The Reality and Delusions Behind "Perfect Blue"

Year: 1997
Director: Satoshi Kon
Screenplay: Sadayuki Murai
Based on the Novel by: Yoshikazu Takeuchi
Producers: Hiroaki Inoue and Masao Maruyama
Production Company: Mad House/Oniro

This entry is being written for one single purpose. I have been trying to write about Mima and Rumi for character entries but from watching the film so many times, I find that if I tried to write one of those characters on here, I will probably end up delving into psychology which is similar to what I wrote when it came to analysing Chiro and Toto. Maybe I will end up repeating myself in those entries but with all my thoughts being here, I can make little references there and not having to fill the character entries with psychology.

The most interesting thing I have found about this film is that critics have slammed the fact that it was made as an anime; that it would have worked as a live-action film. The irony of it is that it was initially adopted to be a live-action project back in late 1993. Production was delayed during early 1994 due to the Kobe earthquake and the decision to animate the film was made. The fact that it works as anime is basically down to the production team that was tackling issues and subjects never before addressed before in the anime world. To do this, the team worked hard so that the film did not fall prey to the constraints of traditional animation. It was felt that anime had not adopted the eclectic nature of manga and was in danger of confining itself to the same characters and subject matter.

Perfect Blue is different from most animes and I believe it is mostly thanks to the director, Satoshi Kon. This is his directorial debut and it gave him a promising start. He would later go on to direct films like Millennium Actress (2001), Tokyo Godfathers (2003) and Paprika (2006), the latter involves delusions and reality in a similar manner to Perfect Blue.

To understand why it works as anime, I will start by giving you the plot. Perfect Blue is the story of a J-Pop singer, Mima Kirigoe. She is the lead singer with girl band Cham. However, despite having a loyal fan base, none of the band's singles or albums have entered the charts and possibly motivated by a lack of fulfilment, she now harbours aspirations of becoming an actress. Despite what her fans think, she quits the band after being offered a part in the psychological TV programme, Double Bind.

In the entertainment, crossing over is a risky move and sadly, for Mima, it does not seem to be worth the risk for the part is a minor, her first appearance being two lines. After some persuasion from her office manager, Tadokoro, the screenwriter does expand her part by giving her a rape scene and making her character much darker. It is at this point that Mima's reality starts to decline and she is brought into the dark abyss of madness. And she is not the only one. The audience is too.

During the rape scene, Mima's world becomes a haze and her mind and body relaxes as she is "raped" for the camera. The filming of the rape scene is arguably one of the most disturbing moments of Perfect Blue and although it is not an actual scene (it's an acted scene for the camera and nothing sexual happens), the way it is portrayed in front of us, the audience, could make it one of the most disturbing rape scenes in any film for it can be hard to forget that it is a fake scene, unlike that in The Accused.

It is at this point, Mima appears in a nude magazine layout to sustain her career. It does not help that after leaving Cham, her band members have started on the road to success after appearing on the charts for the first time (not at a reasonably high position but it is enough for the band members to celebrate).

Also, she is being stalked by an obsessive and seriously disturbed fan known as Me-Mania. And to add to her problems, she is disturbed to find every detail of her life is being reported as a faked diary on an Internet website. Not only that but she finds herself confronted by a floating doppelganger that taunts her with what her life could have been if she had not chosen this path. The final icing on the cake is that the plot of the soap opera and the course of Mima's life start to parallel each other in the most terrifying way, making us wonder what we are seeing is real or not.

The idea of reality and mental illness is not a new theme. It has been covered in many films such as eXistenz and Secret Window but Satoshi Kon brings a fresh look on the subject. With the typical Western film, when it comes to films showing off murder and a fantastic twist on who the killer, the trick used is never show the killer up close until the final twist. For example, we may see a silhouette or the killer is masked/covered by a hood so we never see who is doing it.

Perfect Blue goes one better. We see the photographer being killed at first by an unknown person in a cap. Suddenly the cap flies off and then we see Mima doing the killing. This is the cornerstone shot for Perfect Blue and has the honour of being placed on many of the film posters as well as many of the DVD covers.

Before this point in the movie, there is doubt over what is going on but we are led to believe that there is something dangerously wrong with Mima. It is even brought up in the film through Double Bind when dissociative identity disorder is mentioned when it comes to the TV doctor analysing Mima's character. The classic symptoms of DID are the distortion or loss of time, depersonalization, flashbacks and hallucinations, all of which are exhibited by Mima at numerous points. The appearance of these symptoms are exaggerated by the director through the heavy use of jump cuts, fantastical elements such as the ghostly floating doppelganger of Mima, and by the foreshadowing or revisiting of numerous plot points through scenes filmed for Double Bind

It can be argued that Double Bind itself is a hallucination as the scenes filmed (particularly after the rape scene) seem to reflect what is going on in Mima's life at the time, in particular when she is on set filming a scene where she murders someone as part of the storyline and later when her character is being interrogated by the TV doctor. If it really a hallucination, then it could have been created by and incorporating past experiences from the dissociative personality responsible for creating and controlling the reality of the film's world. It could be then stated that the doppelganger is her real self emerging through and that the TV show is a projection of the repressed memories of an abusive childhood.

It should be noted that the film follows a reasonably simple linear plot until Mima films the rape scene. After that, her fish are killed and she starts to have hallucinations and weird episodes happen around her and it can be interpreted that the following events could be created as a coping mechanism by Mima. Or it could be that Rumi could be having the mental illness and she sets out to destroy or kill off the various personalities within her identity state when one defied her control. This interpretation is reinforced by the role of Rumi within the film, wherein she acts primarily as an increasingly marginalized observer (a role characteristic of the depersonalization a dissociative patient typically exhibits) in conjunction with the amnesia, time distortion and the transposing of traumatic real events into the fictionalized narrative of Double Bind by Mima.

Some critics have complained that with with this beautiful confusion hanging onto the plot, the ending completely turns this idea around where the doppelganger and assassinations are mundanely revealed to be the mere machinations of one of the heroine’s friends. But is it really so simple? It can be argued that when it came to the murder scene where we think Mima is committing the crime, it is in fact the real killer believing themselves to be Mima and this works beautifully in an anime. However, in relation to DID, what we saw as the ending is Mima "killing off" the final personality that is trying to control her mind. True, the killer is incarcerated but this could be one final hallucination brought on by Mima as a way of setting herself free from all that have tried to control her.