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The Ring, Ordeal for Male Maturity or:

To Report Illegal Sale or Rental, Please Call 1-800-NoCopys

 

Let us imagine the following situation: by accident, you have found a video-tape with no label and decided to check what was on it. The piece you just saw was a short black-and-white video, with no spoken words, faces of unknown people, unfamiliar landscapes, and a soundtrack that probably made your skin shudder.[1] Immediately after watching it, your phone rings and you hear a strange voice saying: “Seven days”. Since you are already familiar with the urban legend about a videotape that kills people, you know that you have only seven days left before you die. If you accept this news as a situation with no escape, you will spend next seven days in depression, despair and madness, waiting for the moment when your TV will turn itself on and a scary girl in white dress will come out, her messy long hair hiding her face, killing you just by looking. Nevertheless, if you decide to try out the other option led by strange impulses and fight against the ‘curse’, you will have to start an adventure of interpreting various signs and traces in order to defeat this strange force that has started its seven-day long voyage toward you. You will try everything at your disposal to get out of that madness, just like Rachel, a main character in the Hollywood movie The Ring (2002).

This worldwide-famous horror blockbuster is actually a translation of the Japanese movie Ringu (1998), famous also for starting a new film sub-genre, psycho-horror. In this paper, I will take a closer look at both of those versions, the Hollywood and the Japanese one, analyzing their structures and content in order to formulate main differences in their positions on several issues. The process of translation that happened here actually depicts two significantly different cultural environments trying to define what the ultimate horror of existing social relations is for each of them. The analysis of the content will further offer some more details about the different positions toward media and new technology as well, giving us an insight into particular hierarchy of media constructed primarily in the Hollywood version. Following the example of the main characters from both sides of the Pacific, the solution for the puzzle can be found only through the detailed analysis of the structure of the story and interpretation of visual details left there for the careful eye to read the truth.

 

American Nightmares

NEKRSHTENCI — souls of the children that died before being baptized. Destiny was cruel to them since they did not have time to become the part of their community. According to the Serbian folk tradition, they were also not accepted to the world of the dead. Left without their place in both of the worlds, the souls of non-baptized children were forced to wander forever. (...) They would show up only during the night (...) attacking small children and even babies in the mothers' womb. (...) By impersonating the voice of a familiar person, they would call someone from the house, usually pregnant women. If somebody made a mistake and replied, this person would immediately die. (Dusan Bandic, 1991:178-180, translated by the author)

 

The opening scene of The Ring takes us to the typical room of an American teenage girl Katie, in the course of her intimate talk with her best friend, and couple of minutes before she dies as a victim of the mysterious videotape:

I hate television. It gives me headaches. You know, I’ve heard that there are so many traveling electromagnet waves in the air that we lose ten times more of our brain cells than it is normal. As if all molecules in our head are unstable, and all the companies know that, but they do nothing about it. It’s a big conspiracy.

Although this beginning and numerous details in the further narrative seem like a usual horror-story based on paranoid impulses that contemporary average human beings have toward new media and technology, this movie is actually telling us another horror-story: a story about (contemporary) family relations. This is a special kind of a horror movie where you will not find bottles of ketchup pretending to act as blood, there are no zombies waiting for you around the corner, nor is it the classic slave-master story; here, we see young people and children whose lives are endangered by a simple video tape.

            This Hollywood film tells us stories about the lives of two families: one of today and the other from almost thirty years ago. The ‘contemporary’ family actually consists of Rachel, an independent mother and a newspaper journalist, and her too-early-matured seven-year old son Aidan. After she accidentally became the part of this chain of videotape victims (through researching facts about the strange death of her niece Katie) she will ask help from the only man in her life, Noah, who turns out to be also Aidan’s father. Although now in the relationship with his ‘assistant’, Noah will take the risk and watch the cursed tape, trying to help Rachel and save her from certain death. Little Aidan will also see the tape ‘by accident’, entering this vicious circle together with his parents who will now have even stronger motivation to try to solve the mystery.

