Tumbling Down the Rabbit Hole: An Essay on Serial Experiments Lain

rateyourmusic.com - Serial Experiments Lain is a paragon of many dimensions, and completely unrivaled in many more. It's a masterpiece of intellectuality, and utterly unparalleled in providing a mind-warping trip into extreme psychological and philosophical themes whose impact lingers and haunts like nothing I've ever experienced. This is going without saying that Serial Experiments Lain is one of the most inaccessible creations of art to grace the medium of Animation, and it is difficult to even describe its complexity. There is a broad range of ideas, all of which have massive depth in their facets, which could all be focused on as a main point. Generally, these themes involve technologies impact on society, thorough deconstruction of the internet, the psychology of an impersonal god, Etcetera. In addition, the massive breadth of theoretical possibilities to many of the open-ended points in Serial Experiments Lain's plot and themes is without[...]

escaping the inescapable: final essay on serial experiments lain

zoetv.wordpress.com - Serial Experiments Lain explores the cybernetic system of Lain’s modified body. The text suggests a desire to escape the hindrance that is the body in contemporary society. Lain’s body is a working body within the productive system of capitalism, a gendered body that is coded with patriarchal historical discourses, a ‘sick’ body of Japanese youth that fails at social communication, and finally a cybernetic body that is a collection of interactive processes.(Pinsky, 2003: 133) As individual’s and their bodies cannot be absent from their historical and cultural narratives, (Borer, 2002) Serial Experiments Lain presents us with the paradoxical[...]

Alienation, Depression, and Dysphoria – Serial Experiments Lain

floatingintobliss.wordpress.com - It’s been said before that Serial Experiments Lain is a show that takes four watches to truly comprehend. Twenty years after its production, the show still seems in many ways prophetic in regards to the course of development that the internet would take, identifying future trends that most wouldn’t catch onto for years to come. Having just watched it for the fourth time, I can’t exactly answer the question of whether or not it truly takes four watches to understand the show. What I can say, however, is that I have come away from the show with a markedly different interpretation on every viewing of it[...]

The Terrifyingly Prescient ‘Serial Experiments Lain,’ 20 Years Later

theringer.com - At the onset, Lain Iwakura’s father warns her about the social perils of the internet, alternatively known as “the Wired” in the parlance of Serial Experiments Lain. “When it’s all said and done,” he says, “the Wired is just a medium of communication and the transfer of information. You mustn’t confuse it with the real world. Do you understand what I’m warning you about?” Lain is young, and doesn’t yet know how to use a computer, but she knows better than to place her faith in the older generation’s rigid distinction between real life and online performance. “You’re wrong,” she responds. At age 14, Lain was extremely online. Yes, she’s a fictional character—a cartoon, even — but there is no more frightfully prescient web parable than her story, Serial Experiments Lain, the 13-episode anime series that first aired in Japan in July 1998. Twenty years later, Lain is a distressingly faithful portrait of online life in the 2010s—a hellscape of warring avatars, self-serving mythology, catastrophic self-importance, compulsion, and inevitably, disillusionment. [...]

Identity in the Wired World – Serial Experiments Lain

http://reelgood.com.au - “Who is Lain?” Serial Experiments Lain was something that had always popped up on the fringes of my limited knowledge of anime. Whether I was reading an academic text or an essay, or any anime related article, Lain was hovering just out of sight. Like the Evangelion franchise, or Ghost in the Shell, I knew how much of an impact this show had had on animation culture, not to mention its effect on film and television in general – the cover of the box set proudly proclaims that it ‘paved the way for blockbuster films such as The Matrix’. This I do not doubt. In groundbreaking, mind-bending style, it took what was new and relevant at the time – the Internet – and twisted it in the most memorable and sinister of ways.[...]