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S2E28.75: Perfect Blue (Patreon)

Published:
2023-07-27 00:48:49
Imported:
2026-06

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Rounding out our trilogy of two-host episodes, Devon and Abi are here to discuss Satoshi Kon's Perfect Blue! A member of an Idol group leaves to pursue a more serious career, but it turns out it's not that easy. Next week I promise it'll be Rambo 4. Unless it isn't.

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*WEB DESIGN ALERT*

Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/

Kill James Bond is hosted by Alice Caldwell-Kelly, Abigail Thorn, and Devon. You can find us at https://killjamesbond.com and https://twitter.com/killjamesbond

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Comments

Rose Sarafilovic

if anyone wants to watch an amazing analysis of this film (and others) check out the youtube channel Breadsword

flibbityflob

hooting and fucking HOLLERING at this!!! yes!!!!!!

flibbityflob

On the note about the older male fans - that is 100% accurate; I've been to idol concerts (I live in Japan and love me some idols) and it's a LOT of dudes. Some of them are younger, but especially the smaller idols, there's a lot of older men! Somehow, strangely, despite how creepy it COULD be, it's...occasionally also very sweet, kinda wholesome. It is creepy, I won't deny that. But it's VERY accurate!

Trevor Gilmore

I had a moment of being grateful to be living in America when one of my local library systems had this totally free to stream via one of their online services for members - exactly what I want my taxes to pay for 💖💖💖

Tripp

I've been meaning to watch this for a long time. I really enjoyed Paprika, and Millennium Actress was one of the best experiences I've had in a theater. Looking forward to hearing y'all's thoughts on this one.

QuoProSquids

really great episode and a great movie. someone can correct me if i'm wrong, but i believe that, in the original japanese, Mima's final line ("No, I'm real") is spoken by Rumi's voice actress, something that is straight-up not included in the dub. assume the intention is to leave the audience with Inception-like doubts about what they watched and to provoke a sense of lingering dread about whether Mima is "real" and is in control of her identity. still don't think it works for the reasons you outline. it feels very sudden and very glib and tonally out of place.

AR, rope sharpshooter

yeah, i had the same thoughts about the ending; from about the halfway point i was like "okay, we've jettisoned the text entirely, just running on vibes alone," so when i got to the last ten minutes or so i was like "what the fuck is any of this supposed to mean"

Mulloy

How dare you!

Ben

Love Satoshi Kon and all his works, although now part of me wishes you could break your "no TV shows" rule so that you can talk about Paranoia Agent. Maybe you can cheat and be like "Well, Letterbox lists it as one 5-hour-long movie, so...."

Witch Bitch

Loved Devon's take on ambiguous movies, don't worry about it, it doesn't matter! Just enjoy the movie!

Steph

Once again asking you to watch Good Guys Wear Black featuring Charles Norris

Brendan Hinman

I can’t remember who first said this: sure Rumi was a murderer who manipulated and tortured people, but as an agent she was getting Mima *work*. Featured extra to series villain? That’s an agent who is advocating and hustling for their client

Vandria

I think a perfect companion to this film would be either Mulholland Drive or Inland Empire by David Lynch. I would love to hear you talk about those movies.

Zeroisanumber

Others have already posted about it, but yeah serious Mulholland Drive vibes

Karl Childers

imo if you want a non anime fan to watch a film like perfect blue, simply call it animation not anime, because anime fans are rightfully reviled and anime is not a real fucking genre in the first place, just like everything animated from america is not one genre either

Sock Ray Blue (edited)

Comment edits

2026-09-06 12:00 I just watched this on Shudder and my mind collapsed when I realized this movie was the basis for a season of Aggretsuko.
2023-07-27 18:42

Karl Childers

deeply american and deeply trashy, tbh now that you mention it i really am curious what the KJB crew would make of this

Lain of the Wired

I literally said "fuck you" aloud when I heard the IMDb quote

Zeroisanumber

All of my dumbest friends who were waaaaay too into being Irish-American and Catholic loved the hell out of it.

oranjest1

fully on Abbi's side about how the movie absolutely squandered its ideas by being like OH SHE JUST HAD A CRAAAAZY MAnAgER!!!! ZOMG!! had the exact same reaction like it was building up to something interesting and subverting then just.. did that. felt wasted and all there was to appreciate in it was that it was a visually excellent anime movie