The solution seems to be in the story about the other family from thirty years ago, the Morgans. Anna and Richard Morgan used to live their idyllic life on one of the beautiful but rainy North American islands, breeding world-wide known horses. Nevertheless, only one small thing was missing – the children. They tried everything, but nothing worked and the last option was to adopt a girl named Samara. After that moment, everything went downwards. Horses went mad, committing suicide one by one, jumping into the ocean. The only survivor seems to be Richard, still living at the deserted ranch. Confronted with the truth when Rachel visits him, he commits suicide by throwing TV into the bathtub. The truth was that he never accepted Samara as his child, he was obsessed with the precious horses and kept little girl imprisoned at the highest gallery in the horse stable. This situation brought Anna to madness; little Samara was sent to the hospital to be examined since she stopped sleeping (“The horses keep her awake”) and made strange drawings by the power of her mind - “projected thermography” on x-rays’ foil, trying to express her rejection by the father. Her treatment was stopped on Richard’s demand and her death was even more horrible: Anna took her to the forest on the Shelter Mountain, strangled her using a plastic bag, and threw her into the well saying, “All I ever wanted was you”. Samara was alive for seven more days, calling for help but with no success. Due to some mysterious forces, her ‘soul’ managed to materialize itself as that strange movie on the video tape, trying to tell her story and punish the guilty ones.

Just like nekrshtenci from the Serbian folklore mentioned at the beginning, Samara was rejected by ‘this’ world; murdered in such a horrible way she could not find her retreat at the ‘other’ world either, and that keeps her coming back to revenge. Although Rachel and Noah did find her body in the end and gave it to the police to be properly buried, her soul is still wandering throughout our world, trying to teach people something through her example. Unfortunately, Noah did not get her point. Blind for the drawings through which his son Aidan tries to express his pain for not having a ‘proper’ family, Rachel and Noah part after successfully solving the mystery. Convinced that the puzzle was solved, Noah will be unprepared for the encounter with this being from the ‘other’ world: Samara will come out of his TV and kill him as well – a classical phantasm of a rejected child trying to punish the guilty father, phantasm that no child is ready to realize in reality.

            Maybe this point about Samara being trapped in the well can be interpreted in a bit more radical way, seeing the well functioning here as a gigantic toilet, since that is how human beings get rid of their waste. Or, as Slavoj Žižek had noticed,

The domain where our feces disappear when we flush the toilet is actually the metaphor for the horrifying-sublime Otherness in the ancient, pre-ontological Chaos where everything disappears. Although on the rational level we know what happens to feces, imaginary mystery still remains – the shit remains the excess that does not fit in our everyday reality. (Žižek, 2001: 28-29, translated by the author)

 

The missing part in the case of this gigantic toilet is a hand pull that would flush the water necessary to take this ‘excrement’ further into the ocean. Samara stays forever trapped in the gap between two worlds, being the excess that will never fit into the reality of her parents’ lives. Forced to destroy her object petit a, Ana Morgan will lose her coordinate system and the only escape will be the suicide. Richard will continue his life trying to convince himself that he never had a daughter in the first place, but will become his own executor when confronted with the horror story and monstrous events he was part of.

            The ‘official’ solution for breaking the vicious circle of the cursed videotape is presented in the fact that Rachel survived because she had made a copy of the tape and shared it with somebody else, as opposed to Noah who did not do that. Nevertheless, the chain will only grow bigger and bigger this way, nobody will remain protected, and the point that Rachel and Noah managed to save the life of their child only by their mutual engagement will stay hidden behind this paranoid fear of new media. Mysterious video-tape is not a horror by itself; the horror seems to be in the story about dysfunctional families it tries to tell.

The key for this interpretation can be found in the title – the ring. Although it may have several different meanings, the headline of the movie makes us interpret it as the wedding ring: “Before you die, you will see the ring”. Wedding ring always had a function to “mark the relationship, to band someone; a symbol of a union, community and shared destiny” (Jean Chevalier, Alain Gheerbrant, 1983:537, translated by the author. In the universe of (Christian) symbols, it stills signifies holy matrimony or the marriage.[2] The only ones that will actually see this ring before dying are Noah and young Katie. So, what is their ‘problem’ with the ring? At the beginning of the movie, we hear that Katie saw this mysterious videotape while spending a weekend away from the city with her boyfriend and their two friends, where they ‘did it’. After seven days, all four of them died at the same time, being punished for their deeds. Noah’s problem is slightly different – he admits to be ‘immature’ to become a father and a husband. These details logically produce the conclusion that the world they all live in only superficially allows sexual relations before the marriage and children raised out-of-the-wedlock. According to this, sexual relations are only allowed within the socially approved relationships encircled by the ring, and any other excess will be punished by killing the perpetuators. The survivors will learn their lessons what the consequences are for the ‘immature’ ones.

