Serial Experiment Lain
A Modern and Unusual Series…
Caution – Spoiler Ahead!
Don’t read this if you wish to discover the meanings for yourself. What follows is my synopsis and interpretation of...- - - Serial Experiment Lain - - -
Serial Experiment Lain… what an odd and intriguing anime! I rented the first couple of tapes… watched them… and returned them. The animation was terrific and the characters were interesting… but the story was disjointed and difficult to “put together” in my mind. I rented them again and got some more out of them. Then my video dealer got in the final tapes. I rented the entire set and watched the tapes one after the other... “Ahhhhhh… I get it!”
Lain is a ninth grade girl who is kind of “out of it”. She is lonely and depressed. Her classmates make fun of her because she is such a child for her age. They call her to come along on outings… probably just so that they can feel superior to her. One of her classmates is a true friend: Arisu (Alice). Arisu is interested in Lain and is torn between staying with the “in” crowd and helping, saving, Lain. She works with the girls in the clique to include Lain in their circle.
Strange acts of violence are scattered throughout the production. There is a suicide in the opening moments of the first episode. A female student lets herself plummet from an office building and we see her crash through an electric sign and an awning to splash herself onto the sidewalk. Her death startles a couple that is making-out in the shadows near her crash point. A little further on, Lain’s friends invite her to meet them at Cyberia… a teen nightclub and hang-out. While she is there, a drug crazed gunman kills a couple of dancers. We see his wild eyes and the sweat pouring from his adrenaline-enraged body. The crowds flee… except for Lain. She has a strange look on her face as she approaches the gunman. Lain seems calm and in control. The gunman pleads for his life and begs for mercy as he turns the gun on himself and fires. Lain is splashed with warm blood. Arisu drags her away… into the shadows.Shadows play a big part in Serial Experiment Lain. Everywhere there are huge shadows. And those shadows are colored with an unreal, ghostly mottle of shades of red. Often the shadows are those of power poles and heavy equipment. The main feature of Lain’s environment is the electric infrastructure of modern life… power lines, electric commuter cars, pole-mounted transformers, telephone lines and junction boxes… all are buzzing with an electric, 60-cycle hum.
Lain and the other girls in her group are receiving emails from the dead student who has committed suicide. The dead girl says that she killed herself because she realized that she didn’t really need her physical body. She asks for her friends to join her on “the other side”. Lain realizes that the web (what the Japanese call “the wired”) is her communication link into that other side. She asks her father for a new computer so that she can go onto the wired. He buys her a very powerful unit… they call it a Navi. Lain really gets into it! She finds great freedom and relief from her depressions on the wired. Soon she is acquiring all kinds of add-on and enhancement parts for her system. She feels like she is almost able “to enter” the wired. We, the viewers, see that, indeed, she has entered and that she does have a physical presence within the web… and, in fact… she is on the inside… looking out!
When Lain is in the wired, she is everywhere at once. The web is huge… global… it is the electronic consciousness of the Earth… and Lain is tapped into all of the nodes. One evening, through the wired, she embarrasses her best friend, Arisu, by spying on her during a private moment and allowing everyone on the wired to see the act. The next morning, at school, Arisu is heartbroken and angry at Lain. Lain can’t believe that she did anything. That evening she rampages into the wired to find some answers. She needs to find a way to undo the hurt that she has caused. The solution that she finds is to make it never happen. Lain moves time back to that previous evening and controls the moment so that the event never takes place. Uncertain that her scheme has worked, she goes to school in the morning to visit with Arisu. Arisu and the gang welcome Lain into the group, as always… everything is normal… Lain had rewound time and undone the event... without anyone taking notice.
Meanwhile… some strange things have been happening at Cyberia. Lain’s friends, who go there often, report seeing a rabble-rousing young lady who, they could swear, is Lain! We see Arisu and her buddies meeting Lain at school and cross-examining her about her previous night’s activities. Lain has been home, as usual. “We were sure that it was you… except that you would never have behaved like that!” say the girls. When Lain goes to the club… she fields rude remarks from the clubbers who think they know her from somewhere else. She shrugs them off and feels confused. One of her acquaintances, there, says, “I’d like to date you… not the you that you are now… the other you like you were last night!” It seems that while Lain is home… going inside the wired… the wired is making a 3-D presence using Lain’s likeness!
As the story progresses, Lain is reminded that she doesn’t know much about her family. She can’t remember their birthdays, wedding anniversary, or anything about her own childhood. It comes to light that she just... “is”... no history, no past, no connections to people. In one scene we see her in the kitchen while her parents are nearby. Lain, standing behind them, tries to make light of the idea that maybe these people are not her actual parents… “don’t people say the funniest things?” No comment from the parents… they don’t even look up. What an odd moment it is as the scene fades to black. In the final episode, Lain’s father comes into her room to say good bye. “I really should not have stopped in to see you… it’s just that… I love you.” It seems that “Project Lain” was finished.
It is a little unclear whether Lain was created by men as a Serial Experiment (a 3-D projection using the web) or if Lain was an experiment created by the blossoming consciousness of the web. It is clear that she was created and placed in a home with a family of humans who are not her actual mother, father, and sister… and that the purpose for this was to let her grow and mature as a new entity. Her “parents” knew that she was not their child… and with the CIA-type spies that we see hiding in the shadows throughout the series… I think that she was created by a group of computer-hackers referred to in the series as Knights. What is not known is… did the Knights create Lain… or do they merely know that she has been created?
The “Project” is finished. Lain is alone… confused… sad… lonely. She knows that she is an outsider. She loves her family… she loves her friends. She loves mankind. She hits upon an idea and she acts. Lain modifies reality to give all of her friends happy lives. She is going to roam the planet as the perpetual little girl… tweaking reality from behind the scenes to make life wonderful for the people she loves. Throughout the series, we have seen that she does love all people… and now… omniscient, she will watch and adjust our world, as needed, and she will know each time a single sparrow falls.
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I enjoyed the series. The puzzle, the characters, the imagry... all work together to make Serial Experiment Lain a wonderous anime.
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