it, I was thinking (as I always do) about how it might be suitably adapted into a film. The only way I could think of would be to have the 5 1/2 Minute Hallway as the centerpiece of a DVD, with supplementary 'feature' (literally, since they'd be feature length) providing backup.

[Nick]

I remember teaching House of Leaves a few years ago, and being impressed with how it managed to smuggle theory into genre. For some reason, lots of pop culture today seems very aware of the "code" that lies behind it. My hunch is that many of the people making things today have been raised in an ironic, self-aware culture, so what they make is sort of naturally self-aware. I just read an interview with Tobias Wolff in the May issue of The Believer, where he said that "Postmodernism has forced tremendous self-consciousness upon us, perhaps against our will at times. . . . We're very self-aware as writers now, but it's interesting to see that narrative has been reinvigorated by that, rather than abandoned."

I think of films like Pulp Fiction, and Fight Club, and The Blair Witch Project, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind...and books like House of Leaves. I know it's easy to hate some of these works, to dismiss them as rip-offs of earlier forms, etc., but I really think they show how self-consiousness in pop culture can become a form in its own right.

[Chuck]

I probably mentioned that I have an essay on The Ring floating around, although I didn't focus on the novel at all (perhaps I should have). In my case, I compared it to similar analog desires in Blair Witch and, to a much lesser extent, the 2004 version of Dawn of the Dead.

One of the things I find so fascinating about The Ring is that so many of the shots are "inspired by" painters such as David Hockney and (especially) Andrew Wyeth. At some point, I really need to read House of Leaves....