Satoshi Kon is a man obsessed with duality. You can see it in his truth-crossed hysteria ridden world of Paranoia Agent, in the mishmash of dreamscape and waking existence in Paprika or even in the struggle of fiction versus reality in his original manga, Opus. He's always seemed like a creator intensely focused on exploring what it is to exist in two separate states of being. and my personal favorite example of this... is in his 1997 debut film, Perfect Blue. A nightmare-ish look at the duality that exists between the person... and the avatar. We are obsessed with our avatars - the representation of ourselves that exists purely online. Most of us have multiple different accounts dedicated to perpetuating this idea of who we are and what we represent. We pour hours everyday into grooming and preening this make-believe instance of us, making sure that the perfect version of ourselves is put forward for the world to see. In fact, if you've been following this channel for any length of time, you might have the distinct sense that you know me and you do! That is to say, you know the fictional, highly scripted, highly edited character that the actual person behind this channel uses to voice his ideals. I'm not even really speaking to you right now, I'm reading text off a Word document into a microphone. I'm not real. What you're hearing right now is an avatar, and one that exists in an ocean of billions of others. And the question Perfect Blue asks is: what happens when we lose control of our avatars, when they become an entity in and of themselves, and they start shaping who we are? From the opening moment of Perfect Blue, it's obvious that, like a lot of Kon's works, it's drawing little to no inspiration from standard concept of anime at that time The distinctly bold, highly stylised aesthetic features of 90's anime are nowhere to be seen here. Instead, Perfect Blue renders its characters with a more pulled back, realistic quality and there's even several shots that seemed to toy with this concept. Very few people in Perfect Blue's world are meant to be attractive or stylised. Most of them just look like regular people, and the ones that don't, the ones who stand out as being beautiful, are those with professions like actor and pop idol which means that the world Perfect Blue presents to us feels real, not all that different from our own, meaning that when terrible things start to happen, it's harder to distance yourself from it. There's an unromantic, deeply unsettling quality to the violence portrayed in the world of Perfect Blue. It's not a struggle of heroes and villains but a conflict of attacker and victim. At the centre of this world is Mima Kirigoe, a young idol singer and part of the group CHAM, who in the opening scene announces that she is leaving her career as a pop star in order to pursue life as an actress; a decision that does not go down well with some of her more diehard fans but one that also sets off within her a deeper struggle, some darker part of herself that refuses to let her move on.
This struggle soon starts to take physical form as a ghostly doppelganger
dressed in Mima's old pop idol clothing begins to appear in her everyday life
and in a way that only Satoshi Kon could achieve, reality itself begins to swim
and what's real and what's not soon become nearly indistinguishable as
scenes bleed into one another and Mima quickly begins to lose her grasp on who
she actually is and what her life is about, all the while being pursued by
what seems to be a violent stalker. Unlike a lot of horror, Mima's struggle
never feels voyeuristic. It's upsetting watching these things happen to her and
the reason for this is how well the film establishes her as a character. In its 81
minutes of runtime, it does a great job of characterizing Mima as an actual
person, without clumsy exposition or forced dialogue, and a big part of this
is the way the film conveys her dual nature as both a pop star and as a regular person; cleverly shown in the film's opening moments as we could back and
forth between an energetic pop sequence of her performing on stage and simple,
quiet, nearly mundane shots of her picking up groceries and living out her
day-to-day life. As a pop star, she's constantly bombarded by screaming fans
and press but it's in the scenes by herself that we start to understand who
she actually is; which is why towards the start of the movie, we get a nearly
four-minute long unbroken sequence of just Mima by herself in her apartment.
And I love this scene. Look at the detail that's gone into Mima's environment;
these stuffed animals, the fish tank, the posters, the PlayStation under her TV.
