I have been paying a lot of attention to Todd Epp's SDWatch Blog recently. This is mostly due to the importance of the Tim Johnson story, about which he has been frequently and informatively commenting. To be fair, it is also due to the fact that he has been very gracious in his comments about our blog. It is nice to be "preened" by someone besides myself for a change.
But Todd and I turn out to have a lot in common. I mentioned yesterday our common interest in the Buddhadharma. Today I see he has a post about GI Joe, and some pictures of the GI Joe space capsule. 
This not so accurate replica of a Mercury space ship was probably my very favorite Christmas present ever. I loved GI Joe, and I loved space travel. I would add that there was a low budget version of Joe made for a while called Captain Action. Those dolls fell apart after a few weeks, but they came with an assortment of Superhero costumes, all of which would fit GI Joe. I was eleven, and my ship had come in.
If you want to cut all the Christmas sweetness with something bitter and disturbing, try a little Japanese horror film (JHorror) called Pulse (or Kairo). An American made version, also called Pulse, is now available on DVD. Like almost all Jhorror, Pulse is a story of an invasion of the waking world by malevolent and predatory ghosts. The films are not bloody, but they are deeply disturbing. The Japanese original, written and directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa (no relation, I gather, to the more famous director) is by far the better film. But the latter is interesting, if only for the comparisons.
In the J version, the invading ghosts are very explicitly the spirits of the dead. They are incredibly lonely, but seem to be invading more out of envy of the living than out of any hope. That is a grim picture of the afterlife. Meanwhile, the struggling protagonists are so dispirited to begin with, so depressed and hopeless before the first ghost shows up, that there is not much fight in them. The A version is almost cheery by comparison. The ghost elements are de-emphasized in favor of an invasion motif. The characters want to live. In both versions the malevolent spirits get at us through the Internet, but in the A version this comes as a surprise: an unexpected horror inherent in a new technology. In the J version, no one is surprised. The other side is always leaking into our world through dreams, writing, art, etc.
Both versions are apocalyptic. The ghosts gobble up nearly everyone, and both movies contain a scene of an airliner burning and crashing so as to emphasize the extent of the disaster. But in the American version it is reasonably clear that some folks will survive and find a way to escape the ghosts. In the J version the last remaining character fades into a black stain at the end. If you know someone who is suffering from depression, and you want to push him the rest of the way over the edge, either film will do the trick.
It occurs to me that the J version of Pulse, unlike the A version, probably tells you something important about the society that produced it. I have posted below about the coming demographic crash in Japan. The eeriest effect in J Pulse is achieved simply by removing more people from each scene (libraries and classrooms and restaurants) until the last survivors are wandering about in empty buildings and subway terminals. Sometimes, as Aristotle observed, poetry is truer than history.
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