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Kon Satoshi's Paprika

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Kon Satoshi's Paprika Psychoanalytic Cyberpunk Midsummer-Night’s Dreamtime: Kon Satoshi’s Paprika Timothy Perper, Martha Cornog Mechademia, Volume 4, 2009, pp. 326-329 (Review) Published by University of Minnesota Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mec.0.0051 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/368639 [ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] Japan begins to flirt with a return to milita- Paprika’s psychoanalytic cyberpunk exploration rism, it is one that is still relevant. of fantasy and reality. Paprika is not a difficult anime the way Lain N otes and Innosenzu are. Its images draw from avant- 1. http://imdb.com/title/tt0405821/ garde anime but Kon’s earlier Millennium Actress 2. Jonathan Clements and Helen McCarthy, is a more adventurous challenge to filmic conti- The Anime Encyclopedia: A Guide to Japanese Ani- nuity and separation of frame, background, and mation Since 1917, revised and expanded edition action. Paprika reinvents some well-known con- (Berkeley, Calif.: Stone Bridge Press, 2006), 90. cepts—that dreams are windows into other re- 3. http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/ alities and have great power, that the boundar- encyclopedia/anime.php?id=3439 ies of self are not set by consensus reality, that 4. Peter Williams and David Wallace, Unit 731: troubles stew in the worlds revealed by dreams, Japan’s Secret Biological Warfare in World War II and that dreams can be accessed like playing a (New York: The Free Press, 1989), 48–49; Sheldon DVD with the bio-psycho-electronic DC-Mini Harris, Factories of Death: Japanese Biological machine in the film. Such ideas go back to Lum Warfare, 1932–1945, and the American Cover-Up in Beautiful Dreamer and the 1945 British film (New York: Routledge, 2005), 81–82. Dead of Night, and to Freud, Alice in Wonder- 5. Williams and Wallace, Unit 731, 241. land, and Australian aboriginal ideas about the 6. Igarashi Yoshikuni, Bodies of Memory: Dreamtime as that great place of gods, totems, Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, and origins that lives with us forever in eternal 1945–1970 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University synchronicity.2 So Paprika invites a middlebrow Press, 2000). audience to see familiar mysteries in vivid, pri- mary-color life. But Paprika can bewilder certain viewers. Psychoanalytic Cyberpunk Something is difficult in Paprika—the nature of Midsummer-Night’s Dreamtime: dreams, of the kami, and of art itself. Kon Satoshi’s Paprika Take an example of what Paprika is not. In t iMothy perper and the classic Wizard of Oz film, Dorothy travels Martha cornog from a black-and-white, Depression-era America to a Technicolor Land of Oz located in a dream- Kon Satoshi (director). Paprika. 2007. like Somewhere Else, and, when Dorothy finally Tokyo: Sony Pictures. ASIN B000O58V8O. returns to Kansas, the film becomes a trip There Translated as Paprika. Columbia-Tristar. and Back. But the DC-Mini machine in Paprika ASIN B000PFU8SO. is not a magical cyclone bringing us to a Slum- berland where fantasy comes true. Yes, one can Paprika is a delicious animated version of a sci- enter dreams through the DC-Mini, but the ma- ence fiction novel by Yasutaka Tsutsui about a chine opens a two-way gate. The DC-Mini lets device that allows psychologists to enter peo- the dream world escape from our minds and ple’s dreams.1 Although much lighter in tone materialize in concrete solidity right here in our than Kon’s previous films, Paprika is deeper world. Then its power becomes contagious. Be- than it seems. Three of the most illuminating cause it lets dreams emerge into reality, dreams allusions in Paprika are to Ryutaro Nakamura’s coalesce into ever more complex dreams—and 1998 Serial Experiments Lain, Mamoru Oshii’s then those dreams become real. So anyone using 1984 Beautiful Dreamer, and Oshii’s 2004 In- the machine can infect other people’s dreams. nosenzu. These three create a map for locating When three DC-Mini machines are stolen at the 326 review & commentary Mechademia4_inside.indd 326 9/17/09 9:27 AM start of Paprika, a quickly escalating mass of flirting, having a wonderful time in her world. intersecting dreams becomes real for everyone Paprika is the main reality of this film. collectively. And in the hands of a psychopath, Proof? Not hard. Dreams are a playground the machine is deadly. of primal needs, emotions, fears, and desires. In Paprika, the Dreamtime—a place of Of these, what the Freudians call “oral needs” origins, totems, and kami—is not a private, are basic, and who does Paprika/Dr. Chiba alternate mental-psychological-cognitive state like