Millennium Actress: How Personal IS Art?

So here’s a question: how much do you really know about your favorite actor? 

Follow-up question, do you sometimes wish you knew less?

It is a truism that the people making the magic onscreen are not necessarily mirror reflections of the heroes they are bringing to life. The players in your favorite romantic drama have cheated on their spouses. Your favorite action hero has enabled abuse. Or, he’s just a loser. And all of us lost at least one favorite to #MeToo. 

But just the same, we cannot deny our fascination with those people on the big screen. Film historian, Ty Burr, described in his book, Gods Like Us, 

Gone with the Wind (1939)

“The fascination with stars is in large part a desire to unlock the nagging puzzle of identity—who are these people who we know so well and not at all? ... The violence done to Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin by the mobs in the public square was on some level a rapacious desire to unclothe them, flay them, burrow to their essence. What is the innermost riddle?”  

And film as a medium has tried to comment on this very phenomenon that it creates. From classic-age cinema, we had films such as Sunset Boulevard or Singin' in the Rain, and more recently we had the likes of Notting Hill or The Artist. And those are just the fictional narratives. Loads of real-life entertainers and stars have had their story documented on film. Makes sense. The film industry runs on that exact kind of obsession. Whether its portrait is exalting or scathing, Hollywood wants to reinforce the deification of its workforce.

And this is where you start to run into issues.

    One of my first essays, for example, was specifically about my mixed feelings toward the Judy Garland biopic and its very deliberate phrasing in describing the abuse Ms. Garland faced at the hands of the public. The movie suggests that what happened to her was mostly just bad luck, not truly a fault of a system that persists through today. “Too bad she didn’t get managers who knew better than to get her addicted to sleeping pills.” It doesn’t let you think too deeply about on whose behalf those nasty producers were torturing Judy Garland in the first place. 

The impulse to try to understand our stars will probably never go away. But it does beg the question of whether the medium of moving pictures ever can be used to say something about the star phenomenon that can pull off being both substantive and uplifting yet also truthful.

Which brings me to Satoshi Kon’s 2001 anime masterpiece, Millennium Actress.

    Satoshi Kon was a famed director of anime films. His career only spanned about ten years (Kon passed away in 2010 from pancreatic cancer) but encompassed such films as A Perfect Blue, Tokyo Godfathers, and Paprika. The film of his that I’m interested in discussing today deals with that question of what an artist’s work even means. 

Millennium Actress follows two reporters interviewing an aged actress for her life story. For one of these reporters, this is an opportunity of a lifetime. He is getting to know his idol in a way that perhaps all of us wish we could, and before the film’s end, his own tether to his chosen star has been ratified in a major way, seemingly validating the sort of illusion of the parasocial bond between the producer and the consumer.

    This film isn't really a look at the specific abuses that celebrities face in the real-life systems they occupy. No predatory directors, no celebrity stalkers. Its examination is purely psychological. What is the human cost of becoming a figurehead? As Burr further notes, 

“Most disorienting of all must be the sense that everyone except you knows who you are. A star’s persona is a construct of agreed upon by all who consume it and all who profit by it, and that construct is taken as fact (or at least useful fiction) by everyone except the star, who knows but may not want to admit how temporary the persona truly is.”

Even though the film's ultimate revelation winds up ratifying that connection between star and audience, I don’t think this film prioritizes the consumer’s interests. This is ultimately about the artist at the center finding peace with herself. I can’t ever bring myself to be frustrated with this movie the way I am with something like the Judy Garland biopic.

Let me back up a little … 

The Story

         The film sees two television reporters, Genya and Kyoji, interviewing a fictional actress, Chiyoko Fujiwara, who retired from acting over thirty years prior, as she shares her life story.

    Her narrative centers on her encounter with a young man, a painter and political dissident during the 1940s when Chiyoko was just a schoolgirl. After Chiyoko hid the man in her house from the authorities, he gave her the key to his personal box of art supplies, and she promised to follow him when he departs so she can return it to him, but she misses the train. Knowing he was fleeing to Manchuria, Chiyoko accepted an offer to travel there to appear in a film hoping it would lead her to this mysterious painter. Thus began her career as an actress and her pursuit of this man who had changed her life.

