From the opening scene of Perfect Blue, a huge crowd of men obsessively speculating about and taking pictures of Kirigoe Mima, the leader of girl group CHAM, it’s clear Kon wasn’t fucking around in his examination of the male gaze. However, the possessive and predatory glare of these men isn’t limited to just their gaze, nor is it necessarily only limited to men. Every single person in Mima’s life, from her fans to the press to her own agents, refuse to let her achieve her dreams and be her own person.
Mima’s objectification takes on an equal yet opposite face as she transitions to acting: while as a pop singer she was celebrated for her percieved purity, now greedy writers and executives force her to equate being “taken seriously as an actress” with baring her body and leaving her psyche up for grabs. In a world that loves to see beautiful young women do two things: get naked and suffer, it’s no surprise that she is immediately expected to take a role as a “damaged” stripper who is sexually assaulted in a nightclub.
The men Mima encounters span the scope of an entire industry built on the objectification of women: the writers and photographers’ only use for an aspiring actress is getting her to take her clothes off, and their leers through the camera lens are no different from the actor-rapists or her cheering fanboys, which are explicitly linked to the rapists during this scene. If you can handle it, I seriously suggest going back and watching the scene where Mima collapses playing her stripper role - it’s a great example of visceral yet purposeful filmmaking.
As Mima’s mind degrades under the stress and trauma she faces, the narrative rapidly abstracts into a bizarre melding of reality and fantasy. I might as well throw my hat into the ring of “Perfect Blue theories” that clog up the internet and say that my explanation of this is simple: Mima pours all of her self-doubts into an alter-ego hallucination, her past self who chastises her for wanting to be anything other than what everyone else wants her to be. This hallucination, almost ghostly in appearance, also reveals Mima’s reservations about making not only her image, but her body property of the public. Of course, this falls apart when the movie strangely decides to make her hallucination real, but that feels more like a rookie misstep in the script than anything else.
In the two respective climaxes of the film, Mima’s deluded stalker and agent try to totally possess Mima through utter destruction. Both believe the “real” Mima’s only desire is to live up to their own idea of who she really is. But in the end, Mima finally prevails, triumphantly declaring “I am who I am!". As wonderful and cathartic as the end is, it’s still so weird to me that the movie abruptly abandons its psychological exploration of Mima to reduce everything down to “the hallucinations were actually real the whole time!”. Satoshi Kon is one of my all-time favorite directors though, so I can easily put the issues I have with it aside in favor of his boldness and commitment to experimentation from the very beginning.