Some loose thoughts on Satoshi Kon’s 1997 film “Perfect Blue”
The Following post contains spoilers for the film Perfect Blue.
TW: Violence, Sexual Assault
Satoshi Kon’s 1997 feature-film directorial debut, Perfect Blue, tells the story of Mima, a pop-star who leaves her musical career behind in order to pursue a life as an actor. She discovers a blog which purports to be written by Mima herself and which expresses a desire to leave acting and return to her life as a singer. Mima begins to hallucinate an alternate version of herself who was entirely happy with life as a pop-star and who wishes for nothing more than to please her fans. Meanwhile, the challenges that she faces on the set of the TV show where she is newly employed, a gruesome drama about a serial killer who murders women and wears their skin, probe at the very boundaries of her bodily identity through storylines which force her into scenes of simulated sexual-assault, while she also decides to further her career by participating in a nude photo-shoot. Many of the people who have assisted with her career-change, from her agent to the scriptwriter of the TV show, start being mysteriously attacked and killed, and —in a realisation which mimics the fictional show—Mima starts to believe that she may have committed the murders in a state of dissociation. And through all of this, Mima notices that a stranger has started stalking her at the set of the show. Mima’s reality is now entirely bound up with images of herself over which she has no control: a blogger who claims to be her, a TV show which impinges on her body and her mind, a manager who seems to want to make decisions for her, nude photos which are in the public domain and stalker-fans who demand that she should be a particular version of herself.
The question is, who is Mima with or without these images? When we meet her at the start of the film, we see shots of her performing with her band, “CHAM!”, intercut with shots of her going about her everyday business—taking the train, buying groceries, going home. Perhaps we would distinguish between the “real” Mima, doing her mundane tasks, and the “fake” Mima of the stage performance, but this identification is not so clear, as when asked to identify herself throughout the film, Mima would always refer to herself as some kind of variation of “pop-idol turned actress”. Furthermore, the imposter-blog which Mima discovers has posts which describe in intimate detail the minutiae of her everyday life, such as which brand of milk she always buys and even which foot she leads with when stepping off the train (the fact that on one particular occasion she lead with her left foot instead of the usual right is taken as a sign that her life is disintegrating since she stopped being a singer). These mundane details become just as much of a performance within a demanding gaze as the singing and the acting. There is no moment at which Mima ceases to appear to be some kind of performance. For the sake of this blog post, it should suffice to say that Judith Butler’s analysis of gender as a performative act, as developed in Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter must be relevant to any more thorough study of Mima’s characterisation, especially as it pertains the experiences which are particular to women which are interwoven with Mima’s story.
The (de)framing of Mima’s reality is artfully interwoven with the framing of the film itself. The opening shots of the movie appear to be from some kind of power-rangers style action-film, before the sequence is revealed to be a performance on a stage in front of a crowd. Not only does this already derealise the boundaries of different modalities of reality within the film, but it also identifies us with the audience within the film: for the first of many moments, we are seeing in this performance what the fictional crowd is also seeing. As Mima’s sense of reality begins to disintegrate, so too do fact and fiction within the movie-space begin to elide. Scenes from Mima’s life run seamlessly into scenes from the fictive TV show, into dreams, into hallucinations. “Real life” begins to resemble fiction, with the “real” murders which resemble scenes from the fictive show and an attempted sexual-assault which mirrors the scripted assault in which Mima acted. The hallucinatory doppelgänger springs forth in Mima’s mind as a coincidence of her own misgivings about her career change and the blog posts which seem to give voice to all of these misgivings: the delineation between her interior and someone else’s image of her interior is just fluid as the passage between different layers of the fictional world.
Not only does the doppelgänger posses Mima’s interiority, but also her exterior becomes a site of conflict and control. Fake Mima usually seems to emerge out of and disappear back into a mirror image; mima will be casually gazing at her reflection in a train window, for instance, before the image mutates into the idealised version of herself. This idealised Mima is always seen wearing the outfit that she wore as a pop-star, a picture-perfect smile on her face, not exactly walking but more skipping and floating from place-to-place. At every level, she is the more perfect of the two as she desires to be nothing more than an image for her fans. She seems to have exactly what Mima does not have or, to put it another way (in order to bring this reading of the film closer to Lacan) she does not have that which Mima has by not having: she is lacking lack. Lack being understood as the thing which desire seeks to fill, fake Mima did not have the desire to leave her former career and cast out afresh, she does not have the desire to take control of her own reality, she exists simply as the image rather than as the desire which is formed in response to the image. This is crucial: Mima is more free than the image because she can never be complete in the way that the image is. Mima is united with all of those who seek to posses her image: the image is the unheimlich completion of that which cannot be completed and it seems to offer an end to a castrating reality in which we are inscribed by lack. Her stalker, the scriptwriter, her agent, her manager, her fans, the nude-photographer, and Mima herself all seek possession of Mima’s image, to lay claim to it as a marker of reality.
Let’s consider the significance then, of the final moment of the film, in which Mima (having overheard people speculating as to whether she was really herself or a lookalike) looks into the rear-view mirror of her car and says “No, I’m real!”. Mima addresses her image in the mirror, but the mirror image looks towards us and addresses the audience. She is performing for the image, while the image performs for the camera. Throughout the film, scenes of crowds have often been associated with cameras: photographers in the audience of the pop concerts, cinematographers on the set of the tv show, journalists trying to break into Mima’s apartment to get her take on the murders which have been committed. Who is though the camera but us, the audience? We are the place where the image is received and imbued with libidinal energy, the place where a reality is constructed. Mima is a performer, both as an actress and as a pop-star. An essential part of the performance lies in sharing ownership of the image with the audience, which Mima does in the mirror at the end: an “I’m real” which is for the mirror, which is for the screen; “I’m real here and now with you” she might say. But if we do not recognise that in lack we have something which the image will not yield to us, then we are condemned to seek possession of the image as our very own and so to create the same disturbing doppelgänger which haunts the characters of the film.
James Waide 