Sixteen More Screams For Halloween: Day 4 (Perfect Blue)

(TW: sexual assault)

Ahh, back to the comforting embrace of anime! And this one even has a pop idol in it, just like the last time we checked in with anime on the blog back in the spring! Boy howdy, what utopian songs are we going to sing about this time? Oh. Oh, it's not about singing and friendship. It's actually unsettling psychological horror with an uncomfortable descent into uncomfortable themes that blurs the line between artifice and reality. I knew that coming in tonight, of course. Notably, however, I did not really know that coming in to it the first time I watched the movie. Going in blind, so to speak, kind of fucked me up and left an impression upon my internal landscape. A little bit of flinching fear whenever remembering that movie. Sometimes it's a good idea to face one's fears, and so I decided to take a second look at the film to talk about it. Let's.

Christ, where to begin? Cutting to the heart of the film, I guess, that blurring of the line between artifice and reality. Certainly the pop idol industry thrives on that sort of thing, the girl who goes on stage being a persona and product sold to the adoring fans. Such is the case for protagonist Mima Kirigoe, who graduates from her idol group in the opening credits to pursue a career in acting. Mima is here figuring out who she wants to be, with the hope of taking on even more roles under the umbrella of acting. That dichotomy, that fracture of the true self and the public persona, is what plunges Mima into the hellscape of horror ahead. The moment which truly cracks the glass is when Mima has to act out a sexual assault on her new show. Yes, in-universe it's all just acting, but that doesn't make the fact of watching it any less horrific... and this is when Mima starts seeing the mirror image of herself in her idol uniform, a version of herself who's pure and chaste. Perfect, you might say, and berating Mima for letting herself be sullied like that on screen.

Reality and fantasy start to blur then, as we add another prescient bit of commentary to the mix: fan entitlement and the Internet. Perfect Blue was made in 1997, so it's very early Internet, but we still get to see how the fan culture around Mima both online and offline evolves and reacts to her brash and often lurid career shakeup attempts... and some take it worse than others. The film focuses on one obsessed fan, also unable to tell between reality and fantasy, who becomes convinced that Mima is an impostor sullying the reputation of the perfect idol and that this pretender must die. The climax of the film shows someone close to Mima who also has lost touch with reality, and is obsessed with the perfect idol image of Mima to the degree that the impure "impostor" has to die. Through our own fractured lens, we can see this perfect idol image of Mima glide about and giggle innocently while the world around the real Mima crumbles, people determined to do horrible things to her in the name of the perfection she supposedly destroyed.

In the end, it's breaking that illusion of perfection for them, briefly, which lets Mima break free herself as they scramble to retreat back into their delusion. It lets Mima herself become her own person, free of that perfect image, and to be able to look in the mirror and see the real her. No artifice, no mass-produced perfection that deluded people will kill for. Just Mima. If I've undersold the film, it means I just don't want to go over everything it does. It's simultaneously a dream and a nightmare, both ethereal and haunting, and a damn fine film. It's not for everyone, but by god does the message of artifice and perfection sing in this strange dreamworld of a film. I enjoyed it, even if parts of it are supremely fucked up and visceral at times. Be wary going in, is all.