Page 150 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

Spiraling into Apocalypse 137

conventional narrative paradigms and ‘classical’ filmmaking practices
(like Hollywood-style cross-cutting and detailed exposition) in favour of
a story that is itself a kind of cinematic vortex. In conveying his recursive
tale, Higuchinsky melds what Benoit Mandelbrot would describe as the
‘fractal geometry of nature’ (1982) with a frenetic pacing marked by
disquieting moments of Lovecraftian menace. The result is a vertiginous
postmodern critique of isolationism and endogamy that posits entropic
dissolution as both an ‘end’ to be feared, as well as a ‘means’ to potential
corporeal and social transformation.
A close reading of Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s Pulse, in which
menacing technological and paranormal forces intersect within a carefully
crafted narrative that builds to an apocalyptic finale that is both
threatening and promising, concludes this chapter. A work in which
Kurosawa juxtaposes congested, alienating urban environments with the
high-tech anonymity represented by the internet’s seemingly infinite
‘non-space’, Pulse is not only one of the more effective horror films in
recent years, but also – like All About Lily Chou-Chou (2001), Suicide
Circle, and a myriad of other texts explored throughout the course of this
book – raises vital questions regarding the importance of human
connection in late-industrial culture. Thus, although Kurosawa’s film
culminates in a devastatingly poignant and visually arresting depiction of
a world steadily emptied of its human inhabitants, it would be a mistake
to read Pulse’s apocalyptic climax as unremittingly bleak. To quote
Kurosawa in a Film Comment article devoted to new trends in Japanese
cinema: ‘In…my films…you see cities destroyed, and perhaps even hints
that the end of civilization is near. Many people construe those images
and ideas as negative and despairing, but I actually see them as just the
opposite – as the possibility of starting again with nothing; as the
beginning of hope’ (quoted in Stephens 2002 :36).

Imagining Apocalypse: The Technology of Disaster

As suggested in this chapter’s opening sentence, any discussion of
apocalyptic imagery in contemporary Japanese horror cinema must begin