The networked meaning of SEL's Episode titles
TRIGGER WARNING: Suicidal ideation
The episode titles may seem innocent and empty of any significance, and most viewers give it a passing glance at best. Yet, IMHO, the full meaning of the show cannot be grasped without the significance of the titles themselves and what they seek to say. A quote from Gene Young blood's book "Expanded Cinema" may make this clearer:
"Second, is the quite noticeable seriality of the composition, the
unified wholeness of the statement, although it is composed of
discrete elements. In defining "serial" in this context I should like to
quote from art critic John Coplans: To paint in series is not
necessarily to be serial. Neither the number of works nor the
similarity of theme in a given group determines whether a [work] is
serial.
Rather, seriality is identified by a particular interrelationship,
rigorously consistent, of structure and syntax: serial structures are
produced by a single indivisible process that links the internal
structure of a work to that of other works within a differentiated
whole.
While a series may have any number of works, it must as a precondition of seriality have at least two... there are no
boundaries implicit to serial imagery; its structures can be likened to
continuums or constellations... all contemporary usage of serial
imagery is without either first or last members.
Obviously at one
point there had to be a beginning, but its identity becomes sub-
sumed within the whole, within the macrostructure. The same
principle applies to the last member. At any given point in time one
work in a series stands last in order of execution, but its sequential
identity is irrelevant and in fact is lost immediately on the work's
completion.
It is this seriality, then, that identifies ['Permutations' by John Whitney] both as "words"
and "sentence structures" as well as a complete overall statement,
which is the meaning of the title.
We see that SEL borrows from this sort of "nonlinear" serial structure, each episode being a node in a point that doesn't connect linearly, but in a very non-linear sort of way, each episode making its own statement while also contributing to a cohesive, larger message. This is similar to what Deleuze and Guattari do in a Thousand Plateaus whereby each chapter is not read from start to end but can be connected in any varying amount of ways. If some of you study computer science, you should be familiar with a finite state machine:
As we see further, this is great representation as to how SEL's titles are in an of themselves metaphorical statements that connect with each other non-linearly, forming a very unique approach to conveying its overall thematic premise (as well as an obvious mockery of the myth of "linear narrative" i.e a Foucaultian meta-narrative that we so believe deeply about history and the world at large). Obviously I can't map out the entire structure because it will become too big to cover in a single essay, but it may provide some interesting context for a Lain rewatch! :) Huge shoutout to my brother, without whom this essay may not have been possible.
Before we start, take note of the names of the 13 episode titles:
1. Weird
2. Girls
3. Psyche
4. Religion
5. Distortion
6. KIDS
7. Society
8. Rumours
9. Protocol
10. Love
11. Infornography
12. Landscape
13. Ego
Weird things, weird people
"Weird" seems to be obvious. The show is weird in many ways: weird plot, weird ideas, werid structure, you can go on infinitely. It's easy to get caught up in the obviously weird aspects of SEL's weirdness and ignore the more subtle, yet more profoundly weird aspects of SEL that go unnoticed. Let's run through them.
The first mistake that most people make is viewing the show through a western lens. SEL was made by Japanese people for Japanese people, and there was no intended broadcast plan audience's outside the country (just like Evangelion). So then we have a major question pop up: Why is a Japanese anime for a Japanese audience, a country which explicitly struggles with English even today, written mostly in English?
Even the stores in the anime are written in English, despite the fact that a Japanese person would struggle to understand what's being said at all
English, as a language, is largely associated with are considered WEIRD societies: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic. These societies and their customs, despite being specifically peculiar to their histories, are touted as universal values, even going so far as to be claimed as "human experience". Because of their status, many a country's elite view speaking English as a status symbol, and the mere ability to speak a western language and to engage with western culture is considered a hallmark of upper class mannerisms. SEL's use of English then, isn't merely weird in a Japanese context, but an intentional decision meant to communicate something about Japanese society, a [society] that like many others is largely based on community and consensus, although to a far more extreme degree.
