The Fifteenth Night of Halloween 2022

ON THE FIFTEENTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Perfect Blue (1997) by Satoshi Kon. This is a psychological horror anime feature that unfolds like a labyrinth of distorted mirrors. 

Mima makes a career change from singing in a top 40 band to acting full time on a police procedural show called Double Bind. The show is about the pursuit of a serial killer who is obsessed with a pop star and murders people close to her as a result. Meanwhile, in Mima’s actual life, an obsessed fan of her singing stalks her and winds up killing her colleagues, who in the stalker’s mind have ruined her image. It soon becomes difficult for both Mima and the viewer to distinguish between scenes on the show and events in real life. To make matters worse, a double of Mima dressed in her former stage get-up starts appearing to her in visions and dreams. It seems that this doppelgänger is in league with the stalker in that she believes Mima’s reputation has been tarnished by her sexualized role on Double Bind. She wants to get rid of the new Mima and replace her in her former role as an undefiled idol. 

At one point, we are led to believe that Mima is being interrogated by an actual police psychologist, not a character on the show, such that her life as a singer and then an actress has all been invented to deal with the trauma of being raped in a night club—an event we had understood to be part of the show. In this version of events, Mima herself is the serial killer, and she’s been stabbing people who contradict her delusion. Then, the camera pulls back to reveal that this is taking place on a TV set—which could in turn only be another layer of Mima’s coping mechanism. 

Perfect Blue is an effectively dizzying mind-screw. Except for a few whirling dream-sequence transitions, however, it doesn’t really take advantage of Kon’s massive talent as an animator, as displayed in his later masterpiece Paprika. There’s no reason this couldn’t have been a live action movie, and it might have worked better as such.

“I’m scared that my other self will do something I don’t know about,” Mima declares, both as herself and as her TV character, which gets us to our TWISTED TWINS & DUPLICITOUS DOPPELGÄNGERS theme. Perfect Blue strongly reminded me of David Lynch’s use of doppelgängers in Inland Empire (2006). Lynch is well-known for his insertion of doppelgängers as reality-disrupting ploys in such works as Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and Twin Peaks. But Inland Empire’s central drama revolves around a character becoming her own doppelgänger, as a famous actress crosses over into the reality of the part she is playing. In Perfect Blue, similarly, we watch Mima transform from the naïve and bubbly pop singer of the opening to a distressed and paranoid actress in an erotic crime thriller—only for her earlier self to return as a spectral double—all of which is itself doubled by the possibility that this is merely the fantasy of psychotic killer. So, again, the appearance of a doppelgänger causes us to contemplate the malleability of our inner selves and the ghosts of our old lives, who may wish vengeance against us for what we have become.