Clip 4 - Paprika

As the story progresses, the boundaries between dream life and reality increasingly blur. Eventually, a delusional nightmare (which we find out belongs to the chairman) overtakes the city of Tokyo, becoming an overwhelming spectacle of the kind Angela Ndalianis describes in her essay, “Architectures of the Senses: Neo-Baroque Entertainment Spectacles.” While dreams had previously been a subject of observation and immersion within a controlled space, here they threaten the city with a “neo-baroque logic,” one that “refuse[s] to respect the limits of the frame,” and instead “invad[es] the space in every direction...perforating it, becoming one” with the diegetic reality (Ndalianis and Focillon 360). The spectacle, featuring various household and consumer culture commodities, as well as people whose faces are replaced by screens and cellphones, is set against the backdrop of a mediated cityscape that mirrors present-day Tokyo.