"You look very depressed. Why don't you take some of your jellyfish DNA and 'brighten up'?"
Major spoilers for Spiral:
I think I have had a bit of a breakthrough in my thinking about Spiral after watching it for the first time since the old Artsmagic DVD over a decade ago. On those first couple of viewings I was left with a rather vague feeling of dissatisfaction with the way that events played out. Now I think that I understand why: I kind of hate the main character of this film! For reasons related both to the character of Mitsuo himself and the way that the film treats him as important almost only because it is constantly focused on him and his journey of discovery, if not really enlightenment. It is a very strange film, especially seen now in an era in which there is much more focus on, and criticism of, uninteresting male characters headlining films for the sake of having a male lead when really the female characters are much more interesting and would be much more fruitful to focus on. But that makes Spiral fascinating (if frustrating) to watch now, as it seems all about that aspect. Or at least provides interesting material to talk about that issue in more detail.
The way that the film treats the main character first: Mitsuo is already in a difficult position filmically in being a newly introduced character never mentioned before following on from a highly successful first film (and one with a teasingly evocative twist ending at that!). It is always going to be difficult for an audience to get invested in somebody new, even worse when we get the protagonist of the first film and her son casually killed offscreen (even if pretty much the same thing happens in Ring 2, it happens halfway through after a couple of reunion scenes!), and much of this film involves Mitsuo getting up to speed on the curse, talking to traumatised Mai, and watching the tape himself, which is re-covering territory that we saw done much more effectively in the original Ring.
It is potentially rather gender-politics charged watching it today as Spiral also privileges a male perspective throughout to almost a frustrating degree. If the film adaptation of Ring was all about mothers and their bond with their children, Spiral is about fathers and their estrangement from children they may have killed! The connecting theme between both films is really the question of what you would sacrifice to keep your child. Your parents? Your lover? The world in general? Set against the past where parents killed to protect themselves and their wider communities from the potential threat posed by their offspring.
But back to the main protagonist and male-centric worldview of Spiral. Mitsuo here is pretty awful throughout in the sense that its generally about solving the mystery but really its all "me, me, me"! Its about how losing his distant friend/ex-mentor affects
him. It is about Mitsuo explaining the situation over and over again to both himself and all the other characters, including Mai. It is his guilt about losing his son in a drowning accident. And once he watches the tape it is all about his feelings of approaching threat and fear of death. Lots of scenes start off about the mystery in general and then sure enough Mitsuo somehow makes it all about him, as if he is the one who has all of the answers, or is feeling all of the pain, rather than being a newly introduced 'interloper' (perhaps even usurper?) into the narrative that never even mentioned him before this film!
When Mitsuo sits to watch the tape even that goes a bit 'gender politics' with instead of the telephone just ringing afterwards he is instead sexually assaulted by a manifestation of Sadako. A sexual fantasy and scary nightmare of an extremely forward woman climbing all over you combined? And there are lots of scenes post-video of Mitsuo trying to be the macho pro-active lead of the film by smashing up tapes, threatening journalists, and breaking into apartments all of which play rather unconvincingly from the perspective of actually dealing with a threat and feel a bit more like petulant lashing out more than anything else. It also seems that Mitsuo manages to cut his hand two separate times by all of the video tape smashing he gets up to!
The slowly developing relationship with Mai, the girlfriend of Ryuji from the previous film, is probably central to this. It perhaps does not help that the character of Mai is far, far more interesting than that of Mitsuo and is firmly relegated to a supporting role here. Though despite that Miki Nakatani, with the minimal amount of characterisation afforded her (though characterisation that features elements that would later be enormously expanded on when she became the centre of attention in Ring 2: the psychic powers and her sympathy for Ryuji's son) kind of blows the lead actor playing Mitsuo away in terms of acting and nuance, though to be fair the actor for Mitsuo has a rather annoying character to have to portray!
Mitsuo performs the autopsy on Ryuji, his friend and Mai's lover, then lets the unsympathetic police inspector (another aspect that would get expanded on for Ring 2) rough Mai up a bit in the hospital before belatedly intervening. Then he pretty much dismisses her by patiently explaining about the nonsense of cursed videotapes (which only serves the function of letting him discover the curse for himself, to confirm what Mai instinctively realised). Then after being cursed he apologises for not believing Mai's story, but again it is all about his fears of impending death rather than any particular sympathy or understanding, or even the slightest notice of what Mai is going through herself. All whilst Mai is patiently comforting him over the loss of his son, eventually even sleeping with him (perhaps just because she feels sorry for him?). Mitsuo remains solipsistic and self-obsessed throughout. Ryuji simply
had to have been leaving a message hidden within his body (anticipating Saw IV) that he, and only he, could truly decipher the meaning of.