Take note of L 11 "Infornography's" use of the L1 titlecard. "Weird" is excluded to the corners of the space, marked in a deep red, while the other titlecard's arrange themselves in a cross shaped formation. Those who don't fit in, the "weird" ones, are excluded in a hostile way from the majority. (I'll explain this in a deeper manner in Surveillance State)
A society maintains its reality via consensus, and this consensus is governed by a set of implicit rules that everyone must follow, also known as a [protocol]. Those who don't fit into this existing schema or don't agree to follow these rules are exiles and vagabonds: society's weirdos.
In older times, like how Foucault has mapped so extensively, society's misfits (or those who do not fit pre-existing archtypes) would simply leave in order to avoid the hate they incur from their fellow members. A great example of this would be vagabonds, or wanderers who didn't work in Mediaeval Europe. These people, far from the cool persona they carry now, were seen back then as mentally unstable individuals, and were often thrown in prison. So in our current modern day, where escape is not really an option, where do weird people go? And what do they do?
Arisu's decision to include Lain in her friend group is a conscious effort on her part to prevent incidents like that of Chisa again: the final directive of isolated individuals to escape from a place where they are not wanted.
Chisa Yomoda, L1 "If you stay in a place like this...you might not be able to connect"
Consensus is maintained in modern society via a combination of what Foucault would call Disciplinary apparatuses and what Althusser would call ideology. Far from the idyllic paradise that slice-of-life anime would have you believe, school has always been a simulation of a prison environment, where through artificially constructed concepts like failure that only exist in a society when humans are reduced to machines that make billionaires more money, children are put through an institution where they are constantly surveilled, policed and disciplined.
School is then an ideological state apparatus of the ruling elites, where they make sure children digest exactly those concepts (obey authority without question, failure is bad, study to get high grades) that increase their own power. Those who disobey or cannot follow protocol, whether intentional or otherwise, are chewed and eaten alive by the system, only to then be spit out later as 'rejects'. High school in Asia is especially competitive, with students churned through in a wide variety of ways. Consensus is forced through ideas like school uniforms and class timings.
This is why the setting of SEL takes place not in any school, but a specific [religion]'s school, a Christian missionary girls school (because it's a unisex school). Sexism is rife in Asian culture, and women are often policed, scrutinized and made to obey certain laws without recourse. Not only are they disciplined, but they are forced to swallow certain ideologies, and the production made that decision to intentionally communicate how a society's structures are not meant for the good of the people, but as a system of control. Foucault covers his geneaology of body politics in the 3 volumes of the "History of sexuality" in more detail, but this is way outside the scope of the essay.
Thus, the aim of institutions is the mold the [ psyche ] itself into one more useful to a ruling class. And those that are deemed useless, 'strange' or too weird to fit into useful archetypes, can be subject to hostility, isolation or even severe bullying. Middle school in Japan has a severe bullying problem amongst girls of that age, and Shion Sono's movie Suicide Club talks about it in more detail. Social pressure and the need to conform is a strong force to reckon with, which is why Weirdo's like Chisa and Lain, isolated from the warmth of human belonging, are the most vulnerable to cults on the Wired, the large scale religions of the internet era.
Children, Adults, Eros and predation
We see a specific word used as the title of Layer 2, the word 'Girls'. Not women, mind you. Youth is a very interesting theme present in the episode, because: 1) It opens with the young Accela Kid, 2) It's the introduction to Taro and his friends 3) It's also where we first see Cyberia. These are not coincidences, but intentional screenplay decisions.
Since we have already determined that school is a prison system where human freedoms are somewhat curtailed, there obviously manifests an innate desire in young children, or [kids] to "go where the adults are" and engage in adult conversations as a desire to experience freedom (it also applies to young girls, because since they are so subject to disciplinary measures in the school environment, the club is where girls can just be girls).
Children naturally look up to adults and want to do cool adult things, which why Arisu and friends go to Cyberia, and also the exact same reason why Taro joins the Knights as an enforcer in the Wired.
