Case Study #13: The Case of the Essay Begun on Friday the 13th that Happens to Be the 13th in This Series, Because What’s Unlucky Is Equally Lucky When We See Things Right

But how can the universe have no edge if it was created in the Big Bang? If the universe started as finite in size, shouldn't it still be finite? The answer is that the universe did not start out as finite in size. The Big Bang was not like a bomb on a table exploding and expanding to fill a room with debris. The Big Bang did not happen at one point in the universe. It happened everywhere in the universe at once. For this reason, the remnant of the Big Bang, the cosmic microwave background radiation, exists everywhere in space. Even today, we can look at any corner of the universe and see the cosmic microwave background radiation. The explosive expansion of the universe was not the case of a physical object expanding into space. Rather, it was a case of space itself expanding. The universe started out as an infinitely large object and has grown into an even larger infinitely large object. While it is difficult for humans to understand infinity, it is a perfectly valid mathematical and scientific concept. Indeed, it is a perfectly reasonable concept in science for an entity with infinite size to increase in size.

                        – Dr. Christopher S. Baird, Assistant Professor of Physics at West Texas A & M University[1]

In October 2020, when I came across that paragraph on Dr. Baird’s Science Questions with Surprising Answers blog, my own mind felt like it increased by a whole factor of infinity. I certainly had spent decades assuming the Big Bang had played out in the way that he says is actually incorrect. Part of me, though, can’t let go of the tiny, dense ball of matter model – and in a sense, it is through consideration of one model that we can adequately conceptualize of its opposite.

Often, such is also the case when we juxtapose disparate works of art. Our preconceived notions of one can turn so far inside out that we’re sucked, as if through a black hole, into the mirror image universe of the other. This happened to me this week when, for the first time, I watched the 1998 Japanese film Ringu (which I’ll spell like that, to differentiate it from the 2002 American adaptation The Ring). Unexpectedly, the similarities and differences between it and the 1986 film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off hit me hard and fast, like rivets sealing off the Weltanschauung of an earlier, more naïve me. Or like the heavy lid of a well rolling into place, to hide a supernatural teen.

That’s the first thing the title protagonist in John Hughes’s iconic comedy has in common with Sadako Yamamura, the baddie in Hideo Nakata’s iconic horror film: He is just as much not of this world as she. However, while her presence represents a force of incomprehensible evil and the truncating of others’ lives, his is one of cartoonish positivity and possibility for those around him.

This mirroring is further seen in each film’s other main character: the protagonist/antagonist. In Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, the high school Principal Ed Rooney pursuing Ferris seeks to understand and contain a source of communal joy. In Ringu, the journalist Reiko Asakawa tracking down Sadako seeks to understand and contain a source of communal dread. Notably, both finally come face-to-face with their prey on the grounds of its home. Rooney confronts Ferris in his side yard, before his sister Jeanie opens the kitchen door and rescues him. Reiko pulls up Sadako’s corpse in the watery bottom of the well her adopted mother pushed her into, before it decays before her eyes. Ferris’s habitat is literally his home – and not just any home, but a cinematic affluent American house in the mid-80s, with all its attendant comforts and consumerist accouterments. He is doted on, in the end, by all three of his family members in that place that could almost be said to fuel his unique vitality. Sadako’s habitat, on the other hand, is literally her gravesite, and before that it was where she lived out the last seven frightened days of her life – futilely scratching the stone walls until her fingernails fell off – after being rejected by her parents.

In a further flip in each case, though, Ferris and Sadako present themselves to the world in the cloak of the opposite of the tone they represent. To all but his girlfriend Sloane and his best friend Cameron, Ferris hides under the cloak of the inverse of vitality: sickness. Sadako – in an ingenious twist on the horror genre by Kôji Suzuki, author of the 1991 novel on which the film adaptations are based – presents her spirit to the world via the modern era’s most common source of joy: the television set. This all makes sense when we consider the interpretation that these two characters – and these two films – are two sides of the same coin.

In fact, Ferris and Sadako can be seen as different manifestations of the exact same thing. To explain this, I’m going to turn now to a long quote from the Wikipedia page on jouissance (including all its footnotes), a concept popularized by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.

