One of the greatest tragedies in life is to lose your own sense of self and accept the version of you that is expected by everyone else.
K.L Toth
In the present age, it seems more than ever that society has been working overtime to tell people how they must identify themselves. The government and media are hell bent on telling people their place in society. Celebrity culture tells individuals to align themselves with Group A or they will be ostracized from society. Vaccine mandates, political affiliation, and even gender identity seem to enforce a society where the individual doesn’t matter.
In media and television, there are many films that remind the viewer of these topics. The movie in discussion for now will be a Japanese anime film entitled Perfect Blue. Perfect Blue is a movie about a pop singer who transitions to acting.
If a man is not faithful to his own individuality, he cannot be loyal to anything.
Claude McKay
During the events of this movie, the protagonist is struggling with the transition from singing to acting. The protagonist is being accosted by her agents to either drop or take on roles whether she approves of them or not. The protagonist struggles with the roles she is being given to the point where she starts to hallucinate images of her former pop idol self while people in her professional life are being murdered.
She also has a loyal fanbase of people who start to believe that the actress is not the real version of her and that the pop idol is still the real deal. There is even a website claiming that the pop star is still making music. It makes one fan obsessed to the point where he actively stalks her. Everyone from her mother, her agents, and even the fans start to see her as less than she was as a pop star. One scene in particular destroys the obsessed fan’s image of her purity to the point of believing she is an impostor.
What does this sound like when one thinks about everyday life? It could be a metaphor for the expectations that society places on men and women. Men are expected to be useful beasts of burden or their lives don’t matter. Women’s lives seem to revolve around their purity and beauty. Without those things, for the most part, women become invisible. Media and television tell people if they don’t buy this product, get fat, get plastic surgery, wear certain clothes, and listen to the same music everyone else does, they have no place in society. The hard truth is, as Ed Latimore put it, no one gives a shit about you.
Modern governments seem to be developing stricter laws in terms of societal standards towards vaccinations and medicine. Many political parties in governments across the world are scrapping the idea that individual rights matter in terms of vaccine mandates, citing COVID as an excuse to strip individuals of their rights and destroy small business. Most will not be able to adapt to a world where the individual liberties are being pushed to the side on a massive scale.
The title character feels out of place in the movie because everyone around her has expectations for her to fulfill to become a fully fleshed out actor while the fans of her music don’t accept her individual choice to leave pop singing. One side refuses to let her grow while the other is telling her to take extreme measures to remove the image of her former life. No one in the movie cares about her feelings on her career move or the trajectory of her life, so the protagonist struggles to find her place in the unforgiving world of fame. She starts to lose sight of what is real and what is hallucination due to the pressure of the acting industry and the threat of certain death by a serial stalker.
While the average person may not be famous, they can still feel out of place. It is up to that individual to explore themselves. Every man or woman’s journey is their own and no one will do the hard work for them. It may seem as if the world is against you, but the truth is, everyone on this earth is an indivdual looking for their place in the world. Don’t let other people’s expectations of you determine your destiny or you will find out quickly that being a yes man can destroy your life as badly as any drug or accident.
Until the Next Daydream…
Daydreams Manifesting 