Hodgeson and Eiri are both representative of the same core attitude: While kids look up to adults as a form of guidance and mentorship, there are a lot of predators who see children as simply ends to a means.
While there's also lot to be said about the borderline pedophilic societal relationship between older men and young women in Japan, SEL is trying to say something about the nature of [love] and desire. Love, in the original greek sense of the term, wasn't a single concept. There was Philia, the love between friends, Storge, the love between familial relations, and even Agape, the unconditional universal compassion of God.
But what we're interested in is Eros, a word that may be translated into "Lust", "Desire", and "Sensual love". Eros is Arisu's feelings for her teacher, but also Eiri's feelings for Lain, a feeling of lust for unlimited power because he sees her as a means to his ends (which is why there's an uncomfortable groom-bride symbolism being played up in the show). Make no mistake, Eiri is a predator of the highest order, but rather than a sexual one, he's a demonic one. In the original myth surrounding the greek God Eros, he made the beautiful woman [Psyche] fall in love with a hideous despicable man as a part of Aphrodite's order.
The desire to conform, to aspire to adulthood on the child's side is mirrored by a dark lust for power on the side of predatory adults who yearn to further their own nefarious ends. This why it's impressionable children who are the first targets of cults, scams and organized religious hierarchies. It's also why blackmail is so powerful when used on children, because fearing that they will be shunned from society and having no identity to fall back on, they often relent.
L3: "No...I can't" "Why not? I love you"
This is an interesting dialogue between what is presumably a couple where the man is trying to force consent. How he does it, is through blackmail, via the implication that "if you don't do this, I won't love you no more". We still don't know if she consented or not.
This is why children in the story are forced into situations to which they could not consent to, by virtue of being children, just like how a man preying on young girls is a pedophile because children do not have the ability to consent to certain by virtue of their inexperience as children. Hodgeson and Eiri, the only two labcoat donning characters of the show, are the representatives of this form of exploitation, one in charge of KIDS and the other in charge of LAIN.
The child's desire to fit in with adults is responded to by the predatory lust for power by the adult seeking to further their own agenda, both two sides of the same coin of Eros.
Brainrot, Disinformation, Memetic Warfare
While violence is one way to force consent, as we have seen in the previous section the best way to get consent out of someone is through the power Eros i.e intense attraction via the power of desire. There's a lot of energy involved in the use of physically forcing someone to do something, when the easier thing to do would be to make someone want to do something out of their own free will, their heart's desire.
Desire is a powerful emotion that, if tapped into by a sufficiently manipulative person, can move mountains at a whim. The desire to be adults is what allows the Knights and Eiri to get children like Taro and Chisa to do their bidding, and Eiri uses this tactic against Lain by engineering the [rumours] around Arisu, which led to Lain desiring to clear them up.
The powers of rumours and gossip lies in a fundamental reality of human nature: the desire to know the truth. It's why you, dear reader, came to this page, because you wanted to know the truth, even if that truth could potentially destroy your own interpretations of the show. Conversely, if you can circulate some form of information across a wide [landscape] for a long enough time, you can literally create a truth and thereby [distort] reality. At its core, this is what politics is about: what people agree to be true or false about reality.
One of the best examples of disinformation creating Hyperreality is how CocaCola made their modern rendition of Santa Claus the 'true form' of St. Nicholas just to sell more bottles in winter, despite the saint himself being cloaked in green for centuries prior.
The point of the UFO incident at the beginning of Layer 9 wasn't just to lay some subtle foregrounding in the Lain lore, but to also bring to light the creation of modern myths, like how Carl Jung discusses in his book Flying Saucers. Roswell was very clearly an American coverup for what is probably more powerful experimental research craft aimed at guarding their status as the global reserve currency, but rather than admit that outright, the myth of the "flying saucer" was fabricated, a myth that many still believe in today.
