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A quick analysis of Serial Experiment Lain's first episode


Darklord Rooke

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G’day everyone,I thought I’d see how hard it is to deconstruct the first episode of Lain. Serial Experiments Lain is often seen as one of the weirdest, and most confusing anime but I think it’s blown way out of proportion. One of its strengths is that you don’t understand everything on the first watching, one of its weaknesses is that you don’t understand everything on the first watching, but I don’t remember it being too confusing. So to put that to the test I’m going to rewatch the first episode for the first time in a decade, and quickly write down my thoughts while viewing it. This will be a quick analysis, there’ll be things that are missing like the importance of certain artistic effects, but it should show that getting a general idea of what’s going on isn’t too hard. Obviously spoiler alert.

EPISODE 1:

Key points in the first episode:

-        First scene and we see a young girl distressed in an alley. She’s panting, hand on heart, either running or fearful. A group of passers-by stop to point and laugh, uncaringly. Is that not the way of the world? This uncaring disconnect between people? This lack of empathy? Amid the normal everyday actions of Tokyo’s (I assume) nightlife, that same young girl now appears on a rooftop. She strips herself of her glasses, her hair unties, a metaphor showing herself becoming free. She has a smile on her face and she throws herself off the building. That she wasn’t scared or distressed means she wasn’t running away from something, rather she was at peace and happy which means she’s running toward something. What was she running toward? No clue at this stage. Anyway, the silence of her suicide scene and her beautiful smile juxtapose harshly with her loud and violent death. Words appear on the screen - ‘I don’t need to stay in a place like this’.

-        Next scene Lain appears on a bright morning in school get up. She’s walking down the stairs and is on her way to school. The imagery here is interesting, there’s an electrical hum that permeates strongly and a focus on the power lines. The hum is a metaphor for the wired or ‘internet’ which is everywhere, connecting people and hovering eternally in the background of everyday life. There and yet not there. The powerlines are the same and they also connect everything, but they don’t hover in the background. However, the shadows splotched with what I assume is blood at times are annoying. It was a late decision to insert the metaphor into the anime connecting shadows with the wired, that the wired is everywhere just underneath the surface. A shadow world. I believe they stuffed up here. This was already done with the humming, it was already done with the powerlines, this is just a rather inelegant way of hammering the audience with a concept and I just think it’s ugly and gaudy. It makes things easier for the creators to get some stuff across, but I think it’s unnecessarily whimsical. Anyway what’s done is done, so most every piece of shadow is splotched with stuff.

-        Lain is on a train travelling to school. Everyone on board is doing their own thing as people in society tend to do. In silence. We are becoming increasingly disconnected with each other, so we have people reading, sleeping, gazing romantically out of windows, but nobody interacting and sharing their lives. However Lain comments on how noisy it is, asking why things can’t quiet down. It confuses the train’s inhabitants because it’s quiet in the real world, but I’m sure that electric hum indicates a greater interactivity and connectivity somewhere else. Also interesting that Lain can hear it. Lain doesn’t notice the commotion she causes those near her.

-        She arrives at school with herself gazing at her splotchy shadow, then looking up and seeing reality melt away. Obviously not a metaphor at all of something, which isn’t at all related to the metaphor on the train.

-        In class one of Lain’s classmates is distressed. It appears the young lass who just committed suicide (Yomoda Chisa) has been sending emails to everybody, but how can that be when she’s dead? ‘You shouldn’t be getting mail from a dead girl’ says one of the girls. What truly sage advice. Interesting theme of digital existence is raised here, though. I wonder how they will deal with it. It should be noted here that this show was created in the 90s, well before these themes became mainstream. Words appear on the screen - ‘What’s it like when you die?’ ‘It really hurts :)’ – only if you chuck yourself off a building, crash through some neon signs, and have a vending machine topple onto you after you hit the pavement. In programming class, reality once again begins to melt away from Lain. Sounds fade away, things begin to blur, white smoke from fingers. Lain’s beginning to see things.

