Perfect Blue is one of the all-time movies. It’s about Mima, a member of a C-tier idol group called “CHAM.” Well, she was: Mima is now transitioning to acting, with one member of her management team, Tadokoro, encouraging this decision and the other, Rumi, opposing. Mima herself, sitting between the arguing members of her management team like a disappointing but dutiful daughter, appears to be trying to figure out what people want from her so she can get on with it. A few scenes later, though, it’s clear that she is more eager to make the change than she lets on. On the phone with her mother, Mima says that her pop idol image is strangling her. She means that figuratively; Perfect Blue means it literally.
For now, Mima has a minor part in a drama series, Double Bind. And she has a fansite from her idol days, “Mima’s Room.” Mima doesn’t really know what a website is, but she has her manager buy her a computer and set it up so she can check it out.
It turns out “Mima’s Room” is a series of diary entries. At first Mima thinks the website is cute, but then she keeps reading, and it becomes less cute. It turns out that the Mima of Mima’s Room knows every action of Mima’s life in startling detail, down to which foot she uses to leave the subway and her preferred brand of milk. And she does not like that Mima is acting. The Mima of Mima’s Room wants to be a pop idol. When the real Mima takes steps that mean she absolutely cannot go back to being a pop idol, even if she fails as an actor, the pop idol Mima starts taking things into her own hands, and people associated with Mima’s new career start dying.
One thing Perfect Blue understood about the interactions of fame, fandom, the internet, and industry middlemen—and understood well before it was clear how much these things would become enmeshed with each other—is that the people who are most vulnerable in the entertainment industry are the not quite famous who have not quite made it. Mima’s not a star. In contemporary pop music terms, she’s not even on the “Billboard Bubbling Under” chart. She’s clearly meant to be the “main girl” of CHAM, because her costume is a little different and she stands in the middle, but CHAM’s last performance as a trio is full of empty seats. There are guys who follow the group and cause trouble, hurling beer cans at the stage, and being on the stage means Mima is exposed in a way that makes it easy to throw cans at her. But they aren’t really fans—they’re just jerks. If Mima were a nobody, she wouldn’t have people faxing threats to her tiny apartment for changing careers. If Mima were a star, she’d be more insulated. But as it is, she’s in the dangerous middle space where you’ve lost privacy without gaining security. To get to where she wants to be, she has to suffer.
The suffering is pointless. Mima isn’t grinding away at bit parts to prove herself or hone her craft. What she goes through in making Double Bind is not “paying her dues.” The scriptwriter writes a scene where her character is raped at a strip club, and she agrees to it rather than seem like a diva for saying no. The filming of the rape scene a drawn-out ordeal that goes from being ugly to funny to horrifying as the director repeatedly stops and starts the scene, causing Mima to snap in and out of character. She does a photography shoot where she gets nude, even though she doesn’t want to. Alone in the aftermath of these events, Mima wrecks her apartment, submerges herself in the bathtub, screams. If she had stayed a pop idol, sheltered and protected by her agency, she would have been spared this treatment.1 She’s like a Disney star who has to prove to everybody that she’s all grown up now, in the same way all those actresses do: sleaze.
As much as Perfect Blue is about fandom and the internet, about the image of Mima created by her fans and how that image threatens her ability to act and choose for herself—the truth is that Mima’s big problem is not crazy fans. Mima only seems to have one fan, crazy or otherwise: Me-Mania, who terrorizes her under the influence of somebody claiming to be the “real” Mima. The real Mima demands Me-Mania kill the vile imposter who is dragging Mima’s image through the mud. Mima herself, at this point heavily disassociating, begins to wonder if she really is the person updating this website. She sees her pop idol herself everywhere, taunting her.
Still, there’s a question available to the viewer about that phantom image, which is: who really made it? When CHAM becomes a duo, they dump the cute, ballerina-esque pretty princess look of before. They show up in contemporary clothes and sing about being normal girls who like to wear jeans. They get a hit. But we see enough of Mima’s own aesthetic to guess—if we’re asking these questions—that she wasn’t the one who was pushing the super cute look either. Who made up the costumes, the image, the synchronized dances? It wasn’t Mima. That’s not how idol groups work.
