The main protagonists of Ring are Asakawa and Sadako, heroine and villainess. The main protagonists of Audition are Aoyama and Asami, hero and villainess. In both films, the hero/ heroine and the villainess are connected.
In Ring, the heroine is Asakawa. She is the victim of a dysfunctional family, as she has divorced her husband, Ryuji. She neglects her son, Yoichi, since she has a job as a news reporter and needs the money. She wants to remarry Ryuji and thus have a perfect family. Asakawa is supernatural, as she can read minds. In Audition, the hero is Aoyama. He is also the victim of a dysfunctional family, as his wife has died. However, he does not neglect his son, but becomes closer to him after the death of his wife. He feels lonely and depressed though, as he misses his wife, and had a perfect family. As a result he holds an audition for possible future wife. Both films have major similarities as Asakawa and Aoyama are victims of dysfunctional families and crave for perfect ones. This shows that some families in modern Japanese society are dysfunctional and are in search for a perfect family. The concerns of this are that those families don’t usually become perfect, and sometimes become even more dysfunctional. However, some families do become perfect, so this is one concern that can be fixed.
In Ring, the villainess is Sadako. She is mentally ill and supernatural, since she can kill people using her mind. She kills people out of vengeance because of the grief she endures as her mother was treated like a circus freak (whom is also supernatural, because she can predict the future). This tells us that Sadako was also a victim of a dysfunctional family. She was also the victim of child abuse, as she was put in a room with only a television, because she was different. Here she created the videotape which would be the cause of so many deaths. Her stepfather, Dr Ikuma also killed her, but she came back to life and became a curse to human kind. The only person she doesn’t kill who has watched the videotape is Asakawa, because she hugged her dead body and Asakawa has a scar which was left by Sadako. In Audition, the villainess is Asami. She is a psychotic ex-ballerina, showing vengeance by abusing and degrading men to show how she suffered from child abuse and grief. She made the head of a music company into her “pet”, feeding him vomit and cutting his tongue and legs off and putting him in a bag. She goes for the audition and meets Aoyama, and nearly makes him into her “pet” too. Both films have villainesses that make innocent people suffer because they want to show them how they suffered, and enjoy causing agony to others. They believe that they are teaching their victims more about themselves, by making them experience the kind of pain they received. The villainesses portray bullies in Japanese culture, who bully others because they get bullied themselves. This is a concern in Japanese society because it shows that there are people who enjoy causing grief to others, just because of the grief caused to them.
The themes of Ring are vengeance, grief, dysfunctional families and the supernatural. The themes of Audition are vengeance, grief, dysfunctional families, depression and loneliness. Both films have similar themes, as they both have vengeance, grief and dysfunctional families. In Ring, vengeance was caused by Sadako inflicting death on human kind for her past treatment. Grief was caused by the death of Tomoko (the niece of Asakawa), the death of Ryuji and the dysfunctional family of Sadako. Divorce between Asakawa and Ryuji resulted in another dysfunctional family. In Audition, vengeance was caused by Asami, abusing men because of her past treatment. Grief was caused by Aoyama mourning his wife’s death, and that death resulted in a dysfunctional family. This shows that vengeance, grief and dysfunctional families are the worst concerns in modern Japanese society, as both films portray them as their main themes.
In conclusion, both films teach us that Japanese society is full of vengeance, grief and dysfunctional families. In Ring, Sadako has a dysfunctional family, which causes her grief, which causes her to have vengeance. In Audition, Aoyama has a dysfunctional family, which causes him grief which in turn causes him to be a victim of Asami’s vengeance, who also has grief. This shows that the concerns of modern Japanese society are all connected, with one being the input (dysfunctional families), one the process (grief) and one the output (vengeance).
By Vasanth Naidu
