FILM

CRIMINAL IDENTITY IN SATOSHI KON'S PERFECT BLUE 

a phantom mirror created by 3 people

By Shiyu Zhang

So many identities to choose from

In Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue, Double Bind is a fictional TV series that’s supposed to be real that is part of the story of the film Perfect Blue. It is a parallel narrative as well as an explanation of the main plot. The protagonist, Mima, is an actress who plays the sister of a crime victim, Yuko. Mima’s first line in the series — “who are you really” — is the core question throughout the whole film, which becomes another question: who is the killer that threatens Mima and several people around her.

The answer is hidden in the details in the film which is part of Kon’s narrative strategy: clues are always right in front of you, but hidden in fictional narratives. In the first half of the film, it is repeatedly suggested, though deceptively, that the stalker “Me-mania,” the man one who created the “Mima’s room” website and writes diary entries framing Mima for murder is the murderer. His extremely ugly face and obsession give the audience a negative first impression: you couldn’t ask for a more perfect villain.

He looks like a murderer

In the second half of the film, the film presents scenes that shift the suspicion to Mima. In one striking scene she has a dream where there is a bloody picture of her killing a photographer. It is not revealed until the end of the story, that it is Mima’s agent Rumi, who has schizophrenia, and is the one who wants to kill Mima to replace her. Yet despite all that, there is still no direct evidence in the film that shows whether any of them is the murderer for any of these crimes.

Mima, Rumi and Me-mania are the three main characters in Perfect Blue. Not only do they have an intuitive “actress-agent-fan” relationship, they also possess an implicit link: they are all complicit in the illusory nature of Mima’s stardom, in her role as a pop idol. At its most basic, Mima’s stardom is the root cause of a severe identity crisis; on a more complex level that crisis spreads to those around her. They all share the problem of stardom.

Mima’s mirror image: a stage of career struggle

In the first half of the film, Mima’s reflection consistently appears in windows, screens, mirrors, and water. We can think of these reflections as old Mima who struggles with her new career path as an actress. In the TV series Double Bind, Yuko, the character that Mima plays, had some early symptoms of Multiple Personality Disorder. Although the doctor in the show constantly comforts her that “illusions will not come true,” Mima begins to worry that she is losing her mind. Kon repeatedly gives us scenes of Mima waking up. This distorts the timeline of the film, and shows that Mima can no longer distinguish reality from her dreams and illusions. And it is the illusory world of television and pop stardom that torments her again and again, to the point where she requires a website diary just to confirm her memory.

Reflections are difficult

For Mima, her life is a hall of mirrors, and one can’t help but think that Kon was thinking of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s mirror stage theory. Lacan believes that for an infant a mirror image is an ideal self or a fictional self. After recognizing the difference between the image and its actual self, infants complete an important moment of psychological growth in recognizing themselves. For Lacan, everyone starts by recognizing and then believing that the image in the mirror is their true self. This leads to an obsessive and focused attention on the mirror image.

Such obsession is caused by the denial of imagination and the presence of desires. For the infant who is incapable of independent action, the ability to make the image move gives the illusion of domination, a power the infant had never before experienced. Therefore, the infant affirms the presence of the self-imagery on an imaginative basis and identifies the image as a perfected form of the self.

My Mirror Theory explains it all

We see Mima struggling to identify with her various mirrors: pop star, actress, daughter, client, celebrity. Unlike an infant, there is no illusion of mastery, only a sense that these images are strangely capable of dominating her. However, during the mirror stages, the real self becomes alienated ‘others’, meaning that when the image of ‘I am perfect’ is established, the fact that ‘I am fake’ is also revealed. Nothing could explain Mina’s situation better.

Me-mania’s hallucination: an other’s gaze and narcissist

If Mima creates a number of different and possibly “ideal” Mimas, then the fanatical stalker Me-mania also has an “ideal” Mima as well. That she would serve as a mirror of him is one of the more interesting aspects of Kon’s wild take on Lacanian psychoanalysis. In the first half of the film, Kon represents him as a stalker. During the day, he works as a security guard for the Double Bind set, often observing Mima’s every movement. He spontaneously undertakes the task of protecting Mima, but the question is what or who is he protecting. It seems to not be so much Mima as her “ideal” self.

