Warning: This article will contain spoilers for both Song at Midnight and Perfect Blue! If you care about that sort of thing.
What happens to performers when, for one reason or another, they are past their prime? When they’ve grown too old, too fat, or too political for centre stage, and they are forcibly yanked off of it?
Well, Because We Live In A Society, it highly depends on how well these dregs of human beings can still be used by the system that rejects them: if you’re Hidaka Rumi, you might be retired as idol and become part of a talent agency to manage younger, fresher faces, horrified by how the times change; if you’re Song Danping, you might be attacked with nitric acid by a feudal landlord for your revolutionary actions and forced to fake your death and live as a phantom at the Garden Theatre you once starred in.
Now, other than being great singers cast aside, these two figures have very little in common. One experienced natural decline in her profession, one was disfigured by political violence, but I juxtapose them here because something does unite them in their roles in both films: their use of younger stars in the same trade as proxies of themselves in their attempts to take hold of what was ripped from them, whether this real or perceived crime against their way of life is the source of or originated from the projection.
As mentors to their respective young stars, Rumi and Song teach them the tools of the trade and live vicariously through their protegès to the point that their identities, to greater or lesser extent, merge. Rumi completely develops a new identity in the shape of the Idol Mima and seeks to replace the original when she deviates too far from standard, and Song attempts to mould Sun Xiaoou into a replacement for his disfigured self, who would take his identity in returning to his forsaken lover.
The difference in whether master or student is to be subsumed depends on who is perceived to be “tarnished” in the relationship. In Perfect Blue, Mima is perceived by Rumi’s Mima persona to be a ruined woman after allowing herself to be shown in a sexually degrading manner, whereas in Song at Midnight, Song perceives himself as ruined from the moment he saw his own face scarred by the nitric acid and had the doctor to tell his lover he had died.
The depths of dissociative self-loathing set them even further apart as Rumi grows loathful of her charge and her rebelliousness and Song learns that he has wronged his in monopolising him for his own, for Sun too has his own love. But the action is still the same: violence. Violence against those that cause suffering. Against those exploitative media hawks. Against greedy landlords. One vengeful, horrifying. One noble, revolutionary.
I feel like something could be said about the gendered dynamics of this, but honestly that’d require second watches and a longer writing process to get just right because there’s just too much to poke into.
But I guess the important thing is: the conflict between Mima and Rumi happens because Mima accepts the conditions for succeeding in the modern landscape whereas Rumi wants Mima to stay the same forever, whereas Song yearns for revolution far more than he yearns for the love of Li Xia. Perfect Blue’s entire thing spirals off of paternalistic concern and idol image management whereas Song at Midnight’s class war tragedy is capped off with “we should be inspired by this great hero’s revolutionary sacrifice”.
Anyway, I don’t have anything else to say about this right now, but I’ll say, try double featuring this sometime. You might enjoy it.