Building the Real in Satoshi Kon's 'Perfect Blue'

While [Perfect Blue], [Satoshi Kon](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0464804/)'s feature debut, is his weakest film, it is also a brilliant first foray into the mind of one of the most exciting architects of lucid dreams. When I sat down with him after Lincoln Center's recent screening of Perfect Blue (the interview will be available soon), he suggested that his films are carefully constructed mental gray zones. They are waking nightmares where the dreamers are forced to question the little control they have over their lives.

In Perfect Blue, former pop idol-turned-actress Mima Kirigoe (Junko Iwao) is so unbalanced that she's not sure what she's dreaming and what she's not. She's confronted with an all-too real, maliciously coquettish doppelganger that may or may not be just be a fantasy of hers run amok. She can't make her dream-self disappear and, as it taunts, she may not even be able to make others see herself as real.

By that token, there is no objective truth in Kon's films without seeing things multiple times, as an exercise in remembering and building the real. Both Mima and the viewer re-watch the same images over and over again—a grinning [Todd Browning]-like stalker, a sprightly double and a periodic explosion of violence-in order to get a grip on which of the many dreams we are presented is reality.

Up until the end, there is no objective answers, but rather only the periodic reappearance and reordering of those motifs. This shifting jumble of answers requires an active spectator, one that is not only complicit in Mima's mental and emotional disintegration but actively participates in the reconstruction of her reality. The viewer must make snap judgments based on emotions to determine if what they're seeing is real, a fantasy or both. To keep up with the film, the viewer must be on their toes, which made me think of an experiment.

I will conduct this minor experiment today, Sunday June 29, when the Film Society at Lincoln Center screens all six hours of [Paranoia Agent], Kon's 13-episode long TV Show. I plan on actively taking notes as I watch, in order to chart my own mental disintegration, active questions and other miscellaneous thoughts. I encourage you to come with me today (click [here](https://tickets.filmlinc.com/php/calendar.php?month=6&day=29&year=2008&sid=&cmode=0&org=) to buy tickets for Part 1 at 1pm and/or for Part 2 at 4:15pm, which will be followed by a Q&A with Mr. Kon himself) and make up your own minds. But if you can't, see what you can tease out from my notes. Undoubtedly very little, but then again, I never told you explicitly that I wasn't an unreliable narrator.