A Eulogy for Satoshi Kon

Satoshi Kon was not just an incredible director, he was a man who understood the inner workings of our collective fantasies. Dreams, no matter how strange or wonderful, aren’t just magically conjured from the ether—they are built very carefully, sometimes deliberately from the people, objects, and ideas we encounter every day. Even our most intimate, personal desires which seem to stem from a deep-seated, primal urge can only reveal themselves to the mind’s eye in the guise of things we have found in the world around us: love appears as a celebrity’s face, truth sounds like an advertising slogan, happiness feels weirdly similar to your old Power Rangers pajamas. Whatever mundane symbolic vocabulary you might need to converse with your subconscious, Satoshi Kon knew it and he was fucking fluent.

I first encountered Kon’s work as a rather disgruntled, closeted queer teen in the suburbs of northern Kentucky. Like so many other awkward weirdos before me I decided to create an imaginary sense of community for myself via nerdy obsession, in this case with Japanese animation. Even back in those pre-Adult Swim, Web 1.0 days when anime was still a relatively “new thing” from an American’s perspective, there were very few of those exotic Eastern oddities that could compare to the all-out nightmare head trip of Perfect Blue. Following the career of a young pop idol, Mima, who decides ditch her bubblegum-glamorous popular persona in exchange for a “serious” acting gig in a rape/revenge murder mystery, Kon dragged protagonists and viewers alike into a treacherous mass delusion involving stalkers, intrusive blogging, and self-assassination. To an out of place homo such as myself these images of oppressive social expectations, of friends and strangers trying to hijack your dreams and force you into their twisted idea of “what should be” made a lot of sense. Of course, my life was not nearly so scary or dramatic as Mima’s, but I never forgot Kon’s bizarre-yet-familiar vision of all the crazy shit you have to go through just to make a new identity for yourself.

Over the years, as anime became increasingly mainstream, Satoshi-san continued to produce a body of work that quietly and masterfully managed to blow my mind and alter the manner in which I think about the ways we are all fundamentally connected on a basic mental level. There was Paprika, part psychedelic group therapy session, part detective story, Tokyo Godfathers, a heartwarming, vaguely Kurosawa-ish tale of social outcasts working out personal issues by caring for an abandoned baby, and the TV series Paranoia Agent which explored the mysterious power of urban legends and showcased the bombastic genius of electronic maestro Susumu Hirasawa. For most people any of these things would be a career-defining achievement, but for Kon they seemed more like variations on a theme. From Magnetic Rose to Millennium Actress you could never quite be sure whose mind was imagining what in this endless circuit of shared perception, but the confusion was enthralling nonetheless because we were all in it together.

This past Tuesday, it was announced that Satoshi Kon had died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 46. He is survived by his final project, a movie called Dream Machine which others will now take up and complete. It seems oddly fitting that this last work should be passed along so gracefully. His last message to us was this: