Programming Note: I’ll be on vacation next week, so the next scheduled movie post will be sometime during the week of August 20th. We apologize for the inconvenience.
The idea that our increasingly technological lives set us up for trouble has been a recurring theme since the twentieth century (and probably before that), updating itself whenever some new convenience becomes entrenched in the routine of the average westerner. Pulse is the late eighties version of this, set in a home with such advanced appliances as VCRs, microwaves, and air conditioning units, all things that can be turned against us when under the influence of something sinister. In the mind of the devoted Luddite, our homes used to be a solidly independent thing of wood and stone, but the advent of appliances not only makes people overly reliant on them, but invites an outside presence that we do not even understand, let alone know how to control. In this case, the presence takes the form of a malevolently intelligent jolt of electricity, something that can undermine the entire modern home—it’s another high concept horror, but one with a surprising amount on its mind, fanning out not just into the technological aspects of contemporary living, but with a specifically eighties critique of suburbia.
The suburbs were a regular target at the time, a subtle representation of everything wrong with the Reagan era: prefab conformity, cheap and tacky, intentionally removed from the “real”, everyday existence of those less fortunate (and, more often than not, less white.) Writer-director Paul Golding set Pulse in a tract housing community in Los Angeles, row after row of identical houses connected by a single power line—it’s where young David Rockland (TV child star Joey Lawrence) is visiting his father Bill (Cliff DeYoung) and his stepmother Ellen (Roxanne Hart.) He makes it quite clear early on that he’s not comfortable in this environment, and would rather be back home in Colorado with his mom, where he can have fun in a real outdoors-y setting—but he’s stuck for a few weeks in this LA ticky tacky paradise, his father working one of those vague business jobs that makes him regularly unavailable, unable to make friends with any of the other skateboard enthusiast kids in the neighbourhood, his only outside contact being a younger kid…and even more embarrassing, that younger kid is played Joey Lawrence’s younger brother Matthew (future star of Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad.) In short, he does not appreciate being able to sleep in a racing car. But rather than just focus on David’s awkward adaptation to his parents’ divorce, the movie puts extra emphasis on the claustrophobic nature of the environment by pointing out the bars on the windows of the house, and the extra set they can automatically summon—despite the “friendly” look of the neighbourhood, there’s some deeply paranoid and wrong about the whole place. Paranoia becomes an overriding theme throughout the rest of the movie.
The strange disconnect between people in the suburbs is emphasized further by the opening scene, where the entire neighbourhood seems to crawl out of bed just to gawk at the house across from the Rocklands, where the occupant screams and smashes things in the middle of the night and is found dead in the ruins of his own home. David’s step-mother and his little friend Stevie seem almost a little too gleefully willing to explain how the man in the house “went crazy” after an accident in the home killed his wife, blaming the local kids for poisoning the grass on his lawn (that eternal symbol of suburban living) before apparently having a breakdown and tearing things up. Most of us in the audience have gone into a movie expecting evil electricity, so we already know that guy was far from crazy, and David learns that very quickly as well when a night left alone to watch a baseball game (and also John Carpenter’s film Starman) has him dealing with mysterious issues with the TV and the dryer. Then the Rocklands’ own lawn begins to wither, and David realizes that as long as they’re in that house, they are not at all safe.
There is no explanation for how this electricity entity came to be—a bolt of lightning near a power station is all the origin we get for it—let alone why its immediate plan is to move into a home and kill all humans in it. Being represented by a semi-frequently appearing animated bolt streaking between wires makes this one of the more abstract monsters I’ve written about, and Golding plays this up visually by incorporating frequent zooms through the complicated circuitry of the household appliances, transforming the mazes of diodes, circuit boards, water heaters, and wires into alien landscapes that the monster then invades, melting down soldered parts into silvery goo that slugs away with malicious intent (there’s even some cross-cutting between aerial views of LA and circuity over the end credits, just to hammer the point home about how arcane these landscapes are.) Whenever the electricity decides to do some murderous mischief, we cut to whatever piece of metal it chooses to meddle with, sound (including an appropriately synth-heavy score by Jay Ferguson, future composer of the theme of the American version of The Office) and camera angles turning the components into snarling beasts waiting to pounce when someone checks them. The point, as mentioned, is to make you realize just how complicated even the most basic household machinery is, and how we have very little understanding of how it works, and where it can go wrong—secretly, we are at the mercy of our own tools.
