Serial Experiments Lain – Review

Serial Experiments Lain opens with the main character, Lain, receiving her first PC (personal computer). Lain is your average Japanese teenager, though a bit shy. Her family belongs to the solid Japanese middle class and she lives in a clean suburb. However, Lain’s interactions in the Wired, a global communication network, take a sinister turn when she begins receiving emails from a fellow classmate, Chisa, who committed suicide. The emails state that Chisa did not die, but merely abandoned her flesh and now exists solely within the Wired. After this revelation, the series takes on an increasingly dark, surrealistic atmosphere as Lain is drawn deeper into the Wired, and perhaps closer to her electronic doppelganger and God himself.

Though not explosively intense, the visuals in Lain are superb in their subtly. As the series progresses, the standard images of the Japanese cityscape become twisted; the buzzing of power lines are an ever-present roar, their shadows intersect and the concrete sidewalks while pulsating with energy, psychedelic confrontations between Lain and her electronic double, and an increasing sense of unreality, as typically mundane scenes and interactions are twisted into surrealist nightmares. The story follows a fairly standard non-linear format, a style of storytelling that has been more warmly embraced in Japan than America. Lain splices together fragmented vignettes with a chaotic mess of colors and sounds to bring the audience from Lain, the epicenter of the series, towards an expansive vision of the future of mankind and technology.

Released 10 years after Akira, Lain explores many of the same concerns central to the anime classic and rests comfortably within the Japanese cyberpunk subgenre. However, Serial Experiments Lain is an interesting response to the quintessential cyberpunk anime films (Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Armitage III). Unlike the rebellious motorcycle punks and cybernetically-enhanced police women, Lain is a shy junior high school student whose increasing integration into the virtual world of the ‘wired’ (something much more vast than the Internet) leads her to question reality, the concept of ‘self’ and ‘God,’ and her very identity. The choice to explore a variety of post-modern philosophical musings through the perspective of a young schoolgirl, an iconic figure that became (and continues to be) a highly commercialized and exploited figure in Japan, is of key significance to the series. The young girl has become a signifier of contemporary Japanese consumer culture in its obsession with the ephemeral (youth and beauty) and the material. The vulnerability of shojo characters is particularly significant in relation to contemporary Japan, underlining the fact that the country is intensely aware of its anomalous international position – economically powerful but militarily vulnerable, no longer completely ‘Asian’ but certainly not ‘Western,’ with its traditions constantly threatened from both within and without.

Serial Experiments Lain is a complex series that moves slowly and offers little in way of answers to the questions it poses. Drawing from a variety of intellectual and historical references and layering complicated narratives with dark surrealist images, it is also a series that deserves close attention and revisiting. Serial Experiments Lain is another important addition to the long history of films and series that address Japans ongoing negotiation with technology and modernity and I highly recommend it for the passionate anime fan and any interested in Japanese filmmaking. Casual viewers looking for popcorn-entertainment, beware.