Please be warned. Spoilers follow.
Paranoia Agent delights in subverting its own structure and reinterpreting its own mythos, and so any critique has to start with an examination of its story telling devices. Its closest Western parallel is probably Grant Morrison's body of work. As ever its premise is deceptively simple. A series of seemingly linked assaults takes place when an inspiration-sapped and deadline stressed creator of a stuffed toy character is attacked by baseball bat wielding grade school kid wearing inline skates and a red baseball cap. Each episode tells a single story or is a kind of meditation on a theme while the larger plot twists and turns around each tale.
The assaults mount up and soon the viewer is in way over his head in a story that perversely trumps expectation at every turn. Think you've got a handle on the youthful menace of the assailant, who is quickly nicknamed Shonen Bat by the sensation crazed media? Think again. In a preposterously brave move the "villain" of the piece is quickly neutered, then made a laughing stock, then reinterpreted, then undermined, then utterly destroyed, then given his true form as an allegory for the evasion of responsibility that series creator Satoshi Kon sees as rampant within Japanese culture.
Think you've worked out the mysteries of the police investigation? Nonsense. Theories spring up and are discarded, moments of early intuition are bizarrely proved bang on the money while simultaneously thwarted or turned on their head with later developments. The investigation grinds to a chilling, despairing halt before the two wonderfully realised cops come back with a vengeance, totally changed by the experience.
Reckon you know the characters? Yeah, right. Everyone has something to hide, something lurking under the surface that informs their actions in different ways. Everyone is connected, sometimes spuriously, sometimes intimately. Each short story investigates a particular character's back story, from the dissociative identity disordered university assistant/personal tutor/prostitute to the corrupt cop fantasizing about being a hero from a martial arts comic while sinking deeper into mob debts and paedophilia, from the young Patrick Bateman style high school's star pupil lost in a suspicious world he can't comprehend to the creator of a near Messianic cartoon character plagued by introversion and sexual repression. No-one is as they seem.
There are so many standout gasp-at-the-audacity-of-what-you're-seeing moments. As soon as the investigation reaches critical mass the storyline drops the central cast for three standalone episodes that broaden the mythos and play with other ideas. Fantasy worlds collide and identities split, merge and are cast off like dead skin. Style and genre are picked up and thrown around with a joyous disregard for what a series is supposed to be. A cop show becomes a D & D fantasy world, becomes a superhero adventure, becomes a psychological mind fuck, becomes a superflat analysis of Japanese culture and its perceived obsessions.
Some of the strongest single episodes of any TV show I've watched come in the second half. Take Happy Family Planning, in which three strangers meet up with the intention of killing themselves together after having first chatted on a message board for those obsessed by suicide. The humour is bleaker than bleak, absurdity building upon absurdity while the underlying commentary on loneliness bubbles to the fore. The three death obsessed bedroom shut-ins get out and explore the wider world, starting to show a touching love for each other and life as they knit together as a charmingly dysfunctional family. It's breathtaking television, always making you feel three or four things at once, never apologising for itself and its own bran of singular nuttiness.
Or ETC, in which a number of women congregate outside their homes and retell the Shonen Bat mythos as a series of contradictory riffs on what is rapidly becoming an all-pervasive urban myth. By turns weird, funny, preposterous and creepy, each story is picked up and thrown aside by characters who ruthlessly pick over the details for inconsistencies and implausibilities, a close up look at the series structure in microcosm.
But nothing quite prepared me for Entry Forbidden, probably the greatest standalone episode of any series I've seen this year. Two strands interweave, as Police Chief Ikari (a character who is so Grant Morrison it hurts) who was in charge of the Shonen Bat investigation struggles despairingly to get to grips with his new life and runs into someone from his past, while his dying wife waits at home for him only to encounter Shonen Bat himself grown to monstrous and vile proportions. In a series of narrated direct to camera accounts the frail woman tells the story of her life, her hopes and despair, her illness and cannily weaves together the mysteries of the entire series, unblinking in the face of the threat as her home is destroyed around her by a monster feeding off the psychological detritus of the entire population of Japan. It's a breathtaking, exhilarating celebration of life in the midst of pain and struggle, a sucker punch of reality to the gut of a series that refuses to sit complacently within your television and be what you expect it to be. The closest parallels I can think of are Last Man Falls from The Invisibles, or that astonishing chapter two thirds of the way into Foucault's Pendulum in which the brain-addled main character's wife sits him down and explains to him the entire history of numerology via the human body and the natural world.
And I haven't even mentioned Mellow Maromi, the show within a show that is partially an expose on the ultra-stressed production of an anime series (can't be too harsh on Gainax now, can we?), partially a riff on The Twilight Zone's Nightmare at 20,000 Feet, an examination of the mechanics behind the otaku phenomenon and an investigation into the series main themes of responsibility shirked. All that and it still has time to offer up more on the mysteries of Shonen Bat and Maromi the Healer Dog, the sole success of the character creator whose encounter in the first episode kick-starts the whole narrative.
In thirteen episodes Paranoia Agent offers a critique on the objectification of women, the sexual fetishisation of anime characters, ego-crazed fantasy escapism, immersive role-playing game universes, internet loneliness, suicide, vacant consumerism, the individual as formed and given context by relationships in society, crime and morality, fear of youth, fear of being found out, fear of the self and ultimately what it means to be alive in post-war Japan. It's a dazzling, virtuoso feat of modern television designed to be watched and rewatched and rewatched again, picked over for its secrets and adored for its down-to-earth humanism. Every bubble of pomposity is punctured with warm humour, every standard by which you could judge it is thoroughly blown apart and reassembled by the end. Paranoia Agent is all this and more. |
