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.
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.
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.
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 predecessor, 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.