The Two Truths

Of Dario Argento’s Opera and Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue

By: Gino C. Mongelli

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

The Two Truths: Of Dario Argento’s Opera and Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue is a wide-ranging exploration of the remarkable connections between the film-works of two seemingly disparate directors through discussions of psychology, philosophy East (from which this book takes its title) and West (including integral theory), physics, film theory and other systems related to reality, thought and consciousness. Art-horror director Dario Argento and animated fantasy film director Satoshi Kon receive treatment of comprehensive scale and astounding breadth and depth in this whirlwind analysis of their filmographies (and many other directors’ works including Frank Capra, Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch). Fans of Dario Argento will enjoy the meticulous investigation of Opera and its connections to other Argento films, including Tenebrae, Phenomena and The Stendhal Syndrome. The book starts out with an elucidation of some of the major themes in Argento’s often-overlooked Trauma to set the stage for drawing out further connections to the films of other directors, starting with Magnetic Rose written by Satoshi Kon. For fans of Satoshi Kon, The Two Truths marks a first, including not only analyses of Kon’s films at the high level of resolution they warrant but also in-depth summaries of both the Japanese source novel, Perfect Blue: Complete Metamorphosis, and the Japanese-only companion audio drama Double Bind -The Looking Glass of Perfect Blue-. Author Gino C. Mongelli brings together diverse concepts and systems to present an important work in terms of both analysis of Argento’s and Kon’s filmographies and attending to our human abilities to think, self-reflect and grow. Themes specific to The Two Truths were heavily researched over three years, including poring over academic, filmic and other sources in five languages (especially English and Japanese). There are over 200 references cited including, among many others, Joseph Campbell, Freeman Dyson, Mircea Eliade, Richard P. Feynman, Sigmund Freud, Douglas Hofstadter, William James, Carl Jung, Hayao Kawai, R.D. Laing, Marshall McLuhan, Friedrich Nietzsche, P.D. Ouspensky, Jordan B. Peterson, Chögyam Trungpa, Ken Wilber and Slavoj Žižek. The Two Truths is an augmented spin-off of the previously released The Delicate War: Knowing in oneself the angel from the beast through the films of Dario Argento. In that volume, discussion of Argento’s Opera received one chapter. Here, that chapter and many other elements are remixed and expanded by over five times in length to bring out the similarly fractal qualities of Kon’s Perfect Blue and to use those two films as a foundational hologram through which to explore most of the other films in these two directors’ brilliant oeuvres.