Pulse :: Movies Entertainment Media Essays

PulsePulse is superficially many movies. It is a 2001 vehicle for director Kiyoshi Kurosawa to gain international reputation. It is a teen shame movie. It is a ghost story. How bingle reads this movie determines, to a large extent, what nonp atomic number 18il sees in it. And while this means we cannot hope to disc over one already present Truth waiting for us in the ebbs and flows image and ponderous that comprise the film, we can still 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 cardinal separate groups of young Japanese men and women coming into contact, by reading technology and forbidden rooms, with ghosts whose mysterious effects remove the population of the major planet and drive the only survivors the film shows onto a ship headed to Latin America. adept group, of whom only one survives, works in a greenhouse a nd happens upon the ghosts through a computer wizard friend, who immediately kills himself. The some other pair are at the University and come upon ghosts both through computer-illiterate Kawashima and through a ammonium alum student who makes a miniature computer simulation of our world. I leave alone consider Nol Carrolls cognitive psychological model of abomination film, and then Steven Shaviros theory of The Cinematic Body, offering, between the two, a path of interpretation of the film in details and broader theme.First I will try to imagine Pulse within the model of cognitive psychology suggested by Nol Carroll. The movie, as horror film, is a narrative of curiosity. This can take 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 graduate student the (scary) job 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.