PARANOIA AGENT, EPISODE 7: "MHz"

Paranoia Agent is by any standard a fairly grim television program; so it's saying something to argue that the seventh episode of thirteen (right square in the middle), "MHz", is by a country mile the bleakest, most whole-heartedly disturbing entry in the series to date. And when I say bleak, I mean, bleak, in an active, physical way. The style of the show has been relatively consistent up till this point, but the massive shift found in this episode left me quite agog, gasping at a new, hugely dramatic image, several times every minute. In a quiet episode, with long stretches entirely devoid of dialogue and a sparing use of sound effects that serve to call specific attention to just how quiet the whole damn thing is, the visuals are called upon to communicate even more than they usually do: and what they communicate is terrifying.

"MHz" is full, front-to-back, top-to-bottom, with glaring, washed-out images, aching expanses of white that overwhelm all detail. It is at one and the same moment beautiful and viscerally unsettling.



At the same moment, this episode finds the specifics of the animation and character design reaching levels of realism found nowhere yet in the series; even the more broadly caricatured characters, such as Hirukawa and the old woman, are made to look as real as they possibly can within the limits of being deliberately exaggerated cartoons. This representational realism has the effect of making the episode that much harder-hitting: I would not go so far as to call it the Uncanny Valley, but the combination of people who are this convincingly fleshy with visuals this abstract and graphic is not a combination that will put your mind in a very sound place.

Little happens, overtly: following the revelation that Tsukiko fabricated Lil' Slugger, Ikari and Maniwa beat the truth out of a suddenly not-so-delusional Makoto, that he was a copycat who only (so he claims) attacked Ushi and Hirukawa; meanwhile, Maniwa suffers from peculiar auditory hallucinations related to a mysterious figure broadcasting urgent warnings at 51 MHz. These warnings clue him in to realise what the audience has already figured out: except for Ushi, the victims were all in a state of profound emotional distress, and the attack did something to release them. He also spots the mysterious old man in the hospital, which triggers an entirely different set of hallucinations centered around the idea of duality and split identities.

Duality is a core theme of "MHz": the two Lil' Sluggers, the relationship between Maniwa and the old man, the fact that the old man himself seems to divide into multiple entities, in the detective's imaginings. The identity of the man at the radio is a real corker, too, the most extreme example of duality in the episode, and a moment so damned eerie in its implications that I almost crawled out of my skin watching it. At its simplest level, this seems to be a statement of the fundamental theme of Paranoia Agent: the disintegration of modern society, here manifested as identity rebelling against itself. It's also a reinforcement of one of the show's other core ideas, the individual's inability to properly relate to the outside world. Maniwa's mental breakdown comes about as a direct result of his refusal to accept, as Ikari does, the obvious explanation of what's going on; he needs to rip the façade off of reality itself, not knowing or caring that it's this façade that allows men like Ikari to function, however unimaginative and sedate his life might be.

It's notions like these that make "MHz" such a charming thing to watch, though there are certainly plenty of other reasons that this is the most grueling episode of Paranoia Agent yet. There is, as a particularly rough example, the matter of Hirukawa and Taeko; she sits ramrod-straight in her hospital bed, with absolute no awareness of the world around her and a perfectly expressionless smile on her face, while he gazes at her with the look of a dead man, up until he collapses into a nervous fit that would, all by itself, make a good argument for the episode's disturbing perfection (and frankly, he deserves it, the swine).

More than anything else, though, it's the feeling of weariness, saturating every frame of the episode, that makes "MHz" so effective. The ghastly lighting faded colors, so white they almost hurt your eyes, are a big part of this; so are the compositions, which very often use the edges of the frame to emphasise the separation, the isolation, between characters.

For that matter, the performances of those characters are pretty worn-out themselves. Iizuka Shozo's gruff, tired work as Ikari has always been a highlight of the vocal work in the show, but never more than in this episode, in which he sounds on the verge of death by fatigue at every turn. And the contrast to Seki Toshihiko's agitated, neurotic work as Maniwa is sharper than ever before, making the younger man's quest for the truth into something frightening just from his intensity.

By far, though, the episode's burned-out quality is most evident in the way sound is used: the radio broadcast that provides the title is a constant, scratchy, nasty presence, reminding us in places of the cacophony of conversations that opened the very first episode, but turned into something horrid and dysfunctional. It's the only loud noise in a profoundly hushed episode, and it makes "MHz" sound positively diseased, the electronic version of a chronic, wracking cough. The whole series has been unabashedly Lynchian, though I've done everything possible to avoiding using that word, discounting it as a cliché; but in this episode, the use of sound calls to mind the similarly harsh, otherwordly soundscape in Twin Peaks, which is more and more looking like Paranoia Agent's spiritual successor, both in its aesthetic and its hair-raising conception of a massively disordered world.

Well, we were never promised something pleasant; and "MHz" is far too compelling and engaging to come across as miserabilism. It is, rather, unsparing in its pursuit of its convictions, and brutal in its presentation of a world that has just plain run out of energy (and really, how do you correctly present such a world without being brutal?). Put it another way: I have never been so eager to see the next chapter in a work of art this discomfiting and depressing, and to judge from the fragmentary images of the next episode, presented, as always, as the metaphorical visions of the old man, "MHz" is just the tip of the iceberg.