Paranoia Agent

Happy Family Planning

e08

2025-09-13

I just finished a rewatch of this series last night. I was initially going to write about a different episode I remembered more vividly, the meta one that gets into the process of animation itself, but this one struck me hardest in my rewatch. I totally forgot about the twist in this episode! Frankly it's probably worth another rewatch now that I've remembered and can catch some more details.

First off, subtlety. Elsewhere in the series there's a point where the chief's wife is talking about him in voiceover while we see him and when she mentions he's a good man with eyes for no one else, his eyes are on another woman's ass. Paranoia Agent is just rife with things like that. More often, they're story elements. Like here, we have a girl, young man, and old man. It's never clear why any of them want to die, but at the same time it is. The old man has some reason to take pills, probably an illness. The young man is gay, though we're never given anything remotely explicit from which to conclude that, and this was a time where that was even less accepted. The young girl is perhaps the most open to interpretation, but at that age, such a desire can only be attributable to some form of family issues, in this case probably neglect. The episode is a product of its time, in which such a girl could have conceivably not been culturally warned a million times about the danger of meeting strangers on the internet. In some ways there was more hysteria about that at the time, but I think with regard to children it is greater than ever. Regardless, we find ourselves with a motley crew with a suicide. That's an interesting idea in itself, the way it provides people with the courage to go through with it through the approval of others.

Of course, they succeed, we just never know particularly when. Crucially, neither do they, as they continue going about trying to kill themselves. Or at least the two men do, while trying to leave the girl behind. I don't know what to think about that. Is it hypocrisy or good morals? Both? Whatever it is, it's funny. The whole episode treats an utterly dark subject with upbeat music and a playful atmosphere. There are signs throughout of what really happened, but again, I'll probably need to come back to this someday so I can appreciate them fully. By the end, though, it's still subtle and might confuse the thickest of skulls. Missing shadows, photobombing people oblivious to your presence who seem horrified when they look at the picture. And then perhaps the strangest part to me, the ending with the camera seemingly aimed at publicly available condoms. Is it antinatalism? Are they saying don't have kids if you can't make for their lives to be happy ones where they would never consider suicide, that we don't need more people who don't want to live? It's unclear, but clearly a joke of some kind. Other episode do similar things with their last shots, like the episode on gossiping housewives in an apartment complex ending with an aerial showing the shape of those apartments is "etc."

The openness to interpretation is something I usually don't like in a show, it has to be done masterfully like in Twin Peaks or the like, and this is one of those shows. It's deeply psychological in a way that pokes at uncertainty, reminiscent of dreams and their interpretation. Of course the overall story is that you have Lil' Slugger, this manifestation of fear, stress, feeling like you have no way out, all spread socially. Very much a BOB figure. And then you have Maromi, the cute dog mascot representing consumerism and escapism in all its forms (sex, the acquisition of wealth, gossip, superhero fantasy in the detective's case, and nostaliga in the chief's). Also very Lynchian, especially in that they're ultimately working together and borne from a single girl's suffering and the lie she told to hide it. That central thesis wows me. That broadly construed paranoia, that no-way-out feeling coexists symbiotically with consumerism and such as a kind of society-level coping mechanism is one thing. That it balloons outward from a single person's fear, and that fear is rooted in dishonesty, and dishonesty rooted in suffering? That's some high grade psychoanalytic theorizing!

There's not much more I can say about how great this show is, apart to mention the animation. Absolute top tier stuff. Energetically unsettling from the moment that weird opening theme with all the laughing people comes on with the music and the birds. The moment I caught it on [Adult Swim] as a teen in the wee hours of the morning, I was powerless to think anything other than, "What the hell is this?" And with not much more elocution a couple decades later, I'm still thinking it.