Serial Experiments Lain E11: “Infornography”

Today. Right now. Lain.


"Infornography" doesn't seem to be a word that formally exists, but Urban Dictionary claims that it means information that indirectly leads to subversive or heretical thinking. Granted, the writer of that definition might have seen this show before they wrote it, so it may originate here and mean anything. The intro sequence once again lacks a quote, and is more blatantly different, with the urban nightlife shots now being interspersed with Lain in her room attaching more wires to herself.

The opening shots of the episode itself show the house slowly falling into dusty abandonment, the food in the refrigerator rotting away. The caption "there's nothing as ambiguous as memory" randomly appears, and then there's a blur of random colors, cityscapes, eyeballs, and discordant guitar music. Finally, we get back to Lain standing in the (virtual?) wrecked telephone lines, wondering who she is, and if she's even really "herself" at all. She thinks back to previous moments throughout the series, particularly the shooter at Cyberia who she induced to kill himself. The music speeds up and gets jazzier as Lain next watches Chisa's suicide by jumping, with Lain herself now appearing to have been on the rooftop with her at the time and looking away in sadness as she leaped. A bunch of character mugshots, including Lain's various alternate personas. Lain's sister coming home from the reality breakdown that traumatized her into being a modem. Chisa's ghost doing her Silent Hill multiface thing in the mist back from the first couple of episodes. And so on, and so forth.

Nine minutes in. Is this entire thing just a clipshow episode?" If so, it's a really lazy one even by those standards.

The next couple of minutes are Arisu-focused, and also devote a fair amount of screentime to Trollain's single onscreen appearance. This sequence is bookended by quotes about Lain not being comfortable, wanted, or needed in realspace. Okay, this actually might have some insight into a small part of what's going on. Arisu has been the one person encouraging Lain to live in the real world and enjoy being there. Maybe Trollain is the part of Lain that wants to abandon it entirely and become a pure data entity (or go back to being one, if what Masami said about that is true), so she's sabatoging her meatspace friendships to encourage that. Maybe. It does fit. In this case, that aspect of Lain may or may not be aligned with Masami, since he's been trying to get her to do the same thing.

Around 12 minutes in, the music stops. We get a long, slow shot of Lain just sitting in her room covered in wires and cables again. Then, finally, some new footage of her attaching a pair of metal conductor plates to her face, laying down on the floor, and being contacted by Masami.

He's understanding of her tiredness, and admiring of how she just rebuilt her physical body's brain into a high-end navi emulator. Okay, I guess that's a thing that she did. That said, he warns her, trying to do this much this fast might overload herself; she's still growing into her full capacity.

Um...isn't he the one who's been telling her to abandon her physical body altogether and embrace the Wired as a whole? Why is he now advising restraint? Or rather, if she needs to take it slow and ease into her full potential, why hasn't he been advising restraint all along?

Lain tells him to stop talking about her like she's a machine. He apologizes, and says that she's right, she's not a machine, she's a program, and should be talked about like one of those instead. There we go, no hard feelings!  To clarify a bit more, he says, she's an executable program with a body. How she got said body, or how the body was created, he's silent about. He then disappears, leaving her to fall asleep.

Cut to one of Lain's avatars walking the nighttime streets and irritably telling the vaguely penguin-shaped protoplasmic blob on the sidewalk to shut up.

It wasn't making any noise that I could hear, but I'm not the superpowerful AI here so what do I know.

The blob crosses the street in front of her, making a bunch of demonic faces as it does so, and Chisa appears from behind it. Lain is happy to see her, but Chisa looks mournful. Lain says that she finally understands what Chisa told her before, and Chisa just looks even more miserable. Then the gunman from the club shows up holding a lightsaber...oh wait, no, its just the laser site from his pistol pointing down at the ground, okay that makes much more sense. Anyway, he tells Lain to go ahead and abandon her stupid body already, she has a tool to do it with. She looks down and sees that the glock is in her own hand now. Chisa speaks up and warns her that dying is awful even if she intends to survive the process, and that she shouldn't do it.

So, would killing her physical body make her expand to her full potential faster, or just fuck up her development? Getting mixed signals here.

Also, is that actually her physical self walking the street there, having untangled itself from the wires she hooked it up to? If not, then I guess the gun is just a virtual representation of a body-killer program? IDK.

When Lain hesitates to shoot himself, the shooter says that it's not fair if she stays in the physical world after she called him out of it. If she can force him to migrate fulltime into the Wired, then she'd better be willing to do the same to herself.

