Paprika (2006)

1 year ago

Paprika (2006)

BUT WHAT ABOUT THE REST OF IT?

by Emily Yoshida

No slight against the rest of the film, but the emotional height of Satoshi Kon’s 2006 animated feature Paprika just might be the opening credits. After a brief, if not somewhat vague introduction to the eponymous main character and her mysterious occupation as a “dream therapist,” we are treated to a brilliantly imaginative tour of Tokyo through Paprika’s eyes, traveling by motorbike, truck, billboard, and tee-shirt, mingling with the living one moment and hovering over them unnoticed the next, stopping traffic with a snap of her fingers, and tucking us in at night. Susumu Hirasawa, who has been Kon’s go-to for original soundtracks since 2001’s Millenium Actress (one of the most fruitful director/composer alliances currently in action,) provides a soaring electronic accompaniment filled with distorted, echoing vocals and urgent, insistent beat. This is the kind of music that makes you want to run. Without words, the sequence tells us all we really need to know: yes, Paprika is an animated hottie with a seemingly infinite wardrobe, but she also has a formidable command of her preferred sphere, the world of the subconscious. She is movement and change and electricity in a human form that can be abandoned or subverted at her whim. Not a bad way to experience the world.

We enter Paprika with trouble already brewing: the DC Mini – a highly powerful, tightly controlled little doo-dah that allows a group of psychiatric researchers the ability to watch the dreams of their patients with cinematic clarity – has been stolen. We are introduced to the team as they convene and try to do some damage control: harmlessly dirty old man Chief Shima, icy yet brilliant Dr. Atsuko Chiba, sumo-sized nerd Dr. Tokita, and bland dreamboat Dr. Osanai. So far, nothing has gone wrong, but that lasts all of about ten minutes, with Chief Shima suddenly bursting into a stream of nonsense before tearing down the hallway and taking a dive off the seventh story. Paprika ultimately manages to enter his dream and tear him out of his delusions as he lies in the hospital in a coma, but at this point it’s clear: there is a dream terrorist on the loose.

Of course, all this trippy imagery and talk of dreams and dream therapists and dream machines and dream makers is all a thin veil for what Kon is really up to. Let’s just get it out of the way, because writing about this film as if it were really just about a really crazy looking parade would bore me to tears: This is Kon’s film about film. It’s a film about creation and creators and creativity and what powers Those Who Make ought to have over those who don’t. And as such, it is a mess, but it’s a beautiful mess, compared to the slightly-muddled-sometimes-cool mess it is when read straight. Ambiguity abounds—it’s even kind of hard to tell why the Bad Guys are Bad (I’ll get to that in a moment,) but the film is very clear about at least one thing: Paprika, and, by proxy, all who have the ability to inspire others, are Special, whether it be due to natural, supernatural or technological causes. The argument at hand is to what extent that Specialness should be taken advantage of.

Basically what Paprika is good at, what makes her what she is, is her ability to figure out the rules of a particular individual’s subconscious reality and play along, implicating herself in the fantasy so that she can fix it, or destroy it, from the inside. What this amounts to when she goes about rescuing Shima is her trying on a succession of visual identities until one of them resonates in Shima’s addled mind, then playing along, improvising frantically, and ultimately absorbing herself into his body, blowing up to Macy’s Parade proportions, until he explodes and the delusion is shattered. Sure, why not? If it works in the context of the dream, and Shima belives it, who cares if it makes no sense?

An argument I constantly find myself making in defense of films that others find silly or, God forbid, filled with plot holes, is the old “Hey, it worked for me” line. If a film made me laugh, or made my cry like a baby, I am clearly well past the point where the finer details are of much consequence. Whoever made that film, whatever their flaws, had the Special Specialness to link their brain cells up with mine and dig around there until they found the emotional manipulation controls. Sneaky, yes; noble, not necessarily; but Special, definitely. This all seems harmless enough until we step outside our little film-snob bubble and consider, oh, say, the Twilight series. Millions of teenage girls (and their mothers) experience just as intense an emotional reaction to Stephenie Meyers’ brainchild as I do to Andrzej Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds, and you can scoff at the actual material all you like, but it would be criminally short sighted to scoff at the mass passion. It’s real. It’s the product of careful manipulation and heavy marketing, but there is an actual physiological reaction happening in all those teenagers’ amygdalae; those neurons exist. Does Meyer have the right to go poking around in millions of people’s heads like that?

The Chairman of the Research Institute would say no. Like a far less friendly Professor X, the Chairman is an imposing, ash-white figure who travels by wheelchair – and later, tree trunk appendages – and is the voice of caution in the early part of the film. Technology has gone too far, he says. The DC Mini was a Pandora’s Box that should not have been opened. Stop playing God. It’s the anti-science argument, which in turn is the anti-innovation argument, which becomes an anti-creation argument. Dr. Shima says he’s a stick in the mud, but the Chairman does have a point: the DC-Mini is extremely powerful and if it is misused the results could be horrifically damaging. Spooky as he is, the guy has a point. He’s especially suspicious of that Paprika chick he’s heard rumors about, who’s supposedly been using the device for “unapproved treatments.” At this, Atsuko rolls her eyes: how could anyone believe such nonsense?

