Forum - View topicANN Book Club -- Paranoia Agent.
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JacobC
ANN Past Staff
 Posts: 3728 Location: SoCal |
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Welcome, welcome, welcome to the Paranoia Agent Book Club discussion thread!
Over the course of six weeks, we’ll be watching and discussing Paranoia Agent together, Satoshi Kon's only TV anime and a trippy, spooky delight. The madness begins when commercial character designer Tsukiko Sagi, creator of the hit stuffed icon Maromi, is attacked by a mysterious kid wearing rollerblades and a baseball cap. The Lil' Slugger with the golden bat strikes fear into the neighboring populace, and district detectives are at a loss to find a suspect that dips in and out of shadows and leaves no witnesses but the victims themselves. Because the cases are growing in number, like a pathogen, and the panicked populace can only wonder if the delinquent is a product of the paranormal...or paranoia. Also, I have taken a leaf from Key's smart book of discussion-streamin' and decided to start the new discussion week 48 hours after talk has ceased if it fails to carry a week, which it usually does. So there's no schedule down there yet, apart from the first week. Apart from normal forum rules, there will be only two additional rules for the book club threads: 1. Should you feel so compelled, you can skip ahead of schedule, but please don’t discuss episodes ahead of time in this thread. If the week’s schedule says we’ll be talking about episodes 1-4, don’t talk about what happens in episode 5. Don’t even use spoiler tags as an excuse. You can slightly foreshadow if you like, saying, “Remember what happens in that scene, it will be important in episode 5,” but no spoilage. Zip. Zilch. Nada. 2. Don’t be afraid to speak up about anything and everything you notice in the show, so long as you find it interesting or meaningful. I don’t have to worry about people being noobish much on ANN, so I want to address the opposite problem. Your opinion and participation are what will make this thread memorable and hopefully spark new life for old series for a while here on the ANN forums, so speak your mind! If there's one thing open to multiple perceptions, it's Paranoia Agent, nearly a show ABOUT multiple points of view. I know you're not here to read my prattle, but here's three key things to remember when skating through Paranoia Agent. It may help you to understand it better. 1. Paranoia Agent is all about Stream of Consciousness. The overwhelming majority of what you will see in this show is someone else’s warped perception of the world and is not actually happening, except to them. This should be obvious, but some people watch the show not knowing this and spend too much time debating over if Maromi really is talking or it’s Tsukiko’s imagination, etc. Automatically assume that whatever you’re watching is kinda reality, just reality through the eyes of a slightly screwy individual…even when that becomes several crazies at once, oh boy, then it gets interesting. 2. There are exceptions to this, however! Paranoia Agent is considered more of a psychological drama than a fantasy, but it’s gonna segue into fantasy a little bit. Some individuals (you’ll have to determine who) have the ability to enter other people’s delusions besides their own, so just because two people are seeing the same thing doesn’t mean it’s real, either. There are two such human beings in the story. Keep your eyes open. There’s even a case, and I’ll address it when it comes up, where one person’s paranoia CHANGES reality on a large scale. When you suspect that, don’t try to reason it all away as delusion. (Kon is not beyond employing contrivances to make his point, watch Perfect Blue.) Just know that somebody in this story now possesses unexplained supernatural powers that tie mass delusion to their own and it IS very real. It’s kind of social commentary, but it’s also just a fantastical contrivance, and if you go with it, you’ll like the story more. 3. This is a biggie: Kon doesn’t view paranoia and delusion as a bad thing. He says in the interview on Disc One (I highly encourage you all to watch it) that it’s necessary to some degree to keep everyone from going nuts. So a little crazy saves us from a lot crazy. Furthermore, he separates the ideas of “paranoia” and “self-deception.” He uses an example of a kid that doesn’t want to go to school because of a bad test or something. They tell their parents that they have a stomachache. This is really to get out of school, of course, but the more and more they’re scared of going to school, the more and more their stomach REALLY hurts. They’re not lying at all about being really sick. That might be why, although Paranoia Agent deals with some messy human issues, it remains surprisingly lighthearted and tongue-in-cheek about the whole ball of wax. All these characters aren’t necessarily XXXholic types made to put out a cautionary tale, they’re just funny little nuggets of human truth. Self-deception and defense mechanisms are another matter, where instead of reinterpreting the truth unintentionally, you completely lie to yourself to make yourself feel better. That’s the “evil” in this story. That’s… Well. I’ve said too much. Way too much. On with the show! INDEX September 11th - September 17th discussion TBA TBA TBA TBA TBA Thoughts on the series as a whole |
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JacobC
ANN Past Staff
Posts: 3728 Location: SoCal |
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“To begin…” (pretend I’m a wizened old geezer)
Episode 1 – Enter Lil’ Slugger Episode 2 – The Golden Shoes The first attacks. Juicy. This is actually before stuff gets weird! I’m going to do discussion questions/ideas again, because I’ve found that they do work quite well…
Have at it, folks! 
