Amateur Recommendation Hour: Perfect Blue

Today’s recommendation is the scariest film I have yet seen. Some will dispute whether or not it actually qualifies as horror. I am going to argue that it does in one of the most unique manners of any film I have yet seen. It's uniquely layered and escalating intensity through all of its surrealist bag of tricks is what makes it feel grounded in a reality that many will be able to identify with, even if not experienced in such magnitude as portrayed in the film. Becoming relatable through it’s setting intertwined with what it does within that setting rarely explored in art across its many mediums.

Perfect Blue, directed by the surrealist master himself, the late, great Satoshi Kon is a follows Mima Kirigoe, a member of a Japanese idol group “CHAM”, decides to controversially retire from music to pursue an acting career. As she becomes a victim of stalking, gruesome murders begin to occur, causing Mima to lose her grip on reality. Her everyday life becoming a battle of attrition against her quickly regressing sanity. As she takes on more and more subversive roles in a battle of attrition against both her aspirations of breaking free of her reputation in the industry and her own ability to overcome her life.

It is a masterclass, maybe even a blueprint, in how to make everyday life feel terrifying and menacing. Whereas most horror opts for locales such as a night on an abandoned property or a trek through a fog engulfed town, Perfect Blue’s horror is presented in broad daylight. Places that would be familiar to us. Aboard public transport, walking through busy streets, shopping at the grocery store. The sense of dread and tension conveyed through the sun-drenched bustle of Tokyo is unlike anything I’d ever experienced in a horror work before. It as an atmosphere juxtaposed with bright colors that are just faded enough to not clash with each other. Staying true to Tokyo’s architectural and tonal charm while not taking away from the emotions being conveyed is a monumental accomplishment.

The soundtrack by Masahiro Ikumi does an outstanding job of supplementing the atmosphere, already drenching in foreboding eeriness. A track often lingering in the background is a dissonant screeching buzz that gives the impression a wasps nest is not too far away. The unreality of its soundscape allows the soundtrack a feeling of tightness and unease that enhances the sense that we are hearing the dissonant noises inside Mima’s head bouncing around as she searches for coherency of thought within her intensely loud and self-contained hell to keep herself intact existing outside of a fragmented soul being pulled at every direction.

Those of us who struggle with mental health issues, to any degree, anywhere on the spectrum are familiar with its spikes and most unforgiving moments. The mundanity of life is anything but mundane. Going to the grocery store can elicit a sense of dread and over-stimulation knowing what awaits. The crowds bustling, voices overlapping, momentary social interaction potentially inducing anxiety and panic. In the moment it is a relentless cavalcade of excessive awareness, tension, catastrophizing anything and everything that could go wrong or get worse. To many it may seem like just another part of everyday life, to others it is a mountain they must climb. That explanation alone should be enough to convince how this films broad imitation of life is so unique and unparalleled. Even the aftermath of such an experience may lead to a different kind of dread and terror, persisting as we continue on overcoming our own daily horrors that the world might never know we are fighting as we pass hundreds and thousands of others experiencing their own.

My interpretation of this work is that it is a criticism of parasocial relationships between those with public careers and those who follow them. And the potentially dangerous duality between the person and the persona, the public face, and the private person. With the mass usage of social media, we all have a public presence that looks exactly how we want to look to others, leaving out the details we don't want, even if those details are an important reflection of our true selves. At what point do the lines between what we want and what we are blur? What kind of person do we become? Who we want to be or who others want us to be? And what experiences could tempt us in the direction of directionless-ness? These are just a few of the many multi-layered and introspective questions this particular work asks us to consider. Consolidating ourselves into the most whole version of what we want to be with what we are is as much about survival of the soul in the modern media landscape as it is keeping a strong and healthy track of what is real and what is a fabrication of our wants, biases, and traumas.

I believe that each of us can relate to this work to varying degrees even if we are not a public figure ourselves. Most of us have a social media presence in which we only show what we want others to see in a very specific and carefully curated manner. In a way it has more relevance today than when it was released in 1997 due to the advent of social media and the interconnected society in which we have today due to technological advances made since to allow for a more interconnected public space. 

A common motif in Satoshi Kon’s works that has always made him feel ahead of his time in diagnosing humanity’s future is how he portrays the separation of self and how that is influenced by the technological advances around us and how society would react to them. I would like to think that if he were still with us today, he would feel vindicated in his perception of the world and what it would become before a time where a post-internet world was in our collective sights.