YOUTUBE SERIAL EXPERIMENTS LAIN OPENING SERIES
As the series progresses, Lain develops her technical proficiency exponentially, and her hardware expands to turn her bedroom into a dim, electrified jejunum. By Episode 3, Lain is assembling a desktop fortress without her father’s supervision. Inevitably, Lain’s search for Chisa leads her into “the Wired,” whence Chisa claims to have retreated. But she’s chasing her former classmate Chisa - a young girl who kills herself in the show’s opening scene only to email Lain the day after she’s thrown herself from the roof of their school. He sees the screen at all times.įearfully, Lain regards the new, glowing screen stationed at the far corner of her bedroom as a haunted portal. Lain’s father wears glasses that are frequently filled with a monitor’s awesome light, even when he’s sitting on the couch with just a newspaper in front of him. His conversations with his wife are cold, and his enthusiasm for his daughter is born conditionally from her interest in her father’s profession. For communication, you need a powerful system that will mature alongside your relationships with people.” Curiously, Lain’s father doesn’t seem to have many enviable relationships of his own. “In this world,” he explains, “people connect to each other, and that’s how societies function. Lain’s father takes pride in his daughter’s budding technological interest. Twenty years later, Lain is a distressingly faithful portrait of online life in the 2010s-a hellscape of warring avatars, self-serving mythology, catastrophic self-importance, compulsion, and inevitably, disillusionment.Īt his young daughter’s sheepish request, Lain’s father installs a state-of-the-art personal computer-a Navi-in Lain’s bedroom. Yes, she’s a fictional character-a cartoon, even - but there is no more frightfully prescient web parable than her story, Serial Experiments Lain, the 13-episode anime series that first aired in Japan in July 1998. “You’re wrong,” she responds.Īt age 14, Lain was extremely online.
YOUTUBE SERIAL EXPERIMENTS LAIN OPENING HOW TO
Lain is young, and doesn’t yet know how to use a computer, but she knows better than to place her faith in the older generation’s rigid distinction between real life and online performance. Do you understand what I’m warning you about?” You mustn’t confuse it with the real world. “When it’s all said and done,” he says, “the Wired is just a medium of communication and the transfer of information. Such an overpowering experience is impossible to put into words I love ‘Serial Experiments Lain,’ and that is all that I can write about it at the moment.At the onset, Lain Iwakura’s father warns her about the social perils of the internet, alternatively known as “the Wired” in the parlance of Serial Experiments Lain. Tying to analyse something like this is, at least for me, redundant, for merely thinking about individual scenes is enough for me to break down into gibberish.
I may not understand the intricacies of the plot, yet I feel like I know everything that this is trying to say. Methodological, surely, yet also comprehendible. Rarely have I felt as lonely as I did whilst watching this, and rarely have I felt as wholesome either. I repeatedly found myself paralysed by how overwhelming an experience this was. Rarely, if at all, has something balanced hopefulness and hopelessness so effectively. I know how this ends I last watched this less than 3 months ago, and whilst this conclusion is continuously foreshadowed throughout the series (including in the opening song), it somehow still has the same impact as it did on my first watch.
Individual scenes of undistilled existential terror leave me baffled, confused, unnerved and emotive. This may very well be one of the most beautiful works of art that I have ever seen, yet it is also one of the most frightening. Cerebral, not in the way that it deals with complex ideas (though it certainly does), but because it deals with complex emotions.
So many thoughts, so many emotions that I cannot put to paper. One can either think or feel ‘Lain,’ and I would rather the latter. And whilst closer to the beginning, I started to make sense of many things, at around the half way mark I gave up not because this is indecipherable, but because I don’t want to decipher this. On this rewatch, I tried to understand this, understand what everything means here. This is something that carries you with it, inviting you to inhabit its world for its entire runtime, if not longer. One cannot simply watch ‘Serial Experiment Lain,’ for it is less a film/series than an experience.
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