The "real" Mima was a mental specter trying to possess Mima.
Like
Dom's projection of Mal, she formed out of Mima's issues with leaving the idol group. When Mima became an actress, she was having a hard time staying the dominant personality, so she had to find a way to retake Mima's mind. But during the course of the movie, she's forced further and further out of Mima's mind by other issues until she ends up possessing
Rumi instead. The first few times "real" Mima appears, she's in Mima's reflection. After that, she appears in other places entirely. When
Rumi was trying to kill Mima, we still saw
her reflection, even though "real" Mima was chasing Mima down the street. And at the end of the movie, when
Rumi looks in the mirror, her reflection is "real" Mima, signifying she's been completely taken over.
She was Mima's denial that her actions had corrupted her
Contractual Purity. And of course, during the climax, Mima denies that they're the same person, leading to "real" Mima trying to kill her.
The pop-star Mima and the detective-drama Mima are different people.
The detective drama Mima we saw Mima star in was actually filmed
after the events of the movie, in a case of
Ripped from the Headlines. The first Mima, an idol-turned-actress, was the one involved with the Me-Mania murders. However, the Mima shown during the filmed scenes was an actress in a
Show Within a Show (er...
within a show?) That explains why her scenes of being hallucinated and stalked were juxtaposed with Mima's hallucinations and being stalked. The first Mima did survive and get a happy ending, but the ending was so
suddenly uplifting is because that scene was from the television series.
Mima killed the photographer.
Late in the movie, Mima reads Mima's Room and it mentions her going shopping. Mima doesn't remember going shopping. However, if you pay attention, it does briefly show a photo on Mima's Room of Mima going shopping. My explanation is thus: Rumi took Mima shopping to try and cheer her up. While there, Rumi took a photo of Mima - it doesn't matter why. When Rumi gets home and changes into the Mima-persona, she writes the story on Mima's Room and posts the photo. Rumi-Mima is confused enough to genuinely believe it's a photo of her. Meanwhile, Mima suffers a breakdown causing her to forget the whole incident, much like how she forgot that Rumi had come to visit her and mistook it for a dream. She then reads Mima's Room, panics, breaks down and changes into the clothes, before going and murdering the photographer. She comes home, bundles the clothes away in the bag, gets into bed and wakes up the next morning, confusing it for a dream. The M.O. is close enough to that of the previous murders that people immediately assume it's the same killer.
Rumi had psychic powers.
One of the most accepted theories behind the plot of
Paranoia Agent is that the main character had psychic powers that affected reality. It goes with Kon's use of
Magical Realism and it plays with the way the supernatural is portrayed in movies: we always see the story from the viewpoint of the person with powers, but what is it like for the people that surround them? I think this is a good explanation behind the whole Rumi thing: Rumi somehow obtained psychic powers and the whole plot was a trap for her to ensnare Mima's psyche. At the end she fails due to her own lack of control, and Mima becomes completeley sane because she is no longer in her influence, and has grown from the experience. Unlike Rumi, who is unable to advance from the past.
A murderer is still at large by the end.
Part of the whole point of the movie was to keep us guessing what was going on. The way I see it, the movie is telling us that:
- (1) Mima really did murder that photographer and then cover it up (not hard to do since both Rumi and Me-Mania had already committed murders of their own and Mima could easily have deluded even herself into believing either of them did it), or...
- (2) the skeptics were wrong and some part of Mima's spirit (the "real" Mima hallucination which kept bedeviling her) really did get out and take control of Rumi, driving her to commit the murder.
If (1) is the case, murderous Mima is still on the loose, and everyone had best be nice to her or she might just go
Axe-Crazy again.
If (2) is the case, then the murderous spirit of "real" Mima is currently locked up with Rumi, but since she was able to jump from Mima to Rumi in the first place, she can probably jump just as easily from Rumi to someone else (such as maybe one of Rumi's nurses at the mental hospital), so we still have a murderous Mima on the loose.
Either way, people had better be nice to Mima, or there'll be more murders in the future.
Mima can't sing.
Rumi dubs over all of her live performances.
Me-Mania was a fan of Rumi during her idol days.
Rumi is a rape survivor.
What if her reaction to Mima acting out a rape scene was not only
Rumi seeing "herself" (as in, "Real" Mima) violated, but triggered an actual memory from Rumi's past?
It could also explain how this is a moment when the line between Rumi's and Mima's persona blur.Mima was sexually assaulted at some point, possibly by a
Loony Fan.
Just an idea I had when I was watching this movie for the first time — I half-expected it to be confirmed as canon. But it wasn't, so... here we are.
- It happens to pop idols a truly horrific amount, and it's possible it was never reported or made public because the assault would forever wreck Mima's image and reputation, never mind that it wasn't her fault.
- Mima deciding to go into acting was partially influenced by this incident — both in the hopes of getting away from the crazy idol fans, and as a way of gaining control over her life. (Obviously, neither of these ideas worked out.)
