Hi everyone! So today I am going to talk about a movie that I really enjoy and how it was pretty scary and intense to me and how it still resonates even more today .
This is a very iconic scene in the movie where our main character Mima has a final showdown with her pop star avatar
** So at least some of you of course have Facebook, Twitter, instagram and the like . Of course all of you reading this should have Steemit (lol), but what we don't realize is with these accounts that we have we have what is generally called an "avatar", pretty much our online personality**
** We spend hours and days working on our avatars, showing everyone the side of us that we want them to see, and know. Now although the reality of stalking and reputations and all being dragged through the mud used to be only a big worry for celebrities like our main character Mima... But , with everyone basically having some sort of social media we all pretty much have a "fan base", especially on Steem all of us really rely on having a fan base in a way to become more popular and accumulate more Steem. So these worries become more close to the heart.**
*For all of my anime fans here the original Perfect blue is a film by Satoshi Kon(R.I.P.), loosely based on a manga called Perfect Blue: Complete Metamorphosis, he has made some other really great films and tv series, you should check them out!
One of the first scenes where we realize Mima is starting to lose touch with reality.
So our story circles around Mima, She is a pop-star that is trying to become an actress, because ,frankly, she was making shit money.(as we saw in the movie her apartment was small as hell) the film starts out with the Idols CHAM having a small goodbye concert for Mima where she officially states she is going to quit her pop star career to begin a career in acting. It is obvious the fans are not happy about this at all.. This is also where we meet a very important character in the story , he plays a very big role in the ending..
very friendly stalker type who has an excessive obsession with our friend Mima, He's the ugly one in the very middle
There is a very unsettling scene in this part where this guy is almost literally holding her in his hand , It has a lot of foreshadowing as to how he will be a part of Mimas life..
Creepy...
After her concert she arrives at home to be welcomed by phone call from her mother , she then receives a phone call that is completely silent, and while she is running her bath she gets a fax that literally says "TRAITOR" all over the page.
Shortly thereafter she gets a computer to check on an online diary someone made "pretending" to be her.. or not? (well get to that in a second..)
As these things are happening acting is going well for Mima until her producer asks her to be in a rape scene, she hesitantly agrees to it though to make her manager happy.
The rape scene is quite disturbing to me, because somehow, the fact that it is for a drama and supposed to be fake makes it worse. They get a ways into the scene and Mima is pinned down and screaming in character. Then they yell cut and she just stops and opens her eyes, breaking character. Then she has to lie there while they move the cameras. The repeated breaks make it seem like it just goes on forever. And with how the line between drama and reality gets blurred later on, this scene becomes even more distressing in retrospect, especially when it almost happens for real.
Mima in character for the rape scene screaming and fighting as if it were real gave me a very unsettled feeling
what for some reason is even more unsettling is when it jumps to her out of character with a straight blank face. the other actor even whispers to her that he is sorry and she just nonchalantly answers "it's fine"
Then after that emotionally hard day she comes home to find all her fish are dead, so she goes on a rampage in her room!!... but wait ! that wasn't real... only like 2 fish died the rest are okay .... then what the hell was the scene where they were all floating? things are getting more and more discombobulated as the film is progressing , don't you think?
Another important note is that for the movie being called perfect blue, there's not too many cool hues in the film at all... its ironic but there's sort of a reason for that.. See, in the beginning of the movie its a comforting warm color, but as Mimas mind goes more and more to shambles, the colors become more and more harsh and bright. going back to the rape scene its the first time we are seeing her in a sexual way you will notice the way the lighting is harsh and we are only seeing her through another person's or camera's perspective... almost as if we see her now in a new light.
She starts to see her stalker everywhere while she's acting, going home, going to the store, etc. but is she really seeing him or just hallucinating??