While not saying anything directly about her, it does convey that she's a real
person with a real home and seeing her in her environment like this creates a
level of subtle intimacy and familiarity with the character as it all has such a
personal lived-in feel to it; which not only serves as a great setup for one of
the most disturbing and unsettling scares later on but also gives us a
distinct sense of familiarity with who Mima is which means that when the film
eventually starts to warp that identity, it feels all the more wrong. This isn't
the only instance of Kon using environment to convey Mima's character. In
the beginning of the film, there's nearly a washed-out plain look to a lot of
Mima's surroundings. Any warm colors or tones are restrained and comforting but
as Mima's story grows progressively darker, the colors in her environment grow
harsher and more saturated to the point that they become overpowering, bathing
her in deeply intense hues; like the strikingly lit strip club scene later on
in which Mima must act out a gruesome rape scene as part of her new TV show.
This is the scene that serves to sever the ties between Mima's old existence as
a pop star and her new one as an actress and the way the colors of this scene are
handled is amazing as it creates this great visual metaphor for Mima's
transformation as we literally see her in a new light.
As the film progresses there's also several scenes that depict Mima in a
highly sexualized way but for each one, we're viewing Mima through the eyes of
someone else and what's striking is the difference between how these scenes
portray Mima versus the ones where she's alone or by herself. In fact, it's in
these scenes that she herself voice-ably expresses her extreme upset at being
portrayed this way and this is the primary fear that Perfect Blue expresses -
people perceiving us in ways that we don't choose and that perception
becoming reality. This is the kind of fear Perfect Blue deals in. While there are
moments of intense and frightening violence including, yes, THAT screwdriver
scene, what the film really achieves in conveying that we are literally watching
someone losing grasp of who they are which is horrifying because if you take
away someone's identity, then what's left? As the story moves on, Mima's life
continues to spin out of control. Scenes start to bleed together and
locations swim, scenes that seem to take place in Mima's personal everyday life are revealed to be part of her Double Blind TV show and as the tension of the film ramps up,
these cuts grow increasingly more jarring with Mima herself unable to keep
track of what version of her reality she's in. It actually makes for quite a
disorientating third quarter of the movie and while I'm sure many people
will come away with their own take on what's happening here, I think trying to
figure it out is in itself missing the point. Perfect Blue is not a puzzle to
be solved but a story to be experienced and what this kind of filmmaking does is
put us right in Mima's shoes as like her; for us, the narrative lines between
what's real and what's not begin to blur and Mima's life spirals into a whirlwind
of disembodied events and strange otherworldly characters. All the while
knowing that somewhere in this mishmash of realities, a very real danger lies. The
most direct form this danger takes is with the infamous stalker character, Mr.
Me-Mania. A character with only a couple of words of dialogue throughout the entire movie and yet still someone who is so intensely frightening and memorable. He
starts the film as a (???) super fan where he's helping out at the CHAM
concert and it's here we get one of my favorite shots in all of cinema as he
holds the image of Mima directly in his hand and in this single three-second cut,
Kon represents everything we need to know about this character and how he
sees Mima; not as a person but as an avatar. He
believes in the fictional concept of mirroring created by Mima and her
producers and when that concept is taken away by Mima's shift in career, he
reacts violently stalking Mima and attacking those around her unable to
handle that the idea that the fictional avatar he built up in his head doesn't
match the real-life person disturbingly raising the idea that the
only time our avatars can really take hold is when other people believe in
them. What's truly bizarre about Mr. Me-Mania's character now though is that this same
scenario actually played out in reality during the production of Perfect Blue. In
1995, Kon and crew began working on adapting the original novel "Perfect Blue:
A Complete Metamorphosis" and a year later was the case of the infamous
Bjork stalker, Ricardo Lopez. A man who became obsessed with the singer BjΓΆrk
and chronicles through video tapes his extreme disillusionment in learning that
Bjork's personal life and romantic relationships didn't align with his
perception of who the singer was. He created an elaborate scheme to send
Bjork a package rigged with sulfuric acid with the intent on killing her; at
which point he would commit suicide so that they could be together in the
afterlife. Thankfully, the package was intercepted by police and no harm came
to the singer unlike Lopez who was found dead in his apartment. The final tapes
of him are haunting. The reason I bring this up is because
this was a real case that actually happened. It's unlikely that Kon and his
crew ever heard about it as it only came to global prominence recently after
doing the rounds on various horror and creepypasta channels but the parallels
between it and the story of Perfect Blue are bizarre and horrifying and show that
what Kon was trying to say that the damage that can occur when we lose track
of where a person starts and an avatar ends was a very real thing and this is why as
the years go by, I only find Perfect Blue more unsettling. I had just turned 12
when I first saw the film. I'd just gotten a PlayStation 2 which meant DVDs which
meant anime and as me and my cousin put it on late one night, we became utterly
baffled by it. We weren't old enough to grasp what the
film was actually about, but we'd also never experienced things like Facebook,
Instagram and Twitter. These things didn't exist back then. The
concept of public avatars were only possible to traditional celebrities or
people with large followings and this is exactly who Kon made this film about.