Eiri distorts the image of the Knights themselves by circulating the rumours of their connection to the original Knights Templar, making a NEET, housewife and corporate psychopath seem much more powerful, mysterious and menacing than they actually are. The drive to know more about the Knights is what drives Lain's [Infornography] addiction, which through intense obsession (Eros) , is literally reconstructing her psyche, just like how Accela hijacked the young man in layer 2.
In Layer 7 we have the lady making the famous reference to Sharon Stone's scene in "Basic instinct" The film follows a detective trailing a murder story, much like how Lain is trying to get to the bottom of the suicides in the show.
.png)
We also see, judging from the red tie, this very clear reference to Patrick Bateman from "American Psycho". The movie is satirical take on a sociopathic society consumed by capitalist ideals, where everyone and everything is seen as a commodity.
Landscapes and Egos
Of all the titles, "Landscape" seems to the one most out of place. What landscape? Most of what happens in the show takes place in the same urban locations, not over some valley pass or mountain ridge that comes to mind when we use the word landscape.
But this betrays the idea of a landscape.
In his essay "the precession of simulacra", Baudrillard argues for the idea that people no longer distinguish between reality and a representation of it. He initially draws an analogy with a map which is created, so precise in scale and detail that it is impossible to tell it apart from the landscape it refers. So the map, a simulation, becomes confused for the real terrain until it rots away. However, Baudrillard goes on to say that this allegory is no longer relevant for us, because in today’s world the simulation is no longer a reflection of reality, nor a reference to it, but a creation of a new real by models that are not based on reality. He calls this the “hyperreal”, saying the difference between the map and the territory disappears completely.
When Eiri rants at the beginning of Layer 5 about how humans have stopped evolving due to the absence of a natural environment, the frame in front of us tells us what has replaced it: A network of media in the form of ads, shopping complexes and other symbols of modernity.
We haven't stopped living in an environment though, it's just one of our own creation: Our version of nature. If that's true, what kind of beings evolve in such an environement? A quote from the section "The intermedia network as nature" in Expanded Cinema:
"McLuhan has noted that the true significance of Pavlov's experiments was that any controlled man-made environment is a conditioner that creates "non-perceptive
somnambulists."
Since then science has discovered that "molecular memory" is operative in single-celled and some multi-celled organisms, and there's evidence that memory-in-the-flesh exists in humans as well. Biochemists have proven that learned responses to environmental stimuli are passed on phylogenetically from generation to generation, encoded in the RNA of the organism's physical molecular structure.
And what could be a more powerful conditioning force than the intermedia network, which functions to establish meaning in life?"
The intermedia network isn't just the a single television screen, but the vast coordinated networks of information, propaganda and "memetic pressure" that, like Foucault would put it, manufactures subjects and subjectivity and like how Chomsky would put it, manufactures their consent to enforce the system's agenda. Like nature where animals evolve due to environmental forces exerting genetic pressure for specific traits to arise, the "intermedia network" is where memetic pressure, the pressure placed on certain ideas or memes to arise at the cost of others, then creates consenting subjects that gleefully drool at the desires behest to those that control this flow of information and impose their will upon it, much like how the monarch in feudalism, under the direct pretext of godhood, imposes their will upon serfs who till land that they don't own. Notice how this connects to Eiri?
.png)
On the right, a frame during Mika's meltdown in L5. On the Left, "Diner Booths(1986)" by John Register, a noted American "Landscape" painter.
What we can see is that at some level, the landscape of Japan post the American reconstruction has changed, where even urban restaraunts have been molded to fit American norms instead of Japanese ones
We then understand what Japan's Landscape painting tradition, the ukiyo-e , represents: A Japan before modernity, a Japan before capitalism, a Japan before Media technology, and most importantly, a Japan before America.
So, just like how Eiri believed that he was an individual acting out his own free will despite being a pawn in the game of the ECCO, the individual under consumerist capitalism, in asserting his free will, becomes a pawn to the larger interests of the capitalist superstructure: A form of hivemind control.
