Paprika, or, The Fantasy of Science

I just got back from seeing Satoshi Kon’s new film/mindfuck, Paprika. I feel compelled to write about it because it deals with the intersection of science and mental health, which is an issue I talked about in my last post and something that has been preoccupying me lately. The film has been getting a lot of media attention here in the US—more than Kon’s previous films Perfect Blue or Tokyo Godfathers received, at least. I’m no anime connoisseur, but in terms of sheer visual beauty and complexity Paprika may be unrivaled. I’m pretty sure Kon’s animators came up with ideas for this movie while overdosing on angel dust and peyote. (This is a good thing). My problems with the film are more with its conceptual grounding and implication.

Paprika tells the story of the young and attractive psychiatric researcher, Atsuko Chiba, and a device developed by her team called the “DC Mini” that allows its wearer to enter into the dreams of patients with the intention of curing neuroses and other psychic trauma. The assumption here is that dreams are where the Real of desire can be accessed directly without having to detour through the obscuring and essentially Imaginary effects of “personality” or “consciousness.” It is here that the film’s Freudian/Lacanian heritage appears most clearly, a heritage that is ultimately neglected. The story is similar to Tarsem Singh’s Jennifer Lopez-led sleeper hit The Cell from 2000, although the two films differ wildly in execution. After a DC Mini prototype is stolen, several members of Chiba’s team suddenly seem to lose their minds in rapid succession—she soon discovers that the thief is using the device to insert malicious dreams into the victims’ “subconscious” while they are awake, causing them to act like possessed demons. She works with the device’s inventor, the brilliant yet obese and childlike Dr. Tokita, and soon discovers that the perpetrator of the theft and attacks is none other than the aging and crippled Director of her very own institute. The Director wants to sabotage the DC Mini and prevent it from being approved in Parliament for widespread use.

This Director has become disillusioned with science, apparently, after a lifetime spent in service of it. With increasing frequency, he offers mini-soliloquies on the danger and blindness of technology. The first one seems jarring coming from the head of a scientific research group: “Science is garbage, when faced with a great idea” (I’m quoting from memory). The immediate assumption here is that something resists scientific interpretation and innovation, something escapes its perhaps overly ambitious mandate. The Director firmly believes that he is protecting humanity’s sovereign essence from the invading and classifying gaze provided by the DC Mini; he wants some aspects of the human mind to remain unknowable and inaccessible. The Director seems like a card-carrying Heideggarian here: he believes that technology has precipitated a closure or “forgetting” of access to Being. Technology brings about an “enframing” (Heidegger) of Nature that provides a false sense of security or power for those who operate the technology. The alternative here for Heidegger, as is well known, is a recourse to a “poetic” and nostalgic orientation that provides access to what science has cloaked.

The Director is framed as the villain of the film and Chiba (along with her dream-warrior counterpart Paprika) as the heroine. In the logic of the film, resistance to science is only a short step away from complete, monstrous anarchy—as dreams meld with reality, the Director eventually becomes a blackened, skyscraper-sized creep bent on destroying Tokyo. Somehow, Drs. Chiba and Tokita manage to prevent this from happening and to restore life to normal (don’t ask me to explain how they do this—it involves a transparent baby sucking up the Director’s black slime and then going through puberty). The gorgeous Chiba rejects the obvious romantic interest, the handsome and cunning assistant to the Director, in favor of the grotesque and nearly autistic Tokita based solely on the latter’s scientific genius. (The film actually goes so far as to suggest that this handsome assistant is the Director’s lover, further aligning the poetic, anti-technological perspective with unproductive deviancy). The film ends with the assurance that the DC Mini will soon hit the market and revolutionize scientific psychiatry.

Although they seem drastically different on most issues, I think Heidegger and Lacan sit together well in a rejection of Paprika’s praise of science and along with it the entire reliance on psychopharmacology and its corresponding “theory” (the DSM) that the film seems to represent for our world. As I mentioned in my last post, any change effected in (Lacanian) analysis must occur through a radical reconfiguration of the analysand’s symbolic and imaginary relations—that is, through the skillful manipulation of language. Lacanian psychoanalysis, which I firmly believe to be the only real way of changing a life, requires neither drugs nor technology. Toward the end of his life, Lacan was already familiar with “psychotherapy” and drug-based approaches to mental health—he rejected all of these as being merely “orthopedic,” that is, temporary. Without analysis, the same trauma repeats itself over and over again with tormenting efficiency and regularity.

I’m by no means a Luddite, and I agree for the most part with Badiou’s critique of Heidegger’s privileging of poetry over science. I’m simply skeptical of science’s claim of purchase on human desire and “happiness,” a claim that has garnered a lot of support in the US especially. (I’m thinking of an article by some daffy US government health care official, cited by Bruce Fink in his excellent clinical introduction to Lacan, claiming ludicrously that science will have cured all mental illness-including depression [!]-by the year 2010). You can hardly watch TV today without seeing an ad for an antidepressant that demonstrates just how quickly you can go from sitting with your face in your hands to running on the beach with your dog. Science today fosters this ultimate fantasy of the quick fix, the change without effort, and this does a terrible disservice to the original pioneers in mental health. To use Badiou’s language, a new truth is something that is built: it is an arduous process requiring the most acute fidelity. I think the iPhone is cool and everything, but I don’t think that the chemists behind Zoloft know how to make me happy.

By the way, there were spoilers in this post.