Tsao- Perfect Blue

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Perfect Blue was a film that many could agree with me- was a crazy, mind f*cking film. The film had touched upon many subjects, such as the male gaze in anime mangas and dramas, what reality really is, and the roles gender play in films.

Mima is the main character in the film, and it is very apparent when she starts to have fragments in her memory and her sense of identity.  As a former pop idol, she had a small yet large enough fan base in which she felt great attention from. Then she became an actress, because her manager and her producer decided that Cham would be better as a duo and without Mima, and that she would be better off as an actress.

Mima then started to star in a film within the film Perfect Blue, called Double Bind. In this film, one of her first big scenes was a rape scene. This rape scene brought back memories similar to those she got from being on stage as Mima the pop idol. Falling that scene, I noticed that Mima started to have some trouble distinguishing between real life and her illusions. Pop idol Mima starts to appear more and more, and taunting actress-Mima every time she appears.

I think an important message that should be mentioned is the impact of the computer and the Internet on people as technology flourished throughout time. When Mima first bought her computer, she had no idea how or what to even do with it not to mention not knowing anything about how websites work at all. An important point is that there are no limitations to how far the Internet can push someone’s sense of reality. Since anyone can have access to the Internet, someone else’s reality may very easily become pushed upon our own. When Mimania, Mima’s fangirl account that speaks as Mima, starts to post blogs and daily updates, Mima starts to get lost and confused between what really happened and what didn’t. The more she is playing this role as a psychotic girl in Double Bind, the more she cannot differentiate between what happens in her reality and what happens in the movie.

The most surprising factor, I believe, to most people is that Rumi is actually crazy as well. We all are lead to believe that Mima is the one who is delusional and has a loss of identity, and while she is, what really pushes the movie to the next level is that Rumi is also delusional and has lost her sense of identity. Rumi takes the identity of pop-idol Mima, and while she, herself, was part of what changed Mima into the new, sell-out actress-Mima, she wants to kill her because she does not like what the new Mima has become. I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t that big of a surprise for people. But as for me, I still have some questions about what exactly happened throughout the movie, who is truly crazy and who is not, since at the end, Mima portrays herself as someone who knew who she was the whole time. But overall, I enjoyed the level of thinking this film required from the audience.