Your first time watching Perfect Blue, you will find it easy to pick out the single authority figure who seems to care about Mima: her female manager, Rumi. Her other manager, Tadokoro, doesn’t really mind signing Mima up for questionable gigs if it means she gets a little more screen time. For him, the photography shoot is a way of saying Mima’s a pro, and when she balks at the last minute he’s exasperated. The director, the photographer, and the script writer certainly do not care about Mima. (The director and the photographer barely care about making a coherent television drama.) Rumi, however, is a quiet and semi-maternal if disapproving presence. She’s a former idol herself and believes Mima is throwing away a good career. Maybe her ideas of what Mima should do are a little rigid, but—who else is on her side?
Still, as I said, Mima’s big problem isn’t her fans. Like most artists, her real problem is her manager. Rumi is the one mailing explosives to Mima’s set. Rumi is sending messages to Mima’s single crazy fan pretending to be the “real” Mima. Rumi is trying to manipulate Mima into losing her mind.2 Rumi is killing people (or at least, she’s killing some of the people). Rumi is the person forcing Mima to be a certain way so she can live vicariously through her career. Much as fans are friend-like but not your friends, Rumi is maternal but not Mima’s mother. She has no interest in Mima growing up or standing on her own; she isn’t going to offer Mima any protection that isn’t regression. She is a false mother, and, as in a fairy tale, you either kill your false mother or she kills you.
Or maybe you find a third option. After a long and bloody fight, Mima saves Rumi’s life. At the end of the movie we see her, older now and a successful actress, visiting Rumi in a mental hospital, with the implication being that she’s taken care of Rumi over the years. That Mima doesn’t need to kill Rumi is a sign of how much she’s grown by the end. She ceases to be the cowed and obedient child we meet at the beginning of the movie and becomes a woman capable of fighting back. She wants her life. She knows she is real. And if to get where she wants, she has to undergo things that are traumatizing and degrading, she’s still an adult, and she still gets to decide.
To me, that’s part of what makes this movie so satisfying. Mima wins. She comes out the other side. She’s not some kind of tragic broken bird, she’s not a victim of the entertainment industry, she doesn’t get stuck in her past. She keeps moving forward, even as she disassociates and struggles, and when she’s faced with death she makes the choice to fight back where she’s been primed to give up. She keeps on going even after she’s been stabbed in the shoulder with an icepick and in the side with an umbrella. She keeps going and she lives. She lives, bitch! I love this movie.
I am flying today so I (probably) won’t be around that much. I will try to be around later, though.
My Bluray set comes with 117 minutes of Satoshi Kon interviews which I did not end up watching. But I could watch them at any time.
Relevant Animation Obsessive link:
On that note, Christopher Nolan there is still time to admit you watched Paprika.
In a cool moment of overlap, Perfect Blue also popped up on Angelica Jade Bastién’s newsletter this week:
No matter how insane Americans can get about celebrities (and it’s “very”), there’s nothing here even sort of like idol culture. This might be the only way in which Americans are more normal about fame than people in other countries.
There is obviously a lot about how this movie blends reality and fantasy that I did not write about. However, the moment Mima’s reflection turns into pop idol Mima and says to her, about filming the rape scene, “I absolutely refuse to do it”—I think that was when I realized I was watching one of the greatest movies ever.
I always assumed Rumi killed Mima’s fish after leaving the set early. Do other people think this?
Madonna used Perfect Blue as part of a tour backdrop. You can find it on YouTube but I’m not linking it here because she also incorporates the original tentacle rape movie.
Perfect Blue is technically based on a book, which I have not read, but I believe Satoshi Kon didn’t read it either, sooooOOOoooo.…
I noticed this time that Rumi and Me-Mania are drawn similarly, particularly with their eyes seeming too far apart. Very subtle but there.
As has been previously established, this movie is about Taylor Swift.
Between this movie and what I remember of Paprika I lowkey kinda think Satoshi Kon hates fat people. Hated fat people.
I don’t think this is true of real idols any more than it’s true of real Disney kids.
Though you know… if Mima did kill that photographer… good for her… somebody needed to.
there's something so perfect about the fact that (iirc) what mima proclaims/realizes in the climactic moment is not framed as "i am the real mima" but as "i am who i am"... "mima" can remain contested territory but she can still reclaim and own her selfhood. if you really see yourself as yourself, there's nothing left to prove (and sometimes the only way to win is not to play). something about that really rings out for me and is maybe my favorite moment in a movie i had already happily slotted as a masterpiece well before we got there.
i haven't seen this movie in a long time but it is so good. i love the opening scene cutting between the supermarket and the concert, and all the little moments of dissolution into fantasy...as i saw somebody on lb say, it's basically a giallo...i haven't seen any of the new pop girl horror movies, your Smile 2s, your Mother Marys, but i'm confident they don't measure up to this.