“Am I Alive?”: Reality, Identity and the “Shadow Self” in PERFECT BLUE (1997) and GODZILLA MINUS ONE (2023)

Caveat: I am a 39-year-year-old, white, American man. I approach these Japanese pop culture artifacts purposefully as an outsider to explore their universal truths, both as individual stories and in contrast to one another.

My recent comparison of Defending Your Life (1991) and Wish (2023) analyzed how each movie approaches a person’s purpose in life. After seeing Godzilla Minus One (2023), I thought a similar comparison between another notable Japanese movie could reveal deep truths about identity.

Identity is a nebulous and contextual concept. You may be one person at a certain point in your life and someone completely different just a few years later. You code-switch between the office and with your friends. You put on a uniform and assume a whole different persona.

Perfect Blue (1997) takes this tension between selves and turns it into a nightmare.

The (in)famous Anime doesn’t immediately spring to mind when contemplating a giant green lizard terrorizing 1940s Tokyo. While Perfect Blue is a prescient interrogation of societal pressures on women in contemporary times, Godzilla Minus One examines what it means to be a man in a decimated post-World War II Japan. Stacking the movies against one another, however, illuminates that both lead characters are pushed to extremes that leave them wondering if they are even alive and if the world around them is real.

What even is reality? It’s hard to tell in a day and age when presidential candidates insist the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021 was a “psy-op.” We’ve spent almost a decade being inundated with “fake news” and anti-intellectual authority figures encouraging us to distrust experts. The next year promises electoral campaigns influenced by Russian bots and AI-generated videos on social media.

Perfect Blue predicted this modern connected world and much more. Directed by Satoshi Kon (Tokyo Godfathers [2003], Paprika [2006]) and adapted by Sadayuki Murai from the novel by Yoshikazu Takeuchi, the disturbing psychological thriller follows former pop star Mima Kirigoe (voiced by Junko Iwao in the original Japanese and Ruby Marlowe in the American dub). Her life is turned upside down when she leaves the girl group CHAM! and ventures into acting, joining a crime TV show called Double Blind. As her prominence on the show increases and becomes increasingly risqué, she discovers a website called “Mima’s Room” that’s written like a diary with details that are suspiciously intimate. The posts claim Mima is forced to do the adult-themed content against her will, which compels obsessed fan Mamoru Uchida (Masaaki Ōkura and Bob Marxto, respectively) to go on a murder spree. Except maybe he’s not the killer. Maybe it’s Mima. Or maybe it’s not…

Perfect Blue is very concerned with duality. The movie is filled with mirrors and doppelgängers — both real and imagined. “Perfect Blue announces its preoccupation with perception, identity, voyeurism, and performance — especially in relation to the female — right from its opening sequence,” explains Susan Napier in ‘”Excuse Me, Who Are You?”: Performance, the Gaze, and the Female in the Works of Kon Satoshi,’ included in Cinema Anime: Critical Engagements with Japanese Animation. ‘The perception of reality cannot be trusted, with the visual set up only to not be reality, especially as the psychodrama heights towards the climax.’

Mima is haunted by “Real Mima,” a kind of “shadow self” who keeps appearing with taunts and sinister promises. Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung said our shadow is those traits that we dislike or try to repress, and that can be influenced by the collective unconscious, forming together in the psyche, according to Journal Psyche. Jung believed the shadow to be the antithesis of the “persona,” the self that we present to the world. He encouraged people to reconcile the shadow with the persona to better understand “negative” behavior like anger or selfishness.

The YouTube vlogger Super Eyepatch Wolf updates the persona for the social media age with the “avatar” in his video “Why Perfect Blue is Terrifying”:

Super Eyepatch Wolf describes the avatar as:

The representation of ourselves that exists purely online. Most of us have multiple different accounts dedicated to perpetuating this idea of who we are and what we represent. We pour hours everyday into grooming and preening this make-believe instance of us, making sure that the perfect version of ourselves is put forward for the world to see.

The manifestations of Mima’s shadow and persona/avatar can be charted by her apparel. She opens the movie in her girlish and impish pop star dress, but in the following scenes she dresses in simple, modest, everyday street clothes. This Mima we see in candid moments, shopping and setting up her apartment.

The major turning point comes when she agrees to film a scene for Double Blind in which her character is a stripper, dressed in a hyper-sexualized outfit reminiscent of her CHAM! look, who is raped. “This is the scene that serves to sever the ties between Mima’s old existence as a pop star and her new one as an actress,” says Super Eyepatch Wolf. After this point, Mima is shown in a series of press interviews talking up her new maturity, garbed in professional and womanly suits.

The climax of the movie reveals that the young singer Mima tormenting newly adult Mima is a byproduct of a split personality, now known as dissociative identity disorder (DID) — except maybe not for Mima. The events of Double Blind parallel and blur reality, as Mima’s character is revealed to have murdered her sister to take her place. Once this ambiguity is introduced, the big twist is revealed — Mima’s agent, Rumi (Rica Matsumoto and Wendee Lee), is the one with DID and wants to take over Mima’s life.

That revelation doesn’t let Mima off the hook, as she may be suffering from another dangerous mental disorder. Cotard’s Delusion — which I admittedly first learned about from an episode of Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal — is a a condition in which a person denies his or her own existence or the existence of parts of their body. According to The Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Neurosciences, this “Walking Corpse Syndrome” can be a comorbidity of several other neuropsychiatric diagnoses, including bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. One of the major symptoms of Cotard’s is not recognizing yourself in the mirror.

