Serial Experiments Lain E2: “Girls, Layer 2”

The second episode of this show, and the last of the ones commissioned by @WheelOfFortune.

We return to the psychedelic and terrifying near future world of Lain, a teenaged girl who is either being haunted by some kind of cyberspace ghost creature that claims to be a dead acquaintance of hers, or simply going insane. When we last saw her, she had just come face to face with the apparition on her way home from school. Begin.

Episode 2 starts with the same pastel-lit city evening shots, including the fedora traffic lights. This time, the voiceover is of a creepily giggling Japanese ghost girl voice inviting someone to try something, just this once. Then the title card, with the same monstrous robot voice from last time reading the title. Then, we're in a dance club.

The dancers all appear joyless, almost desperate in their motions, despite the high energy, and we hear ominous horror movie music instead of the song they're presumably dancing to. Ominous Caption Entity says "Cyberia? I don't come here because I want to." Whatever that means. Over in the corner, a shifty looking young man buys what looks like drugs from a woman wearing an improbably combination of a sexy red cocktail dress and a gas mask. OCE then says that this price for "Accela" is a total ripoff while the man stares at his purchase.

Either OCE is just this guy's inner monologue, or it's speaking to him tele(techno?)pathically, and seeing what he sees. Anyway, Accela is not technically a drug, according to OCE, but its similarly illegal. The buyer unwraps his purchase, revealing his Accela to be a glowing seedlike object that he eyes hungrily.

He then cuts the "seed" open, to release a small quantity of insulating liquid, and a tiny metallic device that seems to be the source of the glow, which he inspects carefully. When he's sure it's what he paid for, he ingests the tiny machines and washes it down with beer.

Some kind of electroneural stimulant? Swallowing it seems like an unlikely way to take something like that, so I don't think so. Maybe it's supposed to latch onto his intestinal lining like a hookworm and pump him with something over time?

Well, within less than a minute his vision starts blurring, and he begins twitching and frothing at the mouth. The captions say "I feel accelerated," and then the rest of the room slows down into bullet time while he keeps grunting and twitching at the same speed. The music warps into oppressive white noise, and he collapses on the ground, stars streaking through his eyes. People stare down at him. Then everything stops completely, and we return to a normal external POV as everyone else resumes dancing, the boy laying on the floor either dead or paralyzed as he stares upward in not-exactly-a-drug-addled horror.

Then he's suddenly sitting at his table again, without anything having happened, and OCE commands him to come forth. He silently gets up, and begins walking somewhere.

Then everything fades to white, and we're back to Lain. Who has apparently returned from her ghost encounter, and is now checking her email again; no new messages, from definitelynotareaper@darkspace.net or anyone else. Her mother comes in and chides her in a very halting, off-putting way for talking to her imaginary friend again, and tells her to hurry up or she'll be late again. She ruefully gets ready for school, and steps back out into the blistering white void outside her front door.

She pauses for a moment on her way to the train station when her shadow starts filling with bloody flower petals and the flat ground in front of her twists into a steep downhill slope, but then continues. There's a tall man standing perfectly still next to one of the telephone poles on the otherwise empty street. When she passes him by, she sees that his eyes are all fucked up, with the pupils and irises out of alignment. The consequences of Accela use, perhaps? He continues not reacting to her or anything else, and she hurries past him.

She gets to school, and is snapped out of a half-asleep fugue by the friends who have appeared next to her. They talk conspiratorially about whether or not Lain could be the person responsible for something unsaid, but something about Lain's responses convinces them of her innocence. Um, good, I guess? They quickly change the subject when Lain asks them what the hell this is about, leaving her shut out of whatever they must be dealing with. The isolation, alienation, and paranoia continue to build.

Lain tries to end the ensuing awkward silence by asking if anyone else has gotten more of those Chisa emails, and they pretend to not know what she's referring to for a minute before claiming that they haven't. They ask Lain if she has, and Lain lies. Her raising this topic seems to make the others suspicious, and one of them says that on second thoughts Lain DOES look kind of like the mystery culprit who committed some unnamed offense, and asks her what she was doing last night. Lain doesn't seem to remember, or is too shy to say. We, ourselves, have no idea what Lain was doing last night, or even how long its been since the last episode.

Hmm.

It turns out that the other girls snuck into Club Cyberia last night, and saw a girl who looked a lot like Lain there. They weren't able to get close to her, though, partly because she was screaming like a madwoman and getting in everyone's business, and was also dressed like a total lunatic. I thiiiiiink we may have caught a glimpse of her during the drug/accela sequence at the beginning, but I'm not sure. They then discuss among themselves whether Lain should come with them the next time they sneak into that club, with Lain not offering any input herself.

This is starting to make me think a little bit of Lovecraft's "The Tomb." Shy, nearly silent introvert running off into crazy, party animal fugues under the influence of a ghost. IS that what happened? We know that Main saw the "ghost" on her way home one or more afternoons ago, but we have no idea what happened from there. She could have come straight home after the meeting and had a normal-ish evening, or she could have gone somewhere and done something else entirely.