    As Chiyoko shares her story, the reporters start to recognize the striking parallels between the events from her own life and the storylines of her most famous films. The film depicts this by moving fluidly between high-volume moments of Chiyoko’s own history and her performance on an official movie set, leaving both these reporters and us in the audience to wonder where one ends and the other begins. 

    We’ll start with something like Chiyoko in real life chasing after the train smuggling her savior away from her forever. We see her trip as it pulls away, we see Chiyoko starting to sob on the ground, and then we hear a director yell “Cut!” as we pull back and see a camera crew on her telling her what a great take that was, and we wonder how long they’ve been there.

The suggestion is that Chiyoko has been drawing from her own personal story as she’s developed this incredible acting oeuvre that has won the hearts of millions around Japan. This story she’s performing for the entertainment of everyone else is all just dressing around her need to find this man who gave her hope during a time when her world felt hopeless. If only she had learned his name.

Tokyo Story (1953)

    A lot of Chiyoko’s in-universe films have real-world equivalents or else recall famous genres of Japanese filmmaking. You’ve got samurai epics like those directed by Akira Kurosawa as well as domestic dramas from the likes of Yasujirō Ozu. This film also becomes a sort of statement on/tribute to the history of Japanese cinema as a whole. So, this is a not-so-subtle summation of the worth of a cinematic legacy.

We are told very early on that this key Chiyoko is entrusted with opens up “the most important thing there is,” and we quickly make the connection that this is the key to his art box. Ergo, this mystery man is telling us that the most important thing there is, is art. And this will set-up the framework we will have for Chiyoko's own body of work as it takes flight in front of us: the most important thing, the thing worth chasing across a lifetime, is art.

This is the kind of grandiose statement that’s going to get Aunt Cheryl all up in a furor about why we even have to offer liberal arts degrees. But the film makes a strong case for the worth of a life given to creation and storytelling. Kambole Campbell writes for Little White Lies:

    "Cinema acting as a love letter to itself is hardly a novel idea, but outside of Kon’s own filmography there is nothing quite like Millennium Actress. The director masterfully uses the malleability of animation to find new beauty in even the most well-trodden ground. Kon paints film as almost spiritual in the way it prolongs life, and although the format itself is also perishable, Chiyoko’s life and memory stretch from one millennium to the next."

 Part of what makes this film’s presentation so unique is how it taps into the simulated reality enabled by the medium of cinema itself. 

Let me back up even further … 

 

Diegesis Defined

Inception (2010)

Let's quickly define a really complicated word for a very simple idea, one that has a lot to do with the game Millennium Actress is playing.

“Diegesis” refers to the fictional world within the story being told. The characters, the setting, all the puzzle pieces within it, those are all diegetic elements. They are not added for the audience’s benefit. Elements that are presented within the film but don’t exist within the universe, those are all non-diegetic elements. They exist for the audience, they don't exist for the characters.

       Probably the most obvious non-diegetic element in a movie is the music or the score. Except in very specific cases, the music playing for the audience does not exist within the movie’s universe. In Crazy Rich Asians, when the aisles flood at the wedding and Henry Golding and Constance Wu look at one another, “Can’t Help Falling in Love With You” is literally playing over the speakers at the wedding. That's diegetic. That his happening in-universe.

    But something like the proposal scene, with Katherine Ho singing "Yellow" in the background, the music there is not presumably playing over the airplane speakers and then again during Rachel's victory lap. That music is non-diegetic. That’s the framing of the film itself commenting on the situation.

    The opening crawl during the "Star Wars" movies, also non-diegetic. There are not literally giant floating yellow expository words traversing the galaxy like an alphabet comet. (Or so I presume. I’ll admit I’m not familiar with the extended canon.)

    Flashbacks can generally be considered non-diegetic. When a character is having one, that fictional world’s time flow is not literally wrinkled so a character can relive certain events. Other characters do not experience this flashback also. At the memorial in Knives Out when Marta remembers seeing Harlan walking over to his office, the other characters aren’t like, “Dad! You’re alive!” This is the apparatus of the film letting us into the character’s head and experience a memory so we can access certain information and also identify with their situation.

