Serial Experiments Lain is an experience, not an anime. I've watched it four times now and every single time I'm blown away by the sheer insanity with which this show was imbued. Lain isn’t a subversion of a narrative structure; it finds the notion of a narrative structure utterly ridiculous. Events and dialogues happen slowly, erratically, completely unexplained. Every episode opens with a disturbingly excited English voice: “present day, present time”, before moving on to an identical series of still shots of a bright urban nightscape. These shots, bathed in the neon glow of the city, are the most colorful shots in the entire show, as the rest is diluted into a glaringly subdued color palate approaching pure black and white, but dirtier. The titular character Lain is the only real character in the entire show; everyone else exists on screen by sheer coincidence.
We follow the middle school Lain as her classmate Chisa commits suicide and puts out an invitation for everyone else to join her on the other side, which Chisa declares to be the online world of the Wired. We follow Lain’s newfound interest in computers, as she moves from checking her email on a tiny monitor to surfing the Wired on her new top-of-the-line machine. We follow Lain as she joins her friends at a club, where strangely people begin to recognize her from the Wired, although their description of her online persona seems to be the opposite of her real-life timid self. She sees herself across the dance floor, and suddenly a man pulls a gun out and shoots the people nearest to him in a hallucinogenic rampage. But as he looks on Lain’s face, he aims for her head and pleads with her not to bring the Wired into the real world. In a moment of complete persona switch, she declares that everyone is connected, and he pulls the trigger on himself, staining Lain’s face with dark red blood.
Her obsession with technology grows out of control, and she begins to play with the hardware of her computer until she has three monitors with a fan to cool off the tower, then a whole host of screens and a water cooling system, until finally her room is flooding and completely filled with circuitry. In the first shots that establish her room there is a single bed, a window, and a desk, completely void and empty, as expressionless and devoid of life as the quiet Lain herself. She sits on the bed in a bear suit, staring blankly into space. As her computer grows, she dresses more provocatively, finally smiling, finally laughing, finally being angry, finally being a person. And then it still doesn’t stop, until about halfway through the show we see her sitting in the middle of her clausterphobic technological cavern covered in wires, an alligator clip clamped to her lip. If the world is becoming closer and closer to the Wired, then Lain is certainly walking the fuzzy line between the two.
We see many different Lains. First there is only one, the quiet middle school student, but soon the bold and provocative Lain from the Wired emerges too. Then there is the sinister Lain who goes around revealing the dark secrets people keep to themselves, the doe-eyed happy Lain that wants the best for everyone, and eventually we meet an infinite series of Lains, the ones that exist in the minds of all those she has met.
The people of the Wired worship her as a god, feeding her information and praising her unification of everyone online. The dead come back to life to guide her on breaking down the barrier between the online world and the physical world, while two men in black suits and laser sights affixed to their eyes watch from outside her room at all hours. The world’s top hackers tell her funny stories and then promptly blow up her room with a bomb. Lain goes from talking to her friends to talking to various inanimate objects in her room, to talking to ghostly models of her parents floating off the ground as if hanging from a noose, to talking to giant floating mouths and dead scientists, to talking to God itself.
If the physical world is portrayed with a subdued, dead color palate, then the Wired is portrayed however it needs to be. It is completely free-form, sometimes manifesting as a technicolor swirl of pastels, sometimes as a pixelated maze resembling a dimly lit Windows screensaver, sometimes simply showing darkness or static with a host of voices speaking all in mismatched unison. In the last case, representing the common bustle of information flowing back and forth, we often see Lain’s face slowly blinking in the background, absorbing and managing all human interaction as an unseen god in the shadow of the Wired. I find it very interesting that she blinks, a natural human action that isn’t rendered in any other scenes. It is as if the Lain who rules over the Wired is more human than any of the figures we meet in the physical world.
And then there are events that make absolutely no sense, or have no continuity with the rest of the show. At one point Lain’s sister asks Lain why she was in Shibuya earlier in the day, and suddenly the sister is whisked off to the intersection where Lain was standing earlier, except that everyone is gone. She goes to use a tissue and sees “fulfill the prophecy” scrawled messily in blood all over. The same message is on the drink she spills on the table at McDonalds, and the door she goes through out back. Eventually she gets home, completely distraught, and sees herself walking past the doorway. They make eye contact, but the other her seems to be looking through her. We switch perspectives and the original sister is a glass statue that disintegrates, and suddenly the episode ends. From then on the sister is in a catatonic state, making dial tones while holding her hand up to her head like a phone, completely shattered as a human being. This is the first and last time she is at all relevant to the events on screen.
Why does the show explain how a small spiked ball can cause someone to hallucinate when they swallow it? Why does a small grey alien show up in Lain’s room, only for the episode to primarily turn into a history lesson on Roswell and magnetic fields? Why is God a floating man with paint marks on his cheek and duct tape holding his torso and his stomach together? Why does a little girl chase a teenage gamer to his house and force him to kill himself just for playing an online dungeon crawler, and why does that have any relevance to ESP? The dots all connect in the end, but they do so in the most absurd, obfuscated ways, to the extent that we have to wonder what any of those events actually meant to the story and to the world. The ending renders all these points and more completely moot in the end, creating such a single-minded conclusion that it could have resolved a thirty minute short instead of a thirteen episode show.
And so I’m sorry to you, dear reader, for me attempting to explain the deafeningly quiet madness of Serial Experiments Lain in such a way that gives little or no justification of my score, but ultimately I can’t think of a correct way to even approach a criticism of it, and so all I can say is that I love it for every moment of its insanity, and consider it one of the most revelatory experiences an anime viewer can have. Its silence and pace are punishing and brilliant; the composition of shots and use of colors is unsettling and masterful. It takes the existentialism of its spiritual predecessors such as Akira and Ghost in the Shell to a level that no work before or since has matched, and laid the groundwork for the more contemporary masterpieces of Texhnolyze and Ergo Proxy. It defies the conventions of anime in the same way early surrealist works defied all known conventions of art and cinema, and it does so by blending the two to create a moving picture free of the shackles of filming actors in the real world. It's uniquely an anime, and because of this it becomes something that wholly transcends anime as a medium. It's nothing less than an experience that happens to be in anime form.