The area where the disruptive Macrovision signal is concealed, the Vertical Blanking Interval (VBI), is a place of absolute darkness. Once a CRT's scanning beam has completed a field and arrived the bottom of the screen it is this interval that, when recognised by the tubes circuitry, causes the beam to trip back up to the upper left hand corner to begin it's descent again.
Viewed as a waveform on an oscilloscope the VBI appears deeper than the surrounding signal as if a trough - or deep dark well. If you had ever wondered when watching a horror movie on videotape, why a black night sky or the corners of a creepy cellar, appear not as black as they ought to be but rather something reminiscent of slightly fuzzy eigengrau, it might be because high levels of contrast were hard to obtain with analogue video media because absolute video black was hard to achieve within a fluctuating scanline. Perhaps because of this, within the limited agency of analogue video signal's interaction with the hardware, this position of total video black was a domain reserved for the VBI's band of hidden lines.
'she lives in a dark place now'
The 'old dark well' is employed in The Ring as a murder site that conveniently doubles as a location to conceal the body. Chosen for it's obscurity and isolation it is from this location the film's murdered antagonist rises, in a number of ways, to seek revenge in the sun lit world above.
It is in the depths of the VBI, a place that can be viewed as a sort of video dead time, a negative space, a place of absence, that Macrovision resides - though too it is given to randomly rising up into the light.
Viewed on an oscilloscope the VBI looks like this:
With Macrovision present and ascending:
These unseen areas, beyond image and signal, explored and imagined in The Ring and utilised by the inventors of Macrovision are in themselves already a location of anxiety in that they are experienced as hidden from view. Such spaces are mirrored in the material as sites deemed off limits, undesirable, abject, yet at some level always present. Elements of architectural unconscious that exists within every structure. As an annexe within a media, an adjunct storage resource - like a space created by a false bottom in a chest, you won't know it's there until you find it.
The VBI was utilised as a location for other content such as teletext, closed captioning and a variety of other data and test signals – even something called a Ghost-Canceling Reference (maybe that's what Rachel was searching for, at the screen's edge?). If you ever sat on the remote while replaying an old off-air video recording and inadvertently activated Teletext you have seen that the text, though often corrupted, has also been preserved within the VBI of the recorded video signal.
One of the key vehicles for unease in The Ring is the idea that a VHS tape contains something other than it's visible recording. It is never clearly asserted how Samara's curse is transferred from the recording on the magnetically sensitive tape to the receiver. It occurs during viewing the tape and it's bizarre imagery, so is the curse an effect of the images on the viewer, a sort of Lovecraftian horror that once seen madness and terror ensue? Does the curse exist as a sort of demonic incantation as in The Evil Dead (1981) or the spoken word summoning ritual in Candyman (1992)? Or is the curse a sub-signal as in Videodrome (1983)? Something that exists beneath the visible imagery (whose only real task is to keep you viewing as closely as possible and perhaps emotionally priming the viewer for the absorption of additional para-media) This additional concealed media takes the form of brain altering signal in Videodrome, In the case of The Ring it would be a curse from beyond the grave. Both imagined media would require a depository location. Locations exploited by anti-copy technologies and others might provide such space.
When Rachel and Noah examine the tape by attempting to physically manipulate the video head drum, the video apparatus is visually employed as a site in which the search for clues continues. When Rachel visits a VT archive facility to search even deeper into the recording – even further towards the 'edge of the tape' and the image this interrogation continues.
In both instances the sound effects chosen for the apparatuses reaction to this forced scanning, as the mechanics and electronics reflect the anxiety of the search for the hidden material, include a high pitched whirring as the tracking desperately strives to remain locked onto the tapes signal and to maintain playback.
Some later VCRs with more dynamic, digital tracking circuitry will become so confused by a Macrovision tape that the automatic tracking will emit very similar sounds as they attempt to cope with a signal that has been designed just to throw the AGC and tracking into disarray.¹
In the latter intervention, a VT lab technician guides Rachel to an older machine that she suggests may help her in her quest.
“The big box here's a warhorse – totally analog, she'll read to the very edge of your tape. (just don't force her or she'll get pissy with you)"
The machine, only visible for a moment, does indeed has the look of a far earlier vintage than the early 2000s. The suggestion that an older iteration of a media technology offers greater control, more agency over the apparatus would fit in with Retrotechnophobia's focus on The Ring's response to the perceived threat of the 'Analog Hole'. The fact that media can be accessed, copied or in the case of The Ring, viewed in entirety without limitations with on older equipment, reveals that the developers and producers of media hardware are not always steered by the desire to provide the user as much control as possible.²
As stated by Brian Winston, 'The apparatus is not neutral'³
In fact some of the older VCRs were not supplied with onboard AGC circuitry and as such were seemingly 'immune' to Macrovision. Like the 'Big Box', the more 'analogue' the equipment was, and early VCRs were packed full of multiple boards populated with discreet analogue components that would be replaced with chips and Ics on later variants, the more control over certain specific functions were occasionally available to the user. Not that this agency was ever declared by the manufacturers let alone the tape distributors. These quirks were shared between users, becoming the site of myth, misunderstanding and distortion.
(1) see Macrovision: The Copy Protection in VHS by Technology Connections at 8m 22s for a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VqsU1VK3mU
(2) Retrotechnophobia:
Putting an End to Analog Abjection with The Ring, published in Killer
Tapes and Shattered Screens, 2013, Caetlin Benson-Allott, University of
California Press. p114
(2)
Technologies of seeing : photography,
cinematography and television, Brian
Winston, British Film Institute, 1996. p41
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