  

Story from the Far Japan

KARAKONDZULA is an ugly, bold creature with big eyes; it has long hands, small body, and short legs with hairy feet. It wanders around the house during the night and tries to catch disobedient children, especially the ones that run out from the house during the night. It usually hides itself under the doorway and grabs the child for the neck, and takes to its dump to eat her/him up.[3]

Although the authors of the Hollywood version proudly explained that they had made a movie according to the Japanese ‘original’, these movies have significant differences. The first thing we notice in the Japanese ‘original’ is that it lacks that paranoid fear of new media and technology. Also, instead of the story about the family fighting with the problems created by its own members (e.g. ‘immature’ fathers), the focus is on the problems that the family has to go through due to strong conservative rules created by the surrounding society.

The main character is a divorced TV journalist Reiko who raises her son Yoichi. After watching the cursed videotape, she will ask the help from her ex-husband Ryuji, university teacher who looks like a bit rougher version of his American counterpart.[4] This original lacks many details used by convention in the Hollywood version to create ‘the horror’ atmosphere and significant difference is to be found in the story about the second family: the family from the past. Instead of Anna and Richard Morgan, pastoral horse-breeders and parents of the adopted girl, we meet Dr. Ikuma and the unfortunate psychic Shizuko. The two of them had a daughter, but their marriage was impossible since the doctor already had ‘his’ family. Their daughter Sadako slowly grew up, showing that she had even stronger ‘powers’ than her mother: she was able to kill people with her thoughts. After Shizuko’s suicide, the doctor took Sadako to the forest, where he killed her and threw into the well. But her ‘soul’ is still around, wandering through the darkness of this world, materializing itself as a cursed videotape, continuing to kill people who rejected her. The ending is the same, Ryuji will die and Reiko and Yoichi will make a copy of the tape and the story will continue.

            In the Japanese version, the accent is much more on the punishments for the 'perpetuators' of the law than on the story about the abandoned children: we hear the detailed version of the story about four teenagers killed as the first victims and who had forbidden sexual intercourses outside of marriage. We also learn about the belief in the sea dwarfs who take bad children with them back to the sea. The sequel of this movie, Ringu 2, informs us more about the Japanese way of how-to-get-rid of unwanted children: Shizuko gave a birth on her own in the cave, next to the River of the Sacrificed, where women used to leave mainly unwanted female babies to be taken by the tide. Nevertheless, she had changed her mind in the morning and came back for little Sadako.

Although a culture of highest technological development, it is surprising to discover various facts about Japan as a space with extremely discriminative laws when comes to ‘bastard’ children and independent mothers. In the 1990s, there was a strong public debate to bring new laws that will give those children the same rights as the ‘normal’ ones have, removing from their IDs the line “a bastard child.”[5] It is easy to imagine that thirty years ago the situation was even worse: the woman had two options, to kill her child or herself. Today we find Reiko struggling in sometimes humiliating position of being an independent mother, with the male boss who does not allow her to cover ‘big and important’ stories, but at least she has some space left for her fight. Little Yoichi might be rejected by his father but, as the movie teaches us, at least he is lucky enough not to be a bastard child.

 

 

Urban Myths and Legends

 

The story about the killer-tape is clearly described in the movie as an ‘urban legend’. In the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, urban legend is defined as “an often lurid story or anecdote that is based on hearsay and widely circulated as true, called also urban myth” (http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=urban+legend visited May 15^th 2005). This definition brings the analysis to the field of myths - “a story believed to have been composed in the past about an event in the past or, more rarely, in the future, an event that continues to have meaning in the present because it is remembered” (Wendy Doniger, 2005). In the case of described films, the myth about the killer tape is ‘remembered’ and transferred by different kinds of media, from human beings to the newest technology inventions.

Both movies take verbal legend as their starting points and the narrative of solving the puzzle serves as a way to deconstruct this legend. Nevertheless, in the end we are left with not too much result: the legend is being deconstructed, we have learned about its origin, but this was not enough for the legend to neither lose its power nor protect people from being killed. The circle will never be completed, and this deconstruction seems to be just the way for the legend to regenerate itself.

