S2E28.75: Perfect Blue
Added 2023-07-27 00:48:49 +0000 UTCRounding out our trilogy of two-host episodes, Devon and Abi are here to discuss Satoshi Kon's Perfect Blue! A member of an Idol group leaves to pursue a more serious career, but it turns out it's not that easy. Next week I promise it'll be Rambo 4. Unless it isn't.
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Comments
Is there a reason you always watch the dubs when watching anime? Really sucks because the originals are always superior since the Japanese voice actors are in the same room and can act off each other
Oh No
2025-01-23 19:00:22 +0000 UTCIt was so good, back when. Saw it again at Cle CIA on a big screen a few years ago. Thanks, good pod :)
Christopher Green
2024-05-04 23:42:01 +0000 UTCBefore listening to this ep I knew I had watched this film but I didn't remember where or when, all I could remember about was feeling INCREDIBLY uncomfortable while watching it. After listening to this episode (and 3 years of hrt lol) I now realize in hindsight that my discomfort was 90% pre-trans awakening mega-dysphoria. Was great to hear you chat through it, I feel like i could probably enjoy it now. 5 stars.
A.E. Ross
2023-11-07 09:17:37 +0000 UTCif we can get fully anime stuff is there a chance maybe we get a KJB about Patlabor 2: The Movie?
Bashfash
2023-08-18 23:35:38 +0000 UTCThis movie reminded me of Last Night in Soho (another movie that has little to say about masculinity but that I would love to hear you guys discuss). Similar visuals & themes and also very surreal.
Luke
2023-08-09 12:59:35 +0000 UTCBlonde American Trans Woman getting called OUT in the donator shoutouts /j
Salsa Roja
2023-08-04 21:38:29 +0000 UTCPerfect Blue is becoming one of my favorite movies to analyze because it's such a rich text to me. But I fully didn't realize the pizza delivery murder scene was meant to be apart of double bind. I thought it was meant to be Rumi, in her pop-idol persona, killing the creepy photographer. Maybe i just didn't pay enough attention to what he looked like lol.
Orion666
2023-08-02 17:21:14 +0000 UTCOne thing this movie does really well is disorienting the audience by using the same image or text in different contexts to signify different things. The most obvious case is of course the bleed between Mima's real life and the tv character she's playing, but the movie is constantly cutting to things that seem to follow from the previous scene but are really unrelated. The first big one I noticed is that Mima's first line in the show that she rehearses over and over, "who are you?" becomes a motif as Mima struggles to nail down the identities of the various specters around her. Several times a scene will cut to an image that seems to follow from the events of a previous scene, but is then contextualized. For example, at one point someone is attacked and seriously injured and then the scene cuts to a tight shot on a flashing siren light. You expect it to be an ambulance or police car, but the shot pulls out to reveal that it's on a child's toy car in an unrelated context. One effect of this is that later in the film, when there is a cut between two incomparable narrative beats, the audience can't be sure whether this is a cut from a dream to reality, from reality to a dream, or from one moment to a later unrelated moment.
John Bradley
2023-07-29 19:11:24 +0000 UTCI strongly disagree with the assertion that we are meant to simply unambiguously believe all of this is explained by Rumi being the killer and Mima being a truly separate person. While there is certainly much reason to believe that interpretation, and it is perhaps the simplest to arrive at; the movie does a lot to cast doubt on it. For starters, what would her motive be? The pattern makes no sense. If Rumi really did set Mima up in all these positions, let horrible things happen to Mima, and then murder the perps after the fact, while also making da weirdo run a blog that pushes Mima to go back into being an idol, then her actions contradict themselves in ways that I would argue do not make sense. So many plot points can be interpreted multiple ways that a plethora of possible through lines exist. I watched with a couple friends and we all disagreed on who the killer was: Rumi, Mima, or da weirdo. My interpretation was that Mima (or you could call her Rumi? I believe they are one in the same.) killed all those people and constructed fake narratives in her mind to disassociate with it while living in a psych ward. The DID diagnosis isn’t “part of her show” that’s just her way of pulling herself out of reality and she does in fact have DID. She has imagined her doctors and nurses as her set costars. Look at the hallways she’s often walking in: they could easily be part of a psych ward! The reason da weirdo’s body isn’t found is because he is a hallucination just like idol Mima. The fish go from alive to dead to alive because she’s not the one in charge of taking care of them, as she lives in a ward. As for Rumi? That is just what Mima actually looks like. She has split her personality into the stalker and into what we think is Mima. If you were to take the average of those two characters, it would look quite like Rumi. My interpretation also better explains the blurring of hallucination Mima and Rumi in the wig: the same character who puts on the idol costume hallucinates herself as looking a different way. The taunting from the idol hallucination comes in moments where she is losing her ability to imagine herself as the idol. The separation of “actress Mima” and “idol Mima” is a defense mechanism for the doubts she feels about being the idol. Thats why all the weirdness literally starts the moment she appears to quit being an idol. Of course, I can’t and won’t claim my interpretation is unambiguously correct either. Satoshi Kon himself has stated his movies are deliberately written to lend themselves to multiple completely different metaphysical interpretations, and I’d argue that’s extremely well backed up by how they unfold. I think it is most fun to encourage everyone into sharing their different bonkers theories about his films. What makes watching his movies fun is you can so often grab onto a single moment, build your understanding of the film around it, and if you watch carefully there will often be oodles of stuff to support your theory. He has deliberately made them that way. I think we are biased by classical structure to think the late scenes have the “objective” explanation for things but in this movies it could just as easily be that the answer arrived much earlier and what you see afterward is the sleight of hand.
Violet
2023-07-29 03:33:43 +0000 UTCI didn’t get it into words until just now but the point about Da Weirdo and possessing Mima is spot on. Earlier at the first performance he’s watching from an off angle/posture but he’s positioned with his hand to where she’s essentially dancing in his palm as the framing. He’s obsessed to the point he watches and films the empty space when she’s not there anymore and imagines her back in
Rachel K
2023-07-28 14:55:06 +0000 UTCfully on Abbi's side about how the movie absolutely squandered its ideas by being like OH SHE JUST HAD A CRAAAAZY MAnAgER!!!! ZOMG!! had the exact same reaction like it was building up to something interesting and subverting then just.. did that. felt wasted and all there was to appreciate in it was that it was a visually excellent anime movie
oranjest1
2023-07-28 00:58:05 +0000 UTCThis sounds good, but it also sounds like the plot of the kind of videogame Natalie would stream.
Jason Young
2023-07-27 23:34:12 +0000 UTC