I'm guessing that "Chisa" is Lain's fear and uncertainty, and the "gunman" is Trollain trying to guilt trip herself into just doing it alright. Both of these aspects of Lain may or may not have actually assimilated copies of those two humans during their deaths.

It looks like the gunman is starting to succeed, until Lain hears Arisu's voice calling to her from somewhere far off. She looks up after the voice, and sees the machine spires from The Matrix looming over the desert ravines.

Cut to Arisu - the actual Arisu, I think - having a video chat with one of the other girls from school. The friend says she has a guy she wants to introduce Arisu to, and that maybe a new boyfriend will get rid of those rumors about her and that teacher. Okay, DID Arisu actually have sex with a teacher, or was she just fantasizing about it? And either way, how the hell was she aware of Lain being the one who...ah, whatever, I'm just giving up on trying to understand that whole thing. They end the call, and then a garishly dressed, zombie-handed version of Lain comes twitching through the half-open bedroom door like Pennywise the Clown.

Lain tells her that really, it wasn't her who peeked at Arisu's secrets, and it wasn't her who spread them all over the Wired. Arisu protests that she saw her doing it, and it looked exactly like her.

...

Okay, fuck it, I said I'd stop trying to do this, but the show is giving me no choice.

What's supposed to have happened is that Lain used her Schumann internet magic to either spy on Arisu while she was having sex with the teacher or peer into her mind while she was fantasizing about it. Okay.

Then she spread rumors about it all over the Wired. Okay.

And somehow, Arisu and the other girls at school know that Lain was the one who did this, with Arisu claiming to have SEEN her at it. Not okay.

Was it just a matter of Trollain's avatar appearing on Arisu's bed and cackling at her the one time? Wouldn't Arisu be much quicker to assume that she was hallucinating that part? Even if she didn't assume she was hallucinating, would the other girls at school ACTUALLY BELIEVE HER when she told them that Lain teleported into her room and then teleported out again? Again, Arisu's proof is that she "saw" Lain in the active process of doing this. Does everyone know that Lain has magic internet powers? If so, why are they making a bigger deal out of Lain spying on Arisu than they are out of Lain having magic internet powers?

If Lain's social media or whatever had the rumors on it before anyone else's did, then that would make sense. But that's never been cited as evidence. And it's always talked about as Arisu having "seen her doing it," not just reading what she posted after the fact.

This doesn't work no matter which way you slice it, and it's becoming a bigger and bigger plot point so ignoring it isn't an option.

...

Lain tells her that the person who did it was a different version of herself, with whom she's at cross-purposes. She also warns Arisu that there might be another version of her running around as well. Given how the Schumann internet seems to either create semi-autonomous data copies of people or allow Wired entities to copy their appearances and memories, that's a legitimate thing to warn her about.

Lain tells her that she understands how it might be hard for Arisu to believe this, but that's okay, because she's figured out how to undo the damage. Arisu asks her what the hell that's supposed to mean. Lain just says some cryptic babble about how she doesn't need machines or physical bodies to go anywhere and do anything anymore. Then she Pennywise-creeps her way out the door again, leaving Arisu to just sob to herself in fear and conclusion.

The next morning at school, the other girls approach Arisu and ask what's up, and why she seems so depressed and exhausted. One of them asks her if it's that time of the month, in the most cringeworthy example of men writing women that I think I've ever seen.

Well, moving on from that...

Arisu tells the girl she was videocalling the other night that she's not sure she's feeling up to meeting the guy today. The girl in question has no idea what she's talking about.

I guess Lain erased everyone's memories of that whole incident and its fallout.

That teacher walks by a moment later, and the other two girls start gossiping about how hot he is, and about the rumors that he's been doing stuff with a nonspecific eighth grader. I guess the rumors are persisting, but Lain took out some of the Arisu-related specifics, presumably for the purpose of not having to insert as many fake memories of where people were and what they were talking about at various times. Arisu is as disoriented as you might expect, and starts incriminating herself all over again, when Lain shows up. The other girls happily greet Lain with no sign of resentment or drama.

The music gets ominous as Arisu looks up at Lain and realizes what she's done. Lain then grins at her in a very Trollain manner.

Maybe that was Trollain who appeared in her room before, using the truth (multiple Lains, sort of) to set a new plan in motion of just making Arisu too terrified of Lain to want to keep being friends. That would make sense, and also explains why she was so...well..."It" during that bedroom scene.

Also, the other two girls have vanished, leaving Arisu and Trollain alone staring each other down. End episode.


I think I'm just going to stop doing episode-by-episode analyses altogether until I finish the show. Which is just two more episodes, so it'll only be a few more days.