Stephen King’s 2006 novel Cell and 2006 American horror film Pulse (a remake of an earlier Japanese film) both focus on apocalyptic technology-borne diseases that threaten to destroy the human race. In Cell, the central blight is a cell-signal broadcasted across the world that turns anyone using a cellphone into a zombie, referred to as a phoner throughout the book. Phoners are radically violent, targeting and attacking the unaffected, and as the novel progresses, they develop supernatural psychic powers which allow them to communicate telepathically with one another and with non-phoners. The central scourge of Pulse is somewhat less defined, seeming to be transmittable through most forms of technology. Via internet, cell-phone, and radio, primarily, victims are possessed by a sort of virus that drives them to kill themselves. The virus manifests as ghostly, human-like figures outside of its technological hosts, so it is able to chase and force itself upon its victims. While the form of illness, spread of the disease, and method of destruction are different in the two works, the real power behind both Cell and Pulse lies in the successful blurring of the line between human and technology.
The first hint of this blurring is apparent even in the language of both texts. The word ‘pulse’ is used consistently throughout Cell to refer to the signal that causes the zombification of cell-phone users. The first line of the novel is, “The event that came to be known as The Pulse began at 3:03 p.m., eastern standard time on the afternoon of October 1” (King 3). While the characters in Pulse don’t use that specific word, it is wired into the mind of the viewer as linked with Pulse’s technology disease as well, being the title of the movie. The word ‘pulse’ is an interesting one because it has both biological and technological associations to the modern audience. ‘Pulse’ can refer to an electrical current or other wave vibration, or it can be a synonym for heartbeat. Cell plays explicitly on this crossover with its cover art; below are two different editions of Cell’s cover, both of which incorporate blood or blood imagery into the scene with a cell-phone, suggesting that the phone itself can bleed.
The subtle linkage in both pieces of the fundamentally human with the fundamentally engineered paves the way for more confusion between the categories as the works progress.
This kind of “category crisis” lines up with Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s third theses in his Seven Theses on Monster Culture. He writes that monsters “are disturbing hybrids whose externally incoherent bodies resist attempts to include them in any systematic structuration” (6). The ambiguity of ‘pulse’ and similar words like ‘virus’ contribute to this defiance of classification for the monsters in both works.
In his essay “Terminal Films,” Steen Christiansen uses the concept of a virus to support the point that Pulse explores the boundary between man and machine. ‘Virus,’ like ‘pulse,’ is a word imbued with both technological and biological connotations. It can be a disease spread between computers, or between creatures, but in the normal world, there is no crossover. Christiansen writes that in Pulse, “we see that a digital virus can infect a biological human, suggesting that the boundary between human and code is permeable. Such permeability questions the usual concept of a human being as a bounded entity” (272). Cell and Pulse both wear this boundary thin, but reach slightly different conclusions about the relationship between humanity and technology.
Though the Pulse virus comes from technology, it gets outside of itself in order to infect. The virus takes the shape of ghostly people (as seen below) to gain contact with its human victims; it takes a corporeal form which allows it to run, attack, and hurt those it seeks to infect. In a sense, the technology becomes humanity in order to corrupt humanity.
This becomes a very internal attack. First the virus becomes human, but then it infiltrates another human as it starts to take root. Virus-people get very close to those they want to infect and there is a strange energy exchange between them, like in the picture below. It resembles the soul-sucking of dementors in Harry Potter. Then, the virus enters the body, causing bruising of the skin and dark thoughts, which drive victims to suicide.
So the arc here is that the Pulse virus becomes human, infects a human, and then destroys the human.
Instead of adopting and polluting humanity like the Pulse virus, the Cell pulse robs humans of their humanity. As the phoners develop their psychic abilities, they become pack-like creatures of habit. They share a hive-mind, sleep at the same time, and work towards common goals. They are more like insects, bees, than like humans. The phoners shift to working more and more like technology or primitive lifeforms, like they are following a code that tells them what to do and when to do it. While in Pulse the virus becomes like a human, in Cell the virus makes humans become like technology.
Norah Campbell and Mike Saren, in their essay “The primitive, technology and horror: A posthuman biology,” discuss a concept they call “dirty technology.” “Dirty technology,” they write, “is an aesthetic which combines the sterile, pristine and inorganic efficiency of technology with the visceral, leaking decaying disorganization of animal life” (167). Watching the disintegration of technology when it is linked with life, they say, implies also a disintegration of the borders between technology and humanity. We see this technique at work in Cell in two capacities. First, there is the descent of the human to the sub-human under the effect of the technological disease. Second, there is the decay of the technology itself.
Towards the end of the novel, it becomes apparent that some of the phoners are behaving differently, less threateningly, than others. The characters theorize that there has been a mutation in the pulse which makes its corruption of the mind weaker. This is a prime example of dirty technology: like something organic, the technological villain of the story mutates and changes so much that it could eventually put an end to the threat it has been causing. Cell closes with a quote directing the protagonist how he might save his phoner son,
“Johnny was different from [the original phoners]. Why? Because the worm was still munching, the Pulse program was still mutating? Probably. The last thing Jordan had said before kissing him goodbye and heading north was If you set a new version of the program against the one Johnny and the others got at the checkpoint, they might eat each other up. Because that’s what worms do. They eat” (447).
The protagonist, Clay, then dials 911 and holds his cellphone up to his son’s ear in the hope that the now-corrupted pulse will reverse the effects of the pulse his son endured before. Cell ends on a note of desperate inevitability, then: technology is a problem that, like any human problem, should eventually take care of itself. It might come close to destroying us first, though.
The feeling created by the end of Pulse is a much bleaker sort of inevitability. About 20 minutes before the close of the movie, the two main characters think they have figured out a way to stop the virus with their own technology. Their friend, before his untimely death, was working on a computer program to stop the virus, which he had stored on a secret memory stick. The protagonists race to the computer lab where the virus began to plug in the flash-drive, and for a minute, they think they’ve been successful. The system seems to crash, but then it reboots. As the virus-humans start to take form again, the protagonists get in a car and drive far away, somewhere with no cell-signal or wireless internet, free of the technological blight. This is the final scene of the movie:
“The will to live never dies. Not for us, and not for them.” There is nothing we can do but let our technology come for us. Our will to live is what makes us human, but because we program our technology, it has that same drive.
Pulse does not offer the same hope of eventual triumph for humans that Cell does. Cell seems to wrap up with a conclusion that technology has a sort of life to it that keeps it beyond our control, but it is just sub-human enough that there is hope for us after all. It is like a parasite that can invade us and change the way we act, growing and changing in an almost organic way, but it does not quite get the best of us. Pulse seems to reach the conclusion that someday, we’ll be locked in a stalemate with technology that is just as human as we are. It will take over our cities and drive us away. Both works play with the boundary between humanity and technology, and though both reach eerie conclusions, the scariest part may be that we don’t really know what the technological apocalypse will look like. The humanity of our machines could still surprise us.
Works Cited
Campbell, Norah, and Mike Saren. “The Primitive, Technology and Horror: A Posthuman
Biology.” Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization 10, no. 1 (2010): 152–76.
Christiansen, Steen. “Terminal Films.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, vol. 25, no. 2/3 (91),
2014, pp. 264–277. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24353028.
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, “Monster Theory : Reading Culture”, University of Minnesota Press, 1996. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/davidson/detail.action?docID=310376.
King, Stephen. Cell. Simon and Schuster, 2006, Ebook.