Loneliness and Techno-Fascist Psychosis in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse and Chime
By Sofia Arnold
There’s a sound, can you hear it? It follows me around, ringing louder and louder as I doom scroll through headlines of tariffs, images of dead children, and ozempic ads. Sometimes it softens, all but disappearing -- when I take a walk with a friend through the blooming, spring foliage. Or when I sit in a dark theater, transported to a reality with an intuitive, if predictable logic. But then I look at my phone to see yet another absurd news alert and suddenly the sound is back. Can’t you hear the sound? Can’t you hear the chime?
In 2001, when the internet was still young, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse (or Kairo) was released. The film follows its protagonists as Tokyo falls to an epidemic of ghosts who have “invaded” the world of the living through computers. Only this plague isn’t chaotic or violents, it’s slow and sad. The first victim we see is Taguchi, a co-worker of the film’s protagonist, Michi Kugo. The two work at a plant store, but he hasn’t come to work in days. Beginning to really worry, Michi goes over to his home to find him acting normal and calm, though the apartment is a mess. He talks to her as he moves around his home -- before going into another room and hanging himself. It’s shocking in the normalcy of it with the morbid image of his death mask and too elongated neck a stark contrast to the mundanity only moments prior. After that, more and more people become lost to this epidemic to a point that they no longer even leave bodies behind. Michi’s boss Yabe soon begins to act strange and distant, like Taguchi he misses work and concern amongst the workers grows. Michi then receives a call from him wherein he repeats the words “Help me.” Rushing to find him, she goes to the shop’s storage room and is relieved to see him standing against the wall, encased in shadow about him. As she moves closer, however, Yabe seems to disintegrate into the darkness. All that remains of him is a dark stain against a wall, the vaguest impression of what once was alive. This is the true cost of the epidemic.
Pulse is perhaps one of the most prescient films about the isolation that comes with being so connected by the internet, depicting the internal depression of losing yourself to a screen that holds both everything and nothing. The film is shot at a removed gaze, characters often framed through tarps, curtains, or glass as though to create a second screen between the audience and the characters. Reflections and shadows are used to warp our sense of what is a person and what is, perhaps more importantly, the absence of one. You cannot touch a ghost, but you can become one. The horror of the movie isn’t in any jumpscares or external violence, it’s in the building dread, inevitable collapse, and the loneliness of it all. The internet opens the world up to us, sure, but in that vastness we become swallowed whole.
During a time when the big threat of the internet was Y2K and stranger danger, Kurosawa was looking forward to the ways in which the internet would leave the individual existentially vulnerable. The screen is a promise of connection which reflects back on itself until you are nothing but a reflection on a screen, a shadow of a person. A ghost.
In contrast, Kurosawa’s Chime (2024) offers an external madness, one that follows the isolation seen in Pulse. There is a violence that explodes outwards when life becomes focused so exclusively on the self. While technology may not be an overt focus of the 45-minute short film, Chime begins behind a screen. It’s not a major detail, something I hadn’t even noticed on my first watch. We enter this world through a wide shot of the protagonist, Takuji Matsuoka, teaching a cooking class, and there, at the top center of the image is the back of a monitor. Look beyond it and you see the cooking stations surrounded by groups of students working together. Except in the very back stands one young man, Tashiro, alone with his back towards us. Like Pulse, Chime is also about an irrational infection that cannot be stopped-- and this man is the first of its victims. Seemingly lost in his own thoughts, he becomes irritated and distracted in his isolation. On the second occasion that Takuji has to remind him of the task at hand, Tashiro stands back and asks, “Can you hear it? That sound. The chime.” The teacher doesn’t hear anything. “It’s a message for me.” After class, however, as Takuji cleans up, there’s the sound. A chime. Both he and the audience hear it, unsure of what exactly it can be. The next day, after once again going up to an isolated Tashiro in class, the student, erratic, once again speaks to his teacher. “Half of my brain has been replaced. I had a scar on my neck after the surgery, but it’s gone now. There’s a machine in my head. It’s there to control me. It responds to the chime.” When Takuji walks away from the madness of the young man’s words, Tashiro takes a knife and in the middle of class stabs himself through the neck to show his teacher the “machine”. It’s a suicide, almost mirroring Pulse’s first victim, Taguchi, but this one is a violent spectacle. Chime continues, as do the chimes, and we begin to see the cracks in Takuji and his world. Sometime later, a girl is having a solo lesson with Takuji and becomes distressed at the notion of having to section chicken. Her shy reluctance turns to defiance then introspection. To her, the plucked, headless chicken is “starting to look human.” In response to this, Takuji stabs her in the back. Wherein the crumbling of society in Pulse happens within, what Chime portrays is more of an explosion.
Living through the internet, our brains, like Tashiro’s, have become half machine, but how rational are the parts that aren’t? The desperate loneliness of the internet age has driven scores of folks to find unity and “truth” in the absurd. Think only of claims of microchips in the COVID-19 vaccines, the Wayfair human trafficking “scandal”, the mass gaslighting of AI dependability, or whatever fascist-cringe bullshit DOGE is up to. We live in hyper-curated solitary confinement, an algorithm learning our whims and wishes and fears and reflecting it back on us, but we can only stare at it for so long before going mad. It’s a form of loneliness, perhaps even an epidemic. Since 2023, the male loneliness epidemic has become an ongoing point of discussion, leading to further discourse about how loneliness in general affects us: death by suicide or incel violence. It’s a haunting thought that we are so alone we either kill ourselves or we project that violence outwards. While the internet during the time of Pulse opened the world up to an existential onslaught, the internet now has trapped us in a viral psychosis of hyper-individualism. We are trained to navigate the world as if the world itself is catered to us, because in a way it is. Scroll through TikTok. Chime! Watch Youtube. Chime! Open up a news app. Chime! But unlike a machine, we have to exist in the world and community, but that chime is creating further and further dissonance from one another.
When reflecting on the 23 years between Pulse and Chime, they offer a spectrum of experience that feels almost too on the nose when watching one after the other in 2025. The isolation that we navigate everyday feels all encompassing, but when escaping from it leads you back to the very tool that has caused it, your loneliness is reflecting off itself. And when that happens do you lose yourself entirely to become a ghost or do you succumb to the chime? Hopefully there is a third option, one not even Kurosawa could foresee: We break through the fucking screen, center ourselves in community, and forge connection in spite of psychosis.