Perfect Blue
Disclaimer: mention of rape, trauma, mental illness.
In my quest to explore more anime movies, I happened to find a list of films by Satoshi Kon. I started with the 1997 animated film: Perfect Blue. And boy, oh boy, was it trippy (pun intended). I have watched movies of similar nature before, and usually by the end of it I would be able to tell what happened in reality vs what didn’t. However, that wasn’t the case with perfect blue. And I still am not sure of what actually happened.
Perfect blue as summarized on wikipedia is a psychological thriller that tells the story of Mima, a pop idol who decides to leave her music career to pursue acting. As she transitions into her new career, she becomes a victim of stalking by an obsessive fan, and a disturbing series of events that blurs the boundaries between reality and fantasy.
Mima’s public image transformation is often viewed through her agent Tadokoro, her manager Rumi -a former idol herself-, her stalker -a die hard fan-, and the blogger who writes about her. As the transition unfolds, we watch as Mima grapples with the loss of her former identity, the pressure of her new role in the movie, the obsessive stalker, and her own deteriorating mental health.
The film narrative weaves between dreams and reality, which most of the time made me unsure of what is a figment of Mima’s imagination and what actually happened. As Mima’s mental state deteriorates, the film becomes increasingly surreal and nightmarish. The use of visual symbolism, intense psychological sequences, and an atmospheric soundtrack contribute to the overall psychological tension of the story.
Spoilers below
I think there are a lot of interpretations of Perfect blue, some more literal than others. But, for the sake of this article I’m going to talk about two of them.
Scenario no.1:
The most straightforward interpretation is that Rumi thinks she is “the real Mima” (the pop idol persona), creates the blog “Mima’s room” and leads the stalker into killing people. The actual Mima ends up doubting herself, and her memories, leading her to a mental breakdown after discovering “Mima’s room”. She then survives the stalker attempts at killing her, and faces Rumi as she reveals herself as the antagonist.
After the whole ordeal, Rumi ends up in a psych ward, and the real Mima is a successful actress with a renewed sense of her identity.
Seems like a pretty straightforward (or as straightforward as it gets) explanation, isn’t it?
Except the ending feels a little too neat and complete given everything that happened in the movie. We didn’t watch Mima’s psychosis only for her to end up as the sane one.
If Mima killing the photographer (and then finding the bloodied clothes from the crime scene) isn’t real, then what makes the ending scene of her smiling rear viewmirror of her car any more real?
Scenario no.2:
Here, we could argue that the most obvious interpretation is that the show that Mima got signed to is real and the whole movie (Perfect blue) is taking place in her head as a way to cope. Essentially, we are watching the reality she made to cope with her trauma.
For this show, Mima acts a rape scene, where her idol persona appears before her and calls her tarnished. That same trauma is reflected in the show story line, Mima or Yoko; a rape victim who creates a different personality to cope with trauma, and gets revealed as the real killer of the show. So for this scenario, Mima is the name of the personality Yoko created to cope with the traumatic rape she experienced (it being one of the scenes for the show).
Speaking of that rape scene, i couldn’t watch the whole of it because it felt too real despite it supposedly being a scene for a show. And in construct to that, the sexual assault (which is not an acting scene) where the stalker tries to kill Mima seems kind of unrealistic in it’s depiction.
Perhaps, the TV show (i’m sorry i forgot its name) is Yoko’s real life experience, and she is dreaming of being this idol turned actress who can fight off her rapist, while simultaneity telling herself that the rape she was victim off was a mere scene acted in a show, after all the human brain can find strange ways to cope with trauma or erase it from memory.
There could be countless other scenarios, different personas and different realities. But I think a great aspect of this movie is the struggle of identity. That theme is so focal to the plot that whatever reality you think of, the movie would still be a great existential horror.
