Satoshi Kon, "Millennium Actress," and "Perfect Blue"

"Time fits together in a peculiar way: fortune and misfortune, pleasure and pain, all are exiled to the past to form a landscape in monochrome. It is a mystery—and a blessing."
-Hikaru Okuizumi, "The Stones Cry Out"

This quote from Okuizumi's great 1993 novel is about the nature of memory, but I have always found it also speaks to the way cinema functions -- the confinement of everything put in front of a film camera to the two-dimensional plane of celluloid, then projected onto a two-dimensional screen. Both cinema and memory are flat and intangible, and we occupy a world separated from them by space and time. The late Japanese director Satoshi Kon's film "Millennium Actress" is, at its core, about the way cinema and memory interact, particularly how they melt into one another to form a new narrative distinct from the separate pieces.

The films of Satoshi Kon are chaotic portraits of post-modernity, washing away the grand narratives of Japanese popular culture in a chaotic torrent of fan authorship and a constantly shifting line between fantasy and reality. This post, particularly my reading of "Millennium Actress," is indebted to two sources: Melek Ortabasi's "National History as Otaku Fantasy: Satoshi Kon's Millennium Actress" from "Japanese Visual Culture" and Hiroki Azumi's recently translated theoretical text "Otaku: Japan's Database Animals." Both texts engage with the postmodern in Japan, particularly the desire in pop culture fans for authorial control that is created by the widespread availability of media (films, TV, music) in digital form.

In "Millennium Actress," two characters are given agency over the progress of the narrative: actress Chiyoko and documentarian/fan Genya. Genya lives out the otaku fantasy by re-authoring Chiyoko's history as she tells it, inserting himself into the narrative and, essentially, creating fan fiction. Chiyoko's filmography itself represents a form of postmodern database, to appropriate Hiroki Azuma, an amalgam of famous Japanese films/genres/images. Genya, a master of this database, finds it easy to insert himself -- always in the role of selfless retainer. With Chiyoko, as she tells her life story (which is also a shorthand history of modern Japan) it becomes inextricably bonded with her films. Her memory is cinema, and her agency as storyteller is ultimately stripped by the scripts of the movies she tells (as well as by Genya's narrative meddling). Chiyoko's life story is reduced to her parts and in her Kon creates a new master narrative for the Japanese female protagonist: the eternal pursuer, tragically chasing after a lost and shadowy male hero (a comment on the elusiveness of masculinity in the postwar era?). Chiyoko has no other modus operandi and no other desire. I'm not sure if she is "an empty vessel" to quote Michael Arnold in Ortabasi's article, but she is certainly not three-dimensional (277). We must return to a telling quote from an interview with Kon conducted by Tom Mes of "Midnight Eye", also quoted in Ortabasi, "I don't know [women] the way I know a male, [so] I can project my obsession on to the characters and expand the aspects I want to describe" (277 -- my edit in italics). Chiyoko's agency is partially defined by Kon's desire to rewrite Japanese film image as a coherent narrative through her fictional life story. The unity of Chiyoko's narrative is created from fragmented pieces of actual film history, a postmodern retelling that borrows images from Japanese films and from Kon's eiga-otaku memory bank.

Even Kon's editing and cinematography serve to fragment his narrative. The whirlwind of movement in the climactic final chase of "Millennium Actress" seems to unify several different threads of the storyline (and threads of movement) with a relentless use of Kon's favorite editing technique: the cut-on-motion. In reality, this sequence stitches together the disparate scenes from Chiyoko's life/filmography into a fluid movement -- jarred loose periodically with cuts to motion counter to the flow of the scene -- into a narratively nonsensical mess. Kon's brilliant style foregrounds the motion over the meaning behind it, leaving the viewer in a morass of emotion brought on by Chiyoko's frantic and relatively unified sprint and by the concurrent complication of the plot that runs beneath it.

We see many of the same visual and narrative techniques in Kon's first feature as director, "Perfect Blue," which Ortabasi rightfully sees as a dark mirror to the lighthearted image of fan obsession in "Millennium Actress." Kon's debut is about a pop idol (Mima) who gives up her career to become a television actress. Her fans are outraged by her decision and she eventually finds herself stalked both by an obsessed male otaku and a murderous doppelganger.

"Perfect Blue" can also be read within the parameters of Azuma's theories of the postmodern otaku author. The dangerously obsessed fan who rewrites the life of his idol on the internet after she departs from the path that appeals to him influences the actions her doppelganger seems to take: murdering anyone associated with her departure from music and the associated fall from innocence. Mima loses her agency as a character and becomes an object of projected desire of her fans. When she tries regain agency and depart from that status (by leaving her life as an idol), her mind is almost destroyed.

While "Perfect Blue" draws equally on tropes from Japanese pop idol culture, horror TV serials and Hitchcock, its pastiche isn't foregrounded in the way that the chaotic amalgam in "Millennium Actress" is. "Perfect Blue" is still fundamentally about fragmentation, particularly as a blurring between the real world and the world on set. Both Mima and the viewer become unsure of the line -- as well as the status of Mima's sanity -- as she seems to be committing crimes and repeating the actions of her onscreen characters off the set. She is stuck in an out-of-body experience, her agency defined both by the expectations of her fans and by the characters she plays on TV -- always corrupted innocents. Kon is contrasting the saccharine, purified image of the pop idol with the softcore, often misogynistic nature of '90s Japanese cop dramas -- but more deeply he is highlighting the ancient dichotomy between innocence/corruption (and virginity/sexual experience) that confines women on the silver screen to a prison of two-dimensionality. Mima's fan is so jarred by her descent into defilement (one that, it should be remembered, involves her changing from fictional persona to another) that he is willing to murder her and install her uncorrupted doppelganger in her place. Mima is so tied to the personae that she adopts as an entertainer that her mind becomes unhinged, a imbalanced site reflecting fragmented/opposing nature of her roles.

Kon is also saying something using the time-honored tradition of the confused dynamic between horror heroine and her murderous stalker, which in this case is split into the doppelganger Mima and the psychotic male fan. I don't know enough about horror film conventions to write intelligently on this topic, but it is absolutely one that warrants further investigation. I also think the role of Mima's body (which is sexualized in a way that Chiyoko's isn't) is another point that deserves more discussion.

Sources:
Azuma, Hiroki. Otaku: Japan's Database Animals. Trans. Jonathan E. Abel and Shion Kono. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009.

Ortabasi, Melek. "National History as Otaku Fantasy: Satoshi Kon's Millennium Actress." Japanese Visual Culture. Ed. Mark W. MacWilliams. New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2008. 275-294.

Both quotations from within Ortabasi's article come from articles at Midnight Eye, an absolutely invaluable journalistic source on contemporary Japanese film.
Michael Arnold's review
Tom Mes' interview

Aside: this post was written while listening to Secret by Megurine Luka -- a song/video created on Nico Nico, the Japanese music site that is a source of numerous amateur musical uploads and has strong ties to Japan's otaku scene. Studies on Nico Nico and other fan forums are, I believe, the next step for contemporary Japanese fan studies.