Dreams, Ideology, and Paprika (2006)

The upper most limits of creative animation are defined and then overcome during the blisteringly fast runtime of Satoshi Kon's masterpiece Paprika (2006). It's a powder keg of the colorful, expressive, active and entertaining, with each scene more detailed and inventive than the last. There's not a wasted moment, not a wasted frame; everything that makes Paprika great is in there, radiating from the screen activating every synapse. Yet, the immense activity of the film might be a bit of a double edge sword: on the one hand, Kon reveals a new upper limit to animation (one which I don’t think has been matched yet), experimenting and innovating with the ideas to a near cataclysmic degree; on the other hand, the film becomes — to use a visual metaphor the film employs — a bit like the walking parade of dream-things. What do I mean by this? I simply mean that the film becomes a parade of images, a parade of ideas which are often inscrutable as they stand in relationship to each other. The film, both through it's scene-to-scene construction and through it's sheer quantity of thematic/plot elements, sometimes feels like it's going to break the screen: partly it feels like it's too heavy for the medium that it has chosen — film can only do so much — and partly, that the ideas feel rushed within the temporal limits that this film sets itself within.

So, I think this film has too much going on in it, especially considering it's short run time. On the one hand, we might identify this as a sort of effort to recreate the feeling of dreaming: the film feels cramped, so as to lull one into a near dream state. We might even call this good film-making, as the affect of the film — the intended affect of the film: to catch the effervescent quality of dreams — matches the encompassing dream-like style. Yet, the film still attempts to make some point: there is a logic here, a message and a meaning, that I would not identify with the dream (un)logic presented. The quantity of ideas and images is not intended to simply replicate a dream, but intended to make a point about the nature of reality and dreams, as two facets of human life that interrelate, ultimately, in a logical way — at least according to the psychological-analytical position that the film takes. So, on the other hand, we might identify the jam-packed extravaganza that this film becomes as a potential road block to it making the coherent point that Kon clearly had in making this wacky film. Clearly the expense of making another 30 minutes of film — to flush out and clarify all the disparate plot lines — would have been immense, as this film was clearly expensive as hell to make, yet a 2-hour run time might have brought this film to an end that would have been far more satisfying. As it stands, the interrelated plots do not feel polished enough, nor are the interrelation satisfying enough for it to ultimately feel complete; because of this the ending feels rushed and haphazard. There’s too many ideas, too much happening.

Yet, despite my apparently biting criticisms, I will return to Paprika again and again. Why is this the case? Here, we need to explain what I think the film communicates, then discuss how this relates to the problem of overcrowding ideas/plots, and relate all of this to the end of the film. So, what is Paprika about? This is seemingly a hard question to answer, especially on a first watch, as the film is so visually explosive that I felt like my brain was sprinting just trying to keep up with all the moving images. But on my second time around, I gathered a lot more from both the visual language and dialogue. I think I want to argue that Paprika is about the overwhelming loss of mediation between dreams — in the broadest sense of the word — and reality. The main conflict comprises several ideas that support my above claim: first, psychological researchers loose the technology that allows them to unravel and interpret dreams, second, characters fall prey to a sort of communal-dream that feeds upon individuals psyche, as they seem unable to control and understand the difference between their own reality and dreams, and the compounding, reality consuming communal dream. The bare-bones plot — the first point above — in which the DC Mini device becomes lost, leads to all the events of the film, leading to the expansion of the dream to encompass all people — the second point. The core of the film is about the necessity of mediation, of analysis of the dreams people have. We see necessity of dream-mediation at the individual level when we explore the detective’s plot and character arc; we see this social/societal necessary of dream-mediation, in a slightly less direct way, with the gradual take over of reality by dreams.

