Serial Experiments Lain

1998. TV series. (13 X 30 min.) Science fiction/drama. org Yoshitoshi Abe (concept). dir Ryutaro Nakamura. scr Chiaki J. Konaka. des Yoshitoshi Abe, Takahiro Kishida, Masaru Sato. -bc

The story of a girl and her computer, Lain offers a cautionary tale for the Internet generation about the blurring of lines between the real world and the “Wired.” Filled with the most avant-garde imagery to be found anywhere in TV anime, it’s a head trip for some and a philosophical treatise for others.

Lain Iwakura is a quiet, unprepossessing eighth-grade girl who begins to notice strange phenomena following the suicide of a classmate and the receipt of new e-mails from the dead girl, presumably from the afterlife. Lain’s computer-obsessed father buys her a new state-of-the-art Navi and she soon connects to the “Wired,” a computer network where participants can immerse themselves in virtual reality and assorted role-playing games, and also connect with mysterious entities who communicate enigmatic messages by both voice and text. Lain becomes confused when people, including classmates, recognize her from a game they play on the Wired. One boy asks her for a date, but says he prefers the “wild Lain from the Wired.”

As she explores the Wired, Lain learns more about the Knights, a disparate group of hackers trying to get control of the Wired for a revolutionary purpose. Their spiritual leader is Masami Eiri, the man who invented the Wired and supposedly committed suicide. Tachibana General Labs, for whom Eiri was working, seeks to suppress the activities of the Knights and soon takes an active interest in Lain, going as far as to send Men in Black to maintain an all-too-obvious surveillance of her. At one point she is picked up and taken away for questioning.

Gradually Lain grapples with the notion that her Wired persona may be the real one and her “real life” persona the artificial construction. Immersed in the Wired, she has long exchanges with an entity calling himself God, but who is really Masami Eiri, who makes pronouncements like, “Man has no need for his wretched body anymore.” Eventually, Lain learns the secret behind her existence and the great power she possesses and decides to take drastic steps to gain control of her destiny. . . .

Although the series is set in a recognizable contemporary Tokyo, with several scenes in the famed Shibuya commercial district, the street scenes are shot through with surrealistic touches to the point where an alternate dimension seems to have begun to bleed into the real world. Bright lights and colors abound in the Tokyo intersections and whole fields of architectural space are bathed in washed-out white light that obliterates detail. When Lain walks down her home street, there are long shadows that consist of splotches of red against a black field, suggesting scenes of distant galaxies. Electric circuits appear in the sky overhead. Power lines are everywhere and we hear their constant hum, as if to suggest that the pervasiveness of electric power affects people’s perception of reality. The whole purpose of the series’ visual strategy is to unsettle the viewer and sow confusion as to what is real and what is the “Wired.”

Many scenes take place in the Wired, the series’ fanciful version of the Web, which offers some video-game settings but seems to consist mostly of multicolored abstract backgrounds. Fully dressed bodies of people appear against black backgrounds to question Lain, but with no heads, only pairs of disembodied lips chattering away, replaced in a later scene by identical heads of Lain on each of the bodies. Text messages appear on watery, multicolored fields, generated by entities that only exist on the Wired. Sometimes elaborate real-world-style settings are found on the Wired, as when Lain ventures to question Professor Hodgeson about the Kensington Experiment and finds him on the patio of a lavish villa overlooking the sea on a sunlit cliff.

Lain has a round face with large round eyes and minutely detailed pupils, as revealed in the series’ abundance of extreme close-ups, and a small line suggesting a mouth. There is something unreal about her, although she remains quite endearing in her normal persona, as she comes off passive and uncertain, taken aback by all the Wired activity and its intrusion into her “real life.” A few small changes in the facial lines, however, and she becomes the proactive, often malevolent queen of the Wired, an equally fascinating creature. The three girls who are friends and classmates of Lain have simple faces with a tad more shape and detail than Lain’s. They also behave more like real people than the other characters in Lain’s life, including her emotionally distant parents, and provide the viewer a welcome anchor in the real (?) world.

Series creator Yoshitoshi Abe also created Haibane Renmei. Director Ryutaro Nakamura also directed Legend of Crystania (movie and OAV), Kino’s Journey, and Sakura Wars. Character designer Takahiro Kishida also designed characters for Heat Guy J and Spring and Chaos. Art director Masaru Sato performed the same duties on Irresponsible Captain Tylor, Armitage III, Gundam Wing, His and Her Circumstances, and Great Dangaioh.

Any summary of Lain is bound to oversimplify or make assumptions that may be hard to defend. The series doesn’t yield clear answers to the questions raised, nor does the resolution tidy things up much. Even when conventional narrative elements emerge that could conceivably turn the series into a clever suspense thriller, normal expectations are defied and viewers are soon back to scratching their heads. One can interpret it all as one wishes (as numerous fans and Web critics most certainly have), but there is always the sneaking suspicion that perhaps the creators had something else in mind than what you think.

