Satoshi Kon Tribute: Perfect Blue

The legacy of one of our era's most brilliant filmmakers: kicking your sense of sanity in the balls.


It's only been a few days since the untimely death of celebrated anime director Satoshi Kon. It was a surprising death, made all the more tragic by the fact that Kon had only a handful of movies to his name. But each of his projects was a work of genius. Each was unique and beautiful, a true piece of art. And to me, the most brilliant of his movies was his debut: Perfect Blue. It's a psychological thriller that, unlike most, is actually both psychological and thrilling. It's a story of sanity slipping away, and Satoshi Kon's masterful directing and unique vision bring the audience along for the ride.

The film begins at what I think is some kind of theme park, where a pop-idol band with the bizarre name of "CHAM" is about to perform. A catchy, upbeat pop tune starts playing as the three pop idols take the stage, and then...

The music stops jarringly as a simple white title screen pops up. We do get to hear the song shortly afterward, in short clips interspersed with scenes of the main character's unremarkable everyday life, but this odd cut is the first sign that things aren't going to go quite as expected.

Our heroine in this story is Mima Kiragoe, one of the three members of CHAM, but this performance is her last - she's leaving the band to become an actress. It seems that this decision was made under pressure from her agent Tarakuro, who insists that singing simply isn't a profitable career, but the change upsets a lot of people, including her other agent Rumi, her mother, and a lot of her fans. Also, this guy:

But clearly he's not going to be important to the plot or anything.

Some punks start causing trouble at the show, and Mr. Beautiful there (the only name he's given in the film is his internet screen name Me-Mania) goes to put a stop to it because he's a huge Mima fan. It almost erupts into a full-scale soccer riot, but Mima is able to chill everyone out. After the show Mima goes home to her apartment. She takes down her CHAM poster and looks at her fan letters. One letter mentions a website called "Mima's Room".

The next scene takes us to Mima's first day on the set of a crime drama titled Double Bind. She's nervous about her role even though she only has one line. The head writer of the series arrives and everyone showers him with praise, even though the series is blatantly plagiarizing the premise of The Silence of the Lambs. Tarakuro pressures the writer to give her a larger role. Then, being kind of a dick, he opens a letter addressed to Mima, which explodes.

He isn't badly hurt and decides to let it go. Mima wants to call the police, but since attempted murder apparently doesn't count if the attack hits someone else, she is forced to shrug it off and focus on more important matters like having Rumi install a computer in her apartment for her. Now, I'm not here to point out the plot holes in this movie, but that one is hard to ignore. It was a bomb, and it was addressed specifically to you! You are well within your rights ignore your goddamn agent and go to the police yourself! In fact, unless you're some kind of superhero, that's the only logical thing to do. But never mind that! Lolcats are more important right now! Anyway, Rumi has to explain all of this fancy computer stuff to Mima, because it seems that Mima is a bit of a moron.

I mean, for God's sake, she's using Netscape

Mima goes to the Mima's Room website from her fan letter and finds it to be a blog written by someone pretending to be her. At first she takes this surprisingly well, even laughing at how well the writer understands her (identity theft - hilarious!). But as she reads on the details get uncomfortably specific, down to the brand of milk she buys, and she's no longer amused. She realizes that only someone watching her every move could know all of this.

Rumi argues with Tarakuro, saying that her one line in Double Bind wasn't enough to justify quitting her pop idol career. Tarakuro replies that things have changed since Rumi herself was a pop idol. This topic is glossed over and never brought up again, but it is arguably the single most important line of dialogue in the film. Anyway. Some time later, Mima returns to her apartment building to find a newspaper clipping taped up inside the elevator. It reports that a hit-and-run has left a victim hospitalized and in critical condition. The picture shows the victim to be one of the punks who started the commotion at her show.

The next script comes in and everyone is shocked to learn that it calls for Mima's character to get raped. Mima agrees to do the scene, but on the way home sees a hallucination of herself in her pop idol clothes refusing to be a part of it.

Nevertheless the scene goes ahead as planned (brutally, I might add). When she gets home she finds that her fish are dead and she freaks the fuck out, trashing her apartment and bursting into tears. The rape scene causes the writer of Mima's Room to claim that she didn't want to do it and was forced to by the screenwriter. Mima continues to hallucinate that she's seeing her old self, who claims to be the "real" Mima and says that Mima is "tarnished". Soon afterward, Double Bind's screenwriter is in a parking garage, where he finds an empty elevator with a boom box inside, blaring one of CHAM's songs. Having clearly never seen a horror movie, he gets in the elevator anyway, and since the only possible outcome of that scenario is a gruesome death, a gruesome death is what he gets.

