I hadn’t seen Serial Experiments lelangir Lain since high school, when I most assuredly did not understand it at all, and I found out a friend of mine hadn’t seen it, so last night seemed as good a time as any to dust off the Lain DVDs I had never used and allow them to violate my vulnerable little mind (and those of said friend and a few others) with their giant cyberpunk phallus.

I haven’t finished it yet, having lent the last DVD (containing episodes 11-13) to my friend, but I do have a few unordered notes to heave at you all in the usual fashion.

• Lain is a singularity story. This is pretty obvious, I guess, but I didn’t know what the technological singularity was when I was 16, so for me it’s a new way of describing the show. It seems to take the position of reality being mostly subjective, and thus a superintelligence “connected” to the collective human unconscious effectively has power over reality itself, but I could be wrong, as all the parts of the show that explain such things are real clusterfucks.
• I feel compelled to summarize certain plot points, mostly so I don’t get things mixed up later, but also to help illustrate where I’m coming from, since there seems to be some debate over even the surface level of things in Lain.

  

  As I see it, the central conflict is that between AI Lain (the “real” Lain) and human Lain, who is more or less an input device (i.e. cybrid) for the AI. These are not the “same” person, as such, since human Lain, given a chance to experience human life, developed a personality of her own. (Note to superintelligences: you all really need to watch out for that tabula rasa business. This could all be avoided if you’d just give your human tools personalities to begin with. See also Nagato Yuki.) Some viewers take it as a multiple personalities thing, a conflict in Lain’s head, but I like to think of the Lains as distinct. Either way you could argue it as a coming of age story, though I don’t feel especially compelled to. In any case, the whole business of the Knights vs. Tachibana is, to me, peripheral to human Lain vs. AI Lain. I don’t really know how Eiri Masami and his particular brand of godhood fit in, having not yet re-watched the last three episodes, but I suppose it’s his machinations that render the Lains able to do what they do in the first place.

• One could (probably) characterize the Lain/Lain conflict as ego vs. superego, though which Lain represents which concept depends on one’s perspective. If you look at it as superego vs. id, though, I’d think it obvious that human Lain is the former and AI Lain the latter. Perhaps, then, the ego manifests in the end. Or maybe we should look to the creators having had three Lains in mind (see here), and say that the wired persona of human Lain, the one named in katakana, is the ego, but we wouldn’t want to fall victim to the intentional fallacy, now would we? Really, I’m not at all prepared to discuss the show from a psychoanalytic perspective. Maybe later.
• The animation feels low-budget this time around. I can’t figure out if it was a low-budget production, but if so, the creators sure did a hell of a lot with what they had.
• I have a vague sense of human Lain as the kind of mythic hero-figure who makes herself into something else to complete her journey/overthrow the evil, only to discover that she can’t go back to what she was before in a very literal sense — one of those heroes who can’t go home, in other words. Again, though, I can’t really elaborate yet. Maybe when I finish, I’ll do a more complete Freudian/Fryean look at the thing.
• This is pretty srs bsns for April Fools Day. Ah well.

Basically, I feel like I’m getting far more out of the show now than I did years ago, which I suppose is to be expected. I’ll have more to say when I’m done.

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