Multimedia presentation- A Character Study through the Five Senses: Kirigoe Mima and Song Seo-rae

Project Themes:

I plan to explore the clashes between perceived and “actual” identity in Perfect Blue and Decision to Leave through visualizing the five senses. 

Both films address how trauma and voyeurism shape individual memory, creating a distance between the public and private self. The five senses heavily influence individual concepts of  memory and identity; I want to create artistic interpretations of each, tied to scenes and overarching themes from both films.

The main goal of my project is to gather relevant examples of each sense, and compile them into representative pieces of Mima and Seo-Rae’s characters. I specifically want to highlight the divide between their personal self-image, and imagined personas fabricated by characters such as Hae-jun and Rumi.

Touch:

The banishment of sex also gives us one of the film’s most delicious visual offerings: its wardrobe. The thrilled interest that Decision to Leave takes in Seorae’s clothes parallels another intense romance that keeps sex at arm’s length: Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000)… Seorae also has a favoured style – a long-sleeved blouse and gathered calf-length skirt; a combination we see in a variety of fabrics. A particular blue-green dress, meanwhile, becomes a vital clue, its ambiguous colour symbolic of Seorae’s shifting persona and Haejoon’s loss of self.” (McGill, 48)

• For touch, I plan to crochet a blanket with panels of different textures, patterns and color schemes prominently associated with Mima and Seo-Rae. 
• Perfect Blue: Mima’s idol costume, home attire, and costumes from Double Bind. 
• Decision to Leave: colors from the Buddhist temple, her climbing attire, the blue-green dress, and hospice wear.

Taste:

“Familiarity is not normally the stock-in-trade of the femme fatale, and aspects of Seorae’s inner life will certainly remain elusive to Haejoon. But it is their instinctive understanding of one another, not her mystique, that draws the couple together, and that lends Decision to Leave its strange and disarming emotional power. The couple bonds, for example, by eating together, even as they’re antagonistically positioned as investigator and suspect.” (McGill, 45)

•  I will cook dishes and write corresponding recipes (when applicable.) 
• Decision to Leave: fried rice and jjajangmyeon, representing cultural diffusion and Seo-rae’s status as both a “foreigner” and Joseonjok.
• Perfect Blue: cake and champagne (I’m 21), contrasting the scenes of CHAM! celebrating after Mima’s departure and Rumi visiting “Mima’s apartment” for cake.
• Combination of both: ice cream cake?

Scent:

“The ‘pure’ image of an idol encompasses ‘innocent,’ ‘childlike,’ ‘cute,’ ‘tomboy’ appearances and personal qualities, all of which signify the naïve and thus charming performances of young celebrities that are supposedly untainted by commercial professionalism… this packaging of self, in which an adolescent persona is signified as ‘cute,’ ‘pure,’ ‘modest,’ and ‘full of promise,’ is, then, a cultural practice that aims to collectivize public imagination, taste, desire, or consciousness.” (She, 91)

• I will showcase four perfumes featuring scents integral to the films. I plan on creating two separate displays for Mima and Seo-rae through the website Fragrantica.
• Perfect Blue: sweet vs. sultry to represent Mima’s transition from an idol to an actress.
• Decision to Leave: woody vs. marine notes to symbolize the mountains and the sea.

Sight:

“Therefore, this study aims to address these gaps by examining the representation of image codes such as the mountain, sea, and mist, and investigating the underlying causes of the protagonist’s’ tragic fate.” (Zhu, 339)

“At the crux of this paper is the concept of innocence. It is a feminine performance of purity, cuteness, and chastity cast upon the female body.” (She, 89)

• For sight, I want to edit a collage with relevant images of news related to the Japanese entertainment industry and Korean media coverage of immigration. I will incorporate my analytical paper into the collage in sections, where relevant.

Sound:

“Seong observed a contrasting duality in the film and ascribed the conflict to ‘the fateful inconsistency of human existence’ . Han analyzed the story from the perspectives of “language” and “ethics of love”, suggesting that ‘[l]anguage is subordinated to [the ethics of love]”, and subject to “ethical violence’.” (Zhu, 338)

• I will compile a Spotify playlist with an original cover image, featuring songs from each represented culture. The music will be period appropriate, featured in the films, or songs that suit the theme.
• Perfect Blue: 中原めいこ (Meiko Nakahara) – Fantasy
• Decision to Leave: 정훈희 – 안개 | Jung Hoon Hee – Mist

Works Cited:

Birrell, A. (1999). The Classic of Mountains and Seas. Penguin.

Gardner, W. O. (2009). The cyber sublime and the Virtual Mirror: Information and media in the works of Oshii Mamoru and Kon Satoshi. Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 18(1), 44–70. https://doi.org/10.3138/cjfs.18.1.44 

Jeon, J. J. (2009). Residual selves: Trauma and forgetting in Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy. Positions: Asia Critique, 17(3), 713–740. https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-2009-021 

McGill, Hannah. “Kiss Me Deadly.” Sight & Sound, Dec. 2022, Vol. 32, Issue 10.

She, Y. (2021). A Cure for Woundless Pain. Reconsidering Language and Gender in Contemporary Japan and among the Japanese Diaspora amid the #MeToo Movement, 33(1), 87–102. https://doi.org/10.1075/japc.00072.she 

Zhu, J. (2023). Mountain and Sea: Gender Dilemma in Park-Chan-Wook’s Decision to Leave.