ribs recordings

Stills from ‘Pulse’. Kurosawa, Kiyoshi (dir).Toho.co, Ltd. 2001. cinematographer: Jun’ichirô Hayashi

The future portrayed in Kurosawa’s 2001 Japanese horror film ‘Pulse’ might appear at first watch steeped in technophobia, reflecting the rising anxieties that emerged with the dawning digital age. However, I would argue that any phobic sentiment lies more accurately in the dreaded deterritorialisation of space and body; the emblem of the computer simply functions as the medium through which this happens.

The film follows the dissolution of the binary between the corporeal and cyber world: spectral figures have begun to appear live-streamed into people’s computers, escalating into a global epidemic as those who watch them become compelled to osmose into this immaterial space, leaving only a dust-like silhouette on their walls.

At the film’s climax, one of the central characters, Harue, makes the chilling remark “Ghosts won’t kill people. Because that will only create more ghosts… Instead they’ll make people immortal by quietly trapping them in their own loneliness.” The unspoken premise behind the claim that ghosts don’t want to make more ghosts is that the afterlife, in whatever capacity it existed, has become overpopulated. The unsettling room contained in the computer, then, takes the form of the gutter into which its excess souls filter, overrunning.

The allure in joining this digital afterworld is never quite discerned, it can only be pieced together that for those who have come into contact with the spectres, corporal death is preferred to persisting in a reality in which “people don’t really connect.” In our post-pandemic, techno-feudalist present, the intentional surrender of selfhood to a digital archive for the sake of connection and visibility comprises a familiar reality.

The archival value of “Pulse”, I think, lies not in viewing it as a piece of techno-horror, but rather a prophetic reimagining of afterlife: A world in which death is no longer a means to an end, but a purgatorial haunting – an overpopulated server, and to be alive is to haunt the deserted metropolis left by those who have surrendered themselves to the hollow promise of a better place.