There are a few shows that I’ve reviewed that can really be considered classics. A number of these are fairly well known to show their age; they obviously have something to recommend them, that their names are still remembered after twenty years or more, but they can be affairs where a casual viewer would probably prefer something that came after, learned from it, and built on it. It’s true not just in anime but in media in general that, after a point, anything is going to show its age. Some do so more gracefully than others.
But there are some older offerings that do really hold up, where even if they show age or are the product of their times, they can be looked at significantly later and still shine bright.
Serial Experiments Lain is a show that exists, compared to those two extremes, in a very interesting place. A big part of what means it straddles the line is that Serial Experiments Lain deals with humanity’s interface with modern technology, particularly computers and the internet. In some ways, Lain was actually weirdly prescient about how such technology would alter human lives. In others ways… it came out in 1998, so give it a break.
One aspect of Lain that must be addressed, and that it’s best to address at the start, is the visual design. The characters have a certain softness and humanity to them that might be familiar to long-time readers of the blog, since the character designs were handled by Yoshitoshi ABe, who also did work on the beautiful Haibane Renmei and the lamentable RErideD. The environments, however, are anything but; Lain has much in common with (and perhaps had something of an influence on) productions like Bakemonogatari or Puella Magi Madoka Magica in how it uses its visuals to create a mood and tell the story on multiple levels rather than just literally showing the audience an accurate representation of what’s going on at any particular moment.
For instance, the shadows in this show (particularly those on the street where Lain’s house stands) are often rendered with bloody stains within them. This has been explained as being representative of the omnipresence of the Wired beneath the surface of life. That’s not immediately apparent in the “text” of the show itself, and it isn’t discussed on-camera (as is often the case with avant garde visuals, they’re for the audience only, no character comments on anything being off). What is obvious, though, is that there is a deliberate artistry to the choices. While you might not recognize at once that the bloody shadows represent the presence of the Wired in particular, the shadows do unquestionably communicate the idea of a threatening presence, adding an ineffable something to scenes that would otherwise be quite empty. It gives the sense, even when Lain is alone, that there is something present… which is exactly what’s intended, after a fashion.
This is important to discuss at the start because, frankly, a plot summary of Serial Experiments Lain doesn’t do it justice. Lain isn’t “about” the plot as much as it is about the experience; it’s intend to be evocative, both felt and thought about. Because of that, If I were to do my normal thing and leap into recounting the events of the show, which I do for the benefit of readers who probably haven’t seen the show in question, it wouldn’t get across what Serial Experiments Lain is like.
So, let’s talk about some of the emotions evoked. Serial Experiments Lain is a show that delves deep into isolation and disquiet. The main character, Lain Iwakura, is often alone, even when the technical scene isn’t empty. Not many characters seem to engage with her on an emotional level. Because of that, whether the world is full and cacophonous or empty and silent, Lain is essentially set apart from every other character. Reasons this might be the case aside, it reinforces the general atmosphere, drawing the viewer into what Lain is feeling. Especially when the show really starts to dig into its themes, questioning the nature of reality and personhood alike, it’s proper to leave the viewer uncomfortable, promoting an acceptance of questioning topics that would normally be taken for granted.
And, a big part of the mastery in Serial Experiments Lain (aside from the general brilliance of the ideas) is in how totally all of the elements of the production come together in order to portray those themes and emotions. The avant garde visuals, the script, the general cinematography, even the sound design do a lot of work in order to support each other and reach the audience with the show’s content. Every moment is carefully crafted in order to maintain the show’s unique presence. It really is better watched than anything else. So, I really would encourage seeking out the show and experiencing it firsthand – much more than with most of the shows I take a look at. It’s not necessary that you do so unspoiled, but if you do, this review will still be here when you get back.
Onward to the story.
