By Jake Pitre
How does the internet feel? Maybe it’s slimy, greasy, with warts burbling up all over. Maybe it’s thin and sheer, as though it could collapse at any moment, or could plausibly be said to not have been there at all. Maybe it’s full of rage, loneliness, emptiness, an endless abyss drowning the mind in dopamine.
However you might describe it, the internet has largely defined our lives as it approaches its fourth decade as a mainstream phenomenon. In the 1990s, few understood that the internet would become a smoldering abattoir of the human spirit complete with endemic deepfake harassment, psychological predation of vulnerable minds, and the President of the United States posting AI-generated videos where he shits on everyone. Back then though, the internet was “you’ve got mail” and search engines with names like Lycos, Hotbot, and Altavista. Most people weren’t too involved with the internet and in turn the internet wasn’t too involved with them.
The web, however, would soon enough become a fundamental part of daily life or at least part of a short-lived apocalyptic panic called Y2K. The doomsday scenario revolved around the belief all computers around the world would shut down as clocks reset after passing midnight on 12/31/1999, resulting in the collapse of civilized society. Like many end-times prophecies, Y2K proved false, but an apocalypse of a different sort arrived shortly afterwards: the popping of the dot-com bubble in early 2000.
If the 90s was about coming to terms with the very basics of the internet, and the later 2000s reflected on its dystopian valences, then this moment, say between 1998 and 2002, is worth revisiting for its unique relationship to digital anxieties that were just beginning to take shape. These anxieties were both practical and existential. On one hand, there was fear and confusion about whether our identities could be protected online, and to what extent our activity could be monitored, and what shadowy and unknown dangers could be lurking online. On the other hand, there was a sense of wonder about the difference between “real life” and the web, and about what it meant for us to extend parts of our very selves into this virtual world. Cinema from around the world took note of these gestating feelings and channelled them into entertainment, and after the bubble burst, two filmmakers in particular made the internet come to life in startling ways: Kiyoshi Kurosawa with Pulse (2001), and Olivier Assayas with Demonlover (2002).
Films in the 90s treated the internet largely as a MacGuffin – a plot device to tell a familiar story – or as cyber-punk window dressing on a piece of genre storytelling. In films like The Net (1995), Hackers (1995), or Johnny Mnemonic (1995), it’s clear the internet presents some new threat that could easily be weaponized by cyber-criminals, hostile governments, or maniacal evil-doers. Less common, at this stage, is understanding how the internet would come to impact our psyches in subtler ways. The internet wouldn’t be an isolated danger, but a surveillance and financialization edifice forcibly injected into all aspects of our lives. Your refrigerator is both spying on you and upselling you an “extreme farts expansion pack.”
Once that reality began to sink in, the stories we told about the internet shifted. You could pinpoint The Social Network (2010) as the peak of this realization, the recognition that this technology would go beyond new connectivity or fears about strangers and theft, but that it was quite intimately rearranging much more than that. From here, you get Her (2013), Unfriended (2014), and of course, Black Mirror (2011- ). This format is dystopian in a rather particular and arguably myopic way, as a collective cynicism takes hold that is nevertheless obsessed with and beholden to the visions of tech futures that megacorporations spout at us. In other words, these filmmakers know it’s bad, but they can’t look away.
Kurosawa and Assayas’ films from the short period in the middle show me something else. I could put it simply, that they craft an atmosphere that seems to more precisely capture the internet with a prescience rare for the time period. But what else is going on, exactly, with Pulse and Demonlover, which makes them such stable examples of how it feels to live with the World Wide Web?
Consider Pulse, directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, perhaps best known for his neo-noir psychological horror film Cure (1997), but who is also one of the most gifted filmmakers in the world, with a wide range of work across genres, styles, and contexts. Pulse, though, has him working with full control over its tonal dread. The film centers on various characters who are, in different but parallel ways, feeling alienated and isolated from their lives in Tokyo. They linger among new technologies, and become haunted by what they encounter. A mysterious disk from a co-worker, for instance, causes Michi (Kumiko Asō) to see him staring blankly at his computer screen with a ghostly presence appearing in the background. What could this mean? She visits him, and he acts strangely before hanging himself in the other room. What could have caused this?
As Ryosuke (Haruhiko Kato) says early in the film, as he is setting up his computer, “welcome to the internet.” There is an ineffable aura which hangs around and amid the proceedings, as ghostly images haunt Ryosuke and others on websites that appear on their own, and as those around Michi begin to go missing or end up dead. This aura leaves you with the unmistakable sense that something truly unnatural, and perhaps unknowable, is being revealed. We may be overly familiar at this point with stories about technology’s relationship to loneliness, but Pulse signalled this at the turn of the century as the defining aesthetic of our time: the digital spectrality of an unknown force influencing our material lives, our corporeal bodies and minds. Not only are these characters alienated and desperate for connection, they are caught within a networked society of endless conduits and the blurring of the virtual and the real.
This recognizes the abiding sense that the internet operates according to its own logic, beyond any one user or programmer’s understanding, long before this idea would further calcify with the introduction of generative “artificial intelligence” and machines that by definition operate beyond any coder’s comprehension. It’s not enough to call this film prescient, though of course it is. It also helps to externalize a feeling about what the internet does, that it destabilizes our sense of self and turns us all into lurking and ephemeral spirits.
