Thursday, 28 August 2014

Depiction and Fiction: An Epilogue

As an afterthought to that post, I thought I would quickly add one more example in the form of the ‘Dreamland’ amusement park – a fictional fairground that exists within the world of Satoshi Kon’s Paprika. It was one year ago today that I first posted on the subject of Depiction and Fiction in relation to this film, as a tribute to mark the death of Kon. He has now been gone for four years and as such I find this particular moment all the more pertinent.



The story of Paprika is about a machine that allows one to enter into another person’s dreams, and so we can read the name of the park ‘Dreamland’ as a play on this. Like the rides of Pooch Island, what we have here is a fairground that exists only as a depiction, with its rides and attractions only appreciable on the aesthetic rather than experiential level. But if we look at the mascot figures appearing on the sign, the story becomes more conceptually complex.



As many of the previous posts on this subject would have pointed out, we have a multilayered complexity to the mascot figures; they are animated depictions of model depictions of fictional characters – doubly-fictional characters in the diegesis of Paprika. But eagle-eyed viewers will notice that these figures are the lead characters of Kon’s last – still unfinished – film The Dreaming Machines. The moment is designed as an inside joke, a reference to a film still in preproduction, but it turns Kon’s film into a text-within-a-text, a fictional film that the characters of Paprika might go and see.



The fact that the film will probably never be completed makes this moment all the more bittersweet – our only glimpse of Kon’s final work will always be nestled within another fiction, a depiction of a film appearing in his actual final film. This makes the end of his career, quite fittingly, a little like a cinematic ouroboros, always conceptually folding in on itself, much like the subject matter of his work.



                                                                                                                             - P.S.

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