But Millennium Actress plays things very differently. Chiyoko is recounting a story that takes on a life of its own and starts to grab her in-universe audience: these two reporters are experiencing her story along with her, posing questions about whether these flashbacks are somehow occurring in-universe. This isn’t a "Jumanji" situation where the characters are literally sucked into an alternate dimension through supernatural means. We are just meant to take this as a symbol of the reporters being so engrossed in Chiyoko’s story that they feel as though they are living it. This is noteworthy because diegetic and non-diegetic elements do not interact naturally.

The Emperor's New Groove (2000)

    So what would motivate a film to break diegesis? Usually that answer is comedy. The most common violation of diegesis is like a fourth wall break: a character turning to the camera and talking to the audience, breaking that illusion of separation, almost always for a laugh.

    Violating diegesis is generally a comic act because it signals that this world was never meant to be taken that seriously anyways. Animation is one of those places where it’s relatively easy to play with diegesis because the fabrication of the world is already woven into the experience. And breaking that illusion can help your audience feel special. Like they’re in on a joke.

    But a film can also blur the line when drawing attention to the apparatus of film or television as a medium, generally to examine the ways audience interact with the stories they consume. A popular recent example might be WandaVision in which a person with literal superpowers builds a tv sitcom world and orchestrates all the events within.

    The in-universe reason for all this is because Wanda has used her superpowers to build a television sit-com sphere in which to hide from her grief. The non-diegetic elements were all planted there by Wanda herself, the “main character” of this television show. The laugh-track exists because Wanda put it there. This clever play on the television form becomes a comment on the nature of media itself, exploring the way that a person might bury themselves in comforting media in the face of trauma or loss.

         Millennium Actress has more in common with something like WandaVision than Looney Tunes. It’s a vehicle for exploring the barriers between the fabricated life a person creates for a performance and their actual lived history. As we move between these two planes, we get to see how intertwined they are. A phase of her film career, for example, had her leading so many period-pieces acting as some kind of samurai heroine with an express mission to rescue her lord, and we understand this to be her metaphorical journey to try to find the mystery artist.

    The film never gives a firm answer as to whether these flashbacks are diegetic or not within this universe. Genya and Kyoji literally interact with these cinematic worlds, but we also get inserts where we see them in their living room acting out the movie plots like this has all been some role-playing game. The film never explains the internal logic of our movement through these phases. It just surrenders to the dream logic of the film world it is studying and trusting that the audience will respond to what they are seeing. And the non-linearity of the experience really captures something about the fluid behavior of memory--the way you can be absorbed in one moment only to seemingly cross oceans of time in a second--and what that has in common with the dreamlike flow of cinema narrative.

The scenarios that she acts through onscreen feel like they could have been lifted from very familiar movies. These high-emotional swells that feel cut straight from an action-blockbuster are the vessels for her to displace true emotions that have basis in her actual, lived experiences. They have real meaning for her. These grandiose conflicts she acts out on the screen personify her struggle to reunite with this man.

There’s a really charged sequence toward the end where Chiyoko has recovered the key and is running to find him, and this is presented as her running through her films like they are levels on a Mario course that she has to rush through. This isn’t happening in-universe, but this poetic display does convey a point. Effectively her entire life, in front of and behind the screen, has been leading up to this moment. 

    Running through this model a couple of times, it eventually just starts to get a little discouraging. The bubble always bursts right when Chiyoko—and we, the audience—start to get our hopes up. Each tease of catharsis or discovery is always timed right with the director yelling “cut!” suggesting that maybe any hope Chiyoko ever has of getting what she’s after must always be confined to the augmented reality of cinema.

One of these in-universe films has a sinister witch character who becomes a recurring sort of poltergeist for Chiyoko across her story. She haunts Chiyoko with the idea that the worst thing that may happen to her isn't just that she may never find the man who gave her the key.

It’s sort of the same principle we discussed with Nights of Cabiria. Our heroine is stuck in this space where true happiness feels confined to this hypothetical fantasy realm that can only ever be accessed through this cinematic interface—never experienced firsthand. Being trapped in the pursuit of this man, never to find him in the waking world, becomes its own form of torture.

And from said torture emerges something the audience finds very, very entertaining.

 

How Personal IS Art?