Rachel K

I didn’t get it into words until just now but the point about Da Weirdo and possessing Mima is spot on. Earlier at the first performance he’s watching from an off angle/posture but he’s positioned with his hand to where she’s essentially dancing in his palm as the framing. He’s obsessed to the point he watches and films the empty space when she’s not there anymore and imagines her back in

Rot Economy Critic

I strongly disagree with the assertion that we are meant to simply unambiguously believe all of this is explained by Rumi being the killer and Mima being a truly separate person. While there is certainly much reason to believe that interpretation, and it is perhaps the simplest to arrive at; the movie does a lot to cast doubt on it. For starters, what would her motive be? The pattern makes no sense. If Rumi really did set Mima up in all these positions, let horrible things happen to Mima, and then murder the perps after the fact, while also making da weirdo run a blog that pushes Mima to go back into being an idol, then her actions contradict themselves in ways that I would argue do not make sense. So many plot points can be interpreted multiple ways that a plethora of possible through lines exist. I watched with a couple friends and we all disagreed on who the killer was: Rumi, Mima, or da weirdo. My interpretation was that Mima (or you could call her Rumi? I believe they are one in the same.) killed all those people and constructed fake narratives in her mind to disassociate with it while living in a psych ward. The DID diagnosis isn’t “part of her show” that’s just her way of pulling herself out of reality and she does in fact have DID. She has imagined her doctors and nurses as her set costars. Look at the hallways she’s often walking in: they could easily be part of a psych ward! The reason da weirdo’s body isn’t found is because he is a hallucination just like idol Mima. The fish go from alive to dead to alive because she’s not the one in charge of taking care of them, as she lives in a ward. As for Rumi? That is just what Mima actually looks like. She has split her personality into the stalker and into what we think is Mima. If you were to take the average of those two characters, it would look quite like Rumi. My interpretation also better explains the blurring of hallucination Mima and Rumi in the wig: the same character who puts on the idol costume hallucinates herself as looking a different way. The taunting from the idol hallucination comes in moments where she is losing her ability to imagine herself as the idol. The separation of “actress Mima” and “idol Mima” is a defense mechanism for the doubts she feels about being the idol. Thats why all the weirdness literally starts the moment she appears to quit being an idol. Of course, I can’t and won’t claim my interpretation is unambiguously correct either. Satoshi Kon himself has stated his movies are deliberately written to lend themselves to multiple completely different metaphysical interpretations, and I’d argue that’s extremely well backed up by how they unfold. I think it is most fun to encourage everyone into sharing their different bonkers theories about his films. What makes watching his movies fun is you can so often grab onto a single moment, build your understanding of the film around it, and if you watch carefully there will often be oodles of stuff to support your theory. He has deliberately made them that way. I think we are biased by classical structure to think the late scenes have the “objective” explanation for things but in this movies it could just as easily be that the answer arrived much earlier and what you see afterward is the sleight of hand.

John Bradley

One thing this movie does really well is disorienting the audience by using the same image or text in different contexts to signify different things. The most obvious case is of course the bleed between Mima's real life and the tv character she's playing, but the movie is constantly cutting to things that seem to follow from the previous scene but are really unrelated. The first big one I noticed is that Mima's first line in the show that she rehearses over and over, "who are you?" becomes a motif as Mima struggles to nail down the identities of the various specters around her. Several times a scene will cut to an image that seems to follow from the events of a previous scene, but is then contextualized. For example, at one point someone is attacked and seriously injured and then the scene cuts to a tight shot on a flashing siren light. You expect it to be an ambulance or police car, but the shot pulls out to reveal that it's on a child's toy car in an unrelated context. One effect of this is that later in the film, when there is a cut between two incomparable narrative beats, the audience can't be sure whether this is a cut from a dream to reality, from reality to a dream, or from one moment to a later unrelated moment.

