Page 179 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

166 Nightmare Japan

largely disembodied collectives in which, as in the ‘real world’, identities
are continually under construction. Pulse’s haunted (and often
emotionally haunting) webcasts are ghost stories conveyed by phantoms,
but much the same can be said of all webcasts, telecasts or films. As
representations of passed or passing events, mediated images are two
dimensional abstractions/shadows through which the absent or dead
‘commune’ with the living. Many of Pulse’s more powerful scenes build
quite explicitly upon such parallels, as this crucial exchange from late in
the film illustrates:

Harue: I always wondered what it’s like to die. From when I was really little. I
was always alone.

Kawashima: Any parents or family?

Harue: Sure, but they’re irrelevant.

Kawashima: Right.

Harue: That after death you live happily with everyone over there…Then in
high school it dawned on me. You might be alone after death, too….The idea
was so terrifying. I couldn’t even bear it. That nothing changes with
death…just right now, forever. Is that what becoming a ghost is about?

Kawashima: You can’t mean that. It’s really bad. What have ghosts got to do
with us? Besides, we’re alive.

Harue: (switching on a tiny wall of monitors displaying internet sites
displaying lone, shadowy figures in dark rooms) Then who are they? Are they
really alive? How are they different from ghosts? In fact, ghosts and people are
the same, whether they’re dead or alive.

Harue’s final observations in this scene illuminate Kurosawa’s critique of
the technologies dominating late capitalist culture, particularly the
internet and its paradoxical appeals to creating new, increasingly global
‘communities’, while privileging anonymity and the mobilisation of high-
tech shadows, like avatars and emoticons, in place of face to face
communication and profound interpersonal relations.
Pulse’s appraisal of modern alienation, however, is even more
sophisticated than the above paragraph suggests. One may comprehend
identities on the internet as liminal simulations, or ‘ghosts’, but as Harue