"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
Few things to note. I've written most of this blog when I was young and naive. A lot of mistakes have been written here, in support of individuals i don't agree with.
Wix is also a webhost I can no longer tolerate on conflict of moral grounds, despite me being an Indian man and my country's support for absolute evil. Thus, the website is in the process of being archived and uploaded as a zipfile in the future.
I'd like to say one final thing. I found it very absurd that so many essays by Americans and Westerners in general, both video and written, are always looking at this show from their own western centric perspective (Jung, Freud, George Berkeley, Nick Land etc) despite the Creators explicitly mentioning that Western viewers probably wouldn't get it because it was a show by and for Japanese people. If I were to let's say undertake a study of the Shahnameh (An Iranian Epic) as an Indian man, I wouldn't use Yoga or Mahatma Gandhia as my first point of reference instead of Ferdowsi himself. If I was analyzing This Earth of Mankind, would I completely ignore Indonesia's colonial discourse? Why should a Japanese work be interepreted from the primary lens of western "theorists"?
Yet somehow Western Chauvinists seem to have polluted discourse about a very valuable foreign media work by centering their own perspectives no matter how tangential and irrelevant they are, especially the famous "Explaining Lain Iwakura" video by Skapdaboa on Youtube that seems to think SEL is some techno-commentary on Freud. The idea that the core themes of Lain are about "technology, communication, identity and reality" are very surface level takes that show a blatant degree of narcissistic refusal to even engage with the cultural sources from which a work like SEL emerges. If you're explaining a Japanese media work that explicitly says that its' meant for japanese people, why are your first go-to's Freud and Jung? You see this happen with Evangelion, where everyone talks about the Judeo-Christian symbolism but literally nobody cares about the LCL tsunami being a Buddhist metaphor.
I'm not saying my interpretation is the de-facto truth. We will never know what the full picture is because the writers won't reveal out of artistic choice. However, I am at least WILLING to look at what the Japanese have to say about Japan. The fact that Americans and Western essay writers would rather quote Berkeley instead of Tanizaki puts into question the merit of many American "anime analyses" on youtube and the internet in general. At least admit you don't care about it beyond the performative appearance of it making you look smart. Of course, to get American Liberals, Libertarians and the general populace to admit the truth about their crippling need to constantly engage in hollow performance would be as easy as pulling a tooth out of a Dragon's mouth (they won't like me saying this).