After two viewings in the space of about five or six hours I feel just about ready to start writing about this film. In terms of density it's like a dwarf star in that it manages to compress a distillation of Satoshi Kon's entire canon into what is essentially a superhero sci-fi character piece that's filtered through his usual superflat sensibilities and based broadly around the notion of the psychiatrist-as-shaman. For anyone reading this who has yet to experience Kon at his best (Paranoia Agent and Tokyo Godfathers) that could loosely translate as being a cross between Flex Mentallo, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman.
I guess any analysis has to start with the principle character, which is a minefield in itself. Dr. Chiba is a psychiatrist who uses an experimental device called the DC Mini that allows her to enter the dreams of her patients. It's still in the developmental stages, hasn't been announced to the general public and certainly not cleared for commercial therapeutic use. Despite this she is already using it in therapy sessions, and the style of therapy itself is probably just as controversial as the technology that makes it possible…
You see, when she's operating in dreams Chiba becomes a lucid dreaming superhero called Paprika… kinda. The exact relationship between Chiba and Paprika is ambiguous. If Chiba is the psychonaut and shaman then Paprika seems more like a Holy Guardian Angel, a manifestation of Chiba in the form of her True Will anthropomorphised. In shamanic terms it's like those moments in your journeying when you wear your power animal or tutelary spirit… now, I'm not going to get into the arguments here concerning whether your tutelary spirit is an aspect of you or another being entirely, and how much the dividing line between *you* and *them* is blurred in some shamanic work, but you get the idea of how interesting this is starting to get for the purposes of the film.
And it gets meatier from there. You see, Paprika is also clearly an anima figure, an idea developed by a certain C. G. Jung to describe the dislocated aspects of a male's personality that they project onto an unconsciously constructed female *other* in order to be able to interact with these elements of themselves. Integration with the anima is typically played out in dreams as a sexual union. And it's here that Kon's depiction of Chiba's therapy sessions goes bonkers. She unashamedly utilises all of the above issues of transference and projection that come with the anima figure in a deeply problematic mix of gestalt therapy, lucid dreaming, NLP style submodality interventions, shamanic bargaining/bullying and Jungian psychoanalysis. It's a peculiarly irreverent therapy-by-flirtation and if you've ever done any anima (particularly anima work in dreams) work it rings remarkably true…
… or it would, if your dreams didn't feature a real person who happened to be conflated with said Holy Guardian Superhero in the place of your anima. In dreams the anima – while being far from safe for interaction and non-problematic in terms of gender representations – at least has the benefit of not being projected onto a real person. In waking life it's much more complex, as you will invariably meet people who remind you of those bits of yourself you haven't dealt with and all your psychic baggage tends to go haywire. Here we have a character that willingly takes on this role, in fact seems to actively encourage it, even when the patient's perceived issue seems to bear no relation to any issues they may have surrounding their anima. Paprika's tools more often than not involve the tricky substance of male fantasy and she seems to have next to no reservations about things getting particularly… icky. The film readily acknowledges this problematic subtext by frequently depicting Paprika almost as an escort.
This is where I'm reminded of Angela Carter's Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman. In all these complex psychosexual situations the issue of exactly who is dreaming which elements is deliberately confused. Without the boundaries of waking reality dreams merge and interact in a way that frequently makes you wonder exactly who is projecting which repressed parts of their unconscious desires onto whom, and the result is a film that is troubling to pin down on moral and ethical levels. As a parallel, consider the way in which Kaufman and Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind depicts Clementine in terms of Joel's projections and fantasies. For most of the film we are not seeing Clementine herself, we're seeing the version of her that Joel has constructed in his head, which inevitably contains large elements of his own anima. Despite her actively discouraging these tendencies he has a notion of her as his saviour, and so when he introduces his conception of her into a traumatic childhood memory she does exactly that: saves him, leads him away from it by the hand, tells him the bullies who pressured him into the situation aren't worth his pain. Paprika is another such saviour, but one much more willing to take on the role.
Satoshi Kon is using this context to return to one of his enduring themes: the manner in which women are idealised, simplified and objectified. He presents all this material in a mess of information and interaction, highlighting the processes involved but leaving all conclusions to one side. In terms of gender representation and repressed sexual desire made manifest this is not an easy film to watch and is even harder to dissect. Many critics have previously stated that his work specifically addresses the state of modern Japan, and while there are large elements of truth in that it's still a notion that has exoticises that culture in its implication that the film doesn't equally apply to all cultures. The outward tropes may be Japanese but the themes are universal.
There's a lot more that could be written here, but I'm resistant to writing more about the women in Paprika as once we get past these generalities we're into spoilerific territory. I'm also aware that you'll probably need to own a copy before you can rewatch it enough to analyse, which is hard for a film that's not even been released in the West.
It's worth pointing out that this story couldn't exist in live action. There have been some excellent representations of dream states depicted in the work of Lynch, Jonze, Kaufman and Gondry (and I'm sure many others), but none come close to the sheer scale and spectacle of what's on display here. It's a strength of animation that the eye is never questioning what is real and what isn't, or rather what is a filmed live action element and what has been added digitally. Everything you see is animated and so the blurring of multiple realities is totally seamless.
And if the moment comes when Captain Konakawa finally answers the question that has been posed to him throughout the film, and you don't immediately stand on your seat and cheer the roof off, you're not a friend of mine, movies or life.
Absolutely. I saw the film with Iggy this afternoon and at this moment we spontaneously started applauding, laughing and wiping a tear from our respective eyes. Astounding filmmaking. Satoshi Kon seems to share a peculiar gift with Grant Morrison when it comes to writing these uncomplicated world weary decent coppers in mental situations.
There is much, much more to write about here but I don't want to thread hog. |