The essence of the stalker is to watch and what he is watching are the observable behaviors of his ideal double who we should point out looks nothing like him--she’s beautiful and he’s deformed But he overcomes these physical limitations by managing the contents of the website "Mima’s room". At the same time, he is the representative of morbid fetishisms in the film: he’s always watching the “ideal” Mima even the actual one is present; and he buys every one of the porn magazines featuring Mima.

Who's the real one, the killer that is

According to Lacan's mirror theory, the infant believes that the image is real that this ideal self is their actual self. That means he must follow a set of imposed guidelines to protect the illusion which can lead to a kind of narcissism. On the other hand, the stalker needs to track what the real person is doing. The greater the difference between Mima and her ideal the more distorted his fanaticism will be. After Mima plays a rape scene in an erotic drama, the stalker thinks his pure innocent idol has been defiled, and then tries to murder Mima in order to maintain the illusion of perfect harmony.

When the stalker writes Mima’s dairy on his website, this is a moment when his illusion of the ideal Mima can also strangely turn out to be the actual Mima, even though in this case the actual Mima is also a fabricated illusion that he controls. At this stage, the stalker mistakenly thinks that he has control over the illusion, just as an infant believes that he possesses authority over the mirror image, the infant would be obsessed by both himself and the image. Which, in the stalkers case, was the obsession of himself and the idol illusion.

Rumi’s imitation: a self-punishment murder

The third person in this Mima mirror triangle is Rumi, Mima’s manager. As a retired pop idol, she hates her middle-aged self and as Mima’s agent nurtures Mima’s ideal self. That’s why she cares about Mima so much and regards Mima as her own hope. She even imitated Mima’s room before she changes her career in her own residence with all the decorations from Mima’s idol period. This is a psychological defense mechanism. Through observing and imitating the illusion of idol Mima, an “other”, Rumi gains the ability to make up for her own long-cherished wish of returning to the stage as an idol.

The real reflection is no reflection at all

But when the real Mima becomes an actress and stars in an erotic drama, Rumi’s expectation of re-experiencing her idol life is destroyed. Unable to accept reality, Rumi’s personality splits and she believes that she is the real idol Mima, and because of that plans to murder the real Mima. She also texts the stalker saying she is the real Mima, asking Me-mania to kill that defiled fake actress.

As crazy as this sounds, Lacan's research on a paranoia can help us understand Kon’s complex weave of identification and murderous impulses. Lacan gives an account of an actual murder case that sheds a great deal of light on how the mirror theory works., A paranoid women, Aimee, was arrested for the murder of a famous actress Duflos. During the investigations, it is revealed that Aimee believed Duflos was the manifestation of “a perfect woman”. Lacan points out that this was the cause for her paranoia: she is mirroring Duflos to form an ideal image of herself, and living an imaginative life by superimposing the ideal image over reality.

What’s more, Aimee is not simply harming others, but instead harming herself. The deviation between Aimee’s ideal image and the one she forms from Duflos shatters her imagination: the perfect actress self is unachievable. When distortion and contradiction between the two sides becomes too great, it forces Aimee to murder her mirror image, to punish the ugly core of herself. That’s why Lacan believes that this was a case of “self-punishment paranoia”.

Sometimes your paranoia is real

In conclusion, the triangular relationship between Mima, the stalker, and Rumi is established by the image of idol Mima that overlaps in the imagination of these three characters. Through a series of events in the film, Mima deviates from her idol image, which unbalances the imagination of the three characters. Attempting to achieve harmony between imagination and reality, Rumi communicates with the stalker as "real Mima", making the stalker believe that the actress Mima is fake, and the diary that reflects this belief aggravates Mima’s own identity crisis. This complex triangle has an innate similarity to Lacan's mirror theory, where Mima is the subject of the overlapped illusion, the stalker performs the observation from others onto the overlapped illusion, and Rumi’s split personality acts out the overlapped illusion in the real world. Kon’s delicate interplay between these characters is both philosophy and a shattering personal narrative of betrayal and self-hatred.

©Shiyu Zhang and the CCA Arts Review