Perfect Blue, ‘Passing’ and a Redefinition of ‘gaze’ 

“Medicalized, Under The Knife. Expected to be Grateful. Trapped in the lens of the cis-gaze. Just another Sad Transexual” – (GLOSS, Masculine Artifice).

Within the first 20 minutes of watching Kon Satoshi’s Perfect Blue, I was left with one thought “No one ever told me this movie was about transexuality.” The themes of medicalization, transition, and the capitalistic effects of the cis-gaze were imminently clear from the formalistic use of match cutting described in “Every Frame a Painting’s” video on Kon to the allusion to Silence of the Lambs in Double Bind. I violently scoured the internet for any hint towards these thematic connections: Rumi acting as a cis-gender woman benevolent, implicated even in male violence towards our main protagonist, mi-mania acting as the stereotypical ‘chaser’ archetype and even how all of the scenes regarding rape and identity are structured. Within the 80-minute movie, Mima jumps from the screen not necessarily as a Marxist critique of the Japanese idol and acting scenes or as a Feminist critique of these Japanese cultural institutions, but as a deeply raw trans-feminist critique of a cissexual society’s explicit violence towards transexual women.

The goal of this essay is to provide an alternative explanation to what I’ve seen to be an incomplete reading of Kon Satoshi’s text. Such as in Daniel Josephy’s doctoral dissertation I will be using the naming convention seen above, the patronym first and then the forename. I will be responding to text such as Susan Napier’s “Excuse me, who are you” and Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” to explore the extent and capabilities of a Feminist critique that does not actively reference the material conditions of patriarchy, voyeurism, and rape.

Medicalized, Under the Knife

Perfect Blue, as a movie about the medicalization and rape of trans-women, engages not with the beginning of this process but during the transition from the passing to the radicalized self. ‘Passing’ can be defined as an act of “doing being a woman.”  As Harvey Stacks says in Structures of Social Action “It is not that someone is [woman]; it is perhaps that that is what one’s business is, and it takes work, as any other business does. If you extend the analogy […] then you will be able to see that all sorts of nominalized things […] are jobs that are done” (414). The ‘job’ that Mima asserts to have wanted in her youth, ‘pop idol,’ perverts her current truth. Mima’s job as a pop idol acts as the “job” of “passing,” to do ‘woman.’ Such as the ‘job’ of the transexual is not to do ‘woman’ but to exist Mima’s existence necessitates a career transition. Shown in both the final and the beginning of the movie Mima’s livelihood hinges on the ability to transition from a ‘passing’ femininity to one that is truly her own; at the beginning of this transition away from cisheteronormativity Mima is shown to struggle because the occupation of ‘being woman’ has already taken so much of her time. This section of the movie argues that even in passing the transsexual is not seen as fully human to a capitalistic, cispatriarchal, society expertly weaved into Kon’s narrative when it is revealed that CHAM’s sales have skyrocketed without Mima. Kon intentionally crafts an argumentative narrative of how capitalistic societies profit off of the bodies of transsexual women. Coerced into being sexualized by the cis-gaze Mima is medicalized for her assertion of bodily autonomy, and raped while both cis men and cis women watch, glorifying her violence.

Perfect Blue argues that cissexual women, exemplified by Rumi’s character, profit from, and actively encourage the rape of transsexual women. Rumi feeds Mi-mania’s delusions that Mima is only for his consumption and thus should always ‘pass’ upholding the patriarchy as a capitalist metaphor that powers Kon’s work. Kon argues that even as a part of the subaltern, constantly getting talked over during board meetings and being offered an asymmetric ultimatum, Rumi still works for the hegemonic structure of the cispatriarchy. Kon’s masterful craftsmanship and writing ability hold Rumi accountable as one part of the corporate managers of Mima’s agency. Mima’s agency, composed of a cissexual man and cissexual woman is the backbone of Mima’s loss of agency through the acts of rape that Mima experiences in transitioning away from the ‘true’ (passing) transexual into the ‘dirty’ (liberated) one. Under this lens, the ultimate reveal that Rumi is behind mi-mania’s actions and behind “Mima’s room” becomes analogous to the actions of cisgendered ‘Freudian’ and liberal Feminists such as Valerie Solanas and Laura Mulvey who, in their attempt to formalize a ‘divine,’ white feminine, aided in the solidification of the capital system of rape, cispatriarchy.