In his analysis of the structure of myths, Claude Levi-Strauss ascribed the function to the myths as a way to provide humans with the basic structures for understanding existing cultural relations (Claude Levi Strauss, 1983). In the case of the American Ring series, we indeed find basic binary oppositions as defined by a structuralist approach (man: woman, mother: son, father: daughter, nature: civilization, etc.). This kind of analysis can bring us to some conclusions about the underlying social relations, where, according to this reading, myths serve as means to explain and control strange forces and processes threatening human beings and their survival.

For instance, the binary opposition in the Japanese story from the past (mother: (non) father) shows the relationship where a child was conceived in an ‘illegal’ way, bringing out the well-known fear of not being able to determine if Dr. Ikuma was really Sadako’s father, making this story a disciplinary method to teach about the necessity of legally approved relationships. [6] The binary opposition from the present-day story gives us the example of a legal relationship where child was conceived in the ‘legal’ way; hence the son inherits his father’s psychic powers. Nevertheless, this father was not a ‘normal’ one: not only that he had these non-human powers, but he also decided to abandon his young family. Maybe the conservative position can be read exactly from the positions both women in this story have: they are both considered to be the ‘evil’ ones, Shizuko deciding to save her bastard daughter, and Reiko deciding to be an independent working mother, not being submissive enough to leave her career and devote herself to her husband and save their marriage.

In the structural way, the American version of the families seems a bit simpler: the binary pair from the past shows the relationship between non-mother and non-father raising their adopted child. Here we can say that the conservative fear of raising non-biological children is clearly stated (it could be a monster!) and this ‘dysfunctional’ mother can only commit suicide. The story from the present shows two biological parents and implies the notion of impossibility to have a child/son developed as a ‘normal’ boy without his father. Not being able to overcome problems he had with his own (dysfunctional) father, Noah rejects his fatherly role and the chain reaction continues with the new generation.

Besides these possible conclusions coming from the analysis of the structural positions in family relations, its lack becomes obvious when refusing to pay attention to the content, only prioritizing the structure. In his approach, Levi-Strauss had a clear aim to show the same features that exists in every human society by analyzing the structure. Nevertheless, the analysis of the content and the differences between Japanese and Hollywood version can put some more light on the cultural systems that produce different positions of its members toward essential cultural features. Both are with no doubt conservative in their positions when comes to family relations but, as already mentioned, they have different opinions when it comes to one of the essential part of human civilization today: media and new technology.

 

Horror is the Medium is the Message

 

The main difference between these two versions of a same urban myth becomes obvious right from the beginning. Although structurally the same (two schoolgirls talk and watch TV in the room of one of them) the content of their conversation completely differs. Japanese girl tells the story about a schoolboy who went on vacation with his parents to some far island and since he did not want to miss his favorite TV show while playing outdoors, he recorded it on a video tape; when he came back home and watched the tape, a scary woman came out of the screen and told him he will die in seven days, so he died after seven days. Sounds like a classic story about the evil woman who comes to punish disobedient children, a familiar method of disciplining young generations all over the globe. On the other side, the Hollywood version starts with a girl telling a paranoid story about the bad influence new media and technology have on destroying our brain molecules and cells, and as the previous analysis showed, that further destroy the families and society as a whole. Having this in mind, one of the main focuses these movies put in front of us is how they represent the issues of media. So, the next question could be what, or, maybe more precisely, who is the medium?

Encyclopedic definition of the medium is quite wide and we can state that both movies include almost all the given definitions:

1. something in a middle position;

2. a substance regarded as the means of transmissions of a force or effect;

3. a channel or system of communication, information or entertainment;

4. an individual held to be a channel of communication between the earthy world and a world of spirits;

5. a condition or environment in which something may function or flourish (Meriam-Webster Online Dictionary, visited May 25, 2005).

 

   
       Both movies include different forms of mediums: humans as mediums, newspapers, TVs, telephones, internet, books, drawings, libraries and archives, water, electric waves, etc., all having different function in their intermediate position as message receivers or transmitters. In the Japanese version, the story is clearly mediated through the media: from the past into the present and the future, but also spatially – from the far islands to the urban centers. In this story main mediators are human beings, or more precisely, human beings with telepathic and psychic powers. Through her profession as a TV journalist, Reiko also becomes a mediator of the message that will be further transmitted through the television network. Nevertheless, her objective position of an investigative reporter is not enough; she will need help from her ex-husband who is able to communicate with the ‘other’ side. The story can be solved only through their mutual engagement, but he is the one being able to ‘read’ the symbols and traces, finding the right pieces of the puzzle. We find here an interesting position toward journalists - they are blamed to be the main reason why Sadako started with killing in the first place: her first victim was a journalist who did not believe in the demonstration of Shizuko’s powers and accused Dr. Ikuma for performing pure magician’s tricks.

