"Moderator: Konaka [SEL's Writer] spoke to me of there being one "true" answer to LAIN and the he was surprised to see how many alternatives were brought up. Could you enlighten us as to this "true" answer?
Yasuyuki Ueda, [SEL's producer]: I imagined that Mr. Konaka said that there is one TRUE answer between the creative team"
- 2001 Anime Colony chat interview
First Read these to understand what exactly was going on:
1)The Wired
2) Lain
3) Common Questions
4) The Plot
Then read these for thematics/artistic interpretation:
1)Culture War
2) Chaoskampf
3) Episode Titles
4) Surveillance State
5) Cinematography
Extra trivia:
Everything else
Author's note, which he recommends reading after going through all the articles:
As an Indian living in India, I often wonder: why didn't the Americans, with near infinite access to money and superior information technology, figure it out? And why didn't the Japanese do it either , despite it being a work tailored for them?
The answer could be fairly simple:
The Americans and the imperial core residents simply assume by default that the world revolves around them and are about centering their perspectives. I mean, of course its normal for a person to look at a Japanese media piece and think "Hey, I think its' about Freud, Berkeley and Jung! Not about any Japanese thinker at all!". I mean when was the last time Americans and Westerners genuinely appreciated a culture, not counting fetishistic aestheticization, consumerism and of course, from my own Christian perspective, their usual flippant evangelical hatred for all things strange and pagan? Intellectual curiosity is clearly not a virtue, unlike unbridled performative freedom of opinion, grounded in a love for apathy and ignorance, until obviously those decades of ignorance becomes a rabid dog coming back for every last piece as we can observe in America today.
And because we never questioned this freedom of the proudly ignorant to spread nonsensical rubbish as fact, 25 years were lost, and we are now too late. Chauvinism has doomed us all.
What SEL predicted, has unfortunately not only come to pass, but has become a pervasive unbreakable global reality. Capitalism, it's safe to say, has ruined the magic of computers and the internet. Thanks guys!
Why did the Japanese not get it, despite the home turf advantage? Because this is the SEL production team's Grand experiment:
Who would reach the finish line first ? Would it be the Yank who can only see the world informed by the American way, who loves their warm cocoons and their opaque bubbles, lacking desire to learn more than they already know? Or would it be the baseball-loving apple-buying consumerist Japanese individual, America's number 1 fan, apathetic to the gradual dissolution of their culture and country to an alien invader's assault? Would either of them really get it? Would any of us, since most of the world clearly fits into one or the other of these archtypes?
And the answer is ultimately neither. You can only truly love something if you truly take the work to understand it as deeply as possible, and still look at it with a straight face, with metta in your heart. Everything else, is rose-tinted fantasy, warped by the ecstasy of eros.
I believe that I love SEL as deeply as a human being can love a work of art: because it's deeply important to me, to this world, to this time that we live in. To those of us that see the same things and ask the same questions, looking for any answer deemed sufficient.
I never realised it, but now I do: I don't want to lose my country and my culture to the North Atlantic Mental Illness. Nobody who treasures their roots really does, for a person's roots makes them who they are in an innumerable amount of endless ways. It's better to prune and repair those roots than to destroy them and negate their existence altogether, to replace it with somebody else's socks and shoes.
Like Buddha's eternal maitri for those who desire to learn more, I've decided to share with you why SEL deserves that love, because after many years of analysis, I believe it can be understood, on its own terms. Who I am doesn't matter, because this is the collective effort of a community patched together.
Lain is Lain, after all.