Society needs some cognitive recalibration: Satoshi Kon’s Paranoia Agent
We were talking about sleep (My real talent), which led to dreams (I don’t remember mine), which led to Paprika (I cannot forget my friend Jay yelling “Etchosera!” during a screening of Inception), which led to the late Japanese filmmaker Satoshi Kon, which led to his television series, Paranoia Agent.
This weekend I saw the complete Paranoia Agent. It’s brilliant. Paranoia Agent starts with a seemingly random series of attacks committed by a boy on roller skates, wielding a dented metal baseball bat. This leads to a police investigation, which then moves into unexpected directions. The attacks are not random after all: the victims share feelings of anxiety, dread, helplessness. It is as if their worst fears have taken external shape, like Jung’s concept of synchronicity (“temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events”).
For a simpler illustration, listen to this song by The Police.
(Aye and I used to sing this between classes. I thought the line “Only the rush hour hell to face” was “Only the Russians have soufflés”. Which I think is better. Also I think this was Sting’s audition for the role of Feyd-Rautha in David Lynch’s marvelously terrible film of Dune. Or Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.)
Paranoia Agent (2004) reminds me of other works I love: David Mitchell’s novels Ghostwritten, number9dream and Cloud Atlas (Note David Mitchell’s long-standing Japan obsession) and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia.
Just seeing this trailer makes me want to watch the movie for the 20th time. Those tracking shots.
And if I watch Magnolia again, I’ll have to see The Earrings of Madame de…(the Criterion edition has an intro by P.T. Anderson and by the way I love Phantom Thread even if I frequently want to strangle Daniel Day-Lewis’s character, which is the point).
Meanwhile, the final chapters of my travel book are waiting…waiting…waiting…
So this is really a post about procrastination.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
July 17th, 2018 at 18:53
“..my friend Jay yelling “Etchosera!” during a screening of Inception”
I’m curious.. which part did Jay yell this? :)
July 18th, 2018 at 13:23
oriames: Every time Leo and co were told they had to go from point A to point B to point C or else something terrible would happen, and then they wouldn’t get to point C but it turned out there was a point D, E, F anyway, and the information was conveniently withheld from us to ratchet up the tension.
July 18th, 2018 at 18:24
i will never watch inception in the same way again :)
July 28th, 2018 at 22:30
Used to do lucid dreaming. It’s fantastic especially if you’re a kid who grew up on X-men. Flying, telekinesis, weather-control; create twisters and divert tsunamis with a wave of a hand, etc. all can be yours.
Nope you can’t control what you can dream about, you’ll just have to make do and roll with the “scene” you’ve been given. At least that was in my case.
I only hated the random uncontrollable side-effects:
1. Sleep paralysis — if you experience this, don’t a panic, DON’T will or force your body to move, just relax and try to doze yourself to sleep again. So that your body can wake up properly.
2. Hypnagogia — hallucinations immediately after waking up. In my case it usually happens when I slept when the lights are ON. Sometimes it’s benign, I’ve once hallucinated the kitten version of my then 7 year-old cat that vanished before my eyes after taking a couple of more steps and fully waking-up. But it can be very terrifying when night-terrors carries over to your waking state, especially if you don’t know what’s going on. More so to the superstitious.
3. Loops — this one I really hate. You wake up, you feel that you’re lying in bed, you rise up, get out of bed, it’s dark you’ve got thick curtains so you really don’t know if it’s morning yet, walks toward the light switch guided by muscle memory, flips the switch, nothing happens, Sh!t! Realized you’re still dreaming. You wake up, you feel that you’re lying in bed, you rise up, get out of bed, it’s dark…. over and over. Flipping the switch for about 30 times before finally waking up. Gaaaah!!!
BTW, that’s one of the signs that you’re dreaming; in my experience, you can’t change the lighting condition, light switches and flash lights always doesn’t work. Others are:
–you can’t read; aside from individual numbers, letters, kanji/hiragana symbols, plate numbers and familiar green street signs/names.
–you can’t properly view/read analog watches/clock faces. To me they are always cracked/busted. It’s a very reliable indication that one is dreaming.
–when you look at both of your hands or look down at your feet, the view is slightly distorted it seems like you’re wearing a weird fish-eye lens. Sometimes you can’t see you feet or body at all, only the ground, your incorporeal which is cool, ‘coz then you can fly. :D
Lastly, Inception got it wrong, time doesn’t dilate and you don’t exponentially “gain” time with deeper successive dreaming. Dream time and real time flows are comparable if not the same.