Away! Burn all the records of the realm.
A brief synopsis of Paprika would usually take Paprika—the form Dr. Atsuko Chiba assumes in dreams—as its starting point. Chiba becomes Paprika and enters other people’s dreams, initially to treat Detective Konakawa, and later to thwart the chairman’s plot to make dreams and the real world become one. The protagonists ultimately prevail; dreams and reality return to their respective places, and peace is restored.
Such a synopsis always seems exceedingly flat. Too many elements of obvious importance in the film escape this retelling: Oedipus and the Sphinx, for instance, surely cannot be superfluous, yet we cannot accommodate them in our account of the story. Meddlesome film critics are therefore often eager to counter the apparent story with a series of conspiracy-style readings. The problem, however, is that films and dreams alike are structured like a language. In analyzing a film—or a dream—we cannot simply distinguish, among the components interpretable as signifiers, those that lead to a process of purity from those that do not, since all its components are to be treated as a network of signifiers. Even where the intended references are quite obvious—the politicians in the parade proclaiming themselves emperors and gods, the phone-headed perverts burrowing under schoolgirls’ skirts, moments when Kon’s satire of society’s ugliness is almost explicit—we must still bracket these references and restrict ourselves to the signifying range of the film’s components. Otherwise, we fall into a thoroughly vulgarized Freudian logic: the laughable notion, familiar to many, that someone who needs to urinate will dream of a dripping tap. Through this fundamental Freudian rupture, we readily discover that the film itself contains only a network in which causes and effects actively interact, rather than a structure of signifiers.
On this point, Paprika, Kon’s final animated feature, has attracted a positively excessive stream of professional and amateur commentary and interpretation. Its enduring popularity owes rather more to arguments about whether Nolan plagiarized it. In all these interpretations, ingenious or obvious, lavished on a film that is not particularly easy to analyze, do we not see a signifying chain running in a vicious circle? Again and again it produces a new master-signifier to supply itself retroactively with a foundation, striving to close the circle. It is hardly surprising, then, that different critics tell us the film’s central concern is love, modernity, a technological crisis, or even the unconscious and psychoanalysis. (Flights of fancy through dreams and the unconscious allow the exploration of a surreal plot; together with Kon’s surreal imagery and his dazzling, seamless editing, they seem to give viewers a perfect demonstration of the logic dreams ought to have.) In these efforts we glimpse the absence of what Lacan calls the primally repressed binary signifier.
Is this not precisely the chairman’s obstinate view of dreams? Again and again he preaches in a feverish tone: “Now is the time to make good every lack, to bring about complete order. I shall have unlimited freedom!” In other words, he believes dreams possess the same totality as language: they are a world complete and closed in itself, admitting no outsiders, yet allowing everything to be said within it. The black giant he ultimately becomes gives this belief concrete form. He bellows about absolute order while destroying everything with abandon—is the symbolic order’s preservation of its original completeness not precisely that mythical moment when the primal father, the embodiment of the complete symbolic order, walks the earth? The symbolic order has universal validity, while the primal father, this imagined father, stands beyond the very order he has established. Yet the language of dreams and films must always depend on external reality, since that reality generates their independent states of affairs. This external reality, however, has often already been closed off through language. In other words, the finite totality of dreams and films, with its internal tension, must be expressed by an irreducible limit. Even the complete order the chairman clamors for is always an order revolving around its own central void, defined by this repressed void at its foundation. Try to fill it, as the chairman does, and the order he dreams of loses its consistency and disintegrates. And who brings his beautiful dream crashing down if not “woman” as an ontological scandal? The female figure who devours him and his order belongs neither to dreams, as Paprika, nor to reality, as Dr. Chiba. Rather, she is the internal rupture in the symbolic order exposed when the two become one. Osanai thinks Paprika is merely a false skin, with the real Chiba concealed inside; yet throughout the film Paprika repeatedly acts independently and in her own right, a point we will return to. This female figure refuses to appear through the mediation of the symbolic order. Instead, she chooses to participate in that order by not existing—and to appear in the film.
