Pulse

Pulse

Pulse is superficially many movies. It is a 2001 vehicle for director Kiyoshi Kurosawa to gain international reputation. It is a teen horror movie. It is a ghost story. How one reads this movie determines, to a large extent, what one sees in it. And while this means we cannot hope to discover one already present Truth waiting for us in the ebbs and flows image and sound that comprise the film, we can still interpret film and give contesting interpretations over the facts and implications of every frame and every sweeping plot summary. To offer one such plot synopsis now, the movie is “basically” about two separate groups of young Japanese men and women coming into contact, through information technology and forbidden rooms, with ghosts whose mysterious effects remove the population of the planet and drive the only survivors the film shows onto a ship headed to Latin America. One group, of whom only one survives, works in a greenhouse and happens upon the ghosts through a computer wizard friend, who immediately kills himself. The other pair are at the University and come upon ghosts both through computer-illiterate Kawashima and through a graduate student who makes a “miniature model of our world”. I will consider Noël Carroll’s cognitive psychological model of horror film, and then Steven Shaviro’s theory of The Cinematic Body, offering, between the two, a path of interpretation of the film in details and broader theme.

First I will try to imagine Pulse within the model of cognitive psychology suggested by Noël Carroll. The movie, as horror film, is a narrative of curiosity. This can take place in a scientific model of observation, hypothesis formation, testing the hypothesis, and confrontation. However, it could potentially take place in any particular expression of curiosity (e.g. surrealist, playful, theological or paranoiac), in any (sub/counter)culture, indeed multiple curiosities should be possible all at once. This explains Pulse a bit like the graduate student: the (scary) problem is mysterious, so we (audience/some narrative force) can and will investigate in order to deal with “the problem”, and satisfy our desire to know. The theory addresses itself to watchers of horror films, but depends on the unfolding of a narrative of discovery.

At other levels than the sweeping plot of the entire film, the theory offers more insights.