The Canon: "Pulse" and Suicide

"Isolation is the number one precursor for depression and suicide."

Wataru Nishida, Psychologist, Tokyo Temple Institute

A silent girl sits in the back of an empty subway car.  An oversized tunnel rumbles past the windows and recedes in the glass behind her.  The world outside the subway car looks grainy, faded, imbalanced in some fundamental way.  The effect recalls one of those classic Hollywood movies where the lead actor holds an oversized steering wheel and "drives" in front of a projector screen displaying footage of moving streets.  The rhythm of the foreground and background never quite matched in those days, but viewers accepted the disconnect and engaged with the story anyway.

The girl in the subway car, Michi (Kumiko Asô), means to visit her friend Taguchi (Kenji Mizuhashi), who has an important disk for her.  When she arrives at his apartment, he wanders as though in a trance.  He absently holds a cord in his hand.  He leaves the room to retrieve her disk.  Michi waits around 30 seconds, then calls out to Taguchi.  No response.  She walks through the apartment, repeating his name.  Still no answer.  She leans into a room-- and backs up in terror and falls to her feet.  Across from her, Taguchi hangs from a wall, dead.  In those 30 seconds that Michi waited, Taguchi wrapped the cord around his neck and killed himself.

What's that line we always hear after a suicide?  "I didn't see it coming."  "He [or she] seemed so happy."  "If only we'd known."  Some version of the sentence tumbles out.  We say these words with the brief, cruel understanding that every person holds an inner life we can never know, and many of those inner lives sink into deep pools of suffering.  That high school reading of Thoreau's Walden seeps back into our stream of thought.  "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."  Why does wisdom so often hide itself in the clothes of sophomoric cliche?  Junko (Kurume Arisaka) says of Taguchi, "I never imagined he'd do something like that."

On the surface, Pulse plays like the ultimate conclusion of the East Asian Horror Wave of the 2000s.  While prior and later films like Ringu, Shutter, One Missed Call, and Phone all traded on the threat of ghosts using our technology against us, most kept their stories small-scale.  The classic idea of the vengeful yurei (or onryo) rarely left the haunted house (Ju-On) or the rustic retreat (Ringu, The Eye).  Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Cure, Charisma, Tokyo Sonata) had the inspiration to twist the ubiquitous tech-savvy spectres into an apocalyptic threat.

Along with building on the tradition of Japanese ghost horror, Pulse is one of the few East Asian films to influence Western films.  Brad Anderson's Vanishing on 7th Street riffs on Pulse's barren streets and black spirits and even borrows the key image of a floundering airplane crashing into a city street.  Films like Fin and Don't Blink skip the ghosts, but they trade on Pulse's concept of inexplicable supernatural apocalypse, on the idea of slow-disappearing friends, and on the end of the world as a metaphor for the cruel attrition of life itself.  Pulse also inspired an American remake, which had the good sense to cast Kristen Bell and almost no sense left over.

The remake failed largely by enforcing logic onto Kurosawa's dreamlike story, as when a hero frantically explains that, if you seal a door with red tape, it jams the wavelengths on which the ghosts operate.  In the original Pulse, the heroes use red tape to seal doors because it's the kind of tape that's available... and Kurosawa probably uses it because the color looks striking against weak ambers and greens.  Kurosawa treasures those self-contained, imbalancing details. Television static cuts off the top of a news reporter's head.  One ghost trips, nearly falls, and rights herself in one fluid, horrifying moment of slow-motion.  When Kawashima and Michi escape the city towards the end, one of the street corners holds a clutch of human bodies.  A group suicide?  They don't investigate.

Certain images build into motif.  People remove bags from their heads on internet screens.  More red-taped doors emerge.  A frequent whisper: tasukete.  One of the more interesting visual tricks is actually a recurring camera movement: the camera will pan sharply from one character to the other during a dialogue scene, which puts the two characters in the same space but denies the audience a shot of the two of them together.  In those moments, they never occupy the frame at the same time.  Even together, they remain separate.  Meanwhile, dead people leave behind pitch-black stains on floors and walls.  Those stains call to mind both the water-logged yurei of Dark Water and the human-stains left over from the atomic blasts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

While those images evoke older social anxieties (the kind folded into genre classics like Godzilla and Akira), Pulse plays to newer fears, newer unease.  Its computer monitors show lonely individuals in dark rooms, web-camming for God knows why to God knows who.  After all, the only website to be found in this film opens with the words, "Would you like to meet a ghost?"  Those images on the monitors reflect the Japanese crisis of hikikomori (literally "withdrawal"), a significant proportion of young men who cut themselves off from society, an emergent problem since the 1980s.