re rahrich

Omfg you're right, jesus

re rahrich

I have some thoughts about the framing of the Double Bind's Buffalo Bill style villain that I want to put here because I'm taking a social media break and I have to say this somewhere. The psychiatrist in the show was saying that the murderer skinned the victims because the murderer was trying to "become a woman," a nasty and extremely 90s edgelord murder show trope. Absolutely. But I don't think it's a completely one off line. It primes the viewer to expect a (repulsive) malignant covetousness leering after Mima. Throughout the film, men are consuming her, feeling entitled to her, both in and out of character. We expect the stalker to be the murderer and we are primed to imagine something as lurid as Buffalo Bill. When Rumi is revealed to be wearing the idol costume, the camera focuses on the way her body bulges out of the knee high boots, the way her back spills over the top of the dress, how her cheeks are over plump and her neck is too large. When she is giving chase, the idol projection is placidly floating, but we see Rumi's reflection: fat, sweating, exhausted, out of shape. In a word, repulsive. Almost...mannish. I have a lot of thoughts about fatness and gender, having grown up fat and trans, but this is something we come back to so so often. To be a fat woman is to fail at gender, to become almost a sexless sex, in a way that fatness in a person perceived to be a man does not quite reach. To be a fat woman is to cease being a woman in the eyes of popular culture, especially in the 90s! I don't have context for Japan, but in the US, there was so much mass media designed exclusively around hating fat women. It is no coincidence that so much transphobic media has included cis men dressing in fat suits and wigs and dresses. Anyway, earlier today I was thinking a lot about all the various versions of Hairspray and it primed me to consider gender and fatness. Would love some other thoughts on this, or recommendations from other folks who have done this sort of analysis! I hardly think I'm original here.

Claudia

Is it weird that, as a fat person, I still generally enjoy Hairspray and its relationship to fatness? Tracy being successful and in an energetic hobby/profession such as dance is such a rare thing that to see it represented on-screen was and still is really important to me, especially in my teens. The fatphobia concerning Rumi always makes me feel uncomfortable, and it's like... a proper trope that is also connected to gender: fat women are jealous of the femininity that is tethered to thinness. It boils criticsim of fatphobia down to envy and it's exhausting, and fat women are forced to perform hyperfemininty for acceptance in society. If we (using we even though I'm genderqueer) make less of an effort, that's slovenly and also masculine and worthy of mockery.

re rahrich

I feel you on so many points you just raised! Before I realized I was trans, I viewed my "gender failure" through the lens of fatness before anything else. And it cuts both ways! So many trans women are denied surgeries because of weight. Even though it happens to trans men too, it is rooted in a type of misogyny that is amplified within transness. And Hairspray is a complicated work for me! The movie, the movie musical, all of it. But seeing Tracy unbothered and athletic meant the world to me.

Tyler Smith

Don't have much to add except that this is a very well thought out and written comment.

re rahrich

Thank you! I'm glad I was able to raise this point here in this space with a self selected group of curious weirdos instead of on like, Twitter or whatever. Haha.

Orion's Art

Perfect Blue is becoming one of my favorite movies to analyze because it's such a rich text to me. But I fully didn't realize the pizza delivery murder scene was meant to be apart of double bind. I thought it was meant to be Rumi, in her pop-idol persona, killing the creepy photographer. Maybe i just didn't pay enough attention to what he looked like lol.

Salsa Roja

Blonde American Trans Woman getting called OUT in the donator shoutouts /j

Luke

This movie reminded me of Last Night in Soho (another movie that has little to say about masculinity but that I would love to hear you guys discuss). Similar visuals & themes and also very surreal.

Bashfash

if we can get fully anime stuff is there a chance maybe we get a KJB about Patlabor 2: The Movie?

A.E. Ross

Before listening to this ep I knew I had watched this film but I didn't remember where or when, all I could remember about was feeling INCREDIBLY uncomfortable while watching it. After listening to this episode (and 3 years of hrt lol) I now realize in hindsight that my discomfort was 90% pre-trans awakening mega-dysphoria. Was great to hear you chat through it, I feel like i could probably enjoy it now. 5 stars.

Christopher Green

It was so good, back when. Saw it again at Cle CIA on a big screen a few years ago. Thanks, good pod :)

Christopher Green

No, I saw that too. They both happened. Part of the copycat theme.

Nazunii

Is there a reason you always watch the dubs when watching anime? Really sucks because the originals are always superior since the Japanese voice actors are in the same room and can act off each other

Australian Estuary Pirate

Did Abigail say "yeah you do [have fan interactions]" in the same intonation as when she said "you have Gundams" several episodes prior?

Motive11331

I'd prefer if the manager being the real killer was motivated by an individual trying to respond to the systemic violence, seeing herself in the young idol. Having her be just some crazy jealous rogue is extra disappointing.