s Lain Iwakura is drawn further into the virtual world of the Wired, her "real" life becomes
increasingly disjointed. A voice claiming to be God speaks to her and explains that humans can still evolve. Her room becomes an eerie,
moist womb full of pulsating holograms and bubbling fluids. Apparitions
that resemble her toys or her parents tutor her on the protean, electrical
nature of reality, and her avatar appears first on public broadcast
screens, then in the sky. Her friends say she's "slipping." In person,
she's sometimes shy and distracted, at other times outgoing and almost
normal. In the Wired, she's a confident, arrogant girl who casually
dismisses less competent hackers as wannabes and morons.
Meanwhile, her sister is having her own problems with reality, as linear
time and space seem to break down around her. Eerie messages about death
and prophecy appear in e-mail, on a tissue, in coffee on a table, and
scribbled on a wall. It's not clear whether she's being drawn into the
Wired or possessed by something from it. Lain barely notices; she's
investigating the network game that seems to lead to teen suicide, and
finding some chilling answers about the game's history.
A pair of disturbingly detached men in black continue to tail
Lain. When she confronts them and accuses them of being the mysterious
Knights, they first shrug her off, then invite her to a secret rendezvous.
They refuse to give her their names, but pepper her with confusing
questions: Are you the Lain of the Wired? Are your parents your real
parents? When were you born? Where? Why don't you know? When Lain finally becomes capable of answering, her reactions go a long way toward opening up the baffling mysteries of this stylized, startling series.
Clear as crystal, clear as mud
The first episode of this tape, "Distortion," is itself so distorted and
confusing that it's tempting to believe screenwriter Chiaki J. Konaka is
deliberately teasing his viewers with pointless opacity. But his
indiscriminate mixtures of reality, fantasy, hallucination and virtual
reality--impossible to distinguish from each other in this welter of
surreal images--serve to heighten the tension as Lain moves into a
new phase. Even as the disconnected images become harder to interpret,
increasingly experimental and sophisticated animation make them
eye-poppingly captivating.
And further episodes actually begin to give the story some tangible
shape. Lain's true nature and the extent of her abilities are still mostly
a mystery, but as her Wired side gains dominance and picks up clues from
the variety of people interested in her, even the most outlandish
hallucinations begin to make more sense. The one real frustration is how
rarely the characters' reactions are fully explored: the scene shifts away
from Lain's father as he discovers her transformed room, away from her
friends and the crowd around them as they see her appear between clouds
overhead, away from her sister at the critical moment of each of her weird
confrontations. There may be a message to this method: that only Lain's reactions are truly important. And her odd
acceptance of the radically altered world around her possibly stems from a
very good reason.
Lain seems to borrow equally from Akira, Ghost in the
Shell and Key: The Metal Idol. Its attempts to interpose
cyber-age philosophy into every other scene can be a bit much; eventually,
concepts that appear novel at first blush begin to take on the cute
two-dimensionality of a fortune cookie motto. Still, Lain changes
gears so abruptly and so often that it's impossible to get jaded, even when
events briefly seem to become clear. It remains a beautiful, eerie, and
powerfully evocative series, with a strong promise of more to come.
