Her technophobia is childish, but a powerful system, he believes, will mature alongside her relationships with people. From behind his electronic wall he pronounces that in this world, whether the real or the Wired, people connect to one another, and that is how societies function-all the while failing to connect with his own painfully shy daughter. Her father practically lives in a fortress of processors and screens. Her mother is distant and unresponsive when Lain mentions the disturbing note. Lain appears socially and emotionally withdrawn, friendless in part because she is “not good with computers.” An email from her dead classmate-the reason behind another girl’s terrified sobbing back at school-merely piques Lain’s interest. “If you stay in a place like this … you might not be able to connect” (こんなところにいたら・・・いつまでもつながることなんてー).Ĭonnection is at the heart of the great irony of the Internet age, perhaps already apparent in 1998: the very technologies that are meant to connect us end up dividing, isolating, and finally consuming us.
Interspersed panels of swimming, psychedelic neon splotches with text messages from the void.
Red and green bokeh from the traffic lights at the Shibuya crossing. The starkly contrasting shadows are dark purple to black and speckled with red, like marbled paper, or perhaps blood spatter. Lain’s world is lonely and sterile, its spaces varying between pale hospital green, electric blue, and blinding white, into which figures frequently dissolve out of sight. “I don’t need to stay in a place like this.” And everywhere where there are people in great numbers, sexual harassment and assault lurk on the margins. The epidemic of anxiety and depression in adolescents is front and center: the first scene is the suicide of a schoolgirl, looking serene as she plummets from a building at Shibuya, crashing into a neon store sign before she hits the ground. A constant sense of malaise and nameless dread hangs in the air. It is astonishing how prescient it seems and how current it feels (granted, from an American perspective), and it does not make for easy viewing.
LAIN SERIAL EXPERIMENTS BEAR PAJAMAS SERIES
Present time.” The mocking, mechanical voice is startling enough that I have to stop immediately and look up when the series was actually made. I am going into this with little to no knowledge of cyberpunk or cybernetics, and am staying away from the many analyses floating about the Internet. I am using this entry, as well as subsequent ones as I get deeper into the series (available here), to record first impressions and observations. Judging by what I have seen so far, the path is unlikely to be straightforward. So I am vaguely aware of the endgame for Lain, but not of how we get there. I first came across the title in Susan Napier’s Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle (2005), in which Lain is discussed alongside Revolutionary Girl Utena based on their shared motif of the disappearing shoujo. But since my interest shows no sign of abating, I am exploring it on the side, whether or not it eventually develops into a larger research project or teaching opportunity. My anime consumption falls roughly into three categories: pleasure, guilty pleasure, and “research.” The scare quotes are there because anime is far from my main field of expertise, and only one series so far- Revolutionary Girl Utena-has led me to full-scale scholarly research and serious writing.
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