What the chairman discovers to his horror in the little girl, the empty placeholder devouring him, is precisely the incompleteness of the symbolic order itself. The parricide we witness—he howls in agony as he is sucked up like jelly—thus reflects the ultimate failure of the phallus’s attempt to make good the symbolic order’s deficiencies by means of the Real. For the chairman, “Dreams are humanity’s last remaining refuge.” Yet this Kantian yearning for “unlimited freedom” overlooks the symbolic order’s mediating function within a transcendental horizon. Beneath the deceptive allure of the noumenon, its totality always harbors a missing link. In other words, the gap separating the phenomenal world of experience from the noumenon persists, leaving the thing in itself difficult to approach. To cross this gap in an attempt to reach the thing itself generally brings the mediating transcendental domain inexorably to an end—as the chairman’s failure demonstrates. We must therefore understand the limit as something ontologically constituted. This is also why the phallus is merely an imaginary compensation for its own lack: the primal father is nothing but something the phallus retroactively presupposes in imagination. Only once the primal father has been devoured and killed can the phallus successfully emerge as a point of suture for the symbolic order’s internal rupture. We finally return, that is, to the so-called “orderly everyday life” in which dreams and reality do not trespass on one another. (It is precisely this clean division that deserves to be questioned at its very foundations. Dr. Chiba’s romance with the fat otaku scientist has always been a hot topic in discussions of Paprika, but we should notice that Paprika herself has by now disappeared.)
Is the humanity the chairman speaks of not, in a sense, the fundamental experience of human beings as beings of language: a desire that is constitutively unsatisfied and continually obstructed? His hostility to the development of the DC Mini stems from more than a fear of change or of losing control over technology. More specifically, he fears the loss of possibility. The device makes intangible, mysterious dreams more concrete and comprehensible, easier to realize; all dreams will then come true within dreams, and what was lost will be regained. To the chairman, this means that even dreams have been destroyed by technology. As Dr. Torataro Shima says in the film, “I like remembering my university days. We used to talk about our future and the limitless possibilities awaiting us.” The reality he longs for at this moment is precisely what troubles Konakawa and what the chairman defends—not the past, but the future already lost. Here we can see the chairman undergo a hysterical conversion, one that inverts the obstacle itself: obstructed desire becomes a desire for obstruction; unsatisfied desire becomes a desire for dissatisfaction. What is desired is precisely that our desire should remain open. What the chairman wants is like the dream recounted by the “happy butcher’s wife,” in which her wish goes unfulfilled. Through this conversion, desire reveals its reflexivity: it is always also a desire to desire. The chairman’s declaration that “Dreams are sublime” makes this unmistakable.
In Kantian terms, the sublime is the paradoxical shift from the impossibility of presentation to the presentation of impossibility. In other words, the chairman believes that dreams contain a thing in itself that cannot be displayed in the phenomenal realm. All we can do is present this impossibility itself in various ways, making the transcendental dimension of the thing in itself stand out more clearly. Indeed, throughout the main plot, the chairman and Osanai keep attacking Paprika—the “terrorist” who, in their eyes, defiles sublime dreams—in what are, on the contrary, terrorist attacks of their own, trying to mock her dream therapy, which they regard as a joke. To some extent, is Kon’s decision to give the chairman a disability, whether intentional in this respect or not, anything less than an obvious clue? His crippled legs give concrete form to the impasse and are the crux of his hysteria in the Lacanian sense. His blocked traumatic kernel is converted into a bodily symptom, creating a distorted bodily language that expresses psychic content ordinary language cannot convey. He has, in other words, a hysterical desire. What the chairman advocates is not opposition to dreaming. This is one of the puzzling things about the plot: he seems vehemently opposed to entering dreams, yet ends up more absorbed in them than anyone else. Many viewers and critics simply put this down to his posturing, but that is wrong. He believes, rather, that truly ethical conduct means continuing to dream, continually postponing satisfaction, continually sustaining the fantasy of desire, so that he can remain at the level of desiring and become a subject of desire. (We can therefore also say that, in the end, the chairman gets his wish: an ethical death in Lacan’s sense, a death consistent with desire.)
Seen this way, the great parade, as the chairman’s dream, is clearly a combination of his dream and his nightmare. Traditional Japanese culture, modern technology, and figures from the West and other parts of the world come together to form a terrifying multitude of monsters bent on moving forward, growing constantly as they advance with unwavering determination. It looks modern, diverse, prosperous, but is also full of chaos and confusion. The price of rashly joining it is the loss of our individual identities. Yet when it comes to continually moving forward, Detective Konakawa, who spends practically the entire film running, is an even more striking example. As a detective, he tirelessly pursues criminals, resolute in his determination to keep going. We could even say that his pursuit is the more convincing thread running through the whole film: it opens the film and supplies the turning point that reverses impending defeat.