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angel_lover
 Posts: 645 Location: UK |
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Thanks to the vicissitudes of my DVD rental company (good ol' Tesco) I've only just got the first DVD. I've already watched it twice, and it still feels as though I'm just scratching the surface.
I guess you probably didn't do it intentionally, but I think you've already touched the very heart of Satoshi Kon's mindbending techniques. This is what I mean:
I think you mean "segue". But that was a sort of "Paprika" moment for me, where just that one word triggered off a whole stream of thoughts and images (Maromi on a Segway???). It's the use of things that are not very wrong, but just slightly wrong that can cause the most discomfort because they don't flag up immediately into the conscious mind, they're processed much deeper down - as Maurice Sendak put it, "where the wild things are". Anyway, Li'l Slugger, who is he? I'd say he's the embodiment of post-war Japan itself. He looks kind of like the lovechild of an American serviceman (just look at his facial features) and a Japanese girl - in a way, that's exactly what modern Japan is. He has the golden boots and bat of an elite sportsman, but things have gone badly wrong, degenerated, and the elite sportsman is now a delinquent child whose bat is now bent out of shape. |
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Ggultra2764
 Subscriber Posts: 3970 Location: New York state. |
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Wow, this is quite a coincidence. I'm still watching Paranoia Agent now and a discussion now begins on the series. I guess I could pop in and join in on this one though I probably won't have much to offer this time around since I haven't watched the series as many times like I have with Serial Experiments Lain.
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abunai
Old Regular
 Posts: 5463 Location: 露命 |
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I suspect that we're going to find it extremely difficult to pin this series down to a definite meaning - even more so than with Haibane Renmei and Serial Experiments Lain.
Although Paranoia Agent constitutes a coherent narrative (albeit one that is sometimes hard to discern), it is also, deliberately, a highly fragmented story. We are shown bits and pieces of the story, all the time -- sometimes in the foreground, and sometimes in the background. Here are a few things that I always think of when I am watching the first episode of PA: -- 1. The OP The OP is more revealing than one might think. Look carefully at all the characters being presented. Every one of them is displaced, located in a place where one would not normally expect to see them. Moreover, they are in hostile environments -- surroundings that, in one way or the other, are inimical to their continued well-being. Their circumstances signal alienation and death, or the imminent likelihood of death. Why, the very first time we see Tsukiko Sagi is at the beginning of the OP, and she is standing on a rooftop, holding her shoes in her hands. It may not be immediately obvious to a Westerner, but anyone familiar with Japanese customs will realize that "taking off your shoes on a rooftop" = "about to commit suicide by leaping off the edge". The same applies to all the others, even without the rather blatant symbol of death embodied in the mushroom cloud and the explosion shockwaves seen on planet Earth in the lunar segment. All of these people are in the presence of death. Imminent and overwhelming death. And they're laughing. Fear, denial, absurdity. 2. Making excuses The first few minutes of the first episode are a series of replays of what is essentially the same scene, played out by different people in different but similar circumstances. All of them are pressured by expectations of some kind, and respond by making excuses and lying. They are practicing deception as a survival method. Cut immediately to Tsukiko Sagi, who is (metaphorically speaking) pounding her head against a brick wall, trying to come up with a follow-up to her immensely popular stuffed toy design, Maromi. And getting nowhere. Expectations, pressure, response. -- Yes, this is very much a series about the exigencies of life in modern Japan, though the underlying lessons are universal. - abunai |
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JacobC
ANN Past Staff
Posts: 3728 Location: SoCal |
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I agree with abunai that the series' beginning, (both the OP and the first scene) was the perfect way to set a lot of the themes for the show in motion.
