Serial Experiments Lain Streaming Full Of Black

More than anything, Lain offers a dark and intriguing look at our current Internet-obsessed era that feels quite timely despite being made 20 years ago.

A lot of people know about Cowboy Bebop and Neon Genesis Evangelion, but not nearly as many people are familiar with the tale of Serial Experiments Lain.

Before some of you sharpen your pitchforks, Im not saying that its a completely unknown anime, just that it wasnt as influential or talked about.

The show opens with a teenage girl committing suicide by jumping off a rooftop.

Then we meet our protagonist, soft-spoken 14-year-old Lain Iwakura, whose life is turned upside down when she receives an e-mail from the girl who committed suicide earlier in the episode, claiming she has ascended to a new form within the Wired the shows version of the Internet.

At the same time, she has horrifying realizations about her identity and reality itself.

Its a mind-twisting avant-garde, cyberpunk mystery about identity and what it means to be able to reinvent yourself in a place that isnt technically tangible.

Indeed, producer Yasuyuki Ueda said in an interview that he hoped American audiences wouldnt understand the series as the Japanese audiences would, but make their own interpretations of the show so an exchange of ideas would happen.

Konaka was primarily a horror movies writer, and has stated that he was heavily influenced by The Exorcist, Hell House and House of Dark Shadows.

Visually, the show follows suit, using technology and the internet as sinister beings lurking in the corner.

Whenever Lain enters the Wired (she literally enters the internet, physically, its a thing), she sees people as incomplete bodies, or just body parts surrounded by static in the shape of a body, to show how the version of ourselves we present online is just a partial version of ourselves.

Likewise, telephone lines are always in the background of every scene, loudly buzzing and casting large shadows on the utterly white ground.

Each morning as Lain walks to school, she is nearly blinded by the bright world thats outside the comfort and safety of her room.

Serial Experiments Lain Streaming Full Of Black

As Lain starts to get interested in computers, her bedroom quickly becomes a desktop fortress full of black tubes, bulkheads and wires everywhere, with cooling fans and liquid cooling setups filling up every inch of her bedroom.

Though computers dont cover entire rooms today, using cooling systems is common with a variety of computer users today.

This is a show that came out way before the term NEET started drawing media and government attention in Japan, and the world of the Wired is one where identity and being are as fluid as the data going though the computers.

Lain starts the show as a painfully introverted girl with no friends and a family that is strangely apathetic.

Her classmates make fun of how boring she is and find it impossible to believe she is the girl they saw at a club one night because the real Lain cant do anything fun.

But when shes connected to the Wired, Lain becomes an entirely different person, full of life and confident, glued to a proto-smartphone and even able to cultivate a fan base but also a violent bully.

The second half of the show then deals with Lain struggling to comprehend where her online personality ends and her offline one begins, knowing which one is her real self.

Not only does the show get in deep with conspiracy theories, even involving real names and ideas like Schumann resonances, but on the idea of violence in videogames and on the internet, before those debates really began.

One episode deals with numerous students committing suicide, with the only connection being their addiction to an online action game, and the series explores how easy it is to manipulate easily suggestible people to do acta of violence, or scare them to death (in this case via a secret hacker society).

It has enough existential questions to make you question your reality and your identity, and a plot that benefits from multiple viewings to fully appreciate while still being comprehensible enough to be enjoyed.