In Jungian Psychology this is the psychic death. A topic which can be read into at any time and place. The duality of not only yourself but the difference between fiction and reality. Let the flickering screen be the food for the day.
This persists until Lain lives in the cyber-heaven that she first got to witness in layer one. Every time we see her room something new has been added.
Tubing stretches, viscous green coolant dashes through and feeds her system. Layer one is weird, Layer ten is love, layer thirteen is ego. Her loss is documented through thirteen brutal episodes. The hoodie is worn by a boy no older than thirteen. You press the trigger and the screen collapses and the gun is holstered in your hoodie. The device which you look at the said screen is shaped like a gun. Your self-identity melts away into pixels and becomes yet another blue screen that hums and glitches. Technology isn't timeless, much like this series, it becomes dated. If it were then the answers we seek would be malformed. It happens to be that because that is how technology works. What would you have said in 1998? What would you have said in 2000? 2005? Later? Lain isn't timeless because as time passes what you take from it is utterly different and not through the intent of the writer or director. What do you take from the depiction of the internet? The web that harbors answers and routes of communication that might seem completely unbelievable. The ideas here, which are undoubtedly avant-garde and esoteric, are made to be siphoned from by the viewer. Yet it is an esoteric narrative that is hauntingly believable in the minutia, but ultimately unbelievable in the idea. A depiction of future as seen from the past that purposefully paints itself as completely dissonant than the path we took. This girl, Lain, is given a window to the new, weird, wacky world of vaporwave fuzz and dripping cyber heaven. One on the train-tracks, one splayed out on the streets. We see a poor girl, fourteen, introverted, shy, a parallel to the two souls lost. The presentation is purposefully confusing and fractured. These are the images Lain uses to show us the parallel. Hardly distinguishable as real but they are. Blurred images of parking lots and bridges run through many filters. We are presented with falsehood, we see their reality, we see our own through that same reality. View the wired as a look into the real world through the eyes of the fake world on screen. You need influence, you want religion, you want to be the religion you want. Screw work, screw obligations, you double down. The wires drape over, like taunting beggars asking for you to come. That something right above you every time you walk outside. It weighs heavy on your back and you can feel your ribs begin to crack. You are no longer restricted by the heaving, useless body that no one understands.
SERIAL EXPERIMENTS LAIN SUB 3 WINDOWS
Windows shatter and the metal of the roof crumples under your weight.
The opportunity for freedom, to escape, to become something more. You poor, poor girl, thick-brimmed glasses on your face and a frown that never dissipates. You are without friends or anyone who understands you. Whenever you are to wander into the over-blown, exposed outdoors, you see a world that is one step behind, the people disappear, desperately grasping progress. Ethereal, they walk and cover or uncover. The shadows move and hide anything and everything. They are made up of moving ink, the bubbling of a cauldron. A perpetually connected string of vines that ensnares victims. Power lines, low hums of generators unseen, these are motifs through which director Ryuutarou Nakamura expresses the indulgence of a society bordering on dystopia. A barrier that represents one layer beyond our own.
We consume it as it springs forth every second of every day.Ĭircuitry hangs low over the city like a spider web. The technophobe culture which Lain overtly commented on is the very culture that no longer exists to the same extent today. How it grows, evolves, enraptures, and swallows. The late 90s when, instead of Y2K, Japan was drenched in its own fear. Forever trapped in the screens in front of us. You can make parallels to the lives we live, the wired culture which we indulge in.
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