- Rape and sexual assault victims frequently make drastic changes in the aftermath of their trauma, both to exercise some control, and as a way to distract themselves and cope with what's happened. It doesn't get much more drastic than changing career paths and allowing her public image to do a complete 180.
- Mima agreeing to film a rape scene, and then suffering a Freak Out when she does so, also makes sense through this lens — obviously, if the incident was never properly dealt with, Mima can't say why she wouldn't want to do the scene, and on top of that, she really needs this job. Filming a scene like that can be upsetting even for people who haven't been assaulted, but if you believe that Mima was, and factor in all the other horrific things she's been through at that point, of course she was triggered, possibly having flashbacks to her assault.
- It's also possible that Mima doing the rape scene, as well as the nude photoshoot, is a method of her "proving" to herself that she's completely over what happened — even though, she clearly isn't.
Adding to the above...
Mima was sexually assaulted but
doesn't remember it. It wouldn't be too out of left field for Mima to straight-up repress that memory, or somehow convince herself that what happened didn't really happen, which would of course prevent her from coping with her assault in a healthy manner.
Mima's band mates are the only ones who respect her/ know her/ knew she could handle herself.
While they only get a few scenes/mentions, it's enough to get an idea of their working relationship with our heroine. Which seems extremely positive. They're shown having celebrated Mima's birthday,having a celebratory sleep over with her, are always happy to see her and when Mima changing careers is discussed, problems within the band is never brought up as a subject. Also, you can note that Mima has three heart pillows on her futon along with the regular sleeping one. Two are the colors associated with her band mates (their pajamas and what they wear at their first concert without her (blue and green) )and the third is Mima herself (pink). So they are significant (and cute).
Their biggest scene is their entire concert after Mima leaves, but the focus for this WMG is when they're talking before the performance. Both seem very nonchalant about Mima dealing with an extremely skeevy photographer who has a reputation for pornographic photo shoots. Some may take this as them being callous, but it could be seen as them just being confident that Mima is strong enough to deal with the experience. Remember, this happens AFTER Mima has already been acting in an intense drama series for some time, including her character going through a very intense and graphic rape scene.
So, to them it just looks like Super Determined Actress Mima paying her dues and doing the next crazy thing she has to do for her career to keep going. Nothing less and nothing more. They know she can handle it because they know her and, from their perspective, Mima is doing well and thriving outside of Cham. Also, they're pop idols. Even though they had not made the Big Time (yet) they've no doubt had to deal with weird fans/ perverse individuals by this point in their lives/careers. This would be basically routine for them as (small) celebrities.
What happened to Mima after all of this:
She gets a new agent, stars in small commercials before doing bigger works, gets therapy, and is able to have a better life.
The nature of Mima and Rumi's relationship is different in the Japanese and English versions.
During the events of the movie, Mima might be suffering from a temporary shared delusion (
folie à deux). While the origin of shared delusions are unclear, experts believe that stress and social isolation play large roles in the process - both of which Mima suffers from, on top of her
Loss of Identity issues between Idol-Mima and Real-Mima. During the fight and chase scene, the mirrors show the truth to the viewer: the elegant, prancing "Idol-Mima" is really the grotesquely running Rumi, but both Rumi and Mima are unable to see the ugly truth because of the delusion Rumi forced on Mima. Mima even has to ask Idol-Mima if it was really Rumi, even though the mirror showed Rumi; the viewers, as impartial observers standing outside of their delusion, are the only ones who are allowed to see the truth.
In the English version, Mima suffers from the subcategory folie imposée. In this subcategory, the person with the psychotic disorder (Rumi) forms a delusional belief during a psychotic episode (the most likely inciting event in this movie is the rape scene) and imposes it on another person (Mima) with the assumption that the secondary person might not have become deluded if left to their own devices. In real life, the first step in treatment is separating the person who has the shared disorder from the person with the psychotic disorder. This explains Mima's recovery after her separation from Rumi, at least in the English dub.
In the Japanese original, Mima and Rumi suffer from a different subcategory: folie simultanée, in which two people who both suffer from psychosis independently influence each other's delusions so that it becomes similar. So, by the end, Mima has influenced Rumi's delusions to the point that Rumi believes she is Idol-Mima full-time, and Rumi has influenced Mima's delusions to the point that Mima believes she has Rumi to thank for who she is today, if not to the point that she is Rumi-as-Mima in Mima's body. In either version, it's implied that both Rumi and Mima are content and calm in their respective reality/delusion, having achieved their own version of "Perfect Blue": a total serenity.
Rumi was secretly drugging Mima.
There are several scenes where Rumi visits Mima's apartment and brings her cake, and while in those moments it seems like it's a kind gesture, given Rumi's actual intentions it's possible she laced the food with something that further harmed Mina's mental stability.