Here’s a story: at the end of Funny Girl when Fanny Brice performs the heart-wrenching rendition of “My Man,” the director asked not only that Barbra Streisand perform the number live, but that her co-star Omar Sharif be just off-camera. Sharif and Streisand were having an affair throughout production, which would contribute to the ending of Streisand's already deteriorating marriage to Elliot Gould. And so making this woman whose love life is on the fritz perform this agonizing number about never getting over her man … well, it’s hard to argue with the results, but goodness what methods …

Various people within the field will have different opinions about whether or not an artist needs to have personally experienced the condition they are trying to convey through the specific medium. There has to be some basis of truth, or the artifice will reveal itself and the whole simulation collapses, but a lot can be carried by the imagination and intuition of the actor rather than their personal experience with the material.

From Here to Eternity (1953)

    An actor’s true self can have little or no overlap with the character type they are known to play. John Wayne had to practice looking tough in front of a mirror. Meanwhile, many of cinema’s most stirring love scenes have been performed by gay actors playing in straight pairings. And did you know that Tom Cruise is actually only 5’ 7’’? 

But the proscenium really likes to latch onto narratives about the artist pouring their own personal history into the piece. This allows the audience to imagine that they are somehow getting to know “the real actor” merely by consuming their art and imagining that their para-social relationship has authenticity. 

So Millennium Actress drops this fascinating idea about this star who has risen to great cultural importance by acting out her own history, by displaying her own hopes and disappointments. Even when the landscape of the film is totally removed from her reality, such as when she’s acting in a period piece, her character’s driving engine always seems to be reuniting with this unnamed man. She wants this more than anything, and the only way she can give her best performance is by accessing these feelings. Her worst insecurities and disappointments are converted into entertainment.

And the film never really places clear distinctions between what is performance and what is history. We’re able to intuit some of the divisions, the parts with the raging mecha in the background were probably fictional, but we never get clear jumping off points. The movement between planes is probably as clear for her as it is for us. But we do know that the more this proximity tortures her, the better her performance.

    This exercise becomes a shadow of how artists draw upon their own personal history to craft those emotional beats that are so marketable. Something like Marriage Story in which director Noah Baumbach was literally drawing upon his own real-life divorce. And it does kind of beg the question of whether or not it’s ethical for us to ask that our artists to expose the delicate parts of their psyche just because it goes well with popcorn.   

And there is something really cheap to seeing the most delicate parts of her story reduced to entertainment, something meant for the consumption of the masses, people who can never appreciate the emotional reality driving this story.

  But this ritual still has a very specific motivation from Chiyoko. Her making these films is her somehow sending out a message in a bottle to this figure, hoping that he’ll see one of her films. Of course, she has no idea whether or not he’ll do that. And this begs the question of what exactly she’s accomplishing with this, and for whom she is even putting herself out there.

 

Who Does Chiyoko’s Story Belong To?

    Millennium Actress has some overlap with a 1982 film called My Favorite Year in which a young television writer gets to have a close, personal encounter with his childhood idol--a movie star named Alan Swann, who is slated to be a guest star on his tv show, and over whom this guy is given some stewardship during this time. Basically, he has to keep this faded movie star sober long enough to do the show. In acting as this movie star's baby-sitter, he gets to help him sort out his demons and remember what it was that made him so great in the first place.

    And this is kind of the situation with Millennium Actress. Both films follow someone who gets this once in a lifetime opportunity to have a close, personal encounter with someone they idolized growing up. And more, they get to walk away knowing that their admiration for their idol was singular. Unlike all the other worshippers at the temple, their adoration actually improved the life of this movie star. Swann and Chiyoko both see their demons quelled because some fan cared just that much for them. And this is supposed to reveal something special, even sanctified in the relationship between the star and their audience--something we all wish we could experience.

         Chiyoko has served this same role for her entire country across decades of social turmoil. And so she holds this rarified place in her culture as this icon of grace and perseverance. That’s sort of how art always finds us. Whether we’re looking through the lens of society-wide turmoil or our own private wars, stories can be powerful means of connection, building the exact kind of pedestal that elevates someone like Chiyoko into an idol.

But with time, she is herself eventually denied the opportunity to do that which all her onscreen personas have been celebrated for. Chiyoko moves past the age in which it is acceptable to hold such dreams as finding the man who changed your life. And the film dials in on how something as banal as time or age can just rob you of something so mercilessly. And so there is a hanging suggestion that she has no story of her own. That’s the price of art. She only has imagination. Shadows. Phantoms. And even those may evaporate.

