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When watching Perfect Blue, at what point(s) are you placed into a subjective (as opposed to objective) point of view (POV)? How do you recognize this shift and whose or what POV is it?
When watching Perfect Blue, at what point(s) are you placed into a subjective (as opposed to objective) point of view (POV)? How do you recognize this shift and whose or what POV is it?
I began talking about this in my other post, but the main source of psychological confusion that occurs near the end of the film is the realization of the viewers POV contrasted in both Mima’s reality and Double Bind. What is difficult about this, is that Kon often makes it impossible to differentiate between the two until it is already after the fact, but in Double Bind, the viewer is omniscient, and able to understand fully the situation of the film. However in Mima’s life, which has all to similarly followed the plot of Double Bind, the viewer is only able to see through the eyes of Mima, which have to some extent obviously become disillusioned. While she does begin to imagine people in her life, a stalker, and then a mirror image of herself as a pop-idol, her illusion becomes reality, even though it is stuck in limbo between the two, when Rumi makes an attempt on her life. During this entire scene, and any of the scenes stuck solely in reality, we are only seeing through Mima’s eyes, but in the TV show we see through the lens of everyone else, more trusting and believable.
While it is difficult to recognize these shifts, they most often occur through Kon’s use of framing, when he will start a scene panned in closely, and then gradually progress with the scene until we realize the doctor’s visit for Mima was actually all part of her TV show, or when Mima is talking to one of the detectives in the rain, it is simply another shoot for Double Bind.
For the most part, if Mima was on screen and the scene was before Mima started acting or if the scene was shown to be in “Double Blind,” it was an objective point of view. Everything else seemed to be through Mima’s point of view. When Mima was by herself and crazy things started happening, it became clear that we were watching through Mima’s eyes. To recognize the shift to an objective POV, I relied on the director saying “cut” for me to know that what was shown was just a scene from “Double Bind,” except for the part after she killed Me-Mania. When it came to recognizing the scene as one of Mima’s illusions or an actual event, I either waited for a double-take where the illusion disappeared or I figured that if she saw herself in her stage dress, it was an illusion. However, this still left me with several questions that were never really answered like what happened with the car accident or whether or not Mima was the one to kill the photographer.
Kon’s flashes to a subjective, Mima’s, point of view are made clear through a juxtaposition of hallucination and reality. These moments always begin from Mima’s unreliable perspective, followed by a cut to reality. For the first few scenes where Mima begins to hallucinate, like when Mima sees a flash of her alternate pop idol self in the window, the distinction between hallucination and reality is made clear and obvious. However, as the story progresses, the differences between Mima’s subjective point of view and reality become harder to immediately spot, and the viewer has to closely examine each scene as they are going in to determine if the scene is taking place in Mima’s mind or in reality. One of the first instances of this juxtaposition is in the scene in Mima’s room after her rape scene, where for a moment, Mima believes that all of her fish have died, triggering her to unleash her repressed rage and distress. As the scene ends, Kon quickly flashes back to the fish bowl, where the fish are now again happily swimming, indicating that the scene from before was a hallucination from the perspective of an emotionally distraught Mima.
For most of the TV series, the perspective is trustworthy: not only because the perspective is the third person omniscient, but also because the perspective is through the cameras, which are believed to be unbiased. However, I began to question the legitimacy of this perspective as the scene of the conversation between the female detective and Mima in the rain repeated for a second time. The repeated scene highly matches the former scene, except that it is not raining in the repeated scene, and the lines of female detector change. The repetition is definitely part of the dream and through a very subjective perspective. To this point, the perspective of the TV series changes from objective to subjective.
Also, as Mima begins to be haunted by the illusion of her former self, her perspective becomes extremely radical and subjective, jumping from illusions to realities. Kon, as the expert at the cutting and arrangement of scenes, creates a chaotic mixture of dreams and realities. Such perspective reflects Mima’s inability to distinguish the illusions from the realities. However, near the ending, as Mima wakes up in the room (in fact it is Rumi’s room that is a perfect replica of Mima’s actual apartment) and confront Rumi, who are in her another personality as pop-idol Mima, the audience begins to experience a unique perspective that is neither Mima’s nor Rumi’s. From Mima’s reaction to Rumi’s appearance, she apparently is disillusioned and recognizes Rumi. But on the scene, Rumi’s appearance is exactly the pop-idol Mima. This portrait is not consistent with Mima’s disillusioned mentality. However, the perspective is not totally Rumi’s perspective, since the audience sees the reality through the mirrors.I think this special perspective places the audience in an omniscient vintage point, while maintains the subjectivity, which helps Kon to establish the blending of illusions and realities. This perspective finally unravels the mystery of the murderer, and let the audience experience the process of Mima’s finding her true self at the final stage.
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