Pulse also highlights the crisis of suicide in Japan, which ranks among the highest of any developed nation on Earth.  While the plurality of suicides in Japan recently comes from the shames of unemployment and debt, some people actually meet online and engage in group suicide pacts.  The issue's become so familiar and globally recognized that Hollywood even produced a horror film recently (a tasteless embarrassment called The Forest) based on the still-active site of Aokigahara, the "suicide forest" that rests at the foot of Mt. Fuji.  One can be forgiven for wondering if Japan as a nation might be experiencing a collective depression.

In fact, Pulse functions best not as a dark send-up of internet culture but as a near-flawless stylistic exercise in the mood of depression.  The score remains low with simmering ambience and the atonal croons of solitary singers.  The colors lack warmth (apart from that ubiquitous warning-light red tape).  Even in the beginning, the city of Tokyo feels dead; the city soundtrack mutes everything but soft winds (and the occasional scream).  The youthful main cast avoids sex, groping, kissing.  The most potent moment of physical contact?  Harue's head rests on Kawashima's shoulder.  Later, Kawashima repeats the gesture with Michi.

The fact that Kawashima and Michi survive deserves attention.  What sets them apart from the other characters?  With Kawashima, the answer seems simple enough: he survives on the strength of his denial of reality.  When Harue tries to discuss the afterlife with him, he asks, "Could we not talk about this?"  When a ghost confronts him during the climax, he closes his eyes like a child and shouts, "I refuse to acknowledge!"  Michi, however, survives on the strength of hope.  She's the first of her circle to visit Taguchi.  After Taguchi dies, she comforts her desperate friend Junko.  After Junko dies, she meets Kawashima and promises to help him find Harue.  After Harue kills herself, Michi drives a weakened Kawashima through the debris of Tokyo, toward whatever salvation she can give him.

A few weeks ago, a day or two after re-watching Pulse in preparation for this essay, I visited some friends for drinks and card games.  Late in the evening, after sufficient alcohol intake and frivolity, an acquaintance pulled me aside and began discussing his own anxieties and fears.  How he felt the world is meaningless.  That life and consciousness are byproducts of the laws of nature.  That religion is hucksterism, true selflessness is impossible, and there's no reason to bring children into such a cruel world.  You know, party talk.  Then he said, almost as an aside, "Some days, I wish I were brave enough to kill myself."

I didn't have a great response for him then, and I still don't.  Not because his life is devoid of joy, like the characters of Pulse, but because the universe is an absurd, cruel place.  In a few personal moments of serious anxiety, I've thought of suicide too.  Not with the despairing mental state of a depressive in true need of help - the kind of mental state that Pulse uncannily evokes with its haunted tone and sullen faces.  Instead, I approached the idea of Ending It All with a sort of mathematical distance, like an accountant totaling up a ledger.  What were the pros of living?  What were the cons?  I imagine many of us have considered the question seriously at least once, even if we don't bring up that kind of emotional turmoil, even to those closest to us.

So we might keep those emotions to ourselves, churning waves in our own inner oceans.  And if someone close to us commits suicide, we might say, "She seemed so happy," or "I never knew he was so depressed," even if we understand more than we care to admit.  Maybe we fill our days with benign vices or turn to the support structures of family, friends, and religious communities.  We might close ourselves off in small apartments, or we might soldier on one day at a time, or we might chase the wisdom given to us by all the prophets and philosophers.  Their advice, stripped to the core - be kind, be courageous, be resilient - matches the attitude of Michi.  She knows the reality of suffering and loss.  She sees the disconnect between herself and others.  She engages anyway.

Note: If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts, you can find help at the website for National Suicide Prevention or by calling (800) 273-8255 in the USA.

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"The Canon" is a series of essays aimed at exploring classic horror films from a fresh context.

The Fly and Organic Unity

Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Film Noir

Pulse and Suicide
Scream and Slasher Generations