I finally saw Ring, which, gratifyingly, was pretty great. Bar the cursed VHS conceit I knew zero about the plot, which ended up really reminding me of some of the ghost stories crotchety lesbian aesthete Vernon Lee was writing in the late 1800s. Those are almost all about how brainwork and research establish dangerous, selfhood-compromising links w/ the dead. They've got this deeply queer and melancholy quality; all the protagonists feel estranged from their own time, like they'd only be understood by these dead figures they fixate on. As Terry Castle's argued there's a pretty venerable literary tradition where ghosts are readable as i.e. thwarted sapphic passions. Lee belongs to it, but it was unexpected to find that Ring does too...
There's that amazing bit where - having exhaustively researched Sadako, psychically tapped her memories then tres symbolically dredged the well she was flung down - the main character, a female journalist, has this cathartic embrace w/ Sadako's sodden corpse. The whole mediate, queerly fraught relationship is totally Lee and the hug's really moving - more so, say than when yr supposed to be happy for Molly Ringwald and the yuppie guy at the end of Pretty in Pink.
///BONUS queer non-sex scene from a film of the last decade///
Also I watched Iron Man the other day, and was really reminded of Zizek's contention Edenic sex would be dispassionate, mechanical, basically rectological during the bit where Gwynnie has to deftly manipulate the circuitry inside the prone RDJr's chest cavity, and it's a totally above-board clothed scene in which she's basically fisting him... Bits of that movie (inc. Ghostface aka Tony Stark contributing to the OST, drolly) were pretty interesting, really.
(singer Sargent's portrait of his buddy Vernon Lee from paintingall.com, Sadako's toilette from obrasilero.com, Nanako Matsushima's Shelley Duvallesque gawp (always cast big-eyed, slightly mucoid-featured potential victimesses = rule 1 in telepathic horror) from windowtothemovies.com)
