Serial Experiments Lain is an animated television show that tells the story of a junior high school-girl named Lain who gets an email from a dead student saying that she has left her physical body and now exists on the Wired (the show’s version of the Internet), claiming that God lives there as well. Lain begins experiencing strange phenomena including dislocations of space and time, visions of other people’s experiences, and as she becomes more familiar with the Wired discovers another version of herself existing independently in the real and virtual worlds. Eventually, Lain and her doppelganger turn out to be an omniscient being generated by the Wired, which government agents are attempting to control – her cold, uncaring family is a set of actors and the “reality” that she knows is entirely fake.
The series focuses on the collapsing of distinctions between the Internet and the real world, the Internet as a catalyst for coming-of-age, fragmentation of identity, and the disjointed social networks that emphasize technologically enhanced connection but never truly achieve it. Relationships are mediated and interrupted by screens, or, like Lain’s classmate, people attempt to bypass the screen to achieve total unity on the Wired, which the series ultimately rejects as a futile solution. True integration of worlds is achievable only by the digital god Lain, at the cost of her real-world identity and meaningful human relationships. While the show is intermedial in that the animation portrays digital effects (like the “snowy” screen), it is more interesting in the way it engages the ubiquity of screens and interrogates our relationships and obsessions with them.
Amelia Pitt-Brooke
