Page 180 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

Spiraling into Apocalypse 167

suggests, ‘ghosts and people are the same, whether dead or alive.’ Despite
the varying degrees of familiarity a person may feel she has with other
human beings, people remain ultimately unknowable. Though our bodies
are ultimately reducible to meat and bone, our identities are assiduously
constructed. As a result, the various ‘selves’ we ‘project’ are open to
multiple readings, but they remain incomprehensible, irreducible and
incomplete. Slavoj Žižek advances a similar critique in his recent book,
Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences. Comparing
human interaction with techno-logical interfaces, Žižek argues that ‘we
cannot avoid’ concluding that when we ‘communicate with another
person, we get signals from him, we observe his face as a screen,
but…we, partners in communication, never get to know what is “behind
the screen”’ (2003: 118). ‘[T]he same’, Žižek posits, ‘goes for the
concerned subject himself (i.e., the subject does not know what lies
behind the screen of his very own [self]consciousness, what kind of
Thing he is in the real)’ (118).
Pulse, then, suggests that individual and interpersonal unfathom-
ability informs human relationships far more substantially than one may
have previously imagined. As Michi’s employer at the botanical nursery
states when Michi asks his permission to question a co-worker regarding
the fellow employee’s transparently anti-social behaviour:

[Speaking with him] might be a waste of time. Words said in friendship with
the best of intentions always end up hurting your friends deeply. And then you
wind up getting hurt. Is friendship always that way? If that’s so, what’s left?
[…] Who needs friends like that?’

Furthermore, as the discussion between Harue and Kawashima presented
two paragraphs above illustrates, a comparable notion applies to that
supposedly ‘deepest’ of all human bonds: the family. A potentially
substantial factor in the characters’ dismay and extreme isolation, family
ties, Harue suggests, have become ‘irrelevant’. This perspective echoes
Michi’s contention, voiced earlier in the film, that endeavouring to
contact her absent father in a city as large as Tokyo would be a waste of
time, an opinion with which Kawashima, given his response (‘Right’),
apparently agrees.