Daveigh Chase, the performer who so bravely navigated the psychic chasm separating the sun-bleached shores of Disney’s “Lilo & Stitch” from the creeping, cathode-ray dread of Gore Verbinski’s “The Ring,” has concluded her mortal project at the age of 35, leaving behind an oeuvre that demands we reconcile the alien with the abyss.
One struggles, frankly, to find a historical precedent for such a violent oscillation between the idyllic and the profane; we might look to the unrelenting metaphysical despair of Béla Tarr’s “Sátántangó,” or perhaps the spiraling domestic tragedy of Euripides' “Medea,” though neither truly prepares the uninitiated viewer for the sheer semiotic whiplash of transitioning from a hula lesson with a genetic experiment to a waterlogged corpse contorting itself through a Sony Trinitron. Chase’s genius lay in her refusal to let these polarities exist in isolation, treating the Hawaiian concept of ohana and the cursed VHS tape that kills its viewer in exactly seven days as two halves of the same fractured ontological coin. It is a dualism that the general public—content as they are to consume their media without interrogating the underlying structuralist terror—was tragically ill-equipped to appreciate.
The broader critical establishment, hobbled as always by its desperate need for neat categorizations, completely missed the thematic continuity of a young girl adopting a violently unstable blue creature and a young corpse violently destabilizing the blue glow of an analog television screen. To play Lilo Pelekai was to master the performative joy of the sun; to play Samara Morgan was to embody the suffocating inevitability of the damp, and Chase executed both with a rigorous, almost punitive precision that exposed the shallowness of her contemporaries.
It is a profound tragedy that she will never complete her intended triptych, which we must assume would have synthesized the surfing sequences of Kauai with the structuralist dread of a ringing landline.
To view “The Ring” without immediately chasing it with “Lilo & Stitch” is to fundamentally misunderstand Chase’s project, much in the same way that one cannot fully grasp the existential dread of the aforementioned “Medea” without first mastering the Chao Garden mechanics in the 1998 Sega Dreamcast release “Sonic Adventure.” The casual theatergoer, blissfully ignorant of the semiotic weight pressing down upon them, likely assumed they were merely watching a children's cartoon and a horror remake, entirely missing the radical dialectic Chase was proposing right in front of them. We are left, then, with a void in the cinematic landscape; a sudden, suffocating silence where once there was the joyful strumming of a ukulele, abruptly and deliberately interrupted by the sound of fingernails tearing against the inside of a stone well.