Pictured: A perfectly good reason to take the goddamn stairs

Tarakuro insists that they put the writer's death behind them (I mean, they've already mourned for all of, what, twenty minutes?) and further insists that there's no connection between this incident and the letter bomb. Because, yeah, one murder and one attempted murder committed against two people working on the same TV show - what's the link? He then goes on to bring her to a photo shoot with a photographer who is infamous for pressuring his subjects to do nude shots. Have I mentioned that Tarakuro is kind of a dick?

We then see Me-Mania exchanging e-mail with the writer of the Mima's Room website. She tells him that the Mima on TV is an impostor who is ruining her image. He promises to deal with it for her. Mima then tells her actress friend Eri about her insecurities, but it turns out that's just a scene they were shooting together. After that she sees another hallucination of her old self and chases her into the street, where she's nearly hit by a truck.

We cut to Mima suddenly waking up in her apartment. Rumi comes over and Mima confesses her insecurities to her, but it is Eri who responds to her and suddenly Mima is back on set. She's ruined another take by saying Rumi's name, and the director calls for another take.

We cut to Mima suddenly waking up in her apartment. Rumi comes over and Mima confesses her insecurities to her. She breaks a teacup in her hands, cutting them open. Later she logs onto Mima's Room and reads that she had gone shopping in Harajuku. There is a scene of her fellow actors discussing the possibility that the murderer is just an illusion that she has created, but this again turns out to be a scene in Double Bind.

The photographer who took the nude photos of Mima is suddenly assaulted with what appears to be an icepick. He fails to get away, and we see Mima herself brutally stabbing him to death. There's a voice over of the director calling for a new take.

We cut to Mima suddenly waking up in her apartment. She stares at her hands for a moment, then gets a call from Tarakuro who tells her about the photographer's death. As she's getting dressed she finds a bag from Harajuku in her closet filled with bloody clothes.When she arrives on set she confesses to Rumi that she doesn't know what's real anymore and wonders if she really had been hit by that truck, and if this is all a crazy coma dream. So, yeah, those of you who thought that was what was happening, she said it out loud so now you know you're wrong. Mima then films a scene in which she stabs a man to death with an icepick.

We cut to Mima suddenly waking up in her apartment. Eri is there, asking who she is, and suddenly she's not in her apartment anymore but in a police interrogation room. Eri meets with her partner and explains that Mima suffers from Multiple Personality Disorder. She has created the persona of an actress to create the illusion that her experience of being raped was just a scene in a drama series. She committed the murders herself, when she was a different person.

At this point the director yells "cut", revealing this all to be the conclusion to Double Bind.

Tarakuro and Rumi briefly discuss Mima's next acting job. Tarakuro says that it's a great role but there are a few smutty scenes. Rumi laughs uncomfortably. Meanwhile Mima is attacked by Me-Mania, who plans on killing her to prevent her from ruining the "real" Mima's image. Oh, and he's going to rape her first. Luckily she manages to get her hands on a hammer and she bashes him on the head with it, killing him. She finds Rumi and brings her to see the body, only to find that it isn't there.

Rumi drives Mima home. Mima falls asleep and awakes in her apartment with Rumi in the next room. She tries to call Tarakuro, but he doesn't answer. The audience sees that he's been murdered and his body has been stashed in a prop room next to Me-Mania's. Then Mima notices that the fish in the aquarium are still alive and her CHAM poster is on the wall. She opens the window and sees that she isn't in her apartment at all, but an exact replica of it. Rumi enters the room dressed in pop idol clothes. She speaks as Mima and takes on Mima's image in her own and Mima's hallucinating minds. She admits that she sent Me-Mania to kill Mima. Since he failed, she attacks Mima herself. What follows is one of the most surreal and creepy chase scenes in the history of movies.

Rumi catches Mima and begins to strangle her (and this is after stabbing her twice), but Mima struggles and rips Rumi's wig off. Rumi freaks out and dives after the wig, impaling herself on a shard of glass in a broken window. She then stumbles into the street and is nearly hit by a truck, but Mima pushes her out of the way. The two collapse on the street as the truck driver calls an ambulance.

In the final scene Mima visits Rumi in a mental hospital and is told that her real personality only appears on brief, rare occasions. Mima admits that she never expects to see the real Rumi again, but still feels grateful for all that Rumi had done for her over the years. On her way out she overhears two nurses discuss how she looks like Mima Kiragoe, deciding that she's just a lookalike. But Mima looks in the mirror and confidently says that she is the real Mima.

This movie is amazing. I've seen movies that try to mislead the audience, but this is the only movie I've ever seen that takes the audience on the same psychological journey as the main character. This movie is confusing, but all of the confusion comes from the confusion of the characters themselves. It's not fake confusion caused by tricky or bad directing. With this movie Satoshi Kon created a masterpiece of psychological horror, fascinating both in terms of the story itself and in its underlying themes. In short, if Perfect Blue is not in your movie collection, your movie collection is incomplete.

Perfect Blue is the property of Rex Entertainment and Manga Entertainment