As long as you’re not afraid to be mystified for long stretches, this is a thoroughly compelling series filled with innovative visual schemes that you won’t see anywhere else in anime. The Wired itself is apparently designed to be an alternate-universe take on the Web, but one that wields a far greater hold over its users and that intrudes into the “real world” quite easily. As such, it makes for a fascinating world in which Lain can walk into her room, utter a voice command to turn on all the computer screens and, without skipping a beat, continue walking, quite boldly, into the abstract backgrounds of the Wired itself to pick up on one of the many ongoing philosophical exchanges she has with an entity identifying himself as God (or Deus, depending on what translation you’re relying on). This is a contemporary science fiction story based on a level of technology that the series’ young viewers can relate to, yet it’s one based on ideas and not action or violence.

The series was uniquely prescient about the prevalence of cell phones, portable communications devices, and the Web in young people’s lives. Lain and her peers text-message like crazy and never seem to be without some gadget or other. This could also be a warning about the influence of such technology on our lives and the blurring of the lines between reality and virtual reality. The wholesale disregard for privacy in such a world is illustrated in a startling scene where the “Wired” Lain appears suddenly in the bedroom of her best friend, Alice, and begins to taunt the horrified girl about a deeply held secret of hers. The Wired has destructive effects on a number of young people throughout the series, most notably in a series of suicides (including one in the very first scene) and people going mad. The ending, in which it appears that Lain has taken a bold step to undo some of the damage, seems to suggest that the kids can live normal lives again without the Wired.

Although Lain is as highly original an anime series as one is ever likely to find on Japanese television, one can pick out a number of influences from notable anime predecessors. There is a reference to something called the Kensington Experiment, the components of which, as described, recall the Akira Project in Akira. The Wired inventor, Masami Eiri, shares more than a little in common with software creator E. Hoba from Patlabor: The Movie, both of whom wreak a lot of havoc after they “die.” Lain herself boasts similarities to the Puppet Master in Ghost in the Shell and also finds herself in a position similar to that of Shinji in the movie ending of Evangelion, where he had great power and faced a life-or-death decision that would impact the whole world. Given what we eventually learn about Lain, there’s also a touch of Evangelion’s Rei Ayanami about her as well.

The ninth episode (Layer 09), “Protocol,” ties in the imaginary history of the Wired with much actual history involving the development of computers and the creation of the Internet, referring to such prominent names in the field as Vannevar Bush, John C. Lilly, Ted Nelson, and Douglas Rushkoff. UFO lore and conspiracy threads also pop up, with references to the 1947 flying saucer crash in Roswell, New Mexico, and the appearance in 1984 of documents purported to reveal the existence of a secret government UFO study group called Majestic-12, formed, we are told, by President Truman himself. Documentary-style sequences offer narration over intricate montages of the people named and the documents described. Intercut with the real history is the fictional history involving Masami Eiri and Tachibana General Labs and the creation of the Wired. Furthermore, two Men in Black, familiar figures from UFO lore (and the subject of a satirical Hollywood film the year before Lain), turn up as significant supporting characters.

There is a lot of memorable dialogue to help keep fans debating the series’ meaning. Here are some examples:

“Humans who are further evolved than others have a right to greater abilities.”

“Since the moment of the Wired’s creation, you have always been here.”

“Humans were originally connected at an unconscious level. I reconnected them, that’s all.”

“We still haven’t figured out what you are. But I love you.”

“I’m your creator. Love me.”

The series’ notable theme song, “Duvet,” written and performed in English by the British rock group Boa (no relation to the Korean pop singer, BoA), plays over an opening credits sequence focusing on Lain (and a group of pesky birds) that is a brilliantly constructed music video for the song, which opens with the memorable lines, “And you don’t seem to understand/a shame, you seemed an honest man.”

Lain’s concept of a computer-created alternate world bleeding into the real one shares much in common with the 1999 Hollywood movie The Matrix, in which humanity lives in a computer-created “matrix” resembling the real world as it would have looked in 1999. In the film, a small group of rebels who have broken free from the Matrix wage war on humanity’s machine controllers. Although Lain premiered a year or so earlier, any similarities would be coincidental, given that The Matrix was in production at the same time as Lain and was reportedly conceived many years earlier.

Hideaki Anno’s His and Her Circumstances shares much in common with Lain in terms of its visual imagination and use of experimental techniques and abstract images to form the series’ visual fabric. In the high school show, however, the intent is to convey information about the characters in creative, funny, untraditional ways, while in Lain it is to distort the viewer’s sense of reality. Not surprisingly, both films share the same art director, Masaru Sato.

advisory Some profanity in the subtitles, as well as some very mild sexual innuendo. The only real warning necessary is that many potential fans will find it hard to comprehend.