In the 56th minute of the movie there’s a scene that takes place in the TV show Mima is starring in, they’re talking about the murderer, played by Mima herself, they say that the murderer is an illusion she created, but illusions don’t kill… except if they find someone to possess.
I believe this scene to be the key to deciphering the movie even though it takes place in a TV show inside the film.
I don’t think a scene this suggestive was just thrown in as a red herring so try to keep it in mind as I try to piece together what the story of Perfect Blue actually is.
I will provide reasons and clues to back up my theory later on in the analysis but for now just accept the following statement as true.
Kirigoe Mima has the power to possess and mind control people, turning them into her own alternative personas, she also suffers from Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) meaning that sometimes she is possessed by those personas herself, and on top of that, she hallucinates these personas and at times sees them in her dreams.
Said personas include: The Creep (The hideous guy who stalks Mima and tuns the website “Mima’s Room”) and The Idol (The Mima who’s always in a skirt and shows up in mirrors and stuff).So to be clear, whenever I say "The Idol" I'm talking about 
, whenever I say "Mima" I'm talking about 
and whenever I say "The Creep" I'm talking about 
.
In this analysis I will not be discussing the hidden messages of Perfect Blue, or its psychological aspects; as many people before me have delved into those topics far better than I ever could.
In this analysis, I'll try to understand what the story is, literally.
Mima Kirigoe is a pop idol that quits singing and starts an acting career. In the opening scene we see her singing next to her two partners wearing pink skirts, remember that color, pink, as it will come up again and again throughout the film.Right from this point The Idol tries to get in Mima's way, to discourage her from acting and get her to go back to singing. The Idol is represented by shades of red and Mima is represented by shades of blue.
The letter Mima receives that says "I like looking into Mima's Room", the letter that explodes in her agent's hand, both colored pink.
Mima's room is the reddest thing in the whole movie, perhaps to imply that
she was in The Idol's deathly grip right from the beginning.
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#2. The Creep
A guy is possessed by The Creep persona and does perhaps the most amount of work to mess with her, he runs the website, he takes pictures of Mima and he murders both the writer and the photographer (
I know we see Mima kill the photographer but trust me we'll get to that).
But let's get to why I think this person isn't an actual self-thinking individual and is possessed by one of Mima's illusory personas, The Creep.
First of all, he has way too much information about Mima, he even knows what superstitions she believes (stepping out of the train left foot first) and he knows how Mima felt about Eri Ochiai's performance.
Second of all, he says what The Idol would say, and in this specific scene when he moves his mouth we hear Mima's voice.
Third of all, his internet alias is "
ME-MANIA", "mania" is a suffix used to describe an obsession with something, this guys is a person who's obsessed with The Idol, but his alias says he's obsessed with himself?
The only way for this to make sense is if "ME" and The Idol shared the same consciousness.
And the final and most important piece of evidence is the almost rape scene with Mima and The Creep, when he mentions the writer and the photographer Mima says "You killed them?" and he replies "And you'll die soon too.",
he doesn't deny it, it's implied he killed both of them.
But we see Mima as the killer, this could only mean that The Creep and The Idol share the same consciousness, and he is a puppet being controlled by The Creep, a persona that was manifested by the same brain that manifested The Idol, Mima's.
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#
3. The Idol
Now that we've established what is whose doing, let's talk about The Idol and the role she plays in the story.
Her first appearance happens after Mima agrees to do the rape scene, saying she absolutely won't do it, but we know Mima does the scene anyway and afterwards, she appears in her room for the first time.
The fish are dead in the first image but they're alive in the second one, The Idol manipulated Mima's vision to make the fish
seem dead to push her off the edge so her humiliations would cut deeper. She says Mima is "tarnished" for doing a rape scene.
Next time she appears in the bathroom of the studio where Mima is taking nude pictures, she says everyone's waiting for her and then leaves to perform with her old partners,
yes, the last picture isn't an illusion or a dream or a metaphor, she actually goes to perform there and I know that because of the look on the other two girls face (that's not a still frame I specifically picked out because they looked weird in it, they look like that during the entire sequence) in contrast to the cheerful expression they usually have during a show, confirming that the way they're drawn is completely intentional, also, The Creep writes about this performance on Mima's Room.
After that things keep escalating, she tells The Creep to "get rid of" Mima and she starts taking control over her body more and more everyday, Mima starts having gaps in her memory because she doesn't experience what The Idol experiences, to her it feels like she was having tea with Rumi and suddenly she was on the set of Double Bind.
The Idol threatens to kill her in her sleep, she uses her body to murder the photographer, the memories start to overlap and Mima starts going insane until the finale, which I will get to.The last thing I have to say about The Idol is that every single one of her scenes has the color red in it, you can confirm that for yourselves (if you think the first scene she appears in doesn't, look closer at the second still frame I used at the beginning of this section).
