Paranoia Agent Is An Ironic Social Commentary On Our “Great” America

A few weeks before the 2016 presidential election, I re-watched for the third time Paranoia Agent, an anime series that terrified me when I first watched it in middle school and again when I watched it in my junior year of college. The premise seems ridiculous when you think about it: A boy in golden roller skates terrorizes Japan, knocking out people who feel cornered with a golden baseball bat. The show was even funny at times, reveling in a morbid sense of humor usually at its characters’ expenses, or venturing off into the fantastical, the trippy and the utterly bizarre. And yet, even when I watched the show this past fall, I still found it frightening—and not necessarily in the way a horror movie is frightening, but rather a frightfulness born out of unease. The show made me anxious; it was somehow able to elicit from me a response similar to what its characters were feeling: The sense that there was some invisible attacker, someone or something that would inevitably rear back and deliver the fatal blow. Only the blow wasn’t physical—no golden bat here. It was psychological; the blow was, in itself, paranoia. It was fear.

The psychological undertones and political implications of the show seem so much scarier now, when I think about it within the context of our current political landscape. In the show, the threat is merely imagined, an idea that gets blown up out of proportion and takes on a life of its own, fueled by people’s paranoia. In fact, you could say that the a…