Dreaming of Reality in Paprika
Turn on Satoshi Kon's Paprika, and you are suddenly in the middle of a circus act. Elaborately dressed dancers ride atop elephants, men on stilts walk hand-in-hand holding balloons, and a lion jumps through a ring of fire. Suddenly, a spotlight shines on a detective in the middle of a vast audience as a magician on stage begins a countdown. 1, 2, 3. At the wave of the magician’s wand, the detective appears on stage trapped in a golden cage. Audience members rush to the stage, surrounding, and clawing at the detective. Their faces all merge into one: the face of the detective.
This opening scene is the dream of Detective Toshimi Konakawa. Its disorienting imagery and confusing plot address an important recurring question throughout the film. What is reality and what is fiction?
In Paprika, the dream world of the near future has become a physical reality. A revolutionary device called the DC Mini, created by a team of researchers led by the solemn scientist Dr. Atsuko Chiba, allows the user to enter the dreams of psychiatric patients. Konakawa, from the beginning of the film, is a patient of this device. As Dr. Chiba explains to Konakawa following his circus dream, the device is still a work-in-progress; when it is finished, the patient will be able to enter dreams while awake.
But before it can be completed, thieves steal four prototype devices to doctor their own dreams and begin implanting them into the minds of the researchers. Slowly, a wave of madness sweeps through these researchers, and later all of Japan, inducing hallucinations of the dream world. At the climax of the film, the dream becomes a reality for all characters.
While the animated dreams can be colorful and slightly disorienting like Konakawa’s circus dream, the dreams in Paprika are, as a whole, an escape from reality. In the dream world, Konakawa pictures himself as a successful movie director, while Dr. Chiba envisions herself as a charming pixie-like redhead, a contrast to her stern character in reality. For both characters, the dreams let them live their unrealised aspirations.
Like the dreams of Konakawa and Dr. Chiba, the film identifies itself as a means of escapism. The cinema, as Kon reminds us, is an environment for hallucination. The dreams in Paprika confuse the movie’s cinematic audience as much as the characters in the film. As film-enjoyers, we are attracted to Paprika’s storytelling, colorful panels, and electric musical scores. The film becomes our reality.
But there is a real danger to living in these realities for too long. If the film or dream world subsumes every waking part of our lives, we can lose sight of our own identities just like the researchers who become incapable of anything but dreaming.
At its most basic level, film is capable of capturing the flow of time due to the mechanical nature of the film projector, which can reproduce movements in an unvarying forward movement of action. Despite the cuts between shots and scenes, we, the audience, experience a film as one continuous narrative. Although we can understand the flow of cinematic time, it differs greatly from our own conventional experiences with time. With effects like slow-motion or techniques like the shaky camera, films create their own sense of reality. Like dreams, this new cinematic reality absorbs us into the narrative world it creates, replacing our own identity with those depicted on screen. In dreams we replace ourselves with our dream selves, and in film, we replace ourselves with the performers on screen.
To avoid becoming subsumed by this dream or film world, Kon recognises the need for balance between our reality and our dream realities. In the end scene of Paprika, Konokawa is shown buying movie tickets, finally recognising that he can balance his work life as a police officer with his passion for films. Afterall, we all need a little escapism through films or dreams to allow the repressed conscious mind to vent. As Kon said, “It is necessary to have that relief, because without it life is too difficult.”