Serial Experiments Lain begins with the mysterious suicide of a teenage girl. After she jumps (or is made to jump) to her bodily demise, her former classmates start receiving e-mails from her. The messages have her claim that she is not truly dead, and instead merely gave up her body to attain a new manner of existence within the Wired (what Serial Experiments Lain calls the Internet. I have to admit, I rather like it.), which is also the dwelling place of God. After getting one of these messages, the introverted Lain begins to experience a fascination with computers that she didn’t have before (previously being one of the only members of her class to favor analog).
Before she starts setting up the new computer she requested from her father (who, being a computer guy himself, is very supportive of her interest) Lain ends up being cajoled by her ‘friends’ (I put this in quotes because of the isolation issues I mentioned earlier) into visiting a techno night club with them, in part because they supposedly saw her there before. They’re not alone either, as some individuals at the club seem to recognize Lain despite her lack of any knowledge of previous visits. Most of those encounters agree, though: the other Lain had a very different personality.
The night is further disrupted when a drugged-out maniac starts making a scene with his gun. Lain, oddly for her normal meek persona, confronts the man, giving him a hard glare and a talk that feeds into his paranoid ravings to the point where the man, in utter terror, takes his own life right in front of Lain.
Here, we have the establishment of the “Other Lain” or potentially “Other Lains”. It’s actually little noted and little addressed that our main character has some sort of dissociative fugue thing going on; most of the characters other than Lain don’t seem to realize it (or have something else going on) and Lain herself… is eerily not traumatized by witnessing someone die brutally right in front of her. Again. This is a show about isolation, and this encounter drives Lain farther from society around her in an emotional and philosophical sense, especially given her odd interactions around the encounter.
Remember, we the audience have only known Lain for two episodes at this point – scarcely an hour of real time. A lot of effort was put into creating the image of the quiet melancholy of her existence, bit we don’t necessarily have a strong grasp on what’s “true” about her. So seeing a different Lain or hearing about the Other Lain doesn’t necessarily mean that, to the audience, the “new” one is the interloper.
Still, we go back to the meek and shy Lain as it seems a little paranoia might be contagious – Lain feels like she’s being watched, hears mysterious voices and also comes into possession of a mysterious computer chip. Her dad doesn’t know what the chip could be, nor does a kid/informant she meets at the club, who also notes having encountered her other self in the Wired. Lain’s sister, meanwhile, starts to worry about Lain as Lain begins to work feverishly on customizing and improving her new home computer rig.
From here, we follow a steady descent away from the real and into the esoteric paranoia of Serial Experiments Lain. There are rumors of children being driven to suicide by something lurking in the gaming of the Wired, Men in Black stalking Lain, a group of hackers known as the Knights of Eastern Calculus doing this that and the other thing, and Lain’s own steady descent, losing touch with the reality around her as she retreats ever more into the Wired. Her room transforms in an eerie manner, from the ordinary room of a teen girl clinging to her youth, to a dark and watery cave with monstrous loose machinery, dominated by her computer and all its cables, ducts, and tubes, a place inclement to human life.
Throughout this, it seems like Lain is at the center of the chaos. The Men in Black are spying on her, her whim seems to influence reality, her sister is targeted and driven mad by visions, the Knights target her with a bombing plot, it’s her visage that appears to children in the sky above, echoing through Wired and reality alike.
Yes, things do indeed get rather psychedelic in terms of what we’re shown. All the while, normal school things with normal friends do continue, even as the world seems to be breaking down.
Is Lain going insane, do you wonder, or is it everyone else and the world around her that’s crazy? A cliché line, but one that absolutely does apply in this case. The framing of the show leans towards the idea that the world is going crazy, and that Lain’s experience is authentic, but the question does have to be asked.
The show takes a turn as Lain’s influence on reality becomes less ethereal and more pronounced: a friend confides in her about her taboo lust for a teacher, and rumors of the same begin to spread through the Wired, causing the friend to blame Lain for revealing her secret (and to be fair, the Other Lain might be responsible). Distraught at the pain she has caused and the isolation she experiences as a result, Lain finds herself with the capability to ‘delete’ the event. After a dive into the source code of the universe, that never happened. It’s rewound, undone, sloppily erased from reality with little bits and pieces left to suggest the hole that Lain’s deletion created, letting us know that this isn’t just her dropping some figment of her imagination, but rather a change in space and time around her.
