Perfect Blue: The Madness of the Split Self

Personas are a concept that the average person now can create thanks to social media. No longer just being used for exclusively famous people, it has allowed each individual the chance, or risk, to craft their own person; an avatar that looks like you, speaks like you, likes what you do, but isn’t you at all.

It’s fake. Carefully crafted by the person behind the screen to create a personality and voice that fits an ideal. An ideal no true person can achieve without some sort of disassociation from reality.

Despite it being over 20 years since its release, the Satoshi Kon animated movie Perfect Blue remains extremely relevant, by flawlessly showing the mind numbing (and deadly) effects of the perfect personal avatar. It holds audiences by the throat to ask them: How far are you willing to go to create and pursue this separate identity of the self? And what happens when you lose control over the avatar and it starts shaping who you are?

The opening moments of the 1997 film perfectly shows this contrast between the public personality and the private individual. Mima, a Japanese girl group idol and the movies’ protagonist, is seen performing in front of an adoring crowd, cheering her name on energetically. The scene cuts and connects to moments of her mundane life, buying groceries, the quiet routines of everyday activities. Stark differences of the colourful and bright entertainment character she plays with her normal life as just Mima, lay the foundations for where the movie moves forward in its key themes of perception and real life.

But the reality, of course, is that she is just a normal girl, who has a job as a performer where she has to act bubbly and oh-so-cute. The façade created by her record label is to attract more fans, an exterior for public consumption that is initially entirely separate from the true Mima.

In the storys’ plot, we find that Mima is transitioning from her previously successful career into an actor, and works the necessary, albeit difficult roles to achieve fame. With the growing tensions to find further success elsewhere, her fans are left to wonder why she decided to just quit and start a new job, tainting the carefully crafted image she created as an idol.

Made to work acting roles that depict her getting assaulted, and photoshoots where she strips, Mima becomes distressed over her life and career choices, all while spiraling down the hole of self-identity. She becomes lost and confused about where her acting life begins and when her life as just Mima ends. Visually these narrative lines begin to blur, with scenes we think are from her real-life turning out to be from the TV show she is on.

In a quiet moment alone in her living room, drinking a steaming cup of tea, Mima asks herself “Am I alive? Maybe this is all a dream.” She questions the reality she is living, losing a grasp on who she really is and what experiences she has actually had.

True damage occurs when we lose track of where a person starts and when an avatar ends. In the film, this applies to not only Mima, but her stalker Me-Mania. While she is destroying the youthful public persona from before and building a new version of herself, one that is more adult and explicit, Me-Mania becomes obsessed with trying to get Mima to fit into her old avatar, someone who fit his ideal vision of her in his mind. And he becomes violent when he doesn’t get his way, killing those around her and eventually attacking her too. It shows us how

these personas that are created and people buy into, are bigger than the actual individual itself, and become detached from the human being the face belongs to.

People perceiving us in ways we don’t choose or can’t control and that perception becoming reality is a part of life in our modern world as anything else. As said, who do we let influence our actions? Ourselves, or the ideas implanted about our own being by other people?

Like Mima, the persona she had created for herself brought her to agree to jobs and roles she wouldn’t necessarily do, but was dictated by the need to break from her previous identity. In turn the life she wanted to leave behind began haunting her (to even the point of a physical manifestation of her avatar).

In reality, everyone is a spectator and everyone is a performer. But when we chose to dictate the actions in our lives based on the perceptions of people around us, we steal the true fundamentals of what makes a person, them.

With Perfect Blue, we see someone take away and get taken their identity, left in a limbo state between reality and fiction. With us, in our own lives, how far deep are we willing to go to will our personas into existence, and how lost can we get before our grasp on what is real lifts?