Page 178 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

Spiraling into Apocalypse 165

communication technologies. When Harue, for instance, asks the shy,
computer-illiterate Kawashima if he was drawn to the internet out of a
desire to ‘connect with other people’, she responds to his statement,
‘everybody else is into it,’ with a warning that evokes the drifting
electronic dots in her fellow graduate student’s, Yoshizaki’s, project:
‘People don’t connect, you know…Like those dots simulating humans.
We all live totally separately.’ Harue’s statement, then, proves a valuable
precursor to the critique of technology at work in Sono’s Suicide Circle;
in both instances, attempts at interpersonal communication ironically
result in scenarios in which the urge to engage in a mode of
technologically-mediated discourse inevitably results in simulated
togetherness, a ‘union’ that is, ultimately, only a veiled form of
alienation. Similarly, the suicides in Pulse are acts of self-annihilation
that almost exclusively occur when another human being is in the general
proximity to serve as a witness. As such, one may construe the suicides
punctuating Kurosawa’s film as desperate attempts at connection that,
ironically, sever all ties.
Of course, Kurosawa Kiyoshi is far from the only director
reflecting upon the acute alienation many experience living in crowded,
late-industrial urban settings marked by the presence of emerging
communication technologies in all of their copious manifestations.
Directors from Martin Scorsese (Taxi Driver, USA, 1976) and Nicholas
Roeg (The Man Who Fell to Earth, UK, 1976) to Wong Kar-Wai
(Chunking Express, a.k.a. Chung hing sam lam, Hong Kong, 1994) and
Tsai Ming-Liang (What Time Is It There?, a.k.a. Ni neibian jidian,
Taiwan, 2001) have famously investigated similar sociological and
philosophical terrain. However, what differentiates Kurosawa’s film from
most works of urban ennui in world cinema, as well as from most films
employing tropes from the Japanese kaidan tradition, is its ultimate
equation of the human with the spectral. In Pulse, everyone is a ‘ghost’,
even if their hearts still beat and their lungs still breathe; identity, in other
words, is always liminal. Dots of light on a computer screen uncannily
mirror social economies of ‘real world’ disconnection, as do the ‘ghosts’
inviting internet users to ‘meet them’. In a sense, though, the internet has
always been an ethereal realm, especially since on-line communities are