The J‑horror that pre­dict­ed the rise of inter­net isolation

What do you feel upon hear­ing the sound of an inter­net dialup tone? A lit­tle fris­son of nos­tal­gia, per­haps? A sense of despair at how far down the rab­bit hole we’ve fall­en? Regret for any of the above?

Lis­ten­ing to the once famil­iar crush of clicks, whirs and scratch­es that open Pulse, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 2001 J‑horror, you might be inclined to laugh: are we sup­posed to feel afraid? But per­haps there’s some­thing else going on here. After all, what is a dialup tone but the sound of humans try­ing to com­mu­ni­cate? ​“Peo­ple don’t real­ly con­nect, you know,” mus­es one poor soul in Kurosawa’s film, a tour de force of tech­no­log­i­cal angst whose eerie pre­science only seems to grow with time. ​“We all live total­ly sep­a­rate­ly. That’s how it seems to me.”

Long, lugubri­ous and auda­cious­ly bleak, Pulse is the work of a man once admir­ing­ly charged with mak­ing ​“exis­ten­tial­ist tone poems in the guise of enter­tain­ment”. Which might be stretch­ing most people’s def­i­n­i­tion of enter­tain­ment a bit – the glacial pace alone will ter­ri­fy some view­ers more than any­thing in the film. For those who like their hor­ror big on atmos­phere and meta­phys­i­cal sub­text, how­ev­er, let’s just say you’ve come to the right place: this film is like Andrei Tarkovsky reimag­in­ing Ringu as a Cor­mac McCarthy-esque apoc­a­lyp­tic fable.

The sto­ry is strange­ly dif­fi­cult to define, the gist being that the souls of the dead have start­ed spilling out of com­put­ers and into the streets of mil­len­ni­al Tokyo, prompt­ing a mass exis­ten­tial cri­sis that is push­ing peo­ple to sui­cide. (In one deeply dis­turb­ing scene, an anony­mous woman throws her­self from a water tow­er while a char­ac­ter texts on her phone in the fore­ground.) But what makes Pulse such a fas­ci­nat­ing jour­ney into the heart of tech­no­log­i­cal dark­ness is the way that Kuro­sawa spins this bare bones plot into a pro­found med­i­ta­tion on the way that com­put­ers reflect our lone­li­ness back at us.

Of course, ideas about the alien­at­ed self are in no way bound by dis­cus­sions of tech­nol­o­gy. It’s also true that Japan, still reel­ing from reces­sion, was gripped by a wave of sui­cides in the late ​’90s. More­over, the inter­net of 2001 bore lit­tle resem­blance to the all-per­va­sive beast of today – at the time of Pulse’s release, online time was gen­er­al­ly con­fined to school com­put­er suites and spare moments when some­one in your fam­i­ly didn’t want to use the house phone. ​“I wrote this film (as) the inter­net was just start­ing to become pop­u­larised,” Kuro­sawa said in a 2005 inter­view. ​“It was before any­body real­ly had a full idea of what effect it was going to have on our dai­ly lives… I think at the time it was just kind of this unknown force that was spread­ing like a virus through­out the coun­try and had that kind of omi­nous and men­ac­ing feel to it.”

What­ev­er the intent, Pulse is scar­i­ly on the mon­ey, bristling with images that antic­i­pate the alien­ation of our hyper-con­nect­ed dig­i­tal age. In 2016, researchers are talk­ing up an epi­dem­ic of lone­li­ness linked to increased inter­net use, and it’s a spec­tre that stalks every frame of Kurosawa’s film.

In one haunt­ing sequence, a com­put­er sci­ences stu­dent, Harue (Koyu­ki), sees an image of her hall­way in her com­put­er screen. Is there some­thing out there? She goes to find out, throw­ing her arms around a phan­tom pres­ence lurk­ing, it would seem, some­where behind the cam­era. ​“I’m… not alone!” she whis­pers ecsta­t­i­cal­ly, drunk on the illu­sion of con­nec­tion. Need­less to say, things don’t end well for her.

In anoth­er scene, a com­put­er disk reveals an image of a man star­ing silent­ly at a mon­i­tor dis­play­ing the exact same image, cre­at­ing a hall-of-mir­rors effect rip­pling off into infin­i­ty. In trou­bling images such as this – and in art­ful­ly framed shots spy­ing on his cast from behind win­dows and super­mar­ket coun­ters – Kuro­sawa intu­its a world where URL/IRL dis­tinc­tions have col­lapsed, and peo­ple are plagued by a con­stant, creep­ing feel­ing that they’re being watched. And if that sounds famil­iar, it should.

But there is anoth­er way to inter­pret Kurosawa’s apoc­a­lyp­tic visu­al style. ​“Once the sys­tem is com­plete, it will func­tion on its own,” says one kid of the ghosts’ inex­orable march into the real world. ​“It will become per­ma­nent. There’s no turn­ing back.” In anoth­er film, this would be a makeweight bit of dia­logue con­vey­ing urgency to the view­er. In Pulse, it’s mere­ly an acknowl­edge­ment that, once the Pandora’s Box of tech­nol­o­gy has been opened, there’s no going back.

Read this way, the film becomes a sweep­ing com­ment on the strug­gle to find new ways of being in the face of cat­a­clysmic social change. ​“I think the vague idea I had at the time was that we were real­ly on the cusp of a new cen­tu­ry,” said Kuro­sawa in 2005. ​“The idea was to aban­don, by destroy­ing every­thing from the 20^th cen­tu­ry in order to head into a good, new future. It wasn’t that the apoc­a­lyp­tic vision was neg­a­tive or despair­ing, it was pos­i­tive, a way to get rid of old bag­gage.” In 2016, the thought of a world untouched by the com­pul­sive rhythms of life in the dig­i­tal age seems fan­tas­ti­cal – ridicu­lous, even. But, Kurosawa’s film reach­es out of the screen to ask, have we real­ly got the hang of liv­ing in this one?