Perfect Blue

It wouldn’t be bold of me to state that Fan Fiction has taken over contemporary media — but also the audience. In times past fans would gather in thematic clubs and, later, in online chatrooms dedicated to debating their favorite films, TV series, comics, and novels; they would write and share among themselves personal, unofficial character stories; they would fill blind spots in a given lore, fantasize romances, ship characters, and draw pornography subversive of all sexual orientations. This was before Comic Con was a thing, and easter eggs, well, simply about Easter. Fan Fic was the realm of outsiders, socially embarrassing, with little weight on the media it emulated. Eventually, some fans did enter the industry and ended up writing their idols, and maybe that was when it all changed. But it was also the industry, squeezing profit from IP, who began curbing to the fans — not necessarily to realize their dreams, but definitely toying with them. Today, fans claim their stories; are infuriated when shows, sequels, and spinoffs don’t deliver them; rage online when fictional characters act incoherent in their view; boycott and review bomb what they deem wrong. The result is a simulacrum of fantasies, always fulfilled, always frustrated — a poor media, which feels intuitively hollow, derivative, brainrot.

One might say that Fan Fic started with Star Trek and Star Wars (maybe even with Tolkien and his Middle Earth lore, pre-Peter Jackson), but Japan’s Manga environment and, especially, popular yuru-kyara, empty characters with no backstory except promoting a business — think Hello Kitty and her Sanrio friends— were seminal.  These cutified characters were purposely made to be collected and projected on. From fan fic about media characters to fan fic about real people was but a small step; that is, the self-interested fictionalization of pop idols and celebrities or the idea that our heroes belong to us. After all, once someone becomes media, their self is no longer fully their own. They become a cultural object: libidinal, erotic, pornographic.

This is exactly where Satoshi Kon places Perfect Blue’s Mima, a pop idol wishing to shift careers from music to acting. But will her fans let her? Soon, Mima finds herself loosing her grip on reality, tormented by expectations that aren’t her own, selling herself — and her body — low, both horrified and fascinated by her stalkers’ criminal love bombing, pulled into the then novel online world and reading herself as if in a novel, pushed by her agents to act as an erotic fantasy, literally translated into a rape scene before the cameras to both wicked pleasure and alluring disgust. All around her people are killed gruesomely. Mima, the singer, the actress, the fantasy, both object and subject — who is she? A woman sexualized, neurotically portrayed, repressed and prone to homicidal acts, willful but even then subservient.

Perfect Blue (1997) is Kon’s first feature film, and in it we find the traits that would define his own career. An assistant and sometimes co-scriptwriter to legendary directors Katsuhiro Otomo and Mamoru Oshii, Kon was no stranger to the psychological confusion between reality and fantasy. A confusion dear to a time when the world went global, everyone a capitalist subject, and every corner of reality mediated. For better and worse, Perfect Blue is stereotypical mid-90s. Akin to David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997) and the latter Mulholland Drive (2001) or Wim Wenders’ The End of Violence (1997), it is self-consciously indulgent in its innuendos and plot twists, the protagonist’s psychotic dissolution, media and its devices (television screens, video cameras, the World Wide Web) merging into a deadly fantasy. There is something almost nostalgic about it, now that, today, the psychosis has been normalized, everyone of us vividly, depressingly cast in a viral, sordid, emotionally involved capitalist drama watched panoptically on a handheld screen. The self-conscious vertigo of a Perfect Blue awakes in us, audience and cast combined, the deceptive fiction that we all are.

And so it is as well with Perfect Blue’s gender troubles, or, in general, body troubles. Dysmorphia and an idealized feminine shape, the ugliness of voyerism translated into abnormal physical traits, and the politics of normality itself are all toyed with callously and in ways that will surely rub many today the wrong way — but which nonetheless disturb our morality, itself capitalized and viralized for private gain. Mima is chased by herself, or an idealized image of herself, dressed and ready for the stage, joyfully, greedily self-assured of she is, manically, in panic, reminding whoever Mima is and wants to be that she is not her own. After all, you can never catch your own shadow.