Duality and the aesthetic self in Perfect Blue.

The first time I saw Akira in a video store, it was a half-thorn poster featuring the famous red bike. The detailed and colorful, yet retro aesthetic of the poster captivated me. I took the DVD home, and the depth of the narrative and the underlying philosophy of precision behind Katsuhiro Otomo's artistic choices shook me. Every new film, series, and book slowly deconstructed my prejudices. I went on what I like to think of as a journey through various art forms from the land of the rising sun. My travels took me to incredible and deeply philosophical artifacts like Nausicaä, Ghost in the Shell, Princess Mononoke, Cowboy Bebop and Paprika. In literature, names like Ito Junji and Soseki Natsume, to name but a few, began to fill my bookshelf.

Perfect Blue is a psychological thriller that follows Mima Kirigoe, a young J-pop idol turned wannabe actress. The film depicts a series of gruesome murders linked to Mima's stalker fans, whose violence ranges from a virtual consumerist obsession with the pop singer's persona to borderline brutal and sexual crimes. It also shows her descent into madness, as her story continues to oscillate between the dissociation of the idolized symbol of the singer and a more reified form of herself, deeply sexualized and abused by others. We are hostages to the perspective of the main character. We follow her footsteps down the rabbit hole as the line between Mima the individual and Mima the actress is blurred by a series of confusing and overlapping storylines.

But I am not here to praise Kon's craftsmanship in translating some intricacies of the ominous novel (by Takeuchi Yoshizaku) onto the screen. Very often we are caught thinking about our mechanical daily lives, left with a feeling of anesthesia—not from alienation, but from being too grounded in our routine. The 19th century German intellectual Georg Simmel called it the blasé character of modern life and the struggle of the self amidst vast human collectives in the newborn urban life of industrial Europe. Hence, my eagerness to explore how aesthetic choices in cinema can provide us with a powerful and meaningful social critique. Films can be a resource to communicate through different forms, some of them not through words but through visual stimulation. Emotions, or the possibility of aesthetic values hitting you in the right place and thus dismantling the veiled hegemonic ideology in real life, is a powerful weapon for self-enlightenment and liberation. It is the possibility of non-verbal, non-discursive self realisation of one's position in the fabric of reality that allows for therapeutic critical thinking.

Perfect Blue's representation of the double does not follow the lines of sameness in a different body, but of difference in the same body. In the film, the figure of the doppelgänger, so keenly interested in literary, psychological and anthropological theories, emerges as a consubstantiation of Mima's split existence within the entertainment industry. As the film progresses, we see frustrated attempts to leave behind the false, naive version of herself and pursue a career as an actress. Within the first few minutes it is made clear that the pop singer is a carefully curated persona that only lives as the belief of others in this image, or rather the idea of Mima is maintained and nurtured as a sign of a certain group identification through the consumption of Mima's personality. Mima is the fetishistic object of her fandom, the totem of their identification—and this creates a problem.

Mima, the individual, emerges as symbolically null. The whole of her identity is filled only by aesthetic values. She is bereft of moral meaning and orientation. But the difficulty lies not only in the aesthetic value of her identity, but in the reification of these elements for consumption. Thus, in order to be associated with Mima, one must first consume her. The question for this girl—now facing new challenges in her career—is that she is deprived of any non-commodified visual and moral references of who she is, everything comes to her externally and visually. Kan masterfully presents this dilemma when Mina confronts her agent, crushed by her client's new directions and life choices. The agent, consumed by the ideal and beautiful merchandised persona, wants to change this. She manipulates Mima's virtual avatar to secure the precious commodified version of the pop idol, not because of the money, but because of her identification with that persona—the agent knows her place in the world by how she connects to Mima's music and visuals. I would venture to say, beyond the connoisseurs of Kon's work, that he is concerned not only with the intertwining of identity and technology, but also with how much mixing takes place in our souls through our human aesthetic needs.

Satoshi Kon's impact on modern cinema is often underestimated. His work has influenced the likes of Christopher Nolan, Darren Aronofsky and the Wachowskis. These are artists who push narrative through strong visual appeals. Duality has always appeared in Kon's work through the opposition of the protagonists' selves. To be in the contemporary world is to face interaction mediated by “things” with inherent aesthetic values and content. Aesthetics guides our desires, manipulates our physiological reactions to others (and also to things, always at the same level), and provides a reactive materiality to objects and ideas perceived by our senses.

The necessity of an aesthetic dimension perceived by society, like Mima's vulnerability as an object of desire, implies the dual dimension of the self. Mima wants to be an artist. She used to dream of being a successful singer, and when she finally achieved this, her focus shifted to another medium: television. A curated, aesthetically oriented version of Mima is a consumer good, both for the actress and her audience. Mima deals with depression, disorientation, illusions of a ghostly doppelgänger of her former self that condemns her attempts at acting, always seeking new shapes, colors, and themes to compose her aesthetic self. In a sense, our main character wants and repels the attacks of her double. This is important because art allows us to reconcile radical oppositions and extend our existence by externalizing objects of our own making. As the world plunges further into a more networked reality, where secrets and privacy become luxuries, the aesthetic takes on a whole new dimension, reshaping and recomposing our self-identification.