In this analysis, WFS VP Russ Kale explores the metaphors of Pulse, and how the film focuses on the anxieties of Japanese culture, while still pointing forward to the perils of technology we still discuss today.
Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse is one of a short string of Japanese horror films that drew attention in the early years of the 21st century. These films build their frights on the back of uneasiness about technological progress. Although it is sometimes difficult for modern audiences to imagine, Pulse takes place in a period where the promise of the internet was still undeveloped. Like photography, video technology and landline phones, the internet seemed to be part of a place that was not ‘the real world’ but still intersected with it – an invisible space overlaid over our regular world, where you ‘went’… and where part of you might get lost. It seemed natural that ghosts, beings who were also invisible and not of this world, might move onto the internet, onto videotapes and phone calls, and make their home there. The ubiquity of these technologies opened up new doors for ghosts to make their presence known.
The ghosts in Pulse might be harmless, however, were it not for a simultaneous development among the living. Almost everyone we meet in the film is afflicted by loneliness, whether they seem to be or not. Harue is perhaps the most obvious example of this. She seems sociable, and romantically interested in Ryosuke, but a strange melancholy imbues her nonetheless, and she is overjoyed to discover that, thanks to the ghosts watching her, she is ‘not alone’. The other young protagonists of the film are similar: they all live alone, with curtains drawn, subsisting on meals made in tiny kitchenettes. Even when they are in public, or at work, they talk past each other and give up on communicating with each other. This was early on in the development of the idea of ‘hikikomori’, a generation of isolated people who engaged with the world through the internet, but Kurosawa’s film is oddly prescient.
Although the specific developments of the plot are often left vague, it is clear that this endemic loneliness is what enables the ghosts to do their work. They promise eternal companionship, an existence that is more appealing than the isolation of the real world. When Ryosuke finally encounters a ghost, though, it seems like this promise might be hollow as well. The spectral figure repeats, “Death is eternal loneliness,” a statement that rings with finality. Logging onto the internet will connect you with people, even if you are alone, the film seems to suggest – but all that is achieved is absorbing you into a world where you are still alone, just surrounded by other lonely people.
These concerns about developing technology have stayed with us ever since Pulse was released. In recent years we’ve seen debacles with Replika (a company that created virtual friends that users quickly became reliant on) and, more recently, the rise of ChatGPT-inflicted psychosis. You could say that it was like something out of Black Mirror, except that the word ‘like’ is redundant: one early Black Mirror episode, ‘Be Right Back’, follows exactly this formula.
Pulse tries to do a little more than this, however. Like all ghost stories, the film mines our anxieties about death, and it does so in a number of ways. Fears about the afterlife abound, and the types of ghosts that recur in Japanese folklore are often representations of the ways in which a peaceful afterlife can be denied. What if you die, and instead of contentment, you experience purgatory, or worse? What if you have unfinished business, or business that cannot be finished?
On a more mundane level, Pulse also explores the fears we have about sudden death. Michi’s visit to Taguchi’s apartment is a perfect dramatisation of this. Taguchi seems normal, even though the film frames his behaviour in an ominous way. His first appearance is in shadow, like a zombie, and the cable he nonchalantly picks up off the floor will be put to violent use a few seconds later. But to Michi, he seems fine, if a little distracted. When his body is revealed, though, it appears to have been decaying for a few days. Was he really there just now, or is he already a ghost, playing a loop of his last moments like an animated gif?
Michi is confused by how normal Taguchi’s behaviour seems, but the same experience is common in real life. A conversation you have with someone might, without warning or fanfare, be the last interaction you ever have with them. Once the disappearances begin, Michi clings to the people around her, but even this is not enough to save anyone – her parents disappear; Junko fades to nothingness while Michi’s back is turned; even Ryosuke loses the will that binds him together. Pulse is about fighting the currents that drive us to isolation and instead forging meaningful connections and taking pleasure in the experiences of life. It is not surprising, given the sombre mood that permeates the film, how little colour appears on the screen.
This mood doesn’t leave us any easy answers. Kurosawa tries to pivot to a dramatic apocalyptic survival story, complete with exploding planes and a stolen speedboat, but this type of ending moves the audience away from understanding the main metaphors of the film. What is it that separates Michi from the other characters, enabling her to survive the onslaught of emptiness? Like everyone else, she lives alone. Is it that she doesn’t use the internet? That she has more empathy than the other characters? Some combination of the above? In any event, the shift to the tropes of the action movie doesn’t prevent Pulse from having a famously downbeat ending, a trip on a boat to Latin America, where there are still ‘signals’… although these signals could indicate internet connections, and thus further perils. Like in many contemporary zombie stories, continued survival is futile in the grand scheme of things – but without continued survival, literally nothing is possible.
It helps Kurosawa’s case that the internet is still a poorly-understood thing in the world of Pulse, bordering on ridiculous. The grad student’s project, supposedly a fully-contained world, appears to us today as nothing more than a vaguely-interesting screensaver – and that’s the closest we get to real technological innovation within the film’s world. But Kurosawa films even these comedic things with a latent menace. ‘Look,’ he says to us, ‘even these spots of moving light are a threat. They seem interesting, useful even, but they are a trap.’ By surrounding ourselves with screens, no matter how useful they are, we are opening portals to realms that we have no understanding of. Our only hope is to press forward, and to find each other once again.