The Wired is omnipresent. It exists beneath the world, influencing it as a sphere of reality. And Lain is omnipresent within the Wired – as she begins to believe, it’s her existence there that’s real, and the flesh-and-blood Lain that’s the illusion.
While grappling with this possible revelation, Lain encounters a being that refers to itself as God, but whose true identity might be more of a demiurge – Masami Eiri, who was once a man and a scientist dedicated to creating the protocols the Wired runs on until he gave up his fleshy body to exist in the Wired, through apparent suicide like the girl in the first episode. He is also the “God” of the Wired in that he’s worshiped by the Knights of Eastern Calculus, whose efforts allow his influence to be more felt in the real world. Lain, taking offense at Eiri’s behavior, Doxxes the Knights, which leads to the order being hunted down by the Men in Black and other opposed forces. Eiri is fazed very little by the loss of his followers, however, as Lain (the true deity of the Wired, having been born there rather than being an invader like Eiri) is still on the physical world and Eiri’s next gen infrastructure is still set to be implemented and fully enshrine his place in the Wired.
Lain and Eiri’s sparring match of hacking skill and ideology continues as Lain begins to integrate her computer (the giant technical abomination that takes up an entire room, recall) with herself, getting a few iconic scenes of her practically wrapped in cables as she begins to transcend the barrier between the Wired and the Physical World, accessing both without the need for an external device. She uses this newfound power to repeat her deletion trick, doing a better version in order to actually repair her relationship with her friend.
However, Lain’s tampering begins to break the barrier between Wired and Physical not just for her, but wholesale. Lain herself doesn’t seem to care; her parents bid her adieu, fading out as they recognize her discovery of the truth of existence, apparently having been just parts of the simulation for her (I’m less certain about her sister, who in an earlier arc delved too deep and seemed to be replaced with an alternate version of herself). The Men in Black are dismissed, and then are drawn to their death by the Wired maelstrom. And, all the while, Lain’s obsession is with the ‘truth’ that humans no longer need bodies to live.
A visit from her last, true friend, however, convinces Lain otherwise, as her friend shares the sound of her heartbeat and with that, human connection as human rather than as intellect in the Wired. Eiri appears, attempting to tip the scales one last time, but this time Lain rebukes him – he was God only in her absence. He reacts in fury, but Lain crushes him, both literally and utterly, deleting his entire existence.
The struggle, however, damaged the psyche of Lain’s friend, breaking Lain’s human connection. Unwilling to accept this outcome, Lain decides to reset herself and her life. She comes face to face with her Other Self, the bold version who lingered in the Wired, who warns her that things won’t go perfectly smoothly, since the Wired isn’t an all-powerful superior layer of reality. She accepts the mantle of digital godhood from this posturing spirit and then dismisses her, entering the Wired fully and unwriting the human life of Lain Iwakura. Omnipotent and Omnipresent though she may be, she’s also divorced from reality, and it will not remember who she was in a conventional sense.
In the end we see a grown-up version of Lain’s friend, who sees a projection of her and half-remembers something, asking if she’ll see Lain again. Lain indicates that there’s always the chance, seeing as she’s everywhere, watching over reality.
And that was the story of Serial Experiments Lain. For those who might have had trouble following: the ultra short version is that it’s the journey of self-discovery for Lain Iwakura, who initially believes herself to be an ordinary student but discovers bit by bit that she’s a self-evolved artificial intelligence with god-like powers. She struggles with interfacing with humanity, managing the boundary between the digital and physical worlds, and conflict both with those who would tame or control her power and a madman who would usurp her station. Ultimately, she accepts her deific role, including the severance from common existence that entails, but her presence remains in its own way.
