Satoshi Kon: Perfect Blue (1997)

The late Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue is among the most quietly influential films of the late 1990s. Over 20 years after its release, it continues to provide a nightmarish blueprint for psychological thrillers about young women—Darren Aronofsky famously cribbed scenes from it for Requiem for a Dream (2000) and Black Swan (2010). However, the film’s power goes beyond inspiring some of Hollywood’s most dazzling thrillers of the past two decades. Perhaps more lasting than its portrait of nightmares and delusions bleeding into reality is the film’s examination of the world of entertainment. For even as terrifying as stalkers and doppelgangers are, Kon’s clear-eyed depiction of how movies and fame can absorb a young woman’s soul is even more harrowing.

Perfect Blue is told almost entirely through the lens of Mima, a member of a pop trio who leaves behind music to become an actor. She’s young, and she’s wide-eyed about the world of the movies, but it doesn’t take her long to start breaking down. Kon is brutally realistic in showing how others callously exploit Mima’s innocence in the name of entertainment. Her manager Rumi Hidaka (a former pop idol herself) encourages her to move slowly, but the one-line appearance in a TV thriller doesn’t do much to light up Mima’s career, so her jaded agent Tadokoro jumps at the chance for a bigger part…as the victim in a rape scene in a TV show. 

That scene gets Mima noticed and lands her a bigger role on the show, but the indignity of filming the scene takes its toll on her mentally. Then comes the nude magazine shoot and even darker roles; Mima seems to be making a name for herself straying from the wholesome image of her former pop group. Mima cheerily agrees with the direction her career is taking, but the hollow look in her eyes when she gets home to her small apartment each day tells a different story.

As Mima works her way up the ladder of the entertainment industry, she also finds her own identity slipping away, largely as a result of reading an online diary called “Mima’s Room,” which claims to be her personal diary shared online for fans to get a glimpse into her mind. The diary captures every detail of her day and even small personal tics, like the fact that she always steps onto subway trains with her right foot first. She starts to wonder whether she actually is writing the diary, since it’s so accurate, and has just forgotten. Then one day she sees a doppelganger of herself decked out in her pop idol dress and her grip on reality starts to unravel.

Like so many films that came before and have come since, Perfect Blue mines the psychological tension of being a young woman in a man’s world. It plays up Mima’s innocence and youth, both her beauty and her optimism, but it shows how those traits make her susceptible to the demands of an industry and a culture that does not value her as a person, but only a sexualized commodity. However, Perfect Blue goes beyond being a victimization narrative; it’s also a totalizing portrait of a fractured reality. It’s no accident that Aronofsky is such a fan of this film and has openly copied parts of it in his own work; the film shares the same intensity and intimacy of his most frenzied works.

Similar to a novel by Philip K. Dick, Kon’s film refuses to offer an objective take on reality; we see the world as Mima sees it. To be clear, there are scenes without Mima, such as small conversations between Rumi and Tadokoro, or glimpses into the solitary life of a stalker known by the alias “Me-Mania.” But these scenes only provide snippets of context and never break the crushing atmosphere of paranoia and depression that mounts over the course of the film.

As Mima’s career takes off, her confidence takes a nosedive and she starts to lose her grip on reality. Kon uses repetitive sequences and abrupt cuts to unbalance the viewer and depict Mima’s growing instability. Every time she comes home from a hard day on set, Kon shows her collapse on her bed from the same angle and in the same fashion, showing how one day blends into the next and is imperceptible from the other. Masahiro Ikumi’s score amplifies the discomfort through haunting music that emphasizes discordant choral tunes, as if we’re allowed to hear the voices of confusion in Mima’s head.

As Mima grows increasingly despondent, men in her life start ending up dead. It’s as if her suppressed anger has taken human form and started punishing anyone culpable in her exploitation. Thus, Perfect Blue takes on a Freudian theme in its plotting; the suppressed pain relating to sexuality expresses itself violently. Had the film been made in the 1960s, you could almost see Alfred Hitchcock directing it.

Kon has the courage to present reality entirely as Mima experiences it, which not only offers us an incisive view of this particular reality, but also terrorizes us along with her. It’s hard to overstate how uncomfortable and downright creepy parts of Perfect Blue are. It’s not quite a horror film, but it plays on the insecurities of the audience in a similar way to horror, forcing us to align our perspective with the protagonist in order to help us feel their pain and fear.

The fact that Perfect Blue is animated allows Kon total control over the reality of the film; he warps perspectives, blurs focus, and designs the world as Mima sees it. Unlike the animation in many anime films, Kon’s animation style captures an abundance of personality in the characters. Characters are realistically drawn and not overly stylized and Kon and his animators are careful to give everyone individual characteristics, from Rumi’s bloated face that shows the degradation of age to Me-Mania’s unsettlingly wide-set eyes and crooked teeth. Even Mima avoids personifying vacant, youthful beauty. Kon highlights her childishness, but he also somehow manages to express the pain behind her wide eyes.

The film being animated also allows Kon to critique filmmaking itself without committing the very abuses he’s critiquing. The fact that Perfect Blue deals with filmmaking as a plot point adds an inevitable meta context to the film’s themes. Kon uses this meta approach to comment on the exploitation of young women in entertainment: by agents, by filmmakers, and by the public. During the rape scene, the actor playing the man who rapes Mima tries to be polite—he even comments on how awkward filming the scene is. But it’s hard to look past how Kon depicts the scene and how dehumanizing it is for Mima. Not only does she get manhandled and abused for a scene that is clearly nothing but sexual provocation, but Kon is careful to focus on the people who are watching the scene, both the other actors in the scene and the filmmakers shooting it. 

As the actor playing the rapist tears at Mima’s clothes and forces himself on her, Kon cuts to the faces of the other men in the scene barking at her as a reaction shot. But Kon shows them in clear rows and only from the chest up; from the shot alone, they look as if they could easily be men in a theatre hooting at a provocative scene on the screen. Thus, Kon is implicating not only the types of producers that write such violent scenes into films, but the sorts of audiences that mindlessly lap them up.

Furthermore, by portraying such a scene through animation, Kon is avoiding exploiting an actress in the way he is criticizing in the film. He’s demonstrating how exploitative it is to have a young actress like Mima play a naked victim in such a violent scene, but because the film is animated, no actress was required to act out such a scene. Thus, he skirts the entire issue and manages to avoid the moral culpability that would come with making an actress do anything of the sort that Mima has to do in the film itself. It’s also important to note that Kon depicts these scenes and later ones, such as an uncomfortable nude photoshoot for a magazine, in as dire a tone as the more hallucinatory moments later on when Mima is losing touch with reality. The later scenes may be more visceral, but the real world is every bit as nightmarish as Mima’s imagined world in Perfect Blue. 

Thus, Perfect Blue is worth remembering not just as an inspiration to Black Swan and a stunning psychological thriller, but as a savvy undressing of the film industry and the ways that it exploits young women for thrills. It’s a film about the crisis of reality, both real and imagined, and although the character may claim in the final shot that everything is alright, we know that any peace cannot last just as a “perfect blue” sky inevitably grows cloudy.

9 out of 10

Perfect Blue (1997, Japan)

Directed by Satoshi Kon; written by Sadayuki Murai, based on Perfect Blue: Complete Metamorphosis by Yoshikazu Takeuchi; starring Junko Iwao, Rica Matsumoto, Shiho Niiyama, Masaaki Okura, Shinpachi Tsuji, Emiko Furukawa.

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