Lacan considered that ‘there is a jouissance beyond the pleasure principle’[2] linked to the partial drive; a jouissance which compels the subject to constantly attempt to transgress the prohibitions imposed on his enjoyment, to go beyond the the pleasure principle. Yet according to Lacan, the result of transgressing the pleasure principle is not more pleasure, but instead pain, since there is only a certain amount of pleasure that the subject can bear. Beyond this limit, pleasure becomes pain, and this ‘painful principle’ is what Lacan calls jouissance.[3] Thus jouissance is suffering (ethics), something that may be linked to the influence of the erotic philosophy of Bataille, and epitomized in Lacan’s remark about ‘the recoil on everyone, in so far as it involves terrible promises, by the approach of jouissance as such.’[4] Lacan also linked jouissance to the castration complex, and to the aggression of the death drive.[5]

What is Ferris Bueller if not the epitome of “transgressing the prohibitions imposed on his enjoyment”? For his own enjoyment, he: fakes illness to his parents; compels his hypochondriac friend to not only join him, but also to steal his father’s sports car for their day trip and to imitate Sloane’s father on the phone to the school, lying that her grandmother died; lies to get the three of them into a fancy restaurant for lunch; leads them and a class of school children on a hands-held traipse through the somber halls of a museum; hijacks a parade float to take over lipsynching duties; and, at the end, runs through other people’s homes and backyards to get to his own. In the penultimate sequence, when Principal Rooney confronts Ferris in his side yard, we can see on the actor Matthew Broderick’s face the kind of pain that comes with having taken pleasure too far. Sadako, in Ringu, represents the extreme other end of that spectrum: so much pain that it spills over from her to others, via the device that ostensibly gives them pleasure.

Thus, we can see how – like one model of the Big Bang casting into relief another understanding of it – Ferris and Sadako each highlight the other’s role in the phenomenon of jouissance.

More than that, though – just like how the book Wicked by Gregory Maguire reinterprets the events in L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz from the perspective of the Wicked Witch of the West -- I propose that Ringu presents an interpretation of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off not centered on the antics of the three teens, but rather on how things seem to the community around them. The other side of that looking glass would depict a world in which the whims of one person’s jouissance are causing fatalities right and left. At the very least, that background version of the John Hughes movie would be imbued with a tone of despair – if not dread and metastasizing instances of living rigor mortis, as more and more individuals are overcome with worry about the well-being of their idol.

While it is played for laughs, as with much of the movie, one of the most famous scenes with side characters is very telling in this regard:

Economics Teacher: Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?

Simone: Um, he’s sick. My best friend’s sister’s boyfriend’s brother’s girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who’s going with the girl who saw Ferris pass out at 31 Flavors last night. I guess it’s pretty serious.

This theme of community concern ratchets up comically throughout the movie: from Jeanie encountering a boy in the school hallway soliciting donations to help “buy Ferris a new kidney”; to the words SAVE FERRIS visible on a city water tower; to a police officer, at the station where Jeanie’s mom is picking her up, telling her as an aside that everyone there is pulling for her son; to Rooney sitting down in a school bus, during the end credits, and looking over and seeing a boy writing SAVE FERRIS on his binder. In another genre – such a horror – these instances of hyperbolic concern would be presented as panic, spreading like wildfire and freezing everyone.

Interestingly, symmetrically, at about the same early point in the film, Ringu has a scene that echoes that bit of dialogue:

Reiko: And is there really someone who died a week later?

Teen Girl #1: It’s no one that we know.

Teen Girl #1 looks at Teen Girl #2, who nods and then looks over at Teen Girl #3

Reiko, looking at Teen Girl #3: What is it?

Teen Girl #3: A high-school student I know told me, a girl who’d seen it died on a date with her boyfriend.

Reiko: An accident?

Teen Girl #3: They were found dead in the car. He’d seen the video, too. It was in the newspaper two or three days ago.

Reiko: Do you know what school?

Teen Girl #3: No. My friend heard it from a friend of hers.

This theme of ambiguously attributed communication – fraught with concern – spreading in a community continues throughout Ringu. In fact, at one point, when the protagonist is taking a ship to an island with her ex-husband, her partner in the investigation, they have this exchange:

Reiko: How did the rumors about the video even start in the first place?

Ryuji: This kind of thing... it doesn't start by one person telling a story. It's more like everyone's fear just takes on a life of its own.

Reiko: Fear...

Ryuji: Or maybe it isn't our fear, maybe it's what we secretly hope is true.

 There, at the end, Ryuji hits the nail on the head, driving us back through the black hole, to the Ferris Bueller version of the universe. A force as evil as Sadako could just as easily be seen as an idol the collective psyche of the community yearns to emulate – or at the very least to live through vicariously, as we film viewers do when we cheer on the transgressions Ferris incurs in the course of his famous day off.

When I see people acting foolishly – even self-destructively – I’ll try not to judge them too harshly, when I remember that one person’s finite Big Bang of death drive aggression could be seen as the whole community expanding infinitely and equally with Twist and Shout jouissance.

[1] “Where is the edge of the universe?” Science Questions with Surprising Answers blog post on 1/20/16 by Dr. Christopher S. Baird, Assistant Professor of Physics at West Texas A & M University, https://wtamu.edu/~cbaird/sq/2016/01/20/where-is-the-edge-of-the-universe/

[2] Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (1994) p.184

[3] Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (2002) p.93

[4] Lacan, p. xvi and p. 234

[5] Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1992) p. 194