Pulse :: Movies Entertainment Media Essays

PulsePulse is superficially many moving pictures. It is a 2001 fomite for director Kiyoshi Kurosawa to gain international reputation. It is a teen iniquity movie. It is a ghost story. How one reads this movie determines, to a large extent, what one sees in it. And temporary hookup this means we cannot hope to discover one already present Truth waiting for us in the ebbs and flows image and sound that comprise the film, we can serene interpret film and give contesting interpretations over the facts and implications of every frame and every sweeping plot summary. To offer one such plot synopsis now, the movie is basically about two separate groups of young Japanese men and women coming into contact, through information technology and forbidden rooms, with ghosts whose mysterious effects collide with the population of the planet and drive the only survivors the film shows onto a ship headed to Latin America. One group, of whom only one survives, works in a nursery and happen s upon the ghosts through a computer wizard friend, who immediately kills himself. The other pair are at the University and come upon ghosts both through computer-illiterate Kawashima and through a grade student who makes a miniature model of our world. I will consider Nol Carrolls cognitive psychological model of horror film, and then Steven Shaviros speculation of The Cinematic Body, offering, between the two, a path of interpretation of the film in details and broader theme.First I will effort to imagine Pulse within the model of cognitive psychology suggested by Nol Carroll. The movie, as horror film, is a narrative of oddness. This can sweep up place in a scientific model of observation, hypothesis formation, testing the hypothesis, and confrontation. However, it could potentially take place in any particular expression of curiosity (e.g. surrealist, playful, theological or paranoiac), in any (sub/counter)culture, indeed multiple curiosities should be possible all at once. This explains Pulse a bit like the polish student the (scary) problem is mysterious, so we (audience/some narrative force) can and will investigate in order to deal with the problem, and satisfy our desire to know. The theory addresses itself to watchers of horror films, but depends on the unfolding of a narrative of discovery.At other levels than the sweeping plot of the entire film, the theory offers more insights.