One thing I always notice about that first scene is not only is everyone coming up with some lie or excuse to get out of something, but they're all talking (sometimes just texting!) to people on a cellphone, so the people in question can't see them. This is especially important for the girl telling her boyfriend she's "tired tonight." (She's with another boy.) It's also key for the guy "stuck in traffic," parallel-parked on a non-congested road. They don't see who they're talking to, and they don't see the equally distant people shuffling around them. It's a separation of the world they choose to believe in and what's really happening. No one can see it but them, because they shut everybody else out to keep the illusion safe. In one of the DVD commentaries, Kon describes the world of Paranoia Agent as one where everyone's talking, but no one's really listening to one another. This will become recurrent in the show, so every time there's a conversation going on in an episode, notice how the people in it respond (or fail to respond) to one another. They're just talking in a void, really, and they rarely get what the other person is trying to say because they're after something entirely in their scope of desire or fear and twist the other person's words to match that. That is, with the exception of detectives Ikari and Maniwa, by far the most sensible, non-eccentric characters in the story here at the beginning. They debate about the best way to handle the case, though, because they have different views to take on the oddity of it. Ikari wants to assume that the girl is making it up entirely and must have some reason for doing so, as Tsukiko's story is illogical and fuzzy. He plans to look for witnesses, get the beef on what really happened, and close the case. Maniwa disagrees. He disdains the idea of following old formulas to try and guess a person's motives, so he wants to approach the investigation scientifically, and get in the victim's head. He's not going to deny that it looks like Tsukiko's not being honest, but dismissing the bizarre case as self-inflicted is too simple to him. He's already willing to go through some weirder methods and creative psychoanalysis to get the true answer, not just what's convenient or likely. Maniwa just works too hard. He wants the complete truth very badly. New talent. At this point, though, I have to admit, Lil' Slugger/Shonen Bat looks like a symbol of extreme stress and the bewildered catharsis that follows it. His bat showers down a complete emotional breakdown...or staves it off at the last possible moment in favor of brief, quiet delirium for his victims. So...maybe he's a symbol, for paranoia? Why a symbol with such a universal face, then? That doesn't quite make sense. Obviously, Ichi's story is a little tongue-clucking at the swelled heads of excelling young Japanese students. The implication of the episode is certainly that true acceptance comes with just being a kind, considerate person, even if you aren't especially talented or "top of the class," maybe those people aren't the happiest anyway. (At least Ushi gets good grades...wait, who named that poor kid?) Of course, Ichi may never ever figure this out. His fear of being wrongfully accused was automatically directed at Ushi. Not logical, no, but that was the only imperfection, only threat, to Ichi at the moment, so it became the only reasonable target for him to pit his animosity towards. Of course, the more and more he suspected Ushi and started wrongfully bullying HIM, the more Ushi's problem paralleled his own. He's pretty disgusted by Ushi's friendly assertion that they're similar, but it's hard to deny because Ichi brought it upon himself anyway. I do think I busted a lung laughing when Lil' Slugger suddenly shows up and knocks Ushi out...while Ichi is still daydreaming about it. Ichi is SO relieved when this happens, until he realizes that it only casts FURTHER suspicion on him. At least he thinks so, but chances are that he wouldn't be arrested for the coincidence. So, why would he think that? Because Lil' Slugger was causing his unfair treatment...and he was causing Ushi's. If he's Ushi's bully, then he really DOES feel like Lil' Slugger to some degree, and if it's so obvious to him, it has to be obvious to everyone else. (He sees his face pasted on Lil' Slugger's when he runs to catch him. Scary.) A pattern to notice: Ichi has two delusions. One of grandeur and one of fear. They're tied to the same thing, but on one end he's denying the problem and on another he's making it MUCH worse than it actually is, causing him to escape again until the fear brings him back to greater exaggeration on the other end. And then...! That horrible pull in two directions is going to appear pretty frequently, until the symbolism therein rears its head near the end... |
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fighterholic
Posts: 9193 |
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From the moment I started watching it, I was drawn into the series as a whole. But I'll start with the first part of it. I loved the beginning song and the animation that accompanied it. Like abunai said they did seem to be displaced and in hostile environments, but what made even more intriguing (or more creepy) was the expressions on all of their faces. They were all laughing while in the environments that they were in.
