#weebposting

In addition to all the crazy theories I've seen people come up with (Lain is Jesus, Lain is Shinji from Evangelion, all of Lain is about aliens, etc.) - and god bless the lovely people who write those - there are two common interpretations. #1 is that Lain is a program constructed to break down the barrier between the Wired and the real world. #2 is that Lain is schizophrenic and by the end of the series has gone completely nucking futs. You can think of these as the literal interpretation and the meme interpretation, maybe.

My problem with #1 is if you accept it, the finale is deeply troubling. One key theme in Lain is that Lain despises being observed, but she loves observing others. Notice how panicked she gets any time the Men in Black train their sights on her in the early episodes, or the repeated scenes of her family members opening her door to stare at her, say nothing, and leave. And this gets discussed explicitly in the finale, where Lain tells herself that maybe she prefers to be a god because it's easier to be a god than a human being - you don't have to be seen but you can see everything. It's very clear that the point being made here is that Lain, if given the choice, would choose to be human after all she's been through. As such, her decision to remove herself from the world feels like a defeat, a hollow tragedy, and a betrayal of her own arc. It's not bad writing, necessarily - it just feels bad.

#2, by comparison, sits okay with me, but it does feel a bit silly. You can wave away the entire show as a meaningless hallucination, and its ending as a complete break with reality. So why were we watching this again?

During my second watch of the show, after the ninth episode (the alien one featuring the ultimate husbando Vannevar Bush), I wrote down two possibilities that I still thought were plausible at that stage. My ideas were fairly similar to #1 and #2 above, but with a couple crucial differences, so I'm going to call them #1A and #2A.

#1A: Lain is the emergent consciousness of the internet, and this is the story of her trying to figure out her place in the real world.

The key thing separating this from #1 is that I never took seriously the idea that Lain was deliberately constructed. Rather, I saw her (in this version) as a being nobody wanted or expected, but one who learned to exist with reference to other people.

There's one scene that makes me dismiss the "constructed Lain" interpretation out of hand even before the ending - it's the scene where her dad says goodbye to her on the stairs, and expresses that he "enjoyed playing house". It seems very obvious to me that the scene isn't meant to be taken at face value, being that it follows up the increasingly weird but oddly human behavior of all of Lain's family members. But if you think Lain is literally a program, you have no choice but to take this at face value, along with everything else her family does. Instead, I immediately took their behavior as Lain's perception of them. To Lain, her mother is basically a nonentity whose only emotional act is to kiss her father on occasion. This isn't the behavior of a paid actor - it's Lain's vision of how her human mother would sincerely act.

With #1A, the ending of Lain is her recognizing herself as the goddess of the internet, and recognizing that she cannot participate in the real world - but she loves everyone in it all the same. They are no longer NPCs and simulations to her, but real people. I like that version of her arc, but my other construction is the one I find even more compelling.

#2A: Lain is a human girl. She isn't schizophrenic, but lonely, isolated, and prone to fantasizing. The majority of what we see is her playing out a fantasy where she doesn't have to give up her privacy and finds her secret desire for attention and love - on the internet.

I already mentioned above that all we see of Lain's family seems to me like it's filtered through Lain's eyes. According to this interpretation, that also applies to the rest of her life. In class the other students appear as gray statues in the background because she doesn't care about them. The Knights are people she talks to on the internet, but what they really do we never find out. Instead she lives an elaborate fantasy including secret organizations, aliens, and of course - herself as a god-like figure at the center of it all.

I wasn't sold on this interpretation until I thought in depth about the ending to the story, and specifically Lain's "reset". It was always very hard for me to explain the reset, in conjunction with Lain's apparent affirmation to stop living as a god and start living as a human. But then something clicked - if nearly the entire story is Lain progressing her own fantasy, then the reset is her decision to go back to the real world, not to leave it. She chooses to live as a human again after a very, very long period of dissociative introspection.

#2A gives rise to the question of what the final scenes with Lain's dad and with adult Arisu are. The more comforting and to me, less fitting sub-interpretation is that those too are "memories" - fantasies of the future - and the real Arisu is Lain's classmate. But my favorite of all is this: the real Lain is 14. Her father is dead. The real Arisu is 24 or so. Lain deeply admires Arisu but has not seen her in a long time - the version of Arisu Lain remembers was a middle schooler. Perhaps Arisu was her babysitter when she was a small child. And in this version, the final scene with Arisu is just reality - a meeting after so many years.

The only qualm I have about this version - call it #2A2 - is that Lain's crucial statement in the finale that "memories can be of the present or future, not just the past" isn't used to full effect. But emotionally it seems to fit better than anything.