The journey is dark, twisted, philosophical, and dripping with themes. Serial Experiments Lain really takes its time to explore its universe and its characters, and what these things, in essence, mean. Unlike some (actually, quite a lot) of other works, Serial Experiments Lain does more than just introduce questions without good answers, it lets you watch how the scenario ultimately evolves. Serial Experiments Lain does not just “question the relationship between humanity and our technology” it takes a firm thesis that technology forms a new sphere of existence and runs with it.
One of the most interesting things, over twenty years after Serial Experiments Lain, is how well it seemed to predict some of the vast changes that society has experienced since then. The integration of technology into life is a big one. Remember, Lain came out in 1998. Google essentially came into existence during the first run of the series (feel free to headcanon life at that fact). Amazon already existed, but it was nothing more than a book store. What about other ‘old’ websites, the sort that Lain seems to use? 4Chan, which one might think is evoked by certain scenes in which Lain wanders the Wired encountering various faceless voices, wouldn’t exist for five years. Facebook wouldn’t launch for six years after Lain while Myspace would arrive in five. Youtube? You’d have to wait seven years from when Lain ran in order to see that. Wikipedia would be a bit closer, arriving a mere two and a half years after Serial Experiments Lain. Even Vbulletin, the back-end used for a lot of the early web forums, wouldn’t appear until two years post-Lain. The 1998 internet wasn’t quite as far back as what we’d think of as the Usenet days, but it certainly wasn’t anything like the integrated otherworld where people live huge chunks of their lives that it is today.
And yet that’s exactly what characters in Serial Experiments Lain do. Even “normal” people seem to have a deep connection to the Wired, existing in that realm as much as they do in reality. Technology and connectivity are everywhere, in a way they would eventually be everywhere for our world with the rise of smartphones and tablets. When Lain debuted, the idea that a whole class of school children would have personal electronic devices capable of connecting to the Internet, even in class, and would use those devices to conduct vast swaths of their personal interactions was a science fiction concept. Now it’s just life. The idea of someone, essentially, becoming a different person while in the digital realm? That might have been thought of (after all, flame wars and digital personalities date to the rise of Usenet) but now it’s just plain accepted. How about what happens to Lain’s friend, when a malicious rumor spreads through social media channels, ruining her life? Totally mundane now.
Even the idea in Serial Experiments Lain that the digital realm has a true existence that’s present throughout reality and can effect physical space is one that’s become staggeringly typical; the Wired went Wireless since Serial Experiments Lain, in the process enveloping the world we live in in a field of invisible signal like the presence evoked by the blood-stained shadows – a field that, when the generation of its architecture is updated, people seem to fear will somehow destroy reality. With the panics over 4g and 5g (which are, granted, just the latest rounds of a fear that goes back at least to Edison), you think that some people honestly expect Lain or Eiri to emerge and destroy the world. Even aside from that, we now as a fairly mundane matter of course have Augmented Reality systems where our digital devices can perceive the physical world and overlay new meaning onto it – a concept like Lain’s own powers that we… mostly use for gaming, honestly. When Serial Experiments Lain came out, the digital existed in wires and servers and immobile terminals that functioned as portals to another world. The show projected a world where, instead, the omnipresence of devices (and then perhaps the lack of need for them) would cause those worlds to overlap, or even merge. Children turn their eyes to the sky and observe a phantom image projected from the Wired. Now, we’ve built a world where the Digital and the Physical do overlap, and overlay, and bleed together. You might not be able to touch an ARG’s digital constructs as such, but in the misty border between reality and information, you can catch Pokemon.
To an extent, this is both the biggest argument for giving Serial Experiments Lain a remake, and the biggest argument that it might not need one.
Let me be perfectly clear here at the start: to the limits of my knowledge, there is no plan in existence to remake Serial Experiments Lain. Here, I’m not commenting on anything that exists or will exist, but speculating about what could exist. The reason I’m doing as much is that, well, remakes are an interesting topic. On one hand, there have been some quite successful remakes, both in Anime and outside of it: new versions that update the principles of storytelling or really polish up what was, the first time around, more of a diamond in the rough. On the other hand, Remakes are often seen to be in bad taste, unnecessary knockoffs that don’t bring anything new to the table. And when you get to remakes of something considered to be a Masterpiece (which I absolutely feel that Serial Experiments Lain is)? Watch out, because that’s often going to be bad. And not just bad, insulting.