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abunai
Old Regular
Posts: 5463 Location: 露命 |
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Continuing my earlier thoughts....
3. Relieving the pressure In both of the first episodes (and later, too -- no surprises there), we see people who are at the end of their rope, in one way or another. They are under pressure to live up to expectations, and they have no way to meet those expectations. What are they to do? The OP provides a clue, in a sense. In the OP, we see people laughing hysterically, uncontrollably, in a manner totally inappropriate to their situation. This is, quintessentially, the first of the major points that Kon is making in PA. When the mind is faced with unbearable circumstances, something has got to give... and, well, it's not reality. Instead, it is the perception of reality. Madness starts where despair ends. Look, now, at the first appearance of Shounen Bat/Li'l Slugger. Sagi is at the end of her rope. She is unable to deliver the goods, and this will have serious consequences for her life. She stumbles (physically, as well as metaphorically) and her failed creations scatter across the parking lot. She struggles to pick them up, but one of them is under a car, tantalizingly within reach. She tears her clothes, retrieving something that is essentially worthless to her... and it happens. The shadows lengthen and transform, and Shounen Bat appears. Does the mind make a sound when it snaps? Maybe, in this case, the sound is the sound of rollerblades, approaching. Instant relief from stress -- by a swift blow to the head. Despair, disjunction, absolution. 4. Absolution through victimization I'm not going to delve too deeply into this theme right away, but it seems obvious that the attacks by Shounen Bat are not always unwelcome to his victims. Look at Sagi, who is, in a way, relieved of the pressure when she is attacked. Suddenly, she is allowed to be passive and uncreative, at least for a while -- because that is the rôle that a victim is allowed to play. The same is, to a degree, true of Icchi, of course -- and we may speculate whether some similar motivation takes place in the other victims. Is Shounen Bat, then, invoked by his victims? Maybe, maybe not. But I invite you to listen very carefully to the soundtrack, both in the scenes when he appears -- but also in the scenes when other people (and particularly Sagi) are placed under strong emotional pressure. There is a lesson to be learned, there. Absolution usually comes at the cost of penance. Is the absolution from (or abdication of) responsibility the point of Shounen Bat's appearance? Is the violence he offers at the same time a penance? - abunai |
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JacobC
ANN Past Staff
Posts: 3728 Location: SoCal |
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That's a good point. A lot of what will come up in Paranoia Agent is whether or not Shonen Bat/Lil' Slugger is offering the victims an escape or a kind of salvation, actually. Are the attacks such a bad thing when they free people from their problems?
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BrothersElric
 Posts: 1996 |
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I'm just gonna stick my head in a little bit here for a sec and make you all aware that I do indeed plan on following this thread/series, however I'm going to have to wait until I can get the DVDs from JG before I can, so you probably won't see me in here for a while.
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TheTheory
 Posts: 1029 Location: Central PA |
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I randomly decided to pick this series up from Right Stuf, as they had it at 50% off last week and I've been enjoying Kon's movies lately. So it is in the mail and I hope it arrives soon enough that I can get in on the discussion of the first four episodes. (I'm excited... I haven't had the means to do one of these book club thingies, but conceptually I love the idea).
