Rating: ★★★★★

The private self is dead, and the internet killed it. Satoshi Kon’s psychological thriller “Perfect Blue” is a thrilling and terrifying investigation of how our increased access to online modes of communication has blended the lines between our private and public selves.

At the height of her career, protagonist Mima Kirigoe abandons her role as a pop idol with the group Cham in order to gain fame as an actress. This choice thrusts her into a new world where her actions are under constant surveillance, to the extent that she quickly becomes the victim of a stalking plot.

While her pop idol self demanded a degree of “purity” to satiate her fans, the actress self requires Mima to occupy increasingly revealing roles, forcing her to continue moving the goalpost of her personal boundaries to prove that she is a serious actress in the industry. But whether she’s executing intense choreo onstage with her fellow Cham members or sprawled on a mattress in a strip-club studio set, Kon depicts the audience as a sea of exclusively male faces, beady-eyed and armed with camcorders to preserve Mima’s performances.

Kon leverages this false dichotomy between the pure pop idol and the tarnished actress to communicate that female starlets, regardless of whichever industry they occupy, cannot escape the inevitable sexualization by their audience. At either side of the dichotomy, Mima crafts her identity to please her fan base; she doesn’t have meaningful ownership of either self. 

As she tries to strike a balance between these two irreconcilable halves, we see the tension drag Mima into a dreamlike state in which she envisions scenes in her life that may or may not be real. The only glimpse of peace in Mima’s identity appears in the placid beginning scenes when she wears comfortable clothing and (at least in the English dub) reveals a subtle Southern accent that is not permitted onstage or before the cameras.

But the real uniqueness of “Perfect Blue” is that Kon doesn’t just force accountability on the obvious perpetrators (gross men). Instead, he makes us all complicit in the loss of self that Mima experiences. 

Even if you don’t see yourself as a man drooling over his camcorder, have you ever condemned your favorite artist for making a creative choice that disrupted your perception of what their art should look like? Do you feel like your celebrity of choice owes you something just because you decided to click the follow button? Would you give anything to live your favorite pop girl’s perfect life, even though you don’t know anything about her? 

Kon tells us that it doesn’t matter if we have different intentions from the men who haunt adult film shops searching for Mima’s explicit shoots, we are still responsible for the untenable invasion of the private self that all celebrities experience.

Though it was released over 20 years ago, “Perfect Blue” is visionary in its ability to accurately predict the conversations dominating our artistic spaces about how we ought to treat public figures. But you don’t have to be a multi-millionaire with an album on the way to appreciate Kon’s lament of the loss of the private self. 

He intentionally sets “Perfect Blue” in an era that is only just beginning to experiment with the internet as a social space, and he explores how an online presence requires us to betray certain personal details until even the most private spaces in our lives are monetized for the algorithm. 

At risk of sounding like your grandmother, Satoshi Kon suggests that, indeed, that damn phone may be responsible for the discomfort we experience when we feel like we have to cultivate the perfect public persona.

Unlike Mima, maybe you’ve never been in such an intense identity conflict that you’re unable to parse the difference between your dreams and your waking life. But if you’ve ever been haunted by the way that you’re perceived in a public space, the themes in “Perfect Blue” will feel far more familiar than you might expect.