-        Lain is walking again, presumably home from school. In her bedroom she loads up her computer to discover she has mail from Yomoda Chisa. Not just any mail but a very personalised email from Yomoda Chisa resembling a conversation. ‘I walked home with you once, do you remember Lain? I have given up my body, but through this email I want you to know I’m still alive. Rumour has it that this is a prank, but it isn’t. Do you understand? No matter, everyone will understand soon.’ Absent here is the MWAHAHA evil laugh every member of a nefarious organisation uses when plotting something. Pity. When asked why she killed herself, Yomoda responds ‘God is here’.

-        Lain is at dinner with a very cold, unfeeling family. They are thoroughly disconnected from one another. There's no sharing of lives and feelings here. The sister leaves without finishing dinner to do her own thing. When Lain tells her mother about the email from the dead lady, her mother doesn’t respond. From her facial expression she doesn’t care.

-        She goes to find her father, who is a huge computer nerd and is so lost in the tech word he also doesn’t take an interest in his family’s life. She asks for a new computer so she can see a friend and he’s obviously happy to oblige saying she’s being left in the dust. ‘People connect with each other, that’s how society’s function’ the father says as he interacts with faceless avatars on the computer/wired (metaphor alert.) Remarkably these futuristic computers look like they’re running Windows 3.1 or something xD 

-        Next scene. Lain’s on a train riding to school when the train suddenly halts due to an accident. And when I say ‘suddenly halts’ I mean it looks as though Lain is violently thrown into the door. She shakes it off like a champ, though. Lain looks out the window and things become white, the electrical hum gets louder, and splotchy shadows tinged with blood drip from the power lines. That’s a pretty strong metaphor about what just occurred, blood melting into the wired, also it shows that reality is melting away taking Lain along for the ride (or is it the other way round?)

-        Scenes flutter quickly one after another, whether by chance or is Lain searching for something? The middle of a busy crossing, stairs leading out of a subway, an empty school courtyard, an empty room, then white smoke, train tracks and ... the silhouette of a girl? The girl hops the barricade and runs in front of a train, a fanatical look on her face as the train collides with her. Is she laughing? Was this the cause of the accident Lain was just involved in? Why is Lain viewing this?

-        Lain jerks back to reality in her school classroom drenched with sweat. The teacher admonishes her and walks away. The words on the chalkboard start blurring and reality once again melts away from Lain. New words appear on the blackboard asking Lain to visit the Wired ASAP.

-        As Lain walks home she’s walking in the splotchy shadow. It surrounds her. Possibly important, because at this moment Yomoda Chisa strolls past. ‘Where are you’ Lain asks. Yomoda smiles, then her normal sad expression returns. Yomoda disappears.

So yeah, the anime is confusing but I think it’s blown way out of proportion. If you pay attention and possibly do a bit of research, you should be fine. You might not get everything, but you’ll understand the gist of it.

Though I doubt anybody is interested in the brief analysis of an almost 20 year old anime's first episode.

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Well the obsession with the internetz and the notion that the internetz is "serious business"... I mean, dangerous business, if you will, is easy to get. After all it was all the rage in 1999, and all the way up to 2002 (when I first got it).

Notify me when you get to the Schumann Resonance :amane:

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13 hours ago, Darklord Rooke said:

The Schumann Resonance is a nice bit of world building, that it's an actual scientific theory gives the world some weight, but it isn't really an essential detail. 

I see it as scientific mumbo jumbo thrown in for flashy effect.

The Schumann Resonance does exist, a subtle low-altitude magnetic field that envelopes the Earth, but whether it affects the biosphere, syncing with our brains, or even if it's impossible for us to live outside of it (e. g. in another planet or even a space station), it's very unclear.

Anyway it's a cool reference, there's no denying it. Like the things Uchikoshi tends to put in his novels (Pygmalion Effect, Lemuria, DID, Memento Mori...)

The coolest of the cool was the mention to hypertext, but I don't really remember what conspiracy theories were behind its apparition in Lain.

Edited by Okarin
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