The key texts for digital cinema are not movies at all, but rather books. It is in them that the digital imagination was born and still thrives. The novel The Ring by Koji Suzuki, first published in Japan as Ringu in 1991, is a sustained and dark exploration of the viral nature of biological and image reproduction disguised as a horror novel. Although the Japanese film version (Ringu, 1998) and the American version (The Ring, 2002) differ in significant ways, they both remain true to the basic plot of the novel, which centers on a mysterious videotape that, once watched, will result in the death of the viewer within days unless that viewer makes a copy of the tape and passes it on to others to watch. The dread of reproduction haunts the novel. Here is the narrator near the end of the book, confronted with the choice of dying or saving himself by forcing his wife and child to watch the tape:
He couldn’t help but wonder. What effect is this going to have? With my wife’s copy and my daughter’s copy, this virus is going to be set free in two directions—how’s it going to spread from there? He could imagine people making copies and passing them on to people who’d already seen it before, trying to keep the thing contained within a limited circle so that it wouldn’t spread. But that would be going against the virus’s will to reproduce. There was no way of knowing yet how that function was incorporated into the video. (283).
We could compare this to a passage in Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Lullaby (2002) about a children’s song that is lethal to anyone who hears it spoken:
The culling song would be a plague unique to the Information Age. Imagine a world where people shun the television, the radio, movies, the Internet, magazines and newspapers. People have to wear earplugs they way they wear condoms and rubber gloves. . . . Imagine a plague you catch through your ears (41).
It is not, perhaps, the idea of replication that frightens today (after all, reproduction lies at the essence of who and how we are) but rather that we are continually haunted by images because they are so easily archived and dispersed. Surely, there is no escape from the tyranny of images now. They literally do not go away, or disintegrate upon duplication. Efforts to disengage ourselves from them are met with accusations of bad faith or, worse, nostalgia. David Thomas—of the Cleveland proto-punk rock bands Rocket from the Tombs and Pere Ubu—has said the problem with music on the internet is not only that it is disembodied, but that it is no longer fragile: “The problem I have with it [music on the internet] is the lack of the object. I think the object is very important. . . . Because the object, the fragility of the object lends weight to the art contained within it” (Left of the Dial online mag, 2).
If the original was gauged against the
degradation of second, and third, and fourth-generation copies (and
so on) of the analogue, then the digital leaves no obvious traces or
clues about how far removed it is from the original. In Kazuo
Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, 
a novel about people who are
raised to serve, ultimately, as living organ donors for their
counterparts, Kathy the narrator discusses the desire for the donors
(not clones exactly, but humans created to provide harvested organs
for their doubles) to meet their “possibles”: “Since each of us
was copied at some point from a normal person, there must be, for
each of us, somewhere out there, a model getting on with his or her
life. This meant, at least in theory, you’d be able to find the
person you were modeled from” (139). The interplay between models
and originals becomes a sort of shell game; at some point what does
it matter, since they’re both the same, anyway?
As optics teaches us, sometimes we need to look not directly at an object, but rather slightly askance at it, for it to register fully in our vision. In this case, a diverted glance from digital cinema to a trilogy of books. Ring (1991), Spiral (1995), and Loop (1998) by Japanese author Koji Suzuki explore links between the reproduction of images on a videotape and the reproduction of a deadly virus in human beings. At the heart of these novels is a larger, darker philosophical question: does the mass reproduction of the same images threaten to exterminate diversity, in the same way that the mass reproduction of a single virus might threaten to exterminate the diversity of life on earth?
Suzuki uses the horror genre to look at
questions that haunt our digital era. How can one determine, the
novels wonder, the difference between what is ‘real’ and what is
‘abstract’ in our age of pristine digital reproduction? For
instance, one thread of the novels concerns deciphering the images on
a mysterious tape that prompts its viewers to die seven days after
viewing it. The tape is so disturbing because the source of many of
its images are impossible to trace; they seem to have to have no
‘original’. In Spiral, we are reminded how Ryuji—a
character from Ring—attempted to categorize the tape’s
images: ‘For example, the volcanic eruption and the man’s face
were clearly things that had really been seen, while the firefly-like
light in the darkness at the beginning of the tape looked like
something conjured up by the mind—like something out of a dream. So
Ryuji called the two groups ‘real’ and ‘abstract,’ for
comparison’s sake’ (122). These distinctions between realism and
abstract, or avant-garde, are the foundations upon which film itself
has been divided. But in the digital era, such categories are
confounded, as so called reality (i.e., a shot of a forest, or a
speeding car, or even a human face) can now be rendered artificially
so that all vestiges of the real disappear, leaving only the
appearance of reality. Indeed, a child today in a movie theater is
more likely to lean over and ask her father, are they real?,
regarding leaves blowing in the wind rather than regarding some
spectacular special effect. Reality is today’s special effect.
In the trilogy’s final novel Loop—published in Japan a year prior to the release of The Matrix—we learn that possibly everything that has happened in the prior two books occurred within a virtual reality loop created by scientists to test theories of evolution. In the virtual world of the loop—a world that mirrors our own—we see that the deadly virus being spread by the videotape is now being transmitted by something else: a book called Ring: ‘Ring would be a book, then a movie, a video game, an internet site—it would saturate the world through every branch of the media’, we learn (191). The virus has become the first book in the trilogy, and then its movie adaptations. If readers are familiar with a novel or a film called the Ring, does that mean they are themselves trapped in the loop, or have the works jumped from the loop into the ‘real world’?
And which world, dear reader, have we jumped into? Or: which world has jumped into us?
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