Kon, like fellow dreamland-resident David Lynch, is a filmmaker who continually explores the duality – no, scratch that – the dynamism of women. That Atsuko and Paprika are one is established visually right off the bat, but the rules of that union are somewhat more uncertain, to the point where I’m not even sure Atsuko is bluffing when she laughs off the rumor. Paprika is everything that Atsuko isn’t: warm, playful, personable. She is also is a woman without history, who approaches even the most disturbing dreams with blithe curiosity, confident of her abilities and unhampered with the self-doubt and tendency to overthink things that that comes with the passing of time. A hard-nosed, thoroughly grounded woman like Atsuko would have every reason to want to deny that facet of herself, no matter how useful it could be; at one point, Paprika appears to warn her of danger, and she pretty much tells her to get lost. Atsuko is conscious of Paprika, and works in tandem with her, but that doesn’t mean she likes her.

(An interesting detail that is lost on non-otaku American viewers is that Paprika is voiced by Megumi Hayashibara, who’s pretty much the Julia Roberts of voice acting in Japan. The sound of her voice is meant to call up a multitude of stories and roles—“That’s Faye Valentine from Cowboy Bebop! That’s Rei from Evangelion!” – a cheeky little meta-wink, reinforcing the idea that Paprika is, as her patient Captain Konakawa puts it, a “dream movie star,” in more ways than one.)

After Shima recovers, the dream goes viral, continuing to infect more and more of the staff at the research facility, and then the general populace, who all demonstrate the same ecstatic, almost cult-like spewing of gibberish, before attempting to do serious bodily harm to themselves. Those who find themselves possessed by the dream are happy: they sit in the throne of a terrifyingly chaotic parade of free association imagery, blissed out on imagined power. But they are also non-functional, and at the mercy of whoever is controlling it. Kon is showing us, through a brilliant, unforgettable visual setpiece, what happens when we put a select few in control of our art, and are either unable or refuse to engage with it intellectually, or just make our own stuff up. We are just shells for the creators to occupy, and God bless ‘em, they sure are good at their jobs, but that’s only because they haven’t encountered any serious resistance.

Perhaps that is why on first (or second, or third) viewing it doesn’t seem to make much sense that the guys behind the dream terrorism are the Chairman himself. Why would the man who advocated so hard for dreams to be sealed and unviolated with be the one tampering with them to the point of mass fatality? Well, maybe he just doesn’t like to share.

And here’s where Paprika the film stumbles, because that explanation, simplistic as it may sound, is pretty much right on. If we’re still in metaphor land, it works, but in the context of the film it ends up putting the chairman in the risky territory of “madman bent on world domination for no discernable reason” and the inevitable slippery slope that, in this genre at least, always seems to end with Tokyo In Ruins. But ignore the gigantic naked lady and the gigantic black man doing battle over the skyline for a second and think about it: if the DC Mini existed, you’d want to see your dreams, wouldn’t you? Not just for the novelty, though I’m sure it would be very cool and all, but wouldn’t it open up a part of yourself that you had no prior access to? Wouldn’t the knowledge of your subconscious, even without the direct ability to do anything about it, give you a new sense of agency about yourself and your pesky little melon? And wouldn’t someone’s attempt infringe upon that ability or worse, monopolize it, feel a little bit like a violation of the first amendment?

While all this high-stakes muckery is going on, our B-Plot concerns Captain Konakawa, client of Paprika, and detective assigned to the case of the DC-Mini theft. Konakawa just wants to take advantage of the DC-Mini in the way it was meant to be used: to understand and control the recurring dream that has been haunting him. But when he meets up with Paprika in a “virtual bar” after his initial consultation, she’s more interested in talking about movies. As soon as the word has left her mouth, though, Konakawa blanches. He doesn’t like movies, he says, in a choked voice. It only gets worse when Paprika drags him to an eerily abandoned theatre row, filled with brightly painted marquees all beckoning him to come inside and escape to their various worlds. “Which one do you want to see?” asks a giddy Paprika. “I DON’T LIKE MOVIES!” Konakawa repeats, and the movies hear him, shuttering their doors and dimming their lights at the sound of his protest.

For Konakawa, films are the territory of children, something to be abandoned when you stop being a dreamy adolescent and become a career-oriented adult. When you stop being a Paprika and start being an Atsuko. And yet, as we later learn, his forgotten stint as an amateur filmmaker - his enthusiasm for creating, for digging through his hang-ups and fascinations through art - are exactly what is at the root of his dream. It isn’t about his homicide case; really, it has nothing much to do with the mechanics of the plot at all. It is simply a reinterpretation of the big explosive climactic battle sequence, told through one man and his repressed urge to build imaginary worlds.

Making things, sharing them, and capturing the imagination of others, be it ten or ten million, is a dangerous pursuit. But it is something that everyone must be active in in order for it to be fair; electing to be a passive viewer means handing over your imagination to strangers. The story of the Paprika vs. the Chairman is that of a stock-character bad guy who wants to rule the world of the subconscious, and the feisty dream-pixie who must stop him. Konakawa’s story is that of a man waking up and taking ownership of his dreams, literally and figuratively. And what does he do once he has?

Why, he goes to the movies, of course.

Emily Yoshida was that drunk chick laughing inappropriately three rows behind you at Inception (sorry.) She’s a recent LA transplant living and writing in Seattle, and frequently reports on life and television here.