Lain as Postmodernism
As the years go by, the 1998 anime Serial Experiments Lain becomes more and more relevant to contemporary audiences. The basic premise of Serial Experiments Lain is our protagonist Lain receives a message from her dead friend from the Wired, the show’s equivalent of the Internet. Lain become increasingly engrossed in the Wired after her father installs her first computer. Slowly, there seems to be another Lain in the Wired who gains greater control over information, people, and Lain herself. Eventually, the digital world becomes completely inseparable from reality in some frankly confusing episodes. Until Lain becomes some kind of transcendental being or god and restores order to reality.
Serial Experiments Lain uses the tools of postmodernism to create fragments of plot that when you try to piece together in a coherent manner, defies conventional reasoning. The logic used is more in line with post-structuralism with its manipulation of language and symbols to create meaning which is subjective to one’s experience. This can be seen with the semi-philosophical ramblings in the background and the anime’s use of visual symbols such as a C-like language on whiteboards to imply meaning without a clear teleological message. This is combined with eerie and avant-garde sound design. The anime often opting for electrical hum or ambient background noise, instead of music or non-diegetic sounds.
There are many ways which the show is animated with further add to this deconstruction of meaning. But what I want to highlight here is how Lain herself symbolises the alienation from which we experience modern life. For all intents and purposes, Lain, at the beginning of the series, is a young teenager in a 90’s urban Japan. But quickly it becomes apparent to the audience that the proliferation of digital technology is more akin to the 2020’s rather than 1990’s and Lain is one of the few who hasn’t realised this disconnect.
Characters in Lain begin to lose touch with their physical selves as more of themselves are in the Wired. These digital representations of them become their reality to others. This is seen with Lain’s friend becoming her messages in episode one, and Lain’s fracturing identity later as what she does online becomes more her that real self. Serial Experiments Lain takes a slightly literal approach of the avatars, becoming literal characters themselves able to interact with the the plot, rather than as simply metaphors.
Lain also has an escalation in technology’s physical presence, embodied by Lain’s room which goes from austerely girlish to something out of a distant-future, cyberpunk story. This is very telling of the accelerationist’s relationship with technology where they put technology in front of all considerations of sentimentality. Lain herself becomes an avatar of accelerationist theory, until she becomes some kind of singularity and all notions of trying to predict the future become meaningless.
This meaninglessness in Lain brings us back to postmodernism. One of the central ideas of postmodernism, insofar as you can say such a diverse school of thought has any central idea, is there is no inherent capital-T Truth in anything. One could say the postmodern thinks that all of reality is subjective, while others may say that Truth may exist, but we are never able to directly perceive it in a complete way. In Lain, nothing is clearly told its audience; 10 different people watching the show will have 10 different theories about the plot and meaning. A large part of this is because Lain doesn’t tell its audience it’s plot in plain language. Events aren’t shown as simple cause and effect, there is often a factor influencing events off-screen, whether that is the techno-conspiracy that you hear towards the end of the show; or whether it’s the character’s digital selves having agency beyond the screen. I guess my main point here is Lain defies meaning in a way that postmodern texts such as Gravity’s Rainbow do as well.
Lain’s themes of death, technological conspiracy, and mental health tie it to another movement: denpa. Denpa, meaning electromagnetic waves, is a small art movement in Japanese media mostly from 90’s and 00’s visual novels where characters become disconnected from reality by way of electromagnetic frequencies. Most of these stories deal with communication technology’s relationship with metal health. Often these types of stories blur what is real and what is imagined in a way where it is impossible for the viewer to tell one from the another. Works typically don’t label themselves as denpa as that is more of a fan label. It can be difficult to identify works that meet the criteria for this movement as the movement doesn’t centre around specific texts, rather news stories and urban legends. Whether or nor Lain is denpa, it is evident that it is inspired by urban legends.
Lain weaves many elements into its complicated tangle. It’s about loss and technology. It’s about grief and moving on with or without someone. I don’t want Lain’s association with postmodernism to sound disparaging. The lack of meaning can be freeing for the characters ultimately. They aren’t bound to their scripts; they can escape from their own history by moving beyond it. Lain ends on a hopeful note, in a life affirming message. It says: people matter. Sure, Lain is gone by the end, but she exists as a concept holding everything together by keeping the real and wired separate. Let’s all love Lain.