So, by conventional logic, Serial Experiments Lain would be one of the worst things to try to remake. It was (and is) a unique masterpiece telling a twisted, visionary tale, the sort of thing that would be difficult bordering on impossible to execute a second time under harsh constraints.
But, on the other hand, the relationship between humanity and technology has changed. It’s changed in-line with what Serial Experiments Lain predicted, meaning that the show is now relatable where in its context it was inventive, but something so fundamental to the core of the show has changed all the same. There is absolutely room for Lain to be re-imagined looking forward not from 1998 but from a world that has already integrated digital reality into life, something that has the benefit of seeing what parts of Lain’s Wired became trivial and what parts didn’t manifest – or, perhaps more interestingly, what manifested alongside the integration that the original Serial Experiments Lain wasn’t quite prescient enough to predict.
The Wireless doesn’t just have its own culture, it has its own currencies. The overlap didn’t just give people new places to talk and hang out, it changed the ways in which people talk and hang out. Lain deals a lot with her friend, and their friendship is very traditional. The internet has changed that, keeping people in touch with friends who would otherwise be far away and perhaps forgotten, or even causing friendships to form between people who have never met in physical space and may never meet in physical space. You can have a close friend now and not even know the name they were born with or the country in which they reside. It’s a real experience that touches deeply on many of the themes in Serial Experiments Lain, and would thus be ready fodder for higher ideas, stranger extensions, or greater foresight if Lain one way or another was not a finished thing, if it was revisited and rebooted after two decades and more had passed.
And beyond that, the familiarity with the existence that Lain finds herself in, to an extent, does weaken the viewing experience. We understand more now about what online life is like, and viewers in 2021 are more likely to be more tech savvy than viewers in 1998. Because of this, there are at least a couple assumptions that Serial Experiments Lain makes, or science fiction ideas that it evokes, that come off as a little dated. It’s not that they’re bad – when the storytelling is done right, you accept things that might not be “realistic” – it’s that while some things are more powerfully evocative by virtue of being more real, others, particularly the points where the fiction reaches, need more explanation than they once did.
In a sense, it reminds me somewhat of what was done with the Tron franchise in the West – the original Tron came out in 1982, when computers were basically magic to most people, so it could get away with a lot of concepts that seem laughable when looked at with better understanding of technology. Because of this, the 2010 sequel, though inexorably tied to the basic concept, took more pains to explain its digital world as something unfamiliar and special, rather than just “what it’s like inside a computer”. Whatever you feel about that particular franchise, the way in which the setting was updated was necessary and intelligent to bring the concept to a new audience. Any attempt to touch the concept of Serial Experiments Lain again would have to make similar updates in order to bring the idea of a digital deity with physical presence to ‘land’ with new audiences. Call it an interesting challenge in addition to the fertile possibilities.
But, while there would be a remarkable potential to update Serial Experiments Lain, the original really does hold its own. Though some meaning may be interpreted differently in light of the topics being familiar rather than unfamiliar, there is a distinct degree to which the fact that the matter is still graceful and essentially pulls together is indicative of Lain’s strength.
I’ve said before, and here in summation I’ll say again: Serial Experiments Lain is a masterpiece. It earns its A+ as a landmark in philosophical science fiction, standing as the kind of work that makes it hard to go back to lesser imitators. I may have made an argument that it could be remade to great effect, but it is still true that there’s a likely greater degree to which it doesn’t need to be – I just felt the considerations made for a good framework in which to discuss how time has changed the ways in which the show must be regarded. So, if you’ve gotten this far and you haven’t watched Serial Experiments Lain, do yourself a favor and check it out.