Modern Reality by SATOSHI KON
“The You in You, isn’t the You You think is You” ~ Satoshi Kon
The genius of Satoshi Kon really hit me when I saw the first two scenes of Millennium Actress. It is not only a lesson in editing but also in storytelling. I can easily say that it is easily of those moments of cinema for me, which made me skip a heartbeat. And the real genius of the scene is not in the cut that Satoshi Kon makes from scene one to scene two, I already knew of that technique; but simply knowing a technique doesn’t imply that you know how and when to use it. Within those two scenes, the reality as we perceive it, crumbles. Upon multiple repeated viewings of Satoshi Kon’s movies, it was evident to me that the concept of reality in today’s lifestyle is an essential aspect of his oeuvre.
For this essay, I’m considering Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers, Paprika and his one minute short Good Morning.
If you were to ask me, then perhaps I would say that Tokyo Godfathers is the only Satoshi Kon movie/story which is grounded in reality with inspirations from Italian neo-realism of 50s. It is one of those stories that we may perhaps consider more real as it directly appeals to our world view as we perceive it. Same is not the case in the rest of the movies. Perfect Blue is a movie which tackles the duplicity of what it means to be a celebrity public-figure, Millennium Actress is an exploration of a life that was and told through the characters that an actress played over the course of her career, and Paprika – well it cannot really be defined what it is, it is experience of what reality means to each one of us. To a younger generation, Paprika is what Inception perhaps wanted to be but could never be. Good Morning, the one minute short by Satoshi Kon is another unreal abstract which hits home too hard and perhaps can be said to be one of those works in cinema which has its roots in surrealism, avant-garde and yet tells us of a reality that we never knew existed within us each morning. Watching this one minute short is actually a very humbling experience for any filmmaker, as it made me realize that perhaps I may never be able to think and express anything as well as that one minute short does. It’s an overwhelming experience we all should go through to keep ourselves humbled.
A gentle reminder, I would like to give here, if you have not seen these movies, what I am writing may seem a little gibberish. I would request you to watch these four movies and then think about them. Not only his techniques of narrative structure, editing, framing and blocking are avant-garde but all of Satoshi Kon’s movies have that feeling of inquiry which makes us take a deep dive into our own realities.
Whenever a filmmaker is trying to capture the essence of the world around him, one of his foremost tasks is to touch upon the relatable emotions in his story. You may have heard this tons of time, that the story must be relatable, the characters must be relatable etc etc… To me, none of that is that important. For me the idea of emotion being relatable is what is important. In all the alternate realities that the characters perceive in Satoshi Kon’s films, we as regular people perhaps may never encounter, yet the emotions of our identity is what is common to his characters and us.
The concept of identity in our present world is talked about a lot but never understood enough. Satoshi Kon’s work is an interesting way to begin that inquiry into our own identities and the identity of realities we inhabit. When the protagonist of the Millennium Actress relishes in her days of past with enough melancholy, she is also telling us that all the roles she played in her movies were derivative of her youth and its subsequent melancholy. When in Perfect Blue the protagonist is shook by the coldness or absence of her mother in one telephonic conversation, we feel with her the indifference that comes when the whole world wants you but not your family. The worlds of dreams, both real and surreal that we see while being awake and asleep respectively are brought to our consciousness through Paprika.
In the similar vein, the collective conscious of stories is what propels us make new discoveries about our own lives. When we see a protagonist in a story whose life is totally different from ours, why we see flashes of ourselves in them? Is our reality similar to their? These are all questions that our tough to answer, but worth asking that why a million people who watch a movie compel themselves to relish in life of someone else in a story which they know is not real and fabrication of a storyteller’s imagination?
The age of internet has propelled certain emotions onto us which we ourselves are yet to give a name to. All our generation of short concentration has are the fleeting moments of certain feelings. These moments have no name, these moments are often emotionless… we feel things but rarely have a name to those feelings so as to communicate our emotions. It is not the issue of inability to communicate our emotions, but the lack of name for these feelings in our day to day lives. Like how do you feel when you wake up in the morning to go to a mundane 9-5 job which you dread going to? Monotony is what you feel when you wake up, if that is what you feel, watch Good Morning, you will know that the feeling that you have after waking up cannot be expressed in words but it is a feeling that can only be experienced.