More interesting still, if we remain attentive amid Kon’s dazzling montage tricks, we discover to our surprise that even before the chairman’s plot unfolds—before dreams invade reality—Konakawa has been casually displaying inexplicable superpowers all along. After his treatment, for example, the therapist he sees is Paprika, not Chiba; he can also slip through a computer screen into a dream… We can, of course, regard these scenes merely as cinematic devices intended to give dreams a sense of reality. But might they instead suggest that the reality of so-called everyday life already retains a dreamlike, magical dimension? One major point in the endless arguments about Konakawa concerns the poster for Dreaming Kids at the film’s end: it contains a little girl who was absent before. Some critics have inferred, incorrectly, that the dream has not yet ended. Yet if we return to the scene in which the poster first appears, we are surprised to find that it is precisely a magical scene. Driving his car, Konakawa recalls some old pain—later revealed to concern his youthful dream of making films—and, sweating profusely, clutches his chest. The image begins to warp and shake. Amid the disorientation, we see license plates bearing accusatory questions and the Dreaming Kids poster without the little girl. This tension conveys his unsettled subjectivity. The distorted, wavering scenery—or the protruding or distorting stains of the Real—seems to constitute folds corresponding to the subject in Deleuze’s sense. Under the influence of this stain, the subject’s objective correlative, a previously clear field of vision is deformed and damaged. Which is supposedly real, and which delusional: the poster without the girl that appears here, or the later poster in which she is present? As this question confounds us, the relationship between the distorting stain and reality quietly reverses before our eyes. We discover that the little girl in the poster has taken on the function of objet petit a. Around this object that stands in for the subject, the frame representing reality and the external scenery dissolve into smudges, while the subject sees a dreamlike magic in the little girl. (To some extent, we can say that objet petit a stands in opposition to the phallic master-signifier. The former is the irritating stain forever blurring our picture of reality, or the “bone in the throat” whose presence prevents the subject from ever approaching so-called objective reality. It opposes a subjectless objective order; the latter, by contrast, is a subjective supplement that sustains objective order.)
It is thus easy to see why Konakawa corresponds to Oedipus beneath the painting of Oedipus and the Sphinx in the meeting room. Chiba corresponds to the Sphinx, hinting at the growing female figure in the final confrontation. In the dreamlike scenes, the persistent split between Konakawa’s figure and his surroundings is a constitutive fissure in subjectivity that Kon deliberately emphasizes through cinematic language. The dreamlike scenery looks less real than Konakawa, yet in its magical dimension reveals a deeper reality than his thinly drawn figure. This suggests that he has maintained a certain “immaturity” that makes it difficult for him to integrate with his surroundings. Later, of course, we learn that this is the dream of making films that has never left him. In other words, Konakawa has not undergone a delayed negation in Hegel’s sense: he remains an immature subject still attached to an object, and the little girl is precisely the object that guarantees his fantasy-like connection with reality. (At the film’s end, when he resolves his inner conflict, she returns to her proper place in the poster. Incidentally, for Konakawa this girl may not correspond strictly to Paprika, which also goes some way toward explaining Paprika’s eventual disappearance.)
A better example is the seventeenth floor, to which Konakawa compulsively returns. At this endpoint of the chase, the momentary confrontation between the fugitive about to escape through the door and the policeman hesitating with his gun raised is suspended and slowed. Time seems to congeal. This scene carries an obviously excessive libidinal investment, and its staging at this moment depends precisely on the loss of partial objects: breath held, sound suddenly gone. As noted above, these small partial objects are both subjective stains sustaining objective order and objects that sustain subjectivity as “bones in the throat”—the very short-circuit between subject and object. When Konakawa finally shoots Osanai dead, for instance, the film cuts to a long shot and the sound drops out. Here the sense of reality is infected by an element of lost reality, depriving it of some of its character as “true reality”—and this fictionalizing element is precisely the traumatic Real. Traumatic violence within the narrative thus acquires a dreamlike quality. Shouldn’t Wong Fei-hung and Ip Man smashing someone’s head be utterly horrifying? Yet we happily accept a “smashed head” that amounts to no more than some blood and a loss of consciousness. In other words, the Real appears within the dream at this moment disguised as a dream within a dream. Extend this view, and all the film’s dreams are undoubtedly dreams within dreams. The same principle applies to the moments when characters see unexpected images of themselves in mirrors: Chiba sees Paprika, while Konakawa sees the fugitive he has been pursuing reflected in the glass. Through cinematic presentation, the everyday act of looking in a mirror unmistakably becomes a moment of revelation in which the Real appears.