Twice in the movie Mima expresses uncertainty about the truth of her own senses and flesh. The first time is when she breaks a tea cup in her hands while eating lunch with Rumi. “This blood is real, isn’t it?” she asks, staring at her pooling palms. The second time is after she discovers the photographer Mr. Murano (Masashi Ebara) has been killed. She sits in the Double Blind studio and ponders aloud, “Am I alive? Maybe that truck hit me…and this is all a dream…,” referring to an earlier scene when she was almost hit while chasing her double through the streets.

Kōichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) in Godzilla Minus One has similar doubts about his own actuality. Kōichi starts the movie as a World War II kamikaze pilot. He lands on Odo Island in late 1945, and it immediately becomes apparent he’s feigning mechanical issues to avoid dying in a blaze of glory. His fears manifest in gargantuan flesh when Godzilla surfaces that night. Kōichi has the opportunity to use the guns on his plane but freezes up, resulting in the deaths of all the Navy technicians except Sōsaku Tachibana (Munetaka Aoki). Kōichi then returns home in shame to the decimated Ginza district of Tokyo, finding his parents dead. He starts to rebuild his life when he takes in Noriko Oishi (Minami Hamabe), who is raising an orphaned baby, Akiko. Two years later Kōichi is working as a minesweeper, but nuclear testing mutates Godzilla and sends him rampaging toward the main land. Abandoned by the government and facing the possibility that his life could be torn apart again, Kōichi finds the courage to band together with civilian fighters to take down the beast.

Kōichi spends the majority of Godzilla Minus One struggling with PTSD that has him questioning if he actually survived the war. “Shikishima has night terrors about what happened in the war and has such extreme imposter syndrome that he believes he’s a walking corpse and actually died a long time ago,” says Jesse Lab of The Escapist, indicating something akin to the Cotard’s Syndrome that may be afflicting Mima.

In one harrowing scene he’s plagued by a nightmare of Odo Island. Noriko attempts to wake him but Kōichi, half asleep, grabs her and screams about still being asleep and really being dead. Although he treats her surprisingly chastely throughout their time together, the scene does feel like it’s on the verge of a sexual assault. He falls on top of her and she has to fight him off until he finally wakes up.

Later in the movie, a much more lucid Kōichi asks a shrine to his parents if he can start living now. He’s spent years as a zombie and wants to ask Noriko to marry him so they can leave the past behind them. Of course, that’s when Godzilla comes ashore and tears into the part of Ginza where Noriko has taken an office job. When she’s seemingly killed, Kōichi accepts that he’s been living on borrowed time and decides he’ll embrace his destiny as a kamikaze pilot by crashing into Godzilla.

Kōichi’s journey toward this decision is signaled by multiple personas and costume changes. He starts the movie in his uniform, something that alerts his resentful neighbor Sumiko Ōta (Sakura Ando) to his inability to fulfill his duty. Kōichi soon sheds his uniform, but shows confusion with his self-image as he adopts a bomber jacket that hints at his background. Even with this signifier, he hides from co-workers that he was meant to be a human missile. In fact, he refuses any real sense of identity, including husband to Noriko and father for Akiko (Sae Nagatani), even when she calls him “daddy.” But after he believes Noriko dead and prepares to fly a new prototype against Godzilla, Kōichi dawns aviator goggles as he steps back into the role of pilot.

Where there’s a persona there must be a shadow, and for Kōichi that is Godzilla. The Kaiju’s radioactive secret origin is mostly glossed over in favor of him seeming to be summoned when Kōichi is most distressed. And it’s Godzilla who makes a beeline for Noriko when she’s riding the train. He attacks her like Kōichi when he was awoken from his dream, almost like the monster is sabotaging the man’s attempts at happiness.

In many ways the titular titan embodies Kōichi’s worst traits. “Godzilla doesn’t just seem angry at humanity; he seems angry at simply being alive,” muses Rick Stevenson of Looper. “It’s a rage that reflects Koichi’s own survivor’s guilt — a feeling of discomfort with the gift of life.”

Godzilla is also Kōichi’s inverse. While the former can heal from any wound and defies death, the latter is battered and bandaged for half the movie and wants nothing but an ending. Some of the most iconic imagery in the movie shows Kōichi with his head wrapped in gauze.

Appropriately enough, it’s Godzilla’s head that Kōichi has to destroy. He flies into the behemoth’s mouth where the plane explodes in an incredible fireball, killing Godzilla’s brain and freeing Kōichi of his troubled mind. He lives, having chosen to eject from the plane, and is finally rewarded with a fresh start when he discovers Noriko is alive.

Both Perfect Blue and Godzilla Minus One end on moments of affirmation that are tinged with hints of dread. Mima visits Rumi in a mental hospital and is gawked at by two nurses who think she’s just a lookalike. “No, I’m real!” she declares to her reflection with a grin that is perhaps overcompensation. Kōichi ends his story letting Noriko know that his war is over, but the last shots of the movie are something like a radiation burn on her neck and of Godzilla beginning to regenerate.

Trauma never really goes away. We just learn to live with it. Something that helps is seeing the overlapping experiences of a young woman and a young man separated by 50 years and completely different stories. They’re able to define who they are by choosing paths forward rather than dwelling on the past.