Expected to be Grateful

Mulvey’s article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” is a great example of how these Feminisms, even when not transphobic, solidify the violence of the patriarchy. Mulvey argues that Psychoanalytic theory can be used as a “political weapon, demonstrating the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form” (28). She attempts to pass the obvious critique that others and I would levy by arguing that the economic conditions of the ‘new Hollywood’ had changed to allow for “cinematic production which can now be artisanal as well as capitalist” and that this ‘new Hollywood’ revealed and “reflected the dominant ideological concept of the cinema” (29). The gaze, as Mulvey and Napier describe it, fails to account for the fact that the actions that permit our joint violence, and further all forms of oppression, are intrinsic to this understanding of doing ‘being normal’ as a construct of a capitalistic society. Specifically, Mulvey and Napier assert that the actress acts as a voyeuristic object on screen but do not question the act of consumption as the fiscal manifestation of power under the patriarchy. Instead, both authors argue against giving agency to the oppressor, for how can one be agentive if they are unconscious regarding their actions? A criticism levied on Mulvey is that she neglected, outright denied, how men can be subjected to gaze; under a Marxist critique of patriarchy, as the institutions of fiscal domination that perpetuate oppression, this criticism is formally resolved. Men can “bear the burden of sexual objectification” because the institution is oppressive regardless of personal characteristics, under this model the institution is specifically oppressive regarding gender but capital as the foundation for institutions of oppression can be further expanded towards a holistic view of all oppression, my argument against a ‘state’ form of Marxism.

Trapped in the lens of the cis-gaze

Expanding from the previous section Napier argues that Hitchcock is “the most fruitful director with whom to compare Kon” because both directors were obsessed with gaze (24). I agree with her view that “Kon possesses a strong sociocultural consciousness” and that this sociocultural consciousness allows Kon to ‘agentify’ his female leads however throughout my piece on Kon’s work I both implicitly and explicitly disagree with the argument that “Kon’s implied viewer tend to identify more with the female, leading to the privileging of what I call a bisexual gaze” I do agree that “Kon’s characters tend to identify more with the female” however Kon’s characters use their agency to fight ‘gaze’ become purer ‘individuals’ to themselves as a response to a cisexual society that attempts to disagentify them (25). The implied viewer, through my reading, has consistently been cisexual. We ultimately experience Mima’s gaze not through the male-gaze, but through a ‘cis-gaze,’ a form of ‘gaze’ focused on the financial oppression of ‘doing passing.’ Kon artfully crafts multiple scenarios in which the viewer must come to terms with their role in the rape of transwomen through their position as the cis bystander, instead of a strictly first-person perspective the audience is made a person, however not an individual, in the story and must constantly internalize the fact that they are no different to Rumi or Tadokoro or even Mi-Mania.

Mima’s journey, when understood as the ‘cis-gaze versus the trans self,’ then we can argue that the ending of the movie is meant to allude to a failure by the transexual, when acting within the state and capital, to rid themselves of the cis-gaze. If we contend that Mima’s journey is to be understood through a ‘bisexual gaze’ then we ultimately conclude that this gaze that “still subtly exalts the feminine over the masculine” completely encapsulates Mima. She would no longer see the gaze for what it is, her oppressor. Through this reading, one that would not have come about without many nights of discussion with my girlfriend, one can fully understand how truly horrific and terrifying the ending to Perfect Blue is. We, the audience who have been complicit in Mima’s rape, have not left, we cannot escape the structures of the cispatriarchy without the abolition of state and capital. The ending of Perfect Blue alludes to the fact that even when we are no longer watching, even when we are no longer active in the rape of trans women, our failure to abolish state and capital, through violent force, acts to perpetuate the rape. Napier’s article does not want to contend with the fact that the audience, not as an individual but as a ‘person’ or ‘archetype,’ that she aids in the cispatriarchy, the fiscal abstraction of rape.

Napier’s article and many articles, videos, and reviews of Perfect Blue do not fully develop a hypothesis regarding the ending of the story. Many hypotheses that are developed fail to encapsulate the soul of Kon’s work. In working from the artifice creators such as Super Eyepatch Wolf and Hanlunn view Kon’s message as one of “doing being normal” where only person and society exist and where a dissociation of person and society creates “avatar” as Super Eyepatch Wolf puts it. The ending of the story, under this analysis, does not resolve as the peculiarity of having to announce oneself as “real” no longer holds such a strong sentiment. If the goal is to “keep our avatars in check” then we, the individual, do not and never will exist, my main argument against the generalization of the “doing being” framework outside of how archetype (or “Person” as I have called it) and society interact. The announcement of the “real” self is instead a way Kon creates lingering fear. Originally, I thought that Kon attempted to make a joyful or ‘happy’ ending however as my girlfriend points out “yeah [she] always felt like there was an element of artificiality to [the] ending that is wholly intentional on Kon’s part” (Tiller).

