"Pulse" (2001)

An inverse zombie film in which the decomposing body no longer haunts but simply disappears or is replaced by the occlusion of the face (which disguises itself or makes itself known through a gradual intensity). Fear of the face comes to symbolize the rampant omission of the reproductive urge. I cannot help but read the film as a critique of a social epidemic in which technological connectivity paradoxically induces a viral depression: the need for connection translates to the fear of desire. The absence of bonafide friendship is equally an absence of romance. Romance of the body (desired) and also the romance of sunlight, of friendship, of life-making and life-giving urges, versus Zombies, Death, Loneliness. The rampant cultism of computer life (the bachelor/ette set who live alone and communicate with the world through computers and computer screens) brings to existence a hauntology of the screen. A kind of carnal impotence. Ghosts of Hiroshima. Ghosts of the video game arcade. Ghosts of the computer screen. "Ghost in the machine." It is to say: when one loses sight of the body -- the joys of the body, even the pains of the body, the body-in-immanence which increates and breathes and revels in the world -- the notion of life, the will to live, is suddenly refuted or obliterated by the sight of death. (And the sight of death, the ghost's terrible obscured face, is the source of fear in this film, brilliantly analyzed and so much more than its mere genre-specific concerns.) A theology which works in black-and-white and which seems to reduce the life impulse to either a willful ignorance (such as in the character of Kawashima) or to an endurance that persists in traveling, in keeping movement, in refusing to stay indoors (where shadows, and screens, and ghosts inhabit in a phenomenological reduction of the world that induces depression, loneliness, suicide, etc.). It is a major philosophical component of the Japanese ghost film that Eros should stay resolutely shut out, aborted, completely excised out of the body; this is because the absence of desire creates a different kind of ghost, the ghost of regret, of envy, of loneliness.