Although this negative notion of journalists as publicity seekers is clearly depicted in the Hollywood version as well, the role of Rachel as a research journalist becomes essential. The story about the family from past is being completely ‘rationalized’ so we do not find human beings as mediums nor having psychic powers. Hence, Rachel was asked by her cousin, Katie’s mother, to find out the truth about her daughter’s death, since that is her job. Therefore, Rachel will use any available source for investigating the truth: photographs, books, archives, internet, but she will become the medium herself after falling into the well and having the vision of the murder of little Samara. Working for the old-fashioned newspapers, she will need additional help when it comes to the analysis of the coursed video tape. Luckily, the man of her life is media expert who knows everything about video tapes and their structure.

Having all this in mind, we could even talk about the provisional hierarchy of media constructed in this Hollywood A-production movie, positioned here as the ‘objective eye’. Photography and the eye of the camera are in both movies seen as more objective when comes to seeing the reality than a simple human eye. Photographs taken during the weekend when our teenage couples from the beginning of the movie had fun away from their parents, show the transformation they went through: photos taken after they watched the tape show their faces heavily distorted, announcing their soon death and them being in this in-between space of the two worlds. Rachel will have to check this on her own skin and her portrait taken by the digital camera will never look the same. This goes also for the other kinds of cameras – Noah will have to confront with his distorted face on the monitor of a surveillance camera in the shop and he will finally start to believe in this urban legend.

An interesting hierarchy happens with the position of ‘independent’ and experimental videos shown through the coursed video in the movie. We hear Noah giving his judgment about this Bunuel–like highly symbolic and surrealistic non-verbal video work, defining it as a student movie and entirely disregarding its possible value and significance for the story. Although showing the obsessive need to repeat this video (we see it at least seven times), the Hollywood movie seems like using this unique opportunity to completely discredit this alternative realm of film production.

The medium of television, maybe not surprisingly, has a slightly better position. Although TV sets are main points around which the whole paranoia of new media is being set (long shots of Rachel looking at the neighboring average skyscraper inhabited by the alienated people watching their TVs from the early morning, each of them in her/his own cell) it is positioned as a better solution when compared to the independent ‘student’ video: if the kids had a better TV reception in their cabin, they would definitely not have to watch some strange videotapes, hence they would all still be alive and Samara’s story would never come out from the well.

The solution given at both film endings – you can be saved only if you make a copy and show it further to somebody – is an interesting point that allows the story to be re-told and re-produced in the form of a next movie  (a sequel that will possibly be equally successful and profitable as the first one) but it might also be seen as having a ‘disciplinary’ function. It seems as not being sufficient to share this story about a poor abandoned child by just passing your copy to somebody else - it is important to piratize this video and make an ‘illegal’ copy. Paradoxically, while watching the movie, I had the opportunity to see it together with a textual intervention made by its producers and distributors in the form of a message that comes up every 15 minutes: “To report illegal sale or rental, please call 1-800-NoCopys”. This fact brings out the conclusion about the position this Hollywood movie has on the question of ‘illegal’ copies: piratization is a contemporary disease and it will completely destroy us humans, it will destroy the world as we know it, and there will be no end to this evil. Free distribution of ‘pirate’ copies is seen from this conservative position as a main threat for the existing neo-liberal capitalistic order, more dangerous even than the civil marital disobedience. Interesting fact is that both movies promote this same approach, bringing the mainstream production to the same position regardless of their geographic position. Seen as a ‘disease’ for the dominant industries of global myths and legends, this process of free copying seems to be the only way for the independent/experimental/students productions to be seen. In other words, once the replication has started, it cannot be controlled and ‘illegal’ versions of the films will spread to every home on the planet, leaving Hollywood empty-handed. So, if you still want to save the world and its stability, call 1-800-NoCopys.

 

PostScript or: America versus Japan

 

''

We are transformed into representations.
We are transformed into what we see on TV, and it becomes real.'''

