Best Films of 2007 #10: Paprika

Satoshi Kon's latest best captures the palpable fear of the destructive capacities of our imaginary that simmers beneath the surface of most of the other interesting films this year. The film concerns a terrorist who has stolen a device that can link up our dreams into a collective nightmare, and it has the conviction to suggest that the nightmare that erupts goes far beyond the original intentions of the terrorist who had originally spawned it. We see such an understanding of a clockwork terrorism which has popped a spring permeating the feature, as an animated parade of giant broken toys marches through a central avenue of the dreamworld, bursting through the seams of other individuals' unconscious, and breaking through into the real world as something like a childlike destroyer-god. More poignantly, the film enacts precisely the kind of horror it critiques: its most potent image of Paprika (a dream avatar for a female psychologist) pinned to a table like a butterfly, while a man reaches his hand between her legs to rip off her skin and reveal the doctor beneath, has itself invaded my own thoughts and nightmares, a testament to the film's faith in the power of film.

The film begs, in other words, for the kind of faux-pyschoanalytical interpretation that would level every cultural symbol onto the same social grounding, but it couldn't be more contemporary in its impenetrability outside of the proper intertextual and social context. Paprika is, after all, something like a spicier version of Akira, that anime which first burst the seams across cultural imaginaries by gaining cult popularity Stateside. But while that earlier apocalyptic fantasy opened with the image of a crater through which humanity can transform into something that is terrifying in its productive capacity, Paprika suggests that it is the terrifying productive capacity of humanity as it exists now that causes such a crater, closing in its final minutes with loving shots of a canyon in Tokyo created by the dreamworld's attempt to breach reality. The film demonstrates a curious self-hatred of its own artifice, closing with the hope that such artifice can only be recuperated through the kinds of illusions we create everyday when we're in love. The film is a poetics of melancholy, a smart literalization of the ways in which personal aspirations can become political through relationships which necessarily rest upon an earnest belief in the lie of our own illusory selves.