We should note, however, that Paprika and the fugitive, these two structurally similar images—or characters—cannot actually be discussed together. Although both participate in the film’s narrative to some extent as libidinally invested symbolic identities, neither is the illusory identity of a real person. The film’s most pornographic scene is surely the one in which Osanai pulls Chiba out of Paprika’s body. Paprika is discarded like sloughed-off dead skin. This follows from Osanai’s prejudiced understanding of their relationship: he thinks Paprika is merely Chiba’s illusory identity. Ironically, however, an independent Paprika subsequently appears intact before everyone, even before Chiba, her supposed original. The scene offers a paradoxical, tautological judgment: Paprika is Paprika. In other words, we must affirm the apparition’s identity as an apparition. Paprika is both a fleeting, ghostlike hallucination—she is already wandering about at the film’s beginning—and a supersensible entity. To some extent, this suggests the impossibility of comprehending reality as a whole: the very condition of encountering reality is that some part of it must lose its reality and be experienced as a “ghost.” The fugitive, by contrast, cannot be discussed apart from Konakawa. We could even say that the ghostlike figure here is Konakawa himself. The secret truth he gradually discovers in his pursuit is not that the things around him—the object he pursues, the setting of the chase—are false, but that he himself does not exist in this dream. In other words, there is no dream double, no narrator through whom Konakawa experiences the dream or watches the film. This resembles the childish nonsense Lacan often cites: asked how many brothers he has, a child answers, “I have three brothers: Ernest, Paul, and myself.” Konakawa likewise comes to recognize that “The policeman is chasing the fugitive; I am chasing myself.” The gap between the subject of enunciation and the subject of the statement is sustained here by a certain reflexivity. In other words, as in Freud’s classic dream in which a father appears before his son without knowing that he is dead, unless I am “included out,” I will arrive at a shocking, anti-Cartesian discovery: it is not the world around me that is fictional, but I myself. This explains why, at the moment Konakawa fails to capture the fugitive, he becomes transparent and plunges downward before waking with a start.
This is clearest the third time he enters the dream. In the elevator, he watches with satisfaction the circus, train, and Tarzan sequences starring “himself.” These are scenes he had already conceived for his film. But when he reaches the seventeenth floor, because he has never worked out how to shoot the final confrontation with the fugitive, he instantly returns from the spectator’s position to that of the anxious protagonist, trapped in the chase and repeating it over and over. This logic of “Include me out!” expresses Konakawa’s strange aim as an obsessional subject: to remain between exclusion from and inclusion in the symbolic order. And we do indeed see a policeman who cannot stop thinking about a career in film. In this dream of pursuit, the signifier representing the pursuer is an empty signifier, one without a signified. It is through this empty signifier that Konakawa himself is inserted into the dream as a kind of non-subject. To put it paradoxically, in this signifier the signifying network includes not so much the subject as his exclusion. As the story unfolds, we learn that this chase scene is an unresolved knot in Konakawa’s youthful filmmaking dream. It comes from an excruciatingly boring “avant-garde film” consisting of running from beginning to end. His supposed childhood friend, the fugitive, is in fact the young Konakawa himself. (Thus it may not simply be that the film was not fully thought out: working alone, with the limitations he faced at the time, he may never have shot it at all.) Looking back at those scenes he supposedly had worked out, we find that they tend to be classic sequences from classic films.
In other words, Konakawa is like the anorexic who eats nothingness itself. He believes that the feelings these films produce are valuable only as feelings belonging to the original films, not to him. The hidden enjoyment here lies in his conclusion that he will never have anything truly “his own.” Desire is always the Other’s desire, not “mine”; I can desire an object only within the range of objects the Other desires. The anorexic’s choice is therefore to abandon every definite object of desire and desire nothingness itself. More importantly, through this self-reflexive turn, the symbolic form itself is embedded among these elements. What Konakawa is fixated on is like what the joke reveals when “the thief is stealing wheelbarrows.”1 Making films, the form that contains “classic scenes,” amounts to acquiring a void that could potentially contain them. Is this empty signifier without a signified, which ultimately replaces the subject himself like the nothingness the anorexic eats, not precisely what the film-obsessed young Konakawa yearns for? Yet as an amateur filmmaker, he plainly lacks the talent of a Godard or others of that caliber. No epoch-making avant-garde masterpiece emerges from his hands. All that remains is the cry, “How do I shoot what comes next?”—almost the very sound of a dream collapsing. From a certain perspective, a director sets the film’s intersubjective relations in motion while remaining unaffected himself. Does he not occupy precisely the obsessional position of a pure, invisible mediator? (The obsessional’s coveted ideal is to be “included” in a situation, but only in the “detached” mode of an invisible intervening agent—one who is never properly counted among the situation’s elements.) Konakawa’s unconscious choice to model his appearance in the dream on Akira Kurosawa is therefore an image that can bring a knowing smile to an attentive viewer’s face.