The interesting thing about Kon's movies is that they all feel separate from each other, yet you can definitely tell that he did them. With both Paprika and Millennium Princess I thought that they might have worked better as a 12 episode series rather than a movie. So I'm excited to see how he treats a full series. |
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abunai
Old Regular
Posts: 5463 Location: 露命 |
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They're not so separate as all that. There is definitely a thematic continuum within which Kon regularly works -- certain themes which he returns to, again and again, some of which are: * The plasticity of reality. In all of Kon's works, we see, again and again, the breakdown and/or warping of the distinction between reality and dream/fantasy. He is very much a surrealist director, which is why I usually compare him to David Lynch (although, unlike Lynch, Kon is capable of carrying his films to term, producing a completed product instead of a half-formed stillbirth). * The frailty of the human psyche. Another surrealist theme, but in Kon's films, it is often turned to the subject of frayed morals. Many of Kon's characters are individuals who do morally reprehensible things for reasons that are understandable, if not forgiveable. * The significance of symbols. As much a symbolist as a surrealist, Kon often makes use of the technique of symbolic transference -- one object or person standing in for another. * The intertextuality of art. Like many modern filmmakers, Kon also plays with the postmodernistic use of intertextuality. Many of his works are self-referential or contain references to his other works, or to various other influences. For instance, in one of the next episodes, you will see persons and events that foreshadow the persons and events of Paprika, long before that film was ever made. In effect, Paprika is a development of some of the concepts that Kon first put together in that episode. Similarly, Paprika contains numerous references to Kon's earlier works (look for the promotional poster for Tokyo Godfathers at a movie theater, near the end of Paprika).
I didn't -- I found Millennium Actress (not "Princess") to be exactly the right length -- but I agree that Paprika could have done with about another 5-10 minutes of screen time in the second half of the film. The editing was positively staccato in places. Notice, incidentally, how the theme of plastic reality is central to Millennium Actress? The unpredictable and confusing blurring of the boundary between reality, memory, and fantasy is central to the way that film is told -- as it is to the way Paranoia Agent is told. - abunai |
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JacobC
ANN Past Staff
Posts: 3728 Location: SoCal |
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The difference I would say between them is that David Lynch puts random bits of whatever-pops-into-his-head into his movies and expects you to draw some understanding from them, leaving a movie with nice concepts and a lot of incomprehensible fallout. Satoshi Kon puts random bits of whatever-pops-into-his-head into his films and then, it seems, backwrites to figure out what it COULD mean in his story, keeping even the most unusual concepts somehow in stream with what he's trying to convey.
Episodes 3 and 4 of Paranoia Agent are the best examples of that.
Tokyo Godfathers contains a movie poster of Millennium Actress and Perfect Blue as well, about ten minutes into the movie when Uncle Bag turns his back to a video rental store across the street.
Actually, in episode 5 we're going to see the exact same dynamic of one person's warped reality, another person indulging it, and a third on the outside of the whole schism again, almost mirroring Millennium Actress. (It's one of my favorite episodes, and Millennium Actress was my favorite of his films because of the clever use of that device.) |
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abunai
Old Regular
Posts: 5463 Location: 露命 |
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I think you're more than likely right about that. It certainly seems as if that is Kon's method. Hmm... Kon is to Lynch as.... Anno is to Cronenberg? But that is a matter for a different thread.
I know, but the reason I picked Paprika to mention was because TheTheory had indicated that he had seen that. It's always best to use a familiar example, if possible. Still, you are quite right. The referential movie poster is an emblematic device of Kon's, in much the same sense as Hitchkock's (or Lynch's) cameos in their own movies. It's a big fat "I made this!" declaration, and it's charming, for all its self-importance. - abunai |
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Bluebeard
 Posts: 267 Location: Massachusetts |
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After watching the first two episodes, I found the Episode 2 & Ichi's "story" most reflective of how society reacts to events they feel are out of their control. In the days following the revelation that Shonon Bat was a young boy with inline skates and a baseball cap, everyone rushed to suspect Ichi for those similarities alone. I remember from when I was in high school years ago after the Columbine attack, the days following the event anyone in school who wore a trenchcoat was immediately under suspicion. People would talk about them behind their backs, some people even admitted to being afraid of them now. Keep in mind these people had been wearing trenchcoats for the 2-3 years many of them had been in high school and weren't known for ever causing any disturbances. After September 11'th anyone vaguely resembling a Muslim was under suspicion by the public. An Indian man wearing a turban was murdered in a random fit of anger by a man so ignorant he didn't even realize the man was not even Muslim, but Sikh. People's response to the Shonen Bat attacks through Ichi was certainly fitting to the way people lose sight of logic when they feel helpless.
(Now I'll have to do my best to stay on schedule. I had intended on participating in the Haibane Renmei discussion, however I got carried away and watched the whole series in the first week  I'll have to pick another series to watch in the space between episodes.)
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