We should also touch base on how Mima was highly sexualized in the public eye, her fan diary was saying that they made her do it and then eventually made it to say that the actress Mima was an imposter which made Mima Decline more and more into madness, when she opens the diary later in the movie she even says "so what did I do today?" also that how she is posing and being seductive for the camera in the nude and the contrast of her in her daily life is completely different it shows that there is a real person behind the ex-popstar turned actress that nobody but the audience gets to see
there are also many dream like things that happen though we can't be sure if they are real or not...Mima's slow descent into madness is done so well that the audience has great difficulty in figuring out what's going on. Towards the end of the film, the amount of jump cuts go up and Mima starts losing time - an unfortunate real life symptom of DID - and the repeats of her waking up in her apartment makes it feel like either days or weeks could have passed.
Mima: It's been a while, Rumi.
Rumi: What are you talking about, Mima? I was just here yesterday.
Mima becomes so out of touch she has no idea what is real and what is not, a perfect scene to describe this is when she and Rumi are sitting in her room for tea and Mima holds a tea cup in her hands and squeezes so hard that she breaks it. While Rumi reacts with horror Mima simply looks at the blood with a blank look and says "This blood... Rumi is it real?"
While all this is happening people from her job are ending up murdered brutally one of them the audience is led to believe she did it, though we can't be too sure if she did, because at that time she was so out of touch it could've been a dream. though the scene of her supposedly killing the man who took her naked photos was important enough to put on the cover of the film.
this image really shows the duality of her sweet , innocent pop-star personality and the raw real person that is susceptible to mental break
Pretty intense stuff, huh? and they say anime is for kids ! HA !
The end of the movie is where is sort of comes together but it sort of doesn't ... See at the end of the filming of Double Blind(the TV drama Mima stars in) Her manager puts her friend Rumi in charge of getting her home. rumi tells her to run and go get changed while she starts the car, here's where things start to get really crazy.. As she is walking towards her dressing room the corridor Mima walks down where she accidentally bumps into Eri, who sees her off with some rather ominous words. As Mima is about to continue walking, she spots a familiar person slowly approaching her from down the corridor...who appears to be Her stalker. Mima then quickly looks for Eri from the other end of the corridor, only to see that she has vanished. She then turns around...and immediately comes face to face with her stalker who quickly grabs her head, and takes her into the rape scene room , where he then attempts to really rape her and then kill her because the "real" Mima told him that she was an imposter.. She then bashes the side of his head one good time with a hammer and manages to get away, but the danger is not over yet... Rumi finds Mima in shambles, and they take her to get changed and to the room where her stalker was to find him gone. On the drive home Rumi says she is going to take Mima to "Mima's Room" which is oddly the name of The fake internet diary about Mima.... In this scene Mima closes her eyes in the car seemingly for a second and winds up in what looks like her room... But something's NOT right.. She calls for Rumi and she says she's there seemingly poking around in the kitchen or something. About five seconds later Mima realizes she has a couple more fish than she had before and then Her alter ego comes out the one that has been chasing her all this time, but something isn't right... every time the alter ego is in the mirror it looks alot like rumi in a tight little suit (ew) So in a major plot twist Rumi is the actual villain who made the diary and told The Stalker to kill Mima.. and now its Rumi's turn to take a swing at it... with an ice pick and later and umbrella...
Rumi at one point chases Mima down a street in front of a series of storefront windows. In the foreground chasing Mima is Rumi in the idealized form of Mima's pop-star alter ego, laughing and skipping down the street without a care in the world. In the background, every time Rumi passes in front of a window, you see her real form reflected: a middle-aged woman clutching an ice-pick/umbrella, gasping and snarling while in a dead sprint.
The worst part is that this appears to be a folie à deux or shared hallucination; Rumi thinks she's Super-Innocent-Magical-Avenging-Angel Mima, and Mima also thinks Rumi is Super-Innocent-Magical-Avenging-Angel Mima. For once, the viewer is shown the truth, while the characters can't see it — and you of course can't do a thing about it.
So in the end the reason Mima got so out of control was because of the way her reputation changed and others views around her changed.. We see stories on the news about it , people stalking and obsessing over this idea of another person that really isn't them , and it never turns out well. We saw it with Selena, and Bjork, Some may have not been because of technology but the idea is the same ... and it happens to people like us but it doesn"t make big news like celebrity stalking stories do.
I hope yall enjoyed this little post I made , please upvote and resteem if you liked it , happy steeming yall !