Paul McCarthy, American performance artist

 

The first movie that started this unusual chain, Ringu, was filmed in 1998 and became one of the most successful movies in the history of Japan cinema. Nevertheless, America was able to see it only through some pirate videotapes that added to this story even more exotic taste. As the director of the Hollywood version, Gore Verbinski, stated,

The first time I watched the original Ringu was on a VHS tape that was probably seven generations down. It was really poor quality, but actually that added to the mystique, especially when I realized that this was a movie about a videotape. There is something about that image of a seemingly innocuous videotape just sitting there unlabeled. If you are aware of the myth, the object itself becomes both tempting and haunting. (The Ring - Official Movie Site, visited May 10th, 2005)

The same afternoon when they saw the movie, Hollywood producers bought copyrights to make their own version and prevented the official distribution of the Japanese original in the US before their version was released.

It seems that from the Hollywood perspective even the most popular Japanese movie is seen as off, pure underground movie the average American public will not be able to understand so it has to be properly ‘translated’. Or is this just a nice illustration of Slavoj Žižek’s opinion about the traumatic experience Hollywood has when comes to Japanese movies: “The film The Rising Sun has this ambiguity that there is this Japanese plot of trying to take over and buy Hollywood. The idea is that they do not want only our factories, our land, they even want our dreams. Behind this there's the notion of the thought control” (Geert Lovink, 1995).

Hence, Japan should be prevented from taking the leading position in the projection of our dreams and fears, that position belongs to Hollywood only. In the case of The Ring, Hollywood managed to make a movie that looks more original than the original itself. Interesting development happened with the Hollywood sequel, The Ring 2 (2005), which was directed by Hideo Nakata, the ‘original’ director of the Japanese Ringu series. Nevertheless, Hollywood producers had decided to completely forget the Japanese version of the story about scary girl Sadako and instead created a new story that will have the only connection with its Japanese origin through the title.

Unfortunately, this approach did not repeat the success of the previous Hollywood version and maybe the reason lies in the fact that the new version was turned into the genre of drama, leaving the horror fans disappointed. The cursed videotape will disappear from the movie right after the beginning and the rest is just the story about the motherhood that gives the examples of bad mothers, Rachel slowly being considered one of them. One of the most interesting details in the sequel is the appearance of Sissy Spacek, still widely associated with the role of Carry from Brian de Palma’s movie with the same name made in 1976. In the meantime, Carry has become one of the classics of the horror genre, telling a scary story about a girl with psychic powers who can kill with her thoughts and lives only with her crazy mother. This fact becomes even more interesting when we find out who she is in the Ring story: she is actually Samara’s real mother who tried to kill her several times before she was put in the mental institution and the girl sent for adoption. In this fact we can perhaps even see the clear intention of the Hollywood industry to completely erase the real, Japanese origin of Samara’s character and connect it to one of the most famous psychic girls from the new Hollywood mythology, maybe an interesting subject for some further research. The Japanese director Hideo Nakata will without a doubt continue his new Hollywood career as his ‘adoption’ has successfully been done, but the message coming out of all those films and versions seems to be that the witches are still among us, no matter when or where you lived.

Serbian translation published in Prelom Magazine No.5, September 2003

[6] In one of the closing sentences, the other father, Ryuji, answers to Reiko's question 'How is it possible that he killed his own daughter?' with 'Maybe she wasn't his daughter. Maybe her father wasn't a human being.'
  

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Bibliography:

Bandić, Dušan
1991 Narodna religija Srba u 100 pojmova. Nolit, Beograd

Chevalier, Jean, Gheerbrant, Alain
1983 Rječnik simbola. Nakladni zavod Matice Hrvatske, Zagreb

Doniger, Wendy

2005 “The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth”, http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=58306364

Japan Civil Liberties Union
1998 “Children Born Out of Wedlock (Article 26), JCLU Counter Report.”
http://www.jclu.org/katsudou/counter_report_1998/article_26_a.html

Levi-Strauss, Claude
1983 The Raw and the Cooked: Mythologiques Volume 1. University Of Chicago Press

Lovink, Gert
1995 “Japan through a Slovenian Looking Glass: Reflections of Media and Politic and Cinema.” InterCommunication No. 14, www.ntticc.or.jp/pub/ic_mag/ic014/zizek/zizek_e.html

Merriam – Webster Online Dictionary, www.w-m.com

The Ring Official Movie Site, www.ring-themovie.com

Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, www.wikipedia.org

Žižek, Slavoj
2001 Manje ljubavi — više mržnje. Beogradski krug, Beograd