The episode is then interrupted by a short infomercial about Accela. These nanotech devices apparently use acoustic vibrations to stimulate the body's endocrine system from inside the stomach, triggering a combination of hormone releases that hyperaccelerates brain activity. The user's cognition accelerates to anywhere between two and twelve times its normal speed, which naturally comes with a sense of the rest of the world being slowed down. The device is destroyed by your stomach acid after a few hours of exposure, but it can take some time for your glands to straighten themselves out again afterward, with unpredictable effects for an unpredictable duration. This experimental technology is apparently in use in some fields (I suspect military, though it's not stated) despite the obvious and severe health risks, but is tightly controlled for those same reasons.

Okay, so that's what that does. We go back to Lain in class afterward. She gets a text from one of her friends on a retro-futurist smartphone type thing (maybe her dad got her a new "navi" after all), and she replies that she's not interested. OCE takes this opportunity to remind us that everyone is connected, and then Lain is wandering alone through a semi-dark school corridor where holographic humanoid ghosts are phasing in and out of reality, while Chisa stares at her out of a classroom door.

Probably the most reassuring thing about this sequence is that Lain seems to be scared of this stuff, rather than oblivious or dully accepting. Regardless of whether the things she's seeing are actually there, her reactions suggest that her state of consciousness itself is in better shape than we've seen it in the past.

After the hologram creatures wander on out of our dimension, Chisa magnifies herself into Lain's face and does her Silent Hill thing with three grotesque expressions overlaying themselves at once. While Lain panics and clutches her sobbing, hyperventillating face, Chisa walks through her and subsequently vanishes. Then the sun turns back on.

So it's still daytime. I kinda figured Lain had just zonked out for multiple hours in a closet somewhere and only snapped out of it at around closing time, but no. That raises the question of why she's alone in this hallway by herself, but well...she could have wandered out into the hall during class, but it's also possible that she isn't. She could only think that she's alone. She could be dreaming this entire episode, complete with the setting. This could be a false memory that's just inserted itself into her head.

Nothing is reliable. Nothing we see, hear, or think has any guarantee of actually having a persistent existence outside of our perceptions. If we ever perceived it at all, rather than just having a dream-memory surface out of nowhere disguised as a recent waking experience.

...

Much has been said of the misery, fear, and loneliness of mental illness. Fewer accounts that I've read really talk about the frustration and sense of futility that comes with it. The sense that there's no point in even trying to stay coherent, because your efforts themselves are already compromised.

I'm very glad to say that it's been over a decade since that was my own experience. But I'm also glad to see a pop cultural artwork that actually GETS IT. I don't think I've seen one that does so, at least nearly as well, until now.

...

Lain is then walking home under the twisted power lines and over the blood-oozing void again, or at least appears to be doing so, and sees a delivery van in front of her house. She lets the deliveryman in and signs for the multiple large cardboard boxes without knowing what's in them or who ordered them. Apparently, this is the new navi her dad ordered, and its a high end one too. Her little tablet thing is something else, I guess.

Hmm. Either navis are souped up PC's, virtual reality cyberspace interfaces, or remote controlled android bodies, from the sound of it. I'm thinking the second of those is most likely.

Ominous music starts as soon as she closes the door behind the deliveryman and is left alone with the new arrival. There's no sign of her parents. 

Jump ahead to later that evening, when Lain is all pajama'd up and curled up in bed under her row of creepy stuffed animals. She hears a scraping sound from below, and comes down the stairs to find her parents locked together in the kind of kiss you normally expect from long-married couples only from passionate reunions. And they're holding stone still, not appearing to move it all or make a single sound as Lain comes down the stairs behind them.

Has someone been secretly dosing Lain with Accela, I wonder?

Things around her seeming to hold still sounds like the pulser working as intended. Hallucinations, mood swings, and sleep issues can all be caused by neuroendocrine imbalances, which the aftereffects were said to include.

I don't think that that's the only thing going on here, but I begin to suspect it might be PART of the picture.

Her parents suddenly unfreeze and acknowledge her presence. Dad says, seeming much less creepy than he did in his last appearance, that he'll get her new navi set up after dinner. Mom just complains about the clutter. Lain tells her father that she'd like it if he could install her navi right now, if that's not too much trouble, and technophile that he is he agrees. And gets the anime villain glare on his glasses again as soon as he does.

-_-

Turns out that whatever a navi does, it looks like a desktop computer with a giant tower sticking out of it.

Lain's father helps her register the machine and set up her owner account and so forth, and segues into some more creepy philosobabble about the need for interconnection, and an even creepier hope that her new navi will grow and mature along with her personal relationships.

Uh. Huh.