But now with the advent of social media, everyone is a micro celebrity everyone
has a tiny online following meaning that the horror conveyed by Perfect Blue is
infinitely more relevant today than when it was created because now, everyone is
an audience and everyone is a performer and this is not only why Perfect Blue is
terrifying but why it's more terrifying than it's
ever been. Friends, thank you for joining me today. As you may have noticed, this video is in glorious 1080p and that is because I'm
working off a new machine I was able to purchase on the incredible support of my
extremely generous patrons, who once again I just have to thank you so much.
If you'd like to help support this channel then head over to
patreon.com/Supereyepatchwolf. I will of course be back soon with another video but in the
meantime, you can find me on the Let's Fight A Boss Video game podcast where
will be discussing Nier: Automata, Yakuza Zero, as well as a little talk on our
OTPs or you can come find me on Twitter @Eyepatchwolf. Friends, take care of
yourselves and I'll see you next time.
Satoshi Kon was taken to soon. Just about everything he created reins at the top of the medium. From Perfect Blue, Tokyo Godfathers to shorts like Ohayo shows that, in my opinion, the man was a genius of storytelling and cinematography.
::ninja edit:: I'll also send ppl to another Satoshi Kon video by Every Frame of Painting and Every Day Anime
Ah I'm at work and can't watch this. There's lots of interesting things I hope he talks about though. Interesting things about perfect blue: the title. Firstly, the characters used for the original work are ambiguous, but a "blue" film is basically a porn film. So some critics say it's like the "perfect porn" video. Remember the rape scene and the photographer, etc? Also the film positions us in the watching, and even peeping tom position many times. For example, when we're looking into her window, looking at her through misen abyme structure etc.
Also, the film is set in a time when technology, mainly personal computers were becoming popular in japan, and it really shows the terrifying potential of the Internet, and dangers of not being familiar with it. There were other movies which set technology in a negative light around that time in japan as well. For example: pulse, ringu, lily chouchou, etc.
Another interesting thing is that although the movie is called perfect blue, we don't really see much blue, do we? We see a lot more pinks, reds, and whites. Almost zero blue.
Sorry for long write up, work boring af.
Satoshi Kon is such an inspiration, a genius taken from us too soon. His goodbye letter is one of the most heartbreaking things I've read.
Super Eyepatch Wolf is such a great youtuber. Every video he puts out is extremely interesting to watch.
Great video, I can't imagine how it is to watch Perfect Blue as a 12 yo.
I'm so glad he didn't try and work out the third quarter. He's right, that part of the movie is trippy as hell and should remain that way. It's a case where I don't want to know the truth.
Forever waiting for a US BD :(
Satoshi Kon is a genius and I think his Tokyo Godfather is one of the most under appreciated anime film ever
Wow... I never thought it'd be so terrifying. Great. If I had my doubts about watching this in the past, now I'll nope away from this permanently.