Dark Water revisited

it will take some patience, but this entry takes off from this other entry from my old blog over on the friendster network, and you should probably go read that first before getting back to this one. it's one of the longest blog posts i've ever put up, but scroll down the September 24, 2005 entry and skip past all the bibliomaniacal crap to find the relevant bits.

this is going to be another ramble: i caution you to proceed at your own risk.

(in case you want to explore that other blog, i should probably warn you that when i started Zen, it was a mirror of that other place, so, yes, all the blog-entries are duplicates from the first Zen in Darkness entry in April to around, oh, June, methinks, when i finally gave up on the relatively inaccessible friendster.

it also occurs to me how uninterestingly redundant i can get, beyond the entry-duplications... how certain themes keep coming back around to haunt this and the other blog: mainly, while looking for this post, i found evidence for a particular fixation for the Titus Groan books, Neil Gaiman, the Titus Groan books, writers like Michael Moorcock, Jeff VanderMeer and Mervyn Peake, and the Titus Groan books. did i mention how fixated i am with the Titus Groan books?)

right. where was i? ah yes, taking off from this post. well, i've finally read the Koji Suzuki short that served as the basis for the films Honogurai mizu no soko kara (aka Dark Water) and Dark Water. The short story has the odd title of Floating Water, and is part of a themed collection of short stories by Koji Suzuki called, you guessed it, Dark Water, published by Vertical.

now, i should probably point out up-front that i absolutely love both films; however, of the two versions, i prefer Hideo Nakata's over Walter Salles's, for the simple fact that i find the Asian Horror Movie view of the afterlife much more sensible, more fascinating and more frightening than the Western Horror Movie POV (as i interpret, correctly or not, those particular "cultural POVs"). also, being the earlier film adaptation and made by someone with what i figured ought to be a similar cultural POV, i imagined Nakata's version would be more faithful to the original short story than Salles's. and, not having read the original short at the time, i felt that Rafael Yglesias's blatantly Disneyfied screenplay was a violation of the original material.

thankfully, i could not have been more mistaken.

while it's true that Yglesias's screenplay suggests linear descent from the screenplay by Nakata, Takashige Ichise and Yoshihiro Nakamura, it might just as well have been written with only Suzuki's original text in mind.

Suzuki's short is a straightforward ghost story, and both filmic translations of the material turn-out to be logical translations of the 'hidden' themes of the original text. while it may be argued that Yglesias's translation is dependent upon Nagata's team's interpretation of those 'themes,' all but hidden from readers of the original text, creating the assumption that the Salles version would be further removed from the short story, neither interpretation violates the 'rules' laid down by the core material, and are equally, in their own ways, 'faithful' adaptations.

the 'Dark Water triumvirate' formed by the two films and Suzuki's short story concretizes, in my mind, my personal theory on the relevant 'cultural' perspectives of the afterlife. Floating Water, in its simplicity, is interestingly universal: in the short story, Yoshimi (Jennifer Connely's Dahlia in the Salles version) is a rich character, one certainly formed by her cultural origins, and yet exhibiting an alienating individuality that translates into an archetypal horror-genre personality that could just as easily be transplanted into any cultural background; furthermore, by keeping the story simple, Suzuki keeps the supernatural elements of the story open to interpretation, and the film-makers of both adaptations make brilliant use of that levity.

the universality of Suzuki's 'hidden themes' underpin the superficial differences of the two film adaptations, and provide an interesting template for showcasing those differences. while the two films are identical in terms of plot (a plot that, imho, is brilliantly extrapolated from Suzuki's rather sparse original), the subtle implications that may be derived from each presentation is radically different. certainly, the endings of both films, being more or less identical, are equally poignant in their own right; however, while Salles provides an arguably upbeat note to the end of his film, Nagata retains the ominous feel that is typical of his and other films of the genre.

both treatments are ultimately valid: whether you prefer one to the other may depend on your personal perspectives, arguably dictated by cultural upbringing, on the matter.

all this, of course, is beside the point: the differences are more likely incidental to the respective writers' perspectives rather than integral to the basic essence of the core material, and may, ultimately, have no effect on your own appreciation of any or all or none of the three works. however, it constantly fascinates me to see these differences repeated in modern horror fiction, further exemplified not only by the differences between western interpretations of Asian horror flicks and the originals, but between Western horror films as typified by What Lies Beneath and Gothika contrasted with their Asian 'equivalents.'

if you've made it this far on this post, i feel i owe it to you to provide you with something relatively more entertaining than my ramble, so here's the trailer of Nakata's Dark Water, also viewable directly from youtube here; sorry, it's in Japanese with French subtitles, but you should get the idea from the visuals:



right. back to work.