Chiyoko reveals that what pushed her to retire was the realization that her shipped had sailed. It didn't matter whether or not she ever found the artist: even if she did, he would no longer recognize her. That hypothetical future has been lost and scattered over a thousand dreams she built for her consumer base of devoted fans. We also eventually find out that this artist was killed not long after Chiyoko's lifechanging encounter with him. She has been pining after a ghost for years. We spend a part of the runtime wrestling with whether or not these lost dreams were just part of the sacrifice she made in the service of her fans--who may not be in the position to appreciate such an offering.

For how grateful a star’s consumer base is for their service, their idea of repaying their benefactor is always to ask for more. At first, that’s simply more onscreen entertainment. But before long, they demand entertainment from their offscreen existence as well. Celebrity stalking is definitely a thing, and it threatens real people. Clickbait sites perpetuate half-truths that can destroy a person’s reputation. (And to be clear, I’m not at all looking down on enforcing social mores when a star has committed a verifiable transgression, including and akin to sexual assault, but I’d also suggest that the real work in holding that standard doesn’t really happen within the circle of Buzzfeed derivatives.) 

    Even a star’s own cycle of acclaim, scrutiny, downfall, and rebirth can naturally feed into the machine. Audiences tend to be perfectly content to facilitate and take credit for the “comeback” of stars they themselves strangled. 

Which brings us back to the setup of this film. You’ve got these two guys who are trying to get an interview with this actress. We eventually find out that for Genya, this adoration for his idol has some basis in real interactions. Genya was actually an intern on the set of her films, and that he also actually saved her life on her last day on set. This superfan, then, gets to be the one to return the key to her and validate that connection.

And that is part of the appeal of this film’s model. It indulges in the fantasy of getting to peel back that artifice and see the truth behind your favorite star’s real life story. Inserting himself into these little episodes gives him the opportunity to act out the fantasy of becoming an essential part of your idol’s mission. And this model is validated within the film itself. As with the situation in My Favorite Year, Genya’s hero worship of Chiyoko represents the possibility that this exchange wasn’t wasted, that someone out there in the audience is genuinely stirred by these emotional displays, and that makes them worthy to restore their flame.

         This is where the film starts playing a high-risk game for me. This scenario carries the suggestion that the hardships and losses that a performer experiences in the line of stardom are all somehow satisfied or recompensed by the love of the audience. And with that, there’s a further fantasy that the audience is ever actually in a position to have a genuine connection to their figure of worship—or that they can themselves heal the wounds they have accrued from the dark underbelly of Hollywood. Like, audiences would ever be able to make Judy Garland feel better about giving up custody of her kids by singing "Over the Rainbow" with her. That’s certainly what studio heads want audiences to think.

         But the fact is, these folks will never have any real connection to the subject of their worship. Their relationship is one of server and customer. And more worship will not keep these stars young forever, but it may send them to rehab. Again, a high-risk game, but this model does a few things that I wish I saw more often in films like Judy.

Healing this woman’s heart has actually very little to do with applause. Chiyoko has been carrying around a secret, and Genya helps facilitate her achieving actual closure for her old wounds: first by returning the key she lost, and second by listening to her story. Chiyoko's spent so long in service of building stories for other people that she's lost sight of her own, and Genya helps her to realign with that. There’s still a delusion of aggrandizement in being your star’s favorite fan, the one who "truly gets them," but the angle is still different, and there’s importance in that distinction. This is Chiyoko finding peace with the decisions she made, in the work she produced, and the paths she followed--even if they did not yield the gain she was chasing.

There’s an undeniable unfairness to this situation, yes, but I also don’t think it’s accurate to say that Chiyoko wasted her life chasing this man, or allowing that to fuel her performance. Because her art comes from a place of honesty, it is real. That is why it is so affecting. And that is why it will outlive her even as she graduates from this life.

    Neither did she imagine her bond with this man, however fleeting their interaction. The reason why he never met her was not because she was projecting a connection that wasn’t there—it was because he literally could not meet her. The connection was true, and she matched that truth in her actions. And now she’s leaving the earth behind and taking her place in the heavens, carrying with her the heartbeat of a promise that she never let go of.