This ends up translating into an amusing sense of derision towards repairmen: we get two scenes where people look at the Rocklands’ malfunctioning machines and while using technical jargon like “pulse” to talk about the issues, also explain that they themselves don’t really know how these things work, and simply follow the band-aid solutions provided by the manuals. When it’s a TV showing a bizarre line pattern or refusing to shut off, that professional shoulder-shrugging is an irritation; in a later scene that follows a gas pipe splitting open and almost suffocating David in the family garage, it causes Ellen to go ballistic, as she begins to make the same realizations that her stepson has (it still feels uncommon to have a movie where a child of divorce has a perfectly amicable relationship with a step-parent.) Like a lot of monster movies, the terror is prolonged by pure indifference, but in this case there’s definitely a more down-to-earth aggravation to the inability to do anything.
There’s also something Lovecraftian about all this: those who learn of the electric entity’s presence seemingly do go insane, at least to everyone around them. When David explores the devastated house across across the street, he ends up spooked by an old man (Charles Tyner) who jumps down from the ceiling, and is apparently heading up the clean-up job before the house goes back up for sale (tragic death proving little obstacle to continued commerce.) The old man also knows exactly what happened in that house, and eventually reveals that he’s gone back to gas stoves and lamps in his own house as to not allow the “voice in the walls” into his own home—the only solution, he tells people, is to unplug, but he’s also a cackling weirdo in general, so who would believe him? It does present something of a unique twist on the Lovecraftian angle: rather than going mad from learning of the unfathomable, unseen things just beneath the surface of our reality, people go mad from learning the evil hiding in one of the most common things in our lives, the thing that powers almost everything we do. Since it’s a common thing, and its methods of murder appear so much like horrible but believable accidents (a garbage disposal spitting shards of glass into someone’s head, for example, or its trick of flooding a room with water and then dropping a broken electrical wire into it), it’s also very easy for the incurious residents of the suburbs, interested only in the surface level of things, to dismiss the warnings of these people as ravings and spreading gossip about their apparent mental instability to isolate them, a way for them to continue to live their isolated lives without having to contemplate a horrifying possibility about their own homes.
At first, David’s father treats his son’s growing fears of the house as a side-effect of being away from home, and then as lashing out at him for working too much (that very eighties dad problem!) His Suburban Dad Anguish goes into brief bouts of persecution complex rage when Ellen starts believing David, and he is only convinced that something is acrtually afoot when Ellen is trapped in a scalding hot shower and is sent to the hospital. Bill is still too much of an American Adult Male to stay with his son in a neighbour’s home, though, and has to investigate his own haunted house one last time. This leads to a screw shot right into his forehead (which he is able to deal with surprisingly well), and a final confrontation where the electricity attempts to immolate the entire structure just to get both him and David. It’s a very Poltergeist finale, probably not surprisingly for a film that takes place in the suburbs and prominently uses the television as a central visual for its evil entity—both are interested in turning this vision of “safe” urban living into a hidden den of evil.
Paranoia pervades Pulse, right into its action-packed climax and beyond. No one can trust the safety of their own home or the ability of the ostensible “experts” to deal with their problems, and they can’t even trust that their neighbours will sympathize with them when they vocalize their fears, or even when they run out of their house screaming. Anyone who speaks the truth is branded as insane, and the problem persists as people are completely unwilling to even consider unplugging themselves from modern life. Only Bill is eventually willing to act and to put a stop to the malignancy in their neighbourhood and, despite looking completely off his rocker as he does so, gleefully takes an axe to the electrical pole that connects his house to the one across the street and knocks it down. David and him are taken by the police for questioning, about both their house fire and the flagrant destruction of public property, and both father and son admit to their own “craziness”, safe in their knowledge of the stranger and darker reality, and of the part they played in trying to actually do something about it.
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