the most? Dr. Tokita, partly because he is but becomes the interpenetrating registers immensely fat but also because he is the clos- of a unified collective reality. The Dreamtime est to the Dreamtime: his are the appetites of opened by the DC-Mini is therefore close kin dreaming. Paprika/Dr. Chiba knows about ap- to the Wired in Serial Experiments Lain. So the petites: in the crucial scene of the film, she/they DC-Mini machine is not simply a psychological cheerfully devours the now immense bad guy, passport for entering a hallucinatory Slumber- Chairman—all of him—in one hugely hungry land. It is a reification machine and is familiar moment of pure incorporative appetite. Shlurp. from Shakespeare: And Paprika—and Dr. Chiba, when she gets into it—can be very sexy. We see Paprika’s flir- The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, tatiousness more often and more openly than Doth glance from heaven to earth, we see Dr. Chiba’s sexuality, but Dr. Chiba likes from earth to heaven, the way Dr. Tokita feels, and Paprika thinks it’s And as imagination bodies forth just fine that a huge, dream-enhanced Dr. Tokita The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen (he is now a robot) picks up Dr. Chiba and pops Turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing her into his mouth. If there is any single image A local habitation and a name.3 of desire in the film, it is this. One might think that devouring the heroine is a quick ticket to a The DC-Mini machine is precisely such a pen. bad end, but that is not the logic of Paprika—or One person, Paprika herself, stands outside of dreams. Dr. Chiba will soon rematerialize to these processes.4 Even middlebrow reviewers pull Dr. Tokita out of a wall where his newly have noticed that Paprika is not simply psy- dream-enhanced but clumsy giant robot body chologist Dr. Atsuko Chiba’s alter-ego for enter- got stuck when he collided with a building. And ing patient’s dreams but is a flirty, standalone with that, we encounter two additional myster- goddess of dreams in her own right.5 In fact, ies: the nature of the Dreamtime and the origin Paprika runs away with the film: its detective- of Paprika. story frame (who stole the DC-Mini?) and its The dreams inPaprika are not solely individ- Beautiful Dreamer/Innosenzu–style dream imag- ual inventions come to life. Instead, the Dream- ery are no match for Paprika skipping down a time also embodies a collective unconscious, street or popping up on some random otaku’s where myths, legends, and beings of folklore T-shirt or fluttering through a marvelous se- all reside. Viewers can decide if such legends quence with little fairy wings while giant tree existed first only in imagination and later were roots chase her. The cyberpunk frame induces brought to physical reality by the DC-Mini or if us to see Paprika only as part of Dr. Chiba’s per- the legends always inhabited a Dreamtime and sonality, someone younger and sexier hidden merely pop through to visit us whenever the under the psychologist’s austere Professional machine is used. Either way, they’re real now— Female Scientist manner and costume. But that robots, walking mailboxes and refrigerators, view is too narrow: Dr. Chiba is also Paprika’s beckoning cats, Buddhas, dolls European and alter ego. Paprika is playing, flying, laughing, Japanese, tiny airplanes—all on living parade review & commentary 327 Mechademia4_inside.indd 327 9/17/09 9:27 AM with great and noisy enthusiasm in the streets mind set into the quasi-realism of one of Kon’s of Tokyo. Fortunately for civic order and sanity, favorite animation styles. Paprika is among them. But when we meet the bad guy, Chairman, One of Paprika’s origins is as the tapir (baku) he is a dead ringer for Kim, the hacker in Oshii’s who eats nightmares, most notably from Ru- Innosenzu. He’s more than a trendy visitor from miko Takahashi’s Lum Urusei * Yatsura and from another anime; he’s a warning that the mise en Oshii’s second film version of Lum, Beautiful scene we’ve seen is not the real background of Dreamer. Apparently, this tapir was originally this film. And Paprika herself is not from In- Chinese folklore,6 but Takahashi adopted him. nosenzu at all—for example, she bounces about Paprika is not a tapir, and she is not exactly eat- skipping and (multiplied into four Paprikas) ing a dream, but she is eating monsters from a disdainfully sneering at two harmless young dream world, so she counts as an honorary, if men who try to meet her and then taking off symbolic, tapir: someone who, against Western on a motorbike that becomes a car. Realism, logic, controls dreams by turning their most even the quasi-realism of the opening dream basic mechanism (the appetites) against them.
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