But like Deleuze and Guattari stress:
"Capitalism precisely celebrates the individual and operates through the production and valorisation of the individual, even while the individual is perhaps the most mass produced and standardised commodity under capitalism". - Media after Deleuze, pg 46
"This is one of Deleuze and Guattari's clearest concerns about the effect of media and communication on our world- that the transcendental elements of media are isolated, repeated, deified and then spread all over the world in one homogenous imprint, effectively overriding differences everywhere.
This is not simply about cultural imperialism - that supermodels inspire anorexia across the globe- but also about the spread of a singular world view, that of capitalism". - Media after Deleuze, pg 4
"Mass culture produces individuals: standardised individuals, linked to one another in accordance with hierarchical systems, value systems, systems of submission- not visible....these systems are much more hidden". - Guattari, Rolnik, 2008, pg 23
Thus, local traditions die because the overwhelming power of capitalism's dictates what is cool and what isn't, thus resulting in the memes of a richer culture win out against the poorly funded ones of other countries. Thus, a consumerist modern Japan may be developed, but is deeply infected by an American consumerist mind virus that seems to alter the very constituents of people's minds. Everyone thinks they are more different from everyone else, despite being more similar than ever before in human history.
Gregory Bateson, the famous anthropologist, famously wrote that it wasn't the number of fingers on our hand that made it so influential in the development of human evolution, but the relationships between them owing to their distinct critical differences. But our world, far from being the versatile hand that it could be owing to the many diverse cultures out there, is reduced to a stump unicultural limb by the leprous, decay inducing nature of American consumer capitalism.
The way the episode title card is framed is kind of interesting, because it points one way : Towards the sky. While this will become clearer in my next article (Surveillance State), another explanation could be done some justice.
The most important event in the past 50 years of Japan's history, one that changed it's landscape forever, was the March 1995 Sarin Bomb attacks on the Tokyo subway by Aum Shinrikyo. But what's striking are the almost human personalities of the members of Aum, as documented in Haruki Murakami's book Underground.
"
Murakami: Very much so. By the way, are you interested in Nostradamus prophecies?
Aum member (Who didnt participate in the attacks): Very much so. Nostradamus had a great influence on my generation. I'm planning my life's schedule around his prophecies. I have a desire to kill myself, I want to die.... But since the end is coming in 2 years, I think I might be patient for bit longer. I want to see with my own eyes what will happen when the world ends...
Murakami: When you say "the end", is that when the present system will be wiped out?
Aum member: I prefer to think of it as reset. It's the desire to push the reset button on life"- Underground, pg 238
It's interesting to contrast this with Nietzche's idea of "True worlds", where the last men would much rather work towards some life in a future paradise rather than drive meaning from the present everyday, such as the Knights themselves, one of them literally being an outcome of the Japanese Lost decades. The broader implications are quite nefarious however, considering that Apocalyptic thinking often arises under one condition: Brutal periods of slavery, scrounging or repression.
The 1990 Hessai Lost decades are what likely precipitated the crisis of Aum Shinrikyo in 1995, just like how the 1990 recession in the states along with the dotcom burst is probably a strong factor that drove the apocalyptic thinking around the Y2K incident. Similar trends emerge when we look at the Mayan 2012 apocalypse prediction (there was even a movie about it), directly a consequence of the disastrous 2008 financial crisis.
Even if we go back in history, the first true recorded "Apocalyptic account", the book of Daniel in the bible, was written when the Jews were under Exile in erstwhile Persia (and it gets many predictions wrong). Similarly, the book of Revelations in the new testament, an apocalyptic account of the end of the world, was written when most Christians were being persecuted by the Roman empire.
From Jesus to Marx, the idea of the "End of the world is at hand" is a consequence of something very disturbing: That it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Capitalism , because the idea that this painful system is immortal is such a deeply unbearable thought. But capitalism has a million eyes and a million tricks up its sleeve, and SEL has placed a magnifying glass on its mechanisms of suppression.