This reaches its culmination in the 'Prometheus avant la lettre' scene of the one night stand with Mai having impregnated her with Sadako's curse, saving Mitsuo as he passed it on through his DNA, but killing Mai instead and re-birthing Sadako!
That is bad enough in itself but the first thing that Mitsuo does when confronted with the re-born Sadako is to make out with her in the same manner as he did just after watching the video! This is after Mai has disappeared seemingly without trace and immediately before the scene in which Mai is found dead. Presumably at the very least it still counts as cheating on Mai!
But I think the film eventually wants his character to seem rather grating in that way, like the ultimate flawed protagonist. Especially in the way that we have the much more sympathetic, muted figure of Mai pushed into the background but still present throughout. And the way that even when Mitsuo realises what he has done to pass on the curse in a later scene, he refuses to acknowledge his part in it. Then he goes even further into selfish hypocrisy and enters into a pact with Sadako to have her give birth to his dead son using DNA from strands of the dead boy's hair (anticipating the end of Spielberg's A.I. perhaps!).
Mitsuo even talks rather self-aggrandisingly after making a dramatic gesture of smashing his second videotape in a moonlit plaza that his act has saved "a couple of people, maybe a dozen, maybe hundreds", and contrasts it against his coroner day job, cutting up the already dead to confirm how they died. He seems to want to be the saviour figure (the "White Knight" if you wish!) but ironically his subsequent actions only kill more people, both abstractly and closer to home!
The final beach scene is the one in which the audience is supposed to shockingly realise the consequences of Mitsuo's selfish, solipsistic actions, as he petulantly blames Sadako and Ryuji for 'masterminding' events without ever really acknowledging his central role in many of the worst actions of the film. Mitsuo does feel like an empty vessel of a character, his single-minded suicidal grief at the loss of his son making him susceptible to all sorts of manipulations by smarter characters who 'somehow' had it all impossibly planned out from the beginning.
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It has take a while for me to really figure out this film, and I can certainly understand all of the negative reactions to it over the years. An entirely new protagonist re-learning all of the information we as the audience had already known from seeing the first film, and who is also self-centred to a fault is something that is extremely difficult to overcome.
Add to that the difficult attempted shift back to privileging a male character's perspective on events after a very female-focused adaptation of Ring, and one that in doing so both sidelines important female characters and brings up notions of sex in terms of men being 'used' by predatory women (Sadako) whilst never acknowledging their own use of others (Mai). It is also strange that Mitsuo's dead son is given such prominence whilst the existence of the mother, and presumably Mitsuo's partner (wife?, girlfriend?) is never really acknowledged at all outside of briefly appearing in a dream sequence.
But despite all of these criticisms I think Spiral is much more interesting than I had previously given it credit for. I think that we are pretty obviously meant to find the main character dull and irritating from the very beginning, though really the main flaw of the film (apart from the way that it treats Mai!) is that it so privileges Mitsuo's perspective that the audience is always a couple of steps ahead of him throughout, waiting for him to belatedly catch up to the conclusions we reached a couple of scenes before! However I have to admit to liking the irony of the beach ending much more now
, as Mitsuo gets everything he wanted, but at what cost and for how long? (It also has that brilliantly blunt and brutal response by Ryuji to Mitsuo telling him that he could potentially bring Yoichi back to life as well, which is really worth the entire film in itself!)
There is also an interesting (if also rather unsatisfying when coming off of the original Ring film) theme of literature being given primacy over visual imagery. The video tape here is important to Mitsuo's journey of encountering Sadako directly, but Reiko Asakawa's journal (the primary protagonist of the first film perhaps suggesting, at least in the alternate universe of Spiral, that the date stamps throughout Ring were inspired by Reiko writing her experiences down in her diary?) proves to be even more important in the grand scheme of things. Reiko's journal has the viral power to cause smallpox-style tumours and kill anyone who reads it, and whilst Sadako and Ryuji have completed their task to be re-born by the end of Spiral, Reiko's journal is about to be published all over the world to entice and infect new readers with Sadako's story, much in the vein of a certain Koji Suzuki novel!
I had been wondering for a while if the theme of Spiral was of the womb being the ultimate male fear, but also source of salvation. It brings Mitsuo a child, but that also allows for the child to die, devastating him. He has sex with Mai to comfort himself, but ends up killing her and inadvertently birthing another being. He uses Sadako's womb to re-create his dead son at the age he was when he died, but it is a selfish pact at the cost of the wider world (and he even warns Sadako off from coming any closer to 'her' child, which seems rather rude, all things considered! But it allows Mitsuo to be back to being a single parent again, with potentially no further female influence on his son's development, I suppose!)
But in conjunction with the womb being the biological fear, maybe with the introduction of Reiko's journal being published and spreading the curse wider another fear is about the idea of the power of a woman potentially writing and publishing her own narrative? Another internal process getting externalised and taking on a life of its own that might be impossible for any man to stop, hard as he tries?