But what is a dream, and more importantly, how does the dream effect individuals and society differently? We have all experienced dreams in our sleep; this seems to be the main sort of dream that the film explores. Yet, as I said before, I think there is more to what a dream is, at least as it is understood within this film. I think we might also, based on visual clues throughout the film, identify the dream with more general desires, association societal ideals and ideological understandings of being in the world. If we watch the parade of dream-things closely, we see familiar political and social symbols: the statue of liberty flanks a samurai, religious figures flock together, toys pile over each other, characters call for currency as they shift into the very gold they desire, and different elderly man compete to sit on the parade thrown. I see, in this pile of junk, a series of dreams; a better description might be dream-things, or the stuff-of-dreams. These things do not really exist: we might say that there is no ideal liberty, there is no true samurai spirit, there is no real money, there is no real ultimate power once one has reached the thrown; these ideological-dream-workings only function because there is a belief that they do, a sort of adherence to the idea of the dream; they only “exist” — in a very loose sense — because they are dreamed of. We see these dream-things in different places throughout the film: in the camera that shoots a film, in the sexual desires of the characters, in the Internet and films that we view in a dream-like haze. All these places contain and depict the dream, allowing us to engage not only with our own dreams, but with communal dreams, communal ideologies and things.

And this is why we need the DC Mini. We need something to mediate all of these dreams. We need “psychologists” — thinkers that helps us analyze all of these different sorts of dreams — in order to maintain an intelligent distance from the objects of our desire. The film directly depicts what happens when we loose the ability to understand these interrelated desires: people become subsumed by their desires, fated to turn into gold statues, turning into their own cell-phones to look up girls’ skirts (the only desire/dream/ideological underpinning of any teenage boy). We might even take this visual metaphor further, and think about Himuro, the first character to start the dream parade rolling, yet also a victim of that very process. In him, we see that once one looses his ability to control and mediate their understanding of the dream, one becomes hollow; there is nothing on inside of us, other than our dreams, other than the ideological make up of our psyches. When we are unable to understand our own relationship to ideologies and desires, we loose our internal dream make up to the mass communal dream parade. The dreams intermingle and multiply getting increasingly confused, causing more damage to the real world. The film seems to claim in the end, that through analysis of the people’s internal dream landscape we can maintain the distinction between reality and dreams.

Yet, my reading of this film does not ultimately fit all that well within the ending. What the chairman represents ultimately, eludes me: I am confused as to his place in the story, and why his transformation occurs. While the rest of the film seems to represent a sort of impending expanding control of dreams, one which does not seem directed in any particular way, the end of the film seems directly concerned with a central bad guy. And ultimately, the solution to the problem — that man must remain in contrast with women — felt poorly established, nor did it fit very well with the other themes of the film. While it does support the idea that there are binary forces — dream/reality, man/woman, nature/art — in the world and those must be maintained in order for society to function, it does not ultimately fit with some of the more superficial plot elements established earlier on. The mediation element of dreams, the world which has been breached by ideological and desire-driven thinking, the loss ultimately of the central plot did not feel completed, in the end. We might also questions the chairman’s control of the dream-landscape: why, when all these other characters sunk into a near coma, was the chairman able to control the merge between the real and the dream? The ending is further complicated by the other plot lines: the detective’s character arc is ultimately rather satisfying and allows the film to end on a positive note, and does seem to represent the importance of mediation in microcosm, but ultimately his story feels like a relatively small thing, compared to the behemoth that is the chairmen. Again, I think this is indicative mostly of the inevitable time constraints of the film, and thus it’s hard to fault the creators for this. Yet, I think it is important to keep the disjointed plot in mind as one attempts to analyze this film.

Ending complaints aside, I think the analysis one can preform through Paprika becomes vitally fruitful. Clearly, there is something here, in the complexity of the different dream worlds constructed by Kon. And regardless of interpretive meaning, there is something clearly important and intention in how the film presents and understands dream. Reality and dreams — and the interrelation therein — is something that has the potential to help us understand the dreams we have, and ultimately the platforms we chose to use, assuming that Paprika is correct in saying that the Internet is a dream. Finally, I might also question my assumption that a crowded film is a problem. Filmic fullness, if anything, might actually be presented as a challenge; it may actually allow for more interest to garnered in the audience, allowing more people to attach meaning to the disparate plots and characters, and ultimately call us all to sort out what is going on. We have to make parts of the film; we have to figure it out, which is ultimately an entertaining and creative experience. And, if we take my reading of the film to heart, working over the disparate ideas in Paprika might also allows us to practice mediating our own dreams.