Did "Paprika" predict the decline of the internet?

«Internet and dreams are the means to express man's inhibitions». A phrase that has echoed a lot in recent days, not in these exact terms, but thanks to Kanye West’s tweets and his so-called social experiment—spending twelve hours insulting people on X and praising Nazism, all while managing to keep his social media profile active. At the end of his "game," he deactivated his account himself. But there are multiple examples of how the internet, unfortunately often, is a cesspool best avoided, trying to come out of it more or less clean, knowing that one is always at risk. Whether as a victim or being exposed as a perpetrator. One of the "lighter" cases—though it is anything but light—was the resurfacing of old posts from the profile of Karla Sofía Gascón, the lead actress of Emilia Pérez, who faced public backlash and a sort of damnatio memoriae due to some of her racist and indiscreet remarks. As a result, she was removed from the final Oscar campaign and advised—one might say forced—by Netflix not to attend the last pre-Academy events.

Then, there are cases of such gravity that they leave one astonished, petrified by the atrocities they reveal, such as the Telegram chat with approximately 70,000 men exchanging tips on how to rape women, whether strangers or members of their own families. A hell on earth—or rather, on the internet—following many other similar stories, from private exchanges to Facebook groups, where individuals are subjected to genuine acts of violence. This exposes the darker side of the internet, an immensely powerful and useful tool that has evolved drastically in a short period, with recent years only further deteriorating its nature. Yet, the opening quote, so fitting for our times, comes from a work released in 2006, nearly twenty years ago. A phrase that transcends time and space, speaking directly to today’s audience, especially to film and animation enthusiasts who can find it in the anime Paprika by Satoshi Kon. A cult film based on the eponymous novel by Yasutaka Tsutsui from 1993, it was ten years after its publication that the writer met the filmmaker and invited him to adapt his work into a film. Until then, no one had dared to take on such a dangerous project because it was overflowing with fantasy—perverse, magical, and perilous. But what Tsutsui could not have known, and which immediately led Kon to accept, was that the director and screenwriter had long wanted to bring this story to the screen.

Thus, after completing work on the series Paranoia Agent and dedicating the necessary attention to the creation of Paprika, Satoshi Kon set to work on a project that, from the universe of dreams, managed to foreshadow what the world of tomorrow would be. A grand illusion that, drawing inspiration from Morpheus' realm, takes from the collective unconscious theorized by Carl Jung. In Paprika, this is represented by the amalgamation of the parade, containing within it a convergence of dreams and their protagonists, ultimately merging into a single flow. It is no coincidence that Kon considered dreams on par with fantasy and paranoia, particularly in terms of their relevance to surviving in our world. The World Wide Web has become the container of this collective, where masks fall away in favor of an unfiltered "Self" that reveals our deepest being—which, often, is inhabited by dreams, fantasy, and paranoia. According to Jung, when people populate the internet, they shed their "Ego"—the conscious part of their identity—giving way to another, almost primal force. This is where the director portrays the internet as a place to be wary of, a dangerous space full of pitfalls, as it allows people to communicate in ways that strike directly at the heart and soul of others, albeit through a screen.

Themes like deepfake and fake news are increasingly prevalent in the context of the internet, completely distorting the perception of what is true and what is false, what is right and what is wrong, much like the blurred boundary between reality and fiction in Paprika. The parade in the film represents both the opportunities for connection offered by the internet—considering that even entering dreams requires a dedicated website—and the risk that the viral nature and massive presence of its content could overwhelm and obscure users' knowledge (and consciousness). This is not necessarily a condemnation of the internet itself but rather a warning. It is astonishing how Satoshi Kon’s themes are so relevant to today, from his debut anime Perfect Blue (1997), which explores the hyper-sexualization of the star system—including the presence of a destructive internet and toxic fandom culture—to the omnipresence of the web in every aspect of our lives with Paprika, both inside and outside dreams.

From psychoanalysis to technology, from deception to what we consider authentic, Satoshi Kon’s film is a fever dream of imagery—inspired by Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, itself drawn from George Orwell’s 1984—filled with delirium and unexplored journeys. It is the digital double we construct every day online, which does not always correspond to who we are beyond the screen. It is digitized instinct. It is the warning of a story telling us that technological terrorism is possible and closer than we think, that manipulation is increasingly sought after for dubious purposes. It is hard not to see this reflected in today's world, with Donald Trump, the former U.S. president, placing Elon Musk, the owner of X, and Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook, by his side. Perhaps, more than anything, this could signal the beginning of a nightmare, one from which we do not know how to protect ourselves, let alone how to wake up.