Red for the Unpresentable; Postmodern Cinematic Sublime in Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue.
The sublime is often revealed to be a double-edged sword which pushes one to endure the overwhelming, to eventually gain perspective and insight into their inner self. In his book Pixar and the Aesthetic Imagination: Animation, Storytelling, and Digital Culture, Eric Herhuth suggests that: “A feature film can be a sublime spectacle that elicits terror or awe in audiences, but it can also represent some sublime experience in tame form.” The concept of cinematic sublime can contribute to ingenious storytelling through color-emotion synesthesia, unusual focus, frame cuts and scene transitions, as well as relatability and psychological confusion; this essay is an attempt at analyzing these concepts throughout the Japanese animated psychological thriller film directed by Satoshi Kon: Perfect Blue.
The film Perfect Blue, creates postmodern sublime through the Pavlovian manipulation of colour theory to achieve synesthesia-aka condition the viewer to associate certain colors to specific emotions-which contributes greatly to the paradoxical feeling of admiration and horror the film elicits. The title of the film emphasizes the colour blue, which symbolizes lucidity and clarity for the main character in the movie, Mima, however, the visually dominant colour throughout the movie is indubitably red. Throughout the course of the film, Satoshi Kon gradually introduces red as elements of the background: red railings, a smudge of blood across someone’s face, a random bystander’s jacket or umbrella. However, even though the colour is not yet directly associated with any specific events in the story, it immediately stands out due to its contrasting saturation in comparison with the movie’s colour palette. Research shows that color-emotion synesthesia is primarily caused, not by “the actual hue, or light wavelength involved, but [by] the degree of saturation and brightness.”
Kon relies heavily on both the innate and unconditioned factors, as well as learned experience, to introduce sublime into his work. The human brain is known to react negatively to the sight of bone and blood outside of one’s body, as it elicits a sense of danger; usually when bone and blood make their way outside the human body, something is wrong. In its first few minutes, the film establishes a specific shade of red as the color of blood, and therefore associates that specific tone with danger in the viewer’s mind. From then onwards, Kon crafts a careful continuation of the apparition of that shade of red right before major traumatic events occur in the story; not before long, the viewer becomes conditioned to this color-emotion synesthesia. This distinction between the chosen red and the movie’s lower saturated-almost pastel-color palette, draws the eye of the viewer to small details in the frame, sometimes taking away focus from the main action, while the established color-emotion link allows the film to toy with the viewer’s emotions, as sometimes the color appears in frame when nothing bad happens. This creates a sense of confusion and plants the seed of doubt into one’s mind; now the viewer is no longer sure of what they feel and why, their intuition is off, and they are no longer on top of the narrative. This effect is deliberate, since “postmodern sublime […] emphasizes the disruption caused by sensation and unknowability.”
Perfect Blue is known for its overwhelmingly bright frames of almost all-red. Because the film deals with mental illness and loss of self-identity seen from Mima’s perspective, the viewer has no insight into what is real. In order to make sense of the story, the audience is forced to pay attention to changes in environment, and as Mima approaches yet another critical moment in her story, random objects in her surroundings turn red. This choice of color-blocking sacrifices the aesthetic appeal of the background for powerful effect, supporting Jean-François Lyotard’s premise that “the arts, inspired by the aesthetics of the sublime and looking for powerful effects, can and must neglect imitation of beautiful models and should devote themselves to combinations which are astonishing, unusual, and shocking.”
Satoshi Kon is notoriously known for making psychologically confusing films without a fixed plot or ending. His films carry a sense of doom from start to finish, and yet they invite the viewer in with their mesmerizing portrayals of seemingly normal places and people. Among the techniques used to achieve this are his notorious frame cuts and transitions from scene to scene. Often, when transported from one scene to another, we are faced with a close up of Mima’s face, in front of a bright red background. The screen turns into a big block of saturated red, achieving a similar effect to Barnett Newman’s painting “Vir Heroicus Sublimis”, which aims to depict the inexpressible and overlooked elements of human perception, waking in its viewer a feeling of smallness and horror yet, all the while, maintaining its artistic appeal, thus allowing them to experience sublime within a single frame.
This makes it hard to situate the scene in space and time, and as Mima loses control of her real self, the viewer finds themselves lost within the unreliable point of view they are witnessing the story from. As we watch the film, we start to realize that our feelings and emotions match Mima’s more and more; her growing paranoia is simulated by the prominence of ‘blood red’ in her environment, her confusion and frustration are mimicked by the abrupt scene transitions and uncomfortably zoomed-in frames, and her loss of identity is emphasized by the incessant repetition of the phrase “あなた 和 誰 なの？(who are you?)”.
