Halloween Movie Special: Pulse (Kairo)

suicide is impossible; the spirit only moves on to haunt those closest to you

NOTE: The following was orignally posted 11/12/21 on Blogspot. It is in part a meditation on the Japanese horror movie Pulse (Kairo) but it is also more broadly a meditation on suicide. So that being said, TW SUICIDE.

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The fear of death is one of those fundamental human truths, maybe even the fundamental human truth, the one from which every human action proceeds. The moments in my life where I've felt the sheerest and most bone deep terror  have not been near-death experiences- the few of which I've had gave me some sort of strange out of body calmness- but the moments where I was truly convinced that death isn't real. There are times were I'm seized by by a desperate, inhuman, almost animal, desire to kill myself and simultaneously convinced in the impossibility of suicide. There I believe, at least partially if not totally, that I am already dead, so how could I kill myself, and besides I am not even myself, I exist not only in myself but in the world around me, so any act of suicide can only ever only be partial and incomplete. And that is not entirely untrue. If I kill myself the pain or whatever it is that drove me to kill myself won't disappear, it will only transfer to the people I care about most. Nothing can ever be created or destroyed, only changed or transferred. This is true of pain. It doesn't disappear with death, it just moves to someone else. There is an almost thermodynamic impossibility of suicide. Death isn't the end, not really. At the very least, we live on in the hearts and minds of our loved ones and the consequences of our acts in life.  For many people, I think, this is a comforting thought, one that makes living bearable. It's also the most terrifying thing I can think of. 

The 2001 Japanese horror movie Pulse, understands this, better than maybe anything I've ever seen. It's a ghost in the machine movie, in both the literal and Cartesian sense. The body can die but the mind lives on. The internet makes you kill yourself but death is not the end and loneliness follows from this world to the next. Very few works understand the psychic reality of the internet.  Pulse understands, and even 20 years after the movie, 20 years deeper into the void of the internet, very few works have caught up. The internet in Pulse is a place of collective, apocalyptic, isolation. Like the project of the grad student in Harue's computer science department, it's a machine where nodes of light can never touch yet never escape the orbit of the others. There are ghosts, real ghosts, menacing specters and flickering shadows. They don't want to kill you. They are overflow from a too crowded-afterlife, extraneous emissaries whose mission seems to be to nullify for you the possibility of death. That, the impossibility of death, the isolation that will follow you from this world to the next, is the real horror. The horror is killing yourself only to continue to live.