If we understand Perfect Blue to be about the sociality of rape, specifically the rape of the transexual through the cisexual gaze, then the unease that the final scene asserts turns into the great, lingering, fear that Kon seems to have envisioned. The scene can be read, through this lens, not as a character, Mima, referencing other characters, the two nurses, but as Mima attempting to gain control of her individuality by referencing the audience. The use of the audience as a stand-in for the generalized cisexual society, as a stand-in for the “rapist,” if you would, is unsettling specifically because we have been active participants in Mima’s rape, not passive observers. Thus, in understanding Mima as a transexual character one can more fully read Perfect Blue as a critique of a society that engenders rape, not a Patriarchy as Napier would have you believe, but a cispatriarchy instead. It is not necessarily ‘men’ who are the rapists of the film, it is specifically cisexuals as seen with how Tadokoro and Rumi orchestrate Mima’s rape. 

Just Another Sad Transexual

Ultimately the liberation Mima faces is Kon’s ‘radical’ conclusion for the character. The Feminist reading in “Excuse me, who are you” leaves many loose ends; partially because it is a holistic view of Kon’s work but also because the argument does not account for the medicalization mirrored in Mima and Rumi’s story. Rumi is medicalized at the end of the story in a very blatant manner. However, Mima is constantly medicalized by a cis-gaze which she is not a part of always forced into looking at herself under this lens. While the audience is meant to take the role of the cissexual Mima herself acts throughout the film to counteract its violence until she ultimately subjects herself to survival becoming “the real thing.” Mima’s journey is one about understanding this nebulous interloper, the cisexual, as it applies to a transexual reality. To interpret Mima as herself partaking in the same gaze as the audience, the bisexual gaze as Napier writes, would be to ignore, completely, Mima’s arch throughout the film. The conclusion of Perfect Blue is not a happy one, it still leaves Mima struggling within the same system that raped her. Mima may have a larger fan base now but the cis-gaze is even more oppressive and the acts at the beginning of the film can occur to her again at any point in her career or to another up-and-coming artist. Ultimately Perfect Blue. Initially, I believed that Kon’s work was one of trans joy as ‘radical’, but it is exactly the opposite. The true horror, as my girlfriend helped me see, is that Mima is still within the system that raped her and the ending acts to aid in that analysis through its “artificiality.”

Conclusion

Given the times and conditions that Kon grew up in, as Napier argues during “the brief rise of Anarchism and Marxism and their subsequent repression” and during multiple turbulent economic periods in Japanese history, and Kon’s own history of attempting, and failing, to unionize his industry I believe that Kon’s intention was to create a story about the failure of a radical movement. Napier’s understanding of Kon’s work fails to actively analyze Kon through the Marxist lens by which he wrote, animated, directed, and lived. Napier makes casual mention of Marx as a portion of Kon’s influence but the use of Psychoanalytic theory counteracts the ability for a true Marxist critique. Given a Marxist critique, it becomes elementary to see how Kon creates a trans narrative; the transexual materially disadvantaged, worse so when other intersecting identities interact outside of the hegemon.

Works Cited

Josephy-Hernández, Daniel. “Reflections on the Translation of Gender in ‘Perfect Blue’ an Anime Film by Kon Satoshi.” PhD diss., University of Ottawa, 2017,

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16, no. 3 (Autumn 1975): 6-18.https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/16.3.6.

Napier, Susan. “Excuse me, who are you?: Performance, the Gaze, and the Female in the Works of Kon Satoshi.” in Cinema Anime, edited by Steven Brown. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006.

Ramos, Taylor & Tony Zhou as “Every Frame a Painting.” “Satoshi Kon Editing Space and Time.” July 24, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oz49vQwSoTE.

Satoshi, Kon. Perfect Blue. Rex Entertainment. 1997. 81 minutes.

Smith, Sadie “Switchblade.” “Masculine Artiface.” Track # 2 on 2015 Demo, Sabotage Records, 2016, YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaIqgQqOUiA.

Stacks, Harvey. “On Doing ‘Being Ordinary’ in Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis, edited by J.Maxwell Atkinson & John Heritage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Walsh, John as “Super Eyepatch Wolf.” “Why Perfect Blue is Terrifying.” May 13, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJmK5SOeQBc.

Maris Tiller, Instagram message to author, various.