Incidentally, it is precisely here that we see the difference between Konakawa’s constant running and the chairman’s steadily advancing parade. For the chairman, repression first appears as an attempt to regulate desire: declaring other desires illegitimate becomes a spontaneous source of satisfaction within the libidinal economy. This is because, in hysteria, life’s necessary opening is closed by an imaginary refusal of castration. The hysteric consequently falls into continual dissatisfaction over the gap in the Other, bewildered by the Other’s demand. (In hysterical identification, the hysteric identifies with the Other’s desire, which can lead to identification with a signifier and, in turn, bodily conversion; P.S. .) Konakawa, by contrast, “excludes” even the desire to regulate. The obsessional continually sacrifices his own desire to meet the Other’s demand, which he has no choice but to satisfy, so that the Other may be complete. (The obsessional attempts to control the signifiers connected with the Other’s desire, seeking through this control to make good the Other’s lack; P.S. .) Yet we must point out that the Other is itself an empty set marked by lack, merely a logical position to which the subject refers. In narcissistic imagination, however, the subject vainly seeks to refuse castration and death by continuing to believe that the Other is complete, attempting to fill its incompleteness through an imaginary **. This is, of course, futile for an Other already marked by lack. Hence the hysteric can never be satisfied, while the obsessional remains forever enslaved to the Other.
In short, Paprika is not a film about traveling between reality and dreams, nor can it serve as a key to the unconscious that unlocks our dreams—as is generally the case with Kon’s films. But that does not make it intellectually crude. Much remains unanalyzed here. The film contains multiple tensions—past and present, stillness and movement, youthful awkwardness and practiced assurance—which point toward reality and dreams, illusion and truth: these are its central idea. The best expression of this comes in a scene near the end, one that brings everything together and conveys an important message. The fugitive in the mirror, the young Konakawa so eager to make cops-and-robbers films, tells his future self: “The film I made has come true. You really became a policeman. This is reality created out of imagination. Treasure it.” At this moment we finally understand that Paprika is a kind of medium, existing between reality and fiction, between different identities, different individuals, and different collectives. She does not come to solve problems and put an end to disagreement, but to reach a reconciliation with others, to understand what one person has in common with another. Perhaps this is how Kon understood the art of animation, and what he was always striving to do.
Susumu Hirasawa created two pieces for Paprika worthy of a place in history. Yet compared with “Parade,” full of despairing revelry, the soaring, joyous “The Girl in Byakkoya – White Tiger Field” comes closer to the feeling Kon sought to express through this film:2
遠くの空 回る花の 円陣の喧しさに (High in the sky, the circling ring of flowers makes an uproar)
あの日や あの日に (That day, on that very day)
超えてきた分岐が目を覚ます (Beyond the crossroads, suddenly waking from a dream)
陽炎に身を借りて (Borrowing a body from a mayfly)
道を指す娘を追い (Chasing the girl who points down the road into the distance)
高台に現れた (Climbing the hill, what comes into view)
名も知らぬ広野は懐かしく (Is a plain whose name we do not even know, yet which stirs our longing)
あー静かな静かな娘の視野で (Within the quiet, silent girl’s field of vision)
あー見知らぬ都に灯が灯りだす (Scattered lights begin to shine in a city never seen before)
あーマントルが饒舌に火を吹き上げて (Inside the talkative kerosene lampshade, flames sweep upward)
捨てられた野に立つ人を祝うよ (Bestowing blessings on those who stand in the abandoned field)
あー静かな静かな娘の視野で (Within the quiet, silent girl’s field of vision)
あー見知らぬ都に灯が灯りだす (Scattered lights begin to shine in a city never seen before)
Xin chào các bạn. (Welcome)
Đây là Quê Hương của chúng tôi (This is our homeland)
Đây là tương lai của chúng tôi (This is our future)