Edmund Burke suggests that words carry emotional associations and can be rather effective at diluting the abstraction of the sublime to express the unimaginable. This seemingly inoffensive piece of dialogue, that Mima says as part of an acting line for a role, plays over a sequence of confusing-red-frames of Mima slowly sinking into madness. The tone, hesitant at first, grows desperate as the story unfolds, and the informal choice of wording is an-oh so subtle-hint at the fact that the antagonist in the story is a lot closer to Mima than she realizes. This part of the narrative strongly aligns with the Hegelian understanding of sublime, in which “the subject experiences her environment as unknowable beyond a series of representations and materials, and the subject finds herself likewise unknowable.” Mima, overall, seems to have very little knowledge and awareness of what goes on around her. She is unaware of the kind of scenes she will have to play as a beginner actress until confronted by her managers about them, she feels as though she is being watched yet has very few clues as to whom is watching her and why, she is so caught up in her loss of identity that she overlooks the manipulation she endures from her manager, Rumi, and genuinely comes to believe that she commits the murders of the people who have contributed to her sexualization in the media. When Rumi moves her to “Mima’s room”, a staged replica of her own apartment, Mima fails to notice until it is too late. By the end of the film, Mima no longer has any perception of physical space and no perception or definition of self; she becomes unknowable to herself and, by extension, to the viewer.
Kon counts on the element of psychological confusion, he makes his films in a way that immerses the viewer into the mental state of the character they are watching. Some, if not most, scenes in Perfect Blue are difficult to watch, emotionally overwhelming and often trigger sensory overload. There is no embellishment, but rather crude and uncensored images of traumatizing and disturbing moments, which can trigger almost guttural feelings of discomfort and horror. However, the film cannot be categorized as Horror, as it focuses on aesthetic elements and psychological triggers rather than gore or corporeal monstrosity, which distinguishes the sublime from the uncanny.
Nevertheless, Perfect Blue does not shy away from the topic of technological modernization. In fact, the plot warps around one of the biggest spaces represented in the film yet never explicitly shown due to its peculiar unpresentability: cyberspace. The internet presents a very real danger to Mima in the film, tangible, physical harm, but also emotional distress and anxiety. Before the computer is even introduced into Mima’s life, we see hints that explicitly link cyberspace to stalking when someone hands her fan mail and screams “I am always watching Mima’s Room!” in a crowd of people, referring to the online blog named after her. The fact that neither Mima nor the viewer are aware of the existence of the blog at the time, immediately associates the letter to stalking, and this crucial element of foreshadowing haunts us until the end of the story.
Speaking of a more tangible form of this type of sublime, Kant’s theory of the mathematical sublime attributes the experience of said concept to the visual overload created by the sight of something intimidatingly big in size; we witness instances of mathematical sublime in the few frames that capture the building that Mima lives in, or the empty streets she runs as she tries to escape from her unhinged supposed alter ego. Because such sightings of immense spaces are so rare in the movie, the effect of sublime seems to grow tenfold. This only confirms that the way the movie is drawn is deliberate and carefully crafted to amplify feelings of confusion and fear while still maintaining impeccable art style and smooth animation; Satoshi Kon masters sublime with apparent ease.
Another important factor to the making of Perfect Blue into a sublime experience is the fact that it is animated. Animator and screen director Katsuhiro Otomo, notes that the film would not have been as interesting or expressive, had it been made into a live action movie instead. Eric Herhuth writes: “The postmodern sublime, […] represented by Lyotard and Žižek, has its corollary in character animation that dramatizes the uncontainability and unknowability of personalities and animated bodies.” The control and artistic freedom that comes with drawing every single frame by hand allow for better depiction of the abstraction of the reality within Kon’s idiosyncratic films; such control over the saturation of the color red as well as other subtleties of perception would not have been achievable in live-action film. Therefore, the effect of sublime that dominates Perfect Blue relies heavily on animation.
Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue is a film built on the effect of cinematic sublime, as it is undoubtedly the main vehicle responsible of delivering key elements of the plot to the viewer. Without the carefully assembled puzzle of colour-emotion synesthesia, frame cuts, scene transitions and psychological confusion, this film would lose a crucial element of its story. Sublime makes Mima’s character easy to empathise with and transforms the viewer’s experience into a roller coaster of emotions.
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