Kambole Campbell further says, 

"... Chiyoko acknowledges that she may never find the man in this world or the next, but she’s still happy with the life she has lived and the work she has done. She was so happy that she went on this journey to pursue him. That may be something difficult for a creator to be at peace with because there’s always a chance we never make the one perfect work of art we desire. The last line of Millennium Actress acknowledges this fact but also sums up the joy of simply making work and continuing that trek of formation."

We end the film by moving one last time into the dream sphere of the films she has created with her heart and soul and see Chiyoko strapped inside a space shuttle launching into the edge of the cosmos–a clear metaphor for her death--where she may finally be able to find the artist who inspired her work. And maybe she will. After all, we’ve only followed her across two different dimensions: her own story and her onscreen performance. Whatever plane she enters after she blasts off, that’s all hers.

"What I Really Loved ..."

This essay was harder for me to nail down for a few reasons. One of those has to do with the sort of excitement around the possible "death of the movie star" and Hollywood's inability to use stars to get people to show up for movies, sort of rendering this discussion about movie stars pointless. Certain film theorists have observed that the rise of the YouTuber or Tik Tok stars seems to have filled the congregations need for worship, gods they can carry around in their pocket. During the last week alone, both Tom Cruise and Sean Penn have commented on this phenomenon in some way.

    I have a very complicated relationship with this conversation, in part because I can't personally relate to it. I very much have favorite actors, both from classic Hollywood and those who are actively working. They excite me with their acting prowess. They captain some of the most arresting displays of human dignity.

Violent Night (2022)

    Moreover, when I'm having a hard day, I just love seeing a familiar face. More than once in recent years I have bought tickets to a movie, having not even seen the trailer, solely on the promise of seeing a favorite actor trying something new: David Harbour as Santa is absolutely enough to sell me on a Saturday afternoon in the theater.

But I suppose this line may be true where it counts most. The movie star beacon is having a harder time getting the larger crow to get their butts in the seats at their nearest Cinemark. Of course, saddle a mediocre Netflix original with a name like Ryan Reynolds or Kevin Hart, and you'll get people's attention ... at least, for a moment. When diagnosing the movie theater problem, there are other places I'm willing to look before asking whether audiences are outgrowing celebrities.

The Last Detail (1973)

    It also bears mentioning that these things do have cycles. The seventies saw audiences dumping the more polished old stars of classic Hollywood in favor of the new guard. Players like Jack Nicholson and Dustin Hoffman ascended to prominence under the same banner of "authenticity" and "rawness" that the YouTube kids wave today. And they were happy with that for a time ... then that went out of fashion and people just wanted action figures like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Harrison Ford.

I don't think anyone is really satisfied with this post-movie star phase we may or may not be in. What's true of these parasocial relationships is true of real relationships: you get what you put into it. And the returns you get from likeshareandsubscribe Dan unboxing a weedwhacker on your phone while you're on the bus to work just have no overlap with what happens in the cinema. Best I can hope is that audiences get curious enough to end apart time before we're all gray and wrinkly. (And if the suits want to expedite that process by maybe freezing ticket prices or something, they can try that out and see whether or not it actually hurts.) In the meantime, I'm still going to be talking about movie stars.

   Another obstacle was that the point I wanted to convey—that a star’s personal life is really none of our business and we should all kind of leave them alone—sort of demands that I put on my pull up a chair and start lecturing like I'm putting my readers in timeout. A large part of my viewpoint emerges out of my cynicism over the entitlement I often see exercised by a very vocal user base that seems to miss the point of this shared temple of cinema in the first place. (Turns out people don't even have to go to a person's movies in order to feel ownership over them.) I get very irritated by that sort of thing. And so I struggled to get the phrasing of the verdict to match the effect I was wanting to create.

I don’t want to tell anyone that they shouldn’t have stars they look up to, even get excited about. Honestly, if these artists went through all that they did only for everyone to just stonewall them, well, that’d be a shame. We shouldn’t be afraid of that connection. But given a moment’s thought, we can maybe speculate on how this sort of thing, left unchecked, can enable an unhealthy environment for everyone.

    Certainly, we can love the stories our stars tell us and be grateful for the glow they provide. But I think the one thing I always take from Millennium Actress is this idea that stars are entitled to their own story, and if we really adore them the way we claim to, then we have a responsibility to respect that.

             --The Professor