A garbage collection crew in space receives an SOS signal. When they investigate, the signal is coming from what seems like a derelict, rose-shaped satellite.1 Within the satellite, though—however impossibly—is an opulent palace. Or maybe it’s an opulent mausoleum, dedicated to the memory of Eva, a once-famous opera singer who lost her beloved and her singing voice and retreated here to live out her past glories. But that was a while ago; even her costumes have decayed. So much time has gone by, in fact, that Eva must be dead. All that’s left are holographic expressions of her memories.
So… if Eva’s dead… who is sending out this SOS?
This is the story of “Magnetic Rose,” the first short in Memories, an anthology overseen by Katsuhiro Otomo (the creator of Akira) and adapted from one of his manga stories. As a creepy haunted house story, “Magnetic Rose” is worth watching. It’s directed by Koji Morimoto, who co-founded an animation studio but whose work isn’t well known in America. “Magnetic Rose” is probably the best-known thing he ever worked on over here, but it’s not because of him, and it’s not because of Otomo either. It’s because of the screenwriter, Satoshi Kon.
Kon’s body of work is slim. The work he himself directed, that’s really “his,” amounts to four feature films and one thirteen episode TV show. There’s never going to be any more of it: he died young, of pancreatic cancer, and in the middle of making a movie nobody seems willing or able to finish. That’s why a short film that is, in fact, not even directed by him has ended up making it to the list of movies under discussion here.2
However, even if Kon did not direct it, the influence of “Magnetic Rose” is all over his first feature film, Perfect Blue, and even more strongly felt in his second feature film, Millennium Actress.3 Whether Kon was drawn to the material because he was already interested in nostalgia, female celebrity, dreams, digital artifacts, parasocial love, technology, and ghosts—or whether he became interested in all of of that after working on “Magnetic Rose”—that, I don’t know. (Presumably somebody does.)
You’ve probably guessed the answer about that mysterious SOS: Eva might be dead but she’s also not dead. She lives on, as a ghost or a computer program (or both), and she has lured the garbage crew in for her own purposes. The two sent to check out the satellite, Heintz and Miguel, are very different people. Heintz is older; he’s a married man with a kid who keeps a picture of his family in his wallet. Miguel is a younger man, a player who is constantly chasing women—even if it’s just in his mind. When they enter the improbably ornate, almost enchanted palace, Miguel is the first to glimpse the holographic Eva, and the first to mistake a holograph for reality. And then he does something that even the most casual reader of folklore knows you should never, ever do: he eats the food. At this point you know Miguel is a goner. It doesn’t matter that the food is all fake stuff made to look and smell like real food. Eventually he is drawn into Eva’s world and he likes it there. He is more than happy to let himself be absorbed into her memories of her deceased and idealized lover Carlo.
What about Heintz, though? He’s on edge. The house extends its charms to Miguel, but its relationship to Heintz is more antagonistic. It continually baits him through images of his daughter, and eventually Heintz finds himself in an almost-perfect replica of his own home. Its falseness is given away only when he notices there’s something unnatural happening to the flowers on his lunch table—they are, one by one, transforming into roses.
In an interview with the NHK, Koji Morimoto mentions that he and Satoshi Kon had to develop a story for Heintz, who originally didn’t really have much going on. As Morimoto describes it, Otomo’s original story was about exploring the haunted space, with very little happening, but that turned out not to work very well in a screenplay. And there’s not really that much that happens with Miguel, because he puts up no resistance to Eva. When we meet him he’s a guy obsessed with women and when we leave him… he’s still that guy. Is this even a bad ending for Miguel?
It is, because it’s bad not to live in reality, even if reality is painful and ugly and nothing good is waiting for you there. Heintz’s daughter is dead; she climbed up onto their home’s roof, slipped, and fell. In the house, Heintz watches his daughter die at least four times, as Eva tries to get him to agree that it’s better to live in a dreamworld in which bad things never happened, time never passes, and things can remain forever at a peak of beauty without decay. Eva killed her lover when he tried to leave her, and when she lost her voice she tried to lip sync her own operas,4 and so what we see is her own elaborate, vicious form of denial. She can’t abide the idea of Heintz taking away Miguel, but she also simply can’t abide his disagreement. She needs him to admit he’d rather live in the dream.
But no dream can really be self-sustaining; that is part of why Eva needs them, just like she needed her earlier victims: in her fake palace with its fake food, its fake landscapes, and its fake people. She will consume them just as her ship will consume their technology, all to maintain a delusional world inimical to life.
“Magnetic Rose” is a fun, well-made horror story, but Kon’s subsequent takes on this kind of material would have more depth. In an Animation Obsessive (linked below), it’s mentioned that “Kon viewed the opera singer Eva as the true protagonist of the film.” Moving the woman caught between “reality” and “dream” into the center of the story is the change he would make in Perfect Blue. And it really would make all the difference.
An Animation Obsessive post on “Magnetic Rose”:
Plus:
Something that impresses me about Satoshi Kon is that he made all his work (starting with Perfect Blue) in essentially a ten year period. Like there isn’t much of it, but… he was really working a lot!
Persistently through drafting this I had the weird creepy feeling I was writing stuff that had been written by somebody else and I kept searching things to see if I in fact was… thematically fitting? Maybe?
The other two shorts in Memories are fine; the second short, “Stink Bomb,” has some more great anime Americans. “Cannon Fodder” is visually pretty interesting but had, to me, the weakest premise.
The music in “Magnetic Rose” is composed by Yoko Kanno (who most Americans probably know from Cowboy Bebop or, if they’re a bit older, Vision of Escaflowne). I think that this is the only time her music will appear here, but it’s very effective.
You can watch a short documentary on the making of Memories here.
Do we think the crew behind Event Horizon saw “Magnetic Rose”? I didn’t turn up anything doing a brief web search but it wouldn’t shock me.5
In some ways I wish “Magnetic Rose” had either been made a little earlier, when CGI would have been largely off the table, or a little later, when it was a bit more advanced. To my eye, the CGI has aged unevenly. Some of it’s aged just fine, but the big shot of the rose floating in space, for instance, looks very clunky now.
If this story had been original to Satoshi Kon, I think the big “reveal” that Eva murdered her beloved because he was going to leave her would have been replaced by something weirder. Like she still might have killed him but it would have been weirder.
Next up is Ghost in the Shell! June 27.
I feel like satellite is the wrong word.
Kon worked on Patlabor 2 (discussed here), so this isn’t exactly his first appearance in this series.
I think you could make the case for Paranoia Agent and Paprika too. I have not seen Tokyo Godfathers.
This is the main thing in “Magnetic Rose” that just does not work for me incidentally—I just can’t imagine an opera singer trying this even for the sake of the plot.
This has come up before and it’s gonna come up again but of my various gripes against Christopher Nolan, one is definitely that he should just admit he watched Paprika. He should just say it, you know? Say it. Say it!