For you and your (lady parts)

By Laura on July 16, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (3)

For the past few months Matthew and I have been anxiously anticipating Paprika, a Japanese animated science fiction film, directed by Satoshi Kon¹, animated by Madhouse Studios and produced and distributed by Sony Pictures Entertainment. The film is based on Yasutaka Tsutsui’s 1993 novel Paprika, about a female research psychologist involved in a project to develop a device that will permit therapists to help patients by entering their dreams.
Sounds pretty rad, right?

We were afraid that we would never get a chance to see it, thinking it would be a very limited release. But yesterday, while riding the bus into Pasadena, we saw that it is playing at this cheap theater. We dropped everything, got some bomb Mediterranean food, and went to see it.

Unfortunately, we left the theater two hours later very confused and tired. I felt like I had aged a thousand years and the entire world was dust, (this may also have to do with the book I am reading/was reading on the bus).

I won’t go into the entire plot; I just want to talk about two specific scenes. Let me also say that the movie is rated R, which I had forgotten.

The plot summery on Wikipedia describes part of the essential plot as follows, “Dr. Atsuko Chiba begins using a machine illegally to help psychiatric patients outside of the research facility using her alter-ego “Paprika.” Paprika is literally a “dream girl,” with her cute face and red hair, she is the more playful half of the serious, though attractive, Chiba.” This is literally the main focus of the film. The four other main characters in the film are in love with and, at separate times, take advantage of the only female character, Chiba.

In the most disturbing scene, Paprika, taking the form of a butterfly, is pinned to table with large holding pins. One of the male characters is running his fingers down her body as they argue, he threatens her. As he confesses his love (and she is protesting) he presses his palm onto the zipper in her jeans and it sinks through her skin. He proceeds to travel up her entire body tearing a seam down the center of her body and her head to reveal a naked Chiba underneath. And you see her naked fragile body handled in various ways for the remainder of the scene as one of the other male characters comes to save her. It takes a while for him to cover her with his coat.

The next scene I want to talk about is at the very end, Paprika realizes that everything has its opposite “Light and dark, reality and dream…man and woman.” As winds of change blast through the streets, Paprika returns to Tokita, where Chiba is. Disappearing into the robotic form, a ghostly apparition of a baby comes out of the robotic shell, like a womb. Sucking in the wind, the child (female and naked) grows until she sucks up the chairman himself, becoming a full grown beautiful combination of both Chiba and Paprika (naked). In this new form, she is able to consume the Chairman’s dream form and end the nightmare he created.

The tone of the movie was hollow and barren, which made ripping off the vulnerable character’s skin and later watching her exposed body grow from birth through childhood, puberty, and into adulthood, a very isolating experience. Also, the emphasis on the female form saving men from darkness is just one more depressing theme.

As there are many positives for being the only female among a group of male friends, there often comes a time when this very real and terrifying vulnerability rises and suffocates you. It’s strange how true this is for me because I have preferred male friends for a great deal of my life.

I am sure that there is a counter feeling that men experience. I do wonder if it is related to the body, which leads to a much longer discussion.

Watching this movie made me long to read some gender-blurring fiction, or fucking Annie Dillard.²

¹ _{Satoshi Kon (今敏 Kon Satoshi?, born October 12, 1963 in Kushiro, Hokkaidō, Japan) is the highly-regarded director of the anime films Perfect Blue (1997), Millennium Actress (2001), Tokyo Godfathers (2003), and Paprika (2006), as well as the television series Paranoia Agent (2004). All of his works as a director have been made by Studio Madhouse, where he is a staff director along with Rintaro and Yoshiaki Kawajiri. His films are characterized by psychological complexity, realistic character and background designs, and the blurring of dream and reality.}
² _{A recent review by The Washington Post reads, “Annie Dillard’s books are like comets, like celestial events that remind us that the reality we inhabit is itself a celestial event, the business of eons and galaxies, however persistently we mistake its local manifestations for mere dust, mere sea, mere self, mere thought. The beauty and obsession of her work are always the integration of being, at the grandest scales of our knowledge of it, with the intimate and momentary sense of life lived.” So there’s that.}

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