When I was a little girl I used to listen to my heartbeat using my dad’s stethoscope. I’d lie awake at night, captivated by the cadence of my own pulse, amplified. The longer I paid attention to the rhythm, the more familiar and intuitive it became. But the more I anticipated the beat and the interval that followed it, the more I became wary of the possibility that at some point an interval may not be followed by a beat. Struck by the inevitability of my own mortality, my enthusiasm for the stethoscope abruptly came to a halt and I put that fearsome contraption away indefinitely.
The point is, the moment I thought I knew the pattern of my pulse, I made myself vulnerable, and was thereby forced to submit to the real knowledge: that despite my familiarity with my heartbeat, I still have no control over it. So long as it continues to beat, I am alive. But the moment it stops, well you know. The human heartbeat consists of a lively pas de deux between the systole and diastole: the surge of life and the sleepy repose of death. It offers a constant affective reminder of our own corporeal precariousness, the fragility of our lives.
With that in mind, let me examine the evocative clip below from Just Like Heaven (Mark Waters, 2005):
The film tells the story of Elizabeth (Reese Witherspoon) who has been separated from her body after a near-fatal car accident. She is a specter who haunts the material world. She remains unseen by everyone, except for David (Mark Ruffalo) who now occupies her old apartment. In this particular scene, Elizabeth and David are at a hospital looking for her body. Standing in the hallway, Elizabeth suddenly feels her heart beating. Overcome by this sensation of being “alive,” she clutches at her chest.
The image of Elizabeth is the central focus of the frame, while the sound of her pulse dominates the soundtrack and permeates the space of the scene. Hearing the sound of her heart beating is reminiscent of the beguiling beat of our own hearts. The soundtrack generates a kind of affective engagement with Elizabeth, her pulse is our pulse and we are likewise made aware of the fragility of our own existence.
She travels intuitively down the hospital corridor and ends up in a hospital room. There, she finds her material body lying on a bed unconscious, hooked up to life-support machines. Her heartbeat has reunited her ethereal spirit with her physical body.
Once she enters her room, however, the sound of her heartbeat is eclipsed by the sound of the heart monitor. Elizabeth no longer feels her heart beating, though it continues to beat as the intermittent beep of the cardiac machine intimates. Elizabeth stands still, staring at her immobile body lying in atrophy. This moment is highly suggestive of the way modern western medicine has intervened and created a disparity between the body as a perceived object, and the way it is subjectively experienced.
Elizabeth is shocked at the sight of her material body—seeing it for the first time in its entirety. Once the subject of her own senses, she is now an object that lies before them. Her heartbeat beckons her spirit back to her body, motioning for her to re-inhabit it, as if it were an empty storehouse.
Ultimately this sequence dramatizes something more akin to the Chinese understanding of pulse: “mo” which gestures “toward the ineffable yet palpable difference between a stony cadaver and a breathing, responsive human being—the spirit of a person, the divine essence of life” (Kuriyama 107).
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Kuriyama, Shigehisa. The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine. New York: Zone, 2002.
Interesting post. I especially like the observation you make about the crossfade effect between her beating heart and the beeping cardiac machine as indicative of the modern mediation between body and subject. I think you’re right about this sequence dramatizing the Chinese concept of “mo.” It seems from your description of this scene that the pulse is serving as an anchor to the material body, a way of linking the person Elizabeth with the representation in the physical world, rather actually being her. It’s a very interesting (and nuanced) distinction and well worth considering.