“Excuse Me,Who Are You?”: Performance, the Gaze, and the Female in the Works of Kon Satoshi

Abstract

In 1997 the director Kon Satoshi rocked the world of Japanese animation with his first full-length film, Perfect Blue, a complex and stylish psycho-thriller about a pop idol whose decision to leave her career and become an actress leads to extremely violent consequences. Some critics paid it perhaps the ultimate backhanded compliment, suggesting that the film’s contemporary urban setting, sophisticated narrative, and highly realistic visuals made it seem more like a live action film than a conventional anime. For the record, Kon goes out of his way to insist that he is proud of being an animator and plans to stick strictly to animation, echoing his mentor Ōtomo Katsuhiro’s assertion that Perfect Blue is more interesting precisely because it is an animation.³ Indeed, certain of Kon’s cinematic preoccupations, such as the fluctuating relation between performance and identity, the tension between the ideal and the real, and, above all, the very porous line between illusion and materiality, seem to be perfect candidates for exploration within the animated medium.

[M]en’s fascination with [the] eternal feminine is nothing but fascination with their own double, and the feeling of uncanniness, Unheimlichkeit, that men experience is the same as what one feels in the face of any double, any ghost, in the face of the abrupt reappearance of what one thought had been overcome or lost forever.¹

—Sarah Kofman

Why this interest in female characters?

I like women (laughs)…. It’s because female characters are easier to write. With a male character I can see only the bad aspects. Because I am a man I know very well what a male character is thinking … on the other hand, if you write a female protagonist, because it’s the opposite sex and I don’t know them the way I know a male, I can project my obsession onto the characters and expand the aspects I want to describe.

—Kon Satoshi²