My reading of the film, a theory I haven't seen anywhere else.
My basic idea is that Audition is not about a man who holds an audition to find a wife, but is in fact about a man who works within the movie industry--Aoyama--who is in the process of making a romance movie in which he is a producer, writer, and star. The plot of the movie he’s working on is that the male lead--who Aoyama will be playing--holds an audition for a fake movie as a ploy to find a wife. He initially falls for the woman who would be the leading lady of the fake movie, but Aoyama's movie character, much like himself, has very strict, traditional ideas of women and she is a modern woman who is domineering, so he eventually falls for a secondary female character.
The film Audition is about the initial production of the movie, with Aoyama pitching his movie idea to Yoshikawa and getting it green-lit, holding a casting call, casting Asami as the lead, then further developing his character as well as the female lead's character while the movie goes through all the pre-production stages. What happens in the film is, over the course of creating the movie, Aoyama explores the character he will play, bringing out his fears of modern day women and the threat they pose to his dominance. He initially selects Asami to play the female lead role in the movie, but as his character exploration brings up more and more of his fears, he eventually has to turn her into a secondary character to assert his own dominance. The film culminates with a dream in which he faces and then defeats the lead female character that he created for Asami and converts her into a submissive female.
The film is made by meshing the real world of the film with Aoyama's paranoia-fueled delusions and the visions he has for the final movie.
I have lots and lots of proof for why this is a legitimate reading of the film, including cue marks added in post production (which only show up in projector reels of a film), character discontinuties, odd word choices, double-entendres, and differences in filming style. For the whole in-depth analysis I put together, go here: http://www.reddit.com/r/FanTheories/comments/1a0fnd/audition_1999_theory_ive_literally_been_working/