This is a kind of death that we participate in all the time, however mundane, which is essentially literalized by Kurosawa toward the end of the film when another character, Harue (Koyuki), watches herself being watched on her computer, turns around and walks toward the invisible watcher, and embraces it, contentedly remarking that she’s “not alone.” Here, Kurosawa makes the obvious allusion to the camera itself being a ghost, and how it captures the life of its characters while also capturing them in death at the moment the camera cuts. The image will outlast us, and Pulse seems to argue that there is both comfort and dread to be found within that fact.
The camera is like the internet, then. Technology as the promise of a future, and its emptiness, without you, left behind, but preserved. To simplify, the boundaries between life and death are set in parallel to the boundaries between real life and digital life, all of it becoming something less definable. The logical reaction to this is dissociation and dissolution, which Pulse again delivers through its oppressive atmosphere and, of course, through the black ashen-residue silhouettes left over after a character disappears into their loneliness and isolation.
***
Demonlover, on the other hand, is a more abrasive argument about how the internet would absorb everything, as it makes a more direct allusion to the way the profit motive absorbs everything under capitalism.
Also largely taking place in Tokyo, here the concern is mergers and acquisitions, as a French corporation, represented in part by Diane (Connie Nielsen), is seeking to buy an anime studio pioneering new technology in 3D hentai porn. Soon enough, though, competitors are dispensed with, allies are betrayed, and horrific secrets of what these companies actually host online come to light. This is a story of corporate backstabbing and espionage, erotic power plays, and surreal sadomasochism, as the boardroom negotiations gradually devolve into gory violence.
Put the internet and capitalism together and we find out what happens when our very presence, whether physical or virtual, is monetized at every turn. The corporate world of the film is a fairly specific one, as the executives are interested in cornering the emerging market of online pornography and livestreamed torture and violence on what we once called the dark web but that now more closely resembles the standard social media feed in 2026. This, too, is an early recognition of the fact that if both capitalism and the internet are all-absorbent, then anything and everything can be, and will be, commodified.
Demonlover, similar to Pulse in this way, aesthetizes these feelings with both extremity (the torture scenes, the absurd porn) and the attendant mundanity of its corporate reality. The vast majority of the film, including its ridiculous espionage, is centred on acquisition negotiations, non-disclosure agreements, and hidden files and correspondence. Like Pulse, most of its action takes place in dim offices, fluorescent conference rooms, and grey streets. In a way this could be seen as a failure of imagination for how the internet would intrude on our physical world, but instead, especially looking back, it more strongly suggests an awareness of how the internet, an initially exciting new technology with the potential to upend how we live our banal lives, would become banal itself as it became more and more captured by capital.
Here, too, we are depersonalized, made witness to exploitation and anomie under the ever-watchful eye of the tech conglomerates that shape the ecosystem. Demonlover may present this as a still-hidden underworld, but as its bleak ending implies, this would only continue its ascent into the everyday. There is a way to see this as a moralizing point about being wary of the internet’s ability to desensitize us to horrors, and that is surely a part of what it accomplishes. It is also a way of framing the internet’s seemingly inherent circulatory logic, whereby everything niche is also mainstream, and again these distinctions come to seem meaningless. Capital always finds a way.
Later films about the internet found an easier time assuming how the audience will react to the internet’s status in our lives as a fully-integrated infrastructure, and as a side effect, their moralism is more straightforward (one of the only recent films, to my mind, that has properly captured the mood of its own digital moment is Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair). Once the internet wasn’t just a thing but the thing, its discursive power became corrosive and overwhelming, and most attempts at finding the meaning within are hopelessly overdetermined, through hardly any fault of their own. Pulse and Demonlover together carried something trickier, like an understanding of the networks themselves and what could be extrapolated from its most sinister details. They identified latent qualities at the end of the twentieth century, and could see how they were already being intensified and spread through the internet. We sought solutions to the problems of a technological age within that technology and could not foresee the effect such an ouroboros would have on us, but Pulse could glimpse the raw emptiness inside, and Demonlover could peek at “late capitalism’s” digital pushback.
Both films understand that the internet is essentially a blending of ontology and economics, such that the physicality of its users and its mechanics are inseparable from its commodified circulation and fragmentation. These are films that touch on a number of theories in recent decades on film analysis, from post-cinematic affect to the poetics of digital cinema. These are useful, and you should read up more about them if you’re interested, but even they seem too prescriptive or limiting when it comes to these two movies.
The internet has many meanings, layered and teeming with incentives, and cinema cannot tell us what to do about it. That part is up to us. Pulse and Demonlover, though, depict a human passivity in response to that responsibility. Okay, the internet is a series of interconnected tubes, it is fibre optic cables and routers and modems and screens and signals and waves. The internet, of course, also has a politics, and it hollows us out. It renders us all into interfaces, into proxies, a depersonalization process that is best seen as extractive. Perhaps that is what these two movies get at, and got at early: the internet is a system of extraction. In general, we are its juice, but it extracts all. We are drained according to this haunting logic which surrounds us, drowns us. This is the water. And this is the well. Drink full and descend.
Jake Pitre is a writer and scholar based in Montreal.