Fatal Pulse is one of the most extraordinary indie films of the past ten years. It illustrates Damon Packard's maturity as a filmmaker, depicting a complex and elaborate scenario involving several major characters and interweaving all those peripheral flotsam which Packard is so good at peppering throughout his wholly unique art films.
As with every other major Packard film, Fatal Pulse is simultaneously an homage to, assault on and critique of that most ephemeral sociopolitical construct known as "consensus reality." Easily identifiable characters spout absurdist nonsense which both reflects and denies the time frame supposedly depicted in the story - in this case, somewhere in the nebulous 1990s - yet these confessions from Packard's gang of stoked-up sad sacks magnificently demolishes any palpable identification with that time period. The point being that people's lives are sacred, isolated, and intangible, and even though you may have existed in the 1990s, you never actually "lived through" that decade, that decade, like all others, being an entirely artificial construct. An identifiable cultural period, like any trend or even national identity, is an illusion, a dream, a delusion of "belonging" where none exists.
The individuals inhabiting Packard's assuredly damned cinematic universe are brutally isolated, assuring that meaningful emotional connection is elusive, if not impossible. The more shouting, moaning and partying they do, the more isolated are they in their own personal existential prisons. In short, everybody exists in his own little reality bubble, and the notion of "consensus reality" is a feeble attempt by our rulers to insist that we all share the same dreams, fears, goals and challenges. Nothing could be further from the truth, and Packard's characters in general, and in Fatal Pulse specifically, illustrate the fierce if problematic individualism of modern society brilliantly. Although hyper-ventilating characters yap endlessly in the gaudy, color-soaked mindscapes of a fallen America, Packard's cinematic universe is actually a very grim existential landscape of deep despair, daunting disillusion and demolished dreams; all of the shouting is really a cry of anguish.
What exemplifies the 1990s? Bad dance music? Delusional narcissists? Crappy faux-thrillers? Abundant drug use? The corporatization of New Hollywood? All of these things, and none, because individual characters live wholly outside these entirely facetious, phony "artifacts" clustered together and labeled (always after the fact) a "time period."
Fatal Pulse shows Packard's evolution as a filmmaker in several ways, the most important being his increasing ability to choreograph numerous actors in extended dramatic scenes with abundant, meaningful dialogue. Fatal Pulse is, in some ways, the most linear Packard film yet, but this does not mean, by any stretch of the imagination, that the film runs as a traditional narrative melodrama. Characters break stereotype with alarming glee and regularity, plot twists come crashing out of nowhere, and always in the background lurk metaphysical devils ready to invade and destroy any vile attempt by characters to settle into bland, middle-class conformity. If anything, in Fatal Pulse Packard mounts what at first appears to be a post-modern redux of a late-century TV thriller, only to mischievously undermine audience expectations at every turn, and creating - as with his other masterworks, Reflections of Evil and Foxfur - a stunningly unique film which cannot be compared to any other film ever made. In an era of ubiquitous indie film clones, the startling originality of Packard really means something, one reason why Packard may well be the only working genius in indie film today.
The "fatal pulse," of course, is the incessant beating of your heart, forcing you against your will to continue a meaningless yet torturous existence in an absurd world of bleak horrors. The Fatal Pulse, is the Terror of Life itself. Bravo.
