Brouillette- Perfect Blue and The Black Swan: Shifting Realities

I hate horror movies; they are, in a word, ridiculous in their attempt to try to scare or shock people. You can have all the blood and guts flying everywhere that you can imagine, but if a film doesn't delve into the depths of the human psyche to pull from the real origins of our fears and carefully manipulate them, you are practically left with a brainless comedy under all of that gore. A good psychological thriller, however... that's something I can go for.

The films Perfect Blue and The Black Swan are just that- stories meant to disturb the audience by blurring the line between the real and surreal, piling on multiple layers of reality as they plunge into the insanity of the distressed human mind. Both movies take a young woman character, innocent and unassuming, and have her tormented by the uncertainty of her indentity and her perception of herself. There are a good handful of similarities between the two women in these films.

Nina from The Black Swan falls prey to her own insecurities in the need to fullfill a role that imbodies both light and innocence as well as darkness and untamed lust. This later on causes her to lose grip on the person she truly is; she begins to have hallucinations about actually becoming a black swan as her reality takes a turn down a dark, twisted path in order to create a new image for herself. This is fueled by the desire to be a star. She wishes to be flawless in the eyes of her audience and in the eyes of the people who influence her; her identity is practically their possession.

Mima's sense of reality in Perfect Blue is victimized solely by those around her who impose what they think she should be over her real identity. However, none of these changes to her image make everyone happy at once; two characters in particular, Mr. Mi-mania and Rumi, are determined to force a certain image upon “Mima”, or their perception of her at least. Mima's real self is the only thing that stands in the way. It isn't long before idolization is taken to a murderous extreme. All three of these characters are driven to insanity by this need to fullfill their idea of who “Mima” should be.

When main characters from these two films cross over that line into their new personas, both begin to lose touch with their ability to tell what is real from the illusions brought upon by their fears and these facades of themselves. Ultimately, at points in both of the films, these two women come to fear what they have become. With the loss of control over their identity- Mima loses hers to Rumi's “version” of Mima, and Nina loses hers to the role of the Black Swan itself- comes the loss of control over their own behavior. They feel threatened by what has come to take over their perception of themselves and are soon enough owned by their fears. Both characters begin to have violent hallucinations. Mima hallucinates revenge upon the people who forcedly manipulated her image; Nina invisions herself commiting acts of violence upon her overbaring mother, her rival, and, eventually, the part of herself which was the innocent “white swan”- her former reality. The Black Swan murders the White Swan; Nina's succumming to her dark persona causes her to lose her touch with reality and her own life. Mima is nearly murdered by her “pop idol” persona when Rumi decides to try to dispose of the the tarnished “real Mima” in favor of her imagined “innocent Mima”.

What is most interesting, perhaps, about Perfect Blue is that it not only blurs reality in the main character's mind, but crosses the perceived realities of several characters and their hallucinations. In this way, it is difficult to distinguish at some points in the film whose point of view we are looking through, or if who and what we're seeing is what we think we are seeing. This adds to the confusion that makes for excellent suspence. By the end of the film, I was completely unsure whether the envents that occurred in the film had actually been from Mima's point of view or it was all from Mima's manager Rumi's warped perception of reality until I read more into the story to understand.

There is much more to these two films than meets the eye. With each viewing I find more and more hidden elements within them that I may not have considered before, new ways of perceiving the ideas they express as well as their visual symbolism. Perfect Blue and The Black Swan are two of my favorite examples of the psychological thriller genre. No matter how many times I watch them, I always end up on the edge of my seat.