And as the story progresses, the shades get redder and redder, at the beginning it was usually pink and by the end even the dress The Idol was wearing had changed to a completely red one.
Remember when I said blue represents Mima at the beginning?
This is Mima's way of rebelling against The Idol, though that doesn't mean she's doing it consciously and/or on purpose, wherever she goes redness follows, she doesn't even get to escape it when she's at home, everywhere she looks she sees red.
So it's only natural for her to gravitate towards colder colors when she's choosing clothes to wear.All of the still frames you see above happen before minute 46, what happens at minute 46? It's when The Idol takes control over Mima's body for the first time and performs with her old partners.
Feeling defeated, she goes back home, takes off her blue shirt, and never wears it for the rest of the film. She gets in the tub, surrounded by shades of red, and screams.The acting industry isn't a kind place, as the movie progresses she is expected to do more and more sketchy scenes and nude photo shoots, and that is precisely where and why The Idol and The Creep were manifested.
The more Mima is forced to sell herself the more she acts out as The Idol and The Creep, as a means of stopping herself, I've been talking about those two like they were different people for so long I forgot they were actually one with Mima.
Mima resents this career, this industry and this new life, she's afraid of the public eye, afraid of getting harrased and self-conscious about being famous and all of that is symbolized in this movie by The Creep.
She longs for her old life and her innocent self, she misses singing and being with her group, she needs a device to satisfy these wants and desires, a symbol, which is The Idol.
She gets assaulted by The Creep and almost gets raped before she kills him, but when she and Rumi come back, he's nowhere to be found, you can say he just got up and ran away but...
... all the signs of their fight is nowhere to be found either. On the other hand her clothes are
actually torn up, which leaves us with the explanation:
Mima had a "Tyler Durden" episode where she fought a figment of her own imagination, conjured by The Idol.
At first she was just controlling people
way out of Mima's life, then she became a recurring hallucination, then she started appearing in her dreams and taking over her body and now, she was making her hallucinate not just images, but physical touches as well.
And with that, we are off to the finale and will finally talk about Rumi!
She soon notices that where Rumi brought her is not her own place, her fish were dead, she no longer had that poster up, and the view from her apartment's window is different. This is Rumi's place, and Rumi is living in a replica of Mima's apartment.
Mima looks horrified as the realization hits her, her best friend was being controlled by The Idol too, she was possessed by her all along and this is the last blow she deals to Mima, taking away her best friend and trying to kill her using her.
Every location they stumble upon during their fight has red in it, which I thought was a nice touch.All throughout the film Rumi has been a great friend to Mima, she stood up for her when she was too afraid to do it herself, she checked up on her, and she cried when Mima was doing the rape scene.
I know that another explanation for the entire movie would be that Rumi also had developed Dissociative Identity Disorder and started seeing herself as Mima and emailing The Creep and putting him up to everything in order to eliminate Mima and take her place. I also know that she used to be an idol and her history with the career doesn't help.
But I still think my theory of her being manipulated by The Idol all along makes more sense, to give you a quick idea of what exactly my theory is, short and to the point, here's a recap of everything:
The Idol wants everything to go back to normal, she can possess and control people, so far she was using that power to get in Mima's way and get her to go back to singing but she controlled Rumi and manipulated her as a back up plan, and surely enough, when things didn't pan out with Mima, she resorted to killing her and just letting Rumi take her place. So that way she could live as The Idol Mima-rin forever.This is my interpretation.
This isn't from the ending. In one of the scenes Mima feels overwhelmed and runs out of a subway station,
looks at the clear blue sky, takes a deep breath and calms down.
This
is from the ending. The last scene opens with a shot of the clear blue sky, Mima's at a mental hospital bringing flowers to Rumi.
The incident and having her brain toyed with has left Rumi in shambles, now she actually
does have Dissociative Identity Disorder.
This scene doesn't have a lot of dialogue, but it does have two
very important lines.
> Thanks to her I am what I am today.
On her way to her car two nurses seem to recognize her but they say she must have been a look-alike. Wاen she gets in the car she says:
No, I'm real!
Who is saying that? And what happened to her career? Is Mima in full control now? Or did the Idol win?
Her car is red, does that mean The Idol won and Mima went back to being a pop idol again? Is that what she meant when she said "Thanks to her I am what I am today."? What about when she said "No, I'm real!"? Was that The Idol declaring her existence and full power over a body?
Come to think of it, the blue sky that can be seen in the last frame of the movie and the first frame of this scene must represent Mima right?
Do you trust the blueness of the sky or the redness of the car? Can you even count the blueness of the sky as a hidden message? You can draw shirts in different colors, you can draw cars in different colors, but you can't draw the sky in any other color than blue, but then again, this scene could have very well taken place inside a parking lot, or in cloudy weather, so I guess you can count the blueness of the sky as a message.
But that still doesn't answer the question, who won? What's the ending?