When he's with his wife, the man seems pretty normal. When he's alone with Lain, he starts to seem like the kind of guy who doesn't smoke, occasionally drinks, and makes sure has a glass of warm milk and does twenty minutes of stretches before going to bed by 11 PM. Although on the other hand, everyone and everything seems creepier when Lain is alone with them, so this could have more to do with her perception than with his personality. 

Her mother sticks her head in the door and looks disgusted as Lain starts using her new machine. I'm guessing she resents her husband's computermania and has become somewhat anti-tech herself in reaction, but that's just a guess. Anyway, the parents leave, and Lain checks her email for more ghost messages without success. Then her phone-tablet-thing rings, and she gets yet another invitation from her friends to join them at Cyberia.

Lain looks back and forth between phone and computer. OCE says "Why don't you come?" and its not clear at all which choice it's pushing her toward. Come out with her friends, or come suck her soul out into cyberspace to be with it? In any case, she chooses the former, and meets up with her fellow underaged high schoolers at the club. They criticize her for not dressing more adult-like, and must that they need to take her clothes shopping sometime.

You know, there was also a moment during the navi setup scene where, when she sat down in front of the monitor and starting setting up her account, she took off the childish pajama-hood she'd had over her head as soon as she sat down. That, along with her father's weird ramble, makes this feel like its going to be some really fucked up and subversive growing up narrative.

The topic of that mysterious madwoman who looked like Lain, but dressed and acted nothing like her, comes up again. Lain remains uncomfortable and evasive about the subject. Before they can start enjoying the harsh lights and soulless, tight-packed dancing in earnest though, someone starts firing a gun in the middle of the crowded club. It's the Accela tweaker from the beginning.

People panic, stampeding for the exit. Several, including one of Lain's friends, collapses, either from being shot themselves or from suffocation/shock. As the other girls grab their fallen friend and start evacuating with the other patrons, Lain stares at one of the growing blood pools on the floor. Her eyes go perfectly wide, and take on a doll-like quality as the blood spreads across the floor and ominous citar music plays. Her friends try to snap her out of it and take her with them, but she's unresponsive.

Soon, Lain and the friend trying to wake her up are the only ones left, alone and unhidden, in the club with a wild-eyed shooter.

The shooter locks his eyes on Lain's, and a look of utter, mortal terror comes over him. He screams and babbles at her to stop controlling him, stop making him do this, he knows that she's part of the "scattered god" who is invading from the Wired, and begs and threatens her to go away.

Lain just brushes off her friend, and marches toward him. Eyes wide. Expression doll-like. He trains his handgun on her forehead, but then she opens her mouth and says, in a clear, commanding tone completely unlike her usual delivery, "No matter where you go, everyone is connected."

Tears emerge from his eyes, as he turns the pistol around and puts the muzzle in his mouth. Lain doesn't move, flinch, or react in any other way whatsoever as he pulls the trigger.

End episode.

I was being flippant with the Mass Effect references, but they're starting to seem way more on-point than I realized at the time.

The amalgamation of multiple humans into an entity that cares not for human welfare or suffering is a big boogeyman of our time. I might go so far as to say that it's THE demon in the dark for information age mythology. It's an archetype that existed before, of course, but looking at 19th, 20th, and 21st century pop culture you can see it growing from a relatively niche concept to a go-to monster for horror stories. Looking at the last few decades in particular, I also think that there's a trend toward subtlety in the corruption or assimilation process. Some modern philosophers have argued that that the concept of corporate personhood, and the behavior of those corporations, is already a real life example of this beast. "Serial Experiments Lain" was produced right as the internet was really kicking off, and based on these first two episodes its premise seems to be "what if the conglomeration-monster has already been assimilating you for years?"

A network between people, created through cyberspace, but with the potential to act outside of it. A brain that values us as much as you value any given neuron when you feel like getting drunk. Something beyond you, that nonetheless acts through you. And you can't escape, or fight back, because you can never know how much of you, if any, is actually still "yours," or where any given thought or action really comes from.

The mental illness parallels are still completely on point and convincing, but I think the show is combining that anxiety with another, more specifically modern, one. What if the madness was bigger than you? What if instead of a person becoming mentally ill, a mental illness was growing within the population as a single entity, greater and more sophisticated than the brain of any sufferer?

When you look at how the internet has led to a resurgence of cults, extremist ideologies, and similar problems, Serial Experiments Lain starts to look pretty damned prophetic. 

The exact nature of the entity plaguing Lain and her friends might not be quite what I've been outlining, but based on these intro episodes at least it seems pretty conceptually similar. How its existence and abilities tie in with the Accela devices, the "Wired" (whatever that is, exactly), and the implied growing-up theme for Lain, I can't yet say. I have my suspicions about that last one though. What does "growing up" in the computerized world mean? Integration into the network. Into multiple networks, all of them part of a still bigger system. And you don't know what its doing, or why. You just do your part, and as far as you can tell it's of your own free will.