I guess the thing you could say about Lain is that its all about the fuzzy postmodernishy aesthetic that takes over when you when you first watch it. For an old work it just reeks of newness, in its multiple layered digitized voices for example, or with its complex new subject matter of the internet, or its multiple use of media. The film I would compare it the most to is Olivier Assayas' Demonlover which works with the same kind of aesthetics, usage of sound and multimedia, but depicting instead the alienated corporate battles between multiple Hentai/Porno companies while slowly losing all narrative focus as you go through. Lain at least has a sustained, albeit obscure, narrative thrust to it and has a clean narrative sweep: Start, Middle and End.
The other notable feature is how sustained, as well, the atmosphere of alienation is. People who brush against the mystery element and who try to piece together the scientifically dense plot often push past the whole cohesive feel in search for an answer. I think, personally, that Ghost in the Shell as a whole has a whole lot more dense stuff on the information side, although Lain has a lot to go by in terms of the hard-science parts that appears in the notes and all. But Lain has always been a show about Lain Iwakura, the lovingly drawn Yoshitoshi ABe character with the weird one droopy string of hair who encompasses a whole lot of different emotions throughout the whole stretch of the show. The whole show is all about the growing paranoia and complexity as Iwakura Lain navigates the increasingly deep society of the Wired and the various corporations involved in it, whilst simultaneously trying to 'find herself' amidst the infornographic outbursts that she encounters repeatedly. Furthermore the narratives layered on top of her story are about the rising disconnect between multiple characters except for the single link between Lain and Alice. The Wired is a surreal ground but its also a ground where everyone partakes in their own fantastic vision of things, where people become floaty voices in their own world marginally interacting with one another.
That's not to say that its Just A Character Study, because everyone can draw their own conclusions from the plentiful information overload and red herrings and all that, but maybe the point is that by following so many routes of data you miss the true Lain Iwakura that exists and is trying to search for her significant friend amidst everything. But that's not to say that Lain is a counterpart to Evangelion because I think that it isn't. Lain isn't about the extremely flawed human narrative or about showcasing the real psychological pain of its characters, but it always takes a step back in a sterile coolness as a part of its aesthetic, except for maybe one or two during the extremely key moments of the show where only then does something really break through that isn't mediated by all the digital overflow. The same themes, about leaping over the void and all that, but Lain aims to show the void itself rather than show the being in the void screaming for another. The sterile fragile quality of floating images.
But then that also means that you hardly feel the psychological bulletpoints being revealed to you, rather you just observe them. This isn't bad though since basically it bears similarities to a form of aesthetic that was theorized a long time ago by Brecht and also reflects in some of the films of Jean-Luc Godard. Highly stylized intellectual pieces. If you ask me I can appreciate that but to really break the mold you have to get to the more human aspects because what sells it for me is an overdose empathy and character emotion being transmitted directly to my brain past all the electronic prattle. Some works can go all the way though, to have a fully alienating atmosphere so as to completely overwhelm to cause that kind of epiphanic catharsis. I heard Texhnolyze may be a work that goes all the way in this so I may have to see that. Ergo Proxy doesn't quite.
Raw peeling guts, Lain does not have. Raw bloody peeling raining human guts. The type of guts that pulsates pus-ridden boils and fleshy tears and looks all bleeding horrible like a mound of everything wrong with your life. Lain does not have.
But to anyone who hasn't had this sort of experience, its a new kind of monstrosity. Full of its own pure kind of style. The cold stare into the monitor blinking flickering kind of style. Being battered by sensory matter and intellectual bytes while Iwakura Lain is hazy like a ghost working her phantom magic.
I don't know what else is there to say. I mean sure it appeals to intellect sense with its puzzle-structure nature and you probably can analyze the hell out of all that, but that's not exactly mind kind of thing now. As a work I love that it exists but I want the more that exists in the aesthetic like Tsai-Ming Liang films. In fact the one thing that Lain doesn't exactly condescend to is to portray dirtiness. Its wholly cyberpunk and it also doesn't quite get to the biopunk horror levels of stuff like Akira. An Anno work has the bitter human pill and grotesquerie. And Tsai is willing to film a water drenched apartment with the corpses of dead cockroaches floating about. Lain in her cyber-shack is too fetishistically nerd cool to be that. The manga Ressentiment has that same escape into cyberspace plot but constantly shows its protagonist as a sad lump living out his fantasies. Lain has one of those I guess but the external world Lain lives in is more chilling than degraded. Coolly chilling. With Men in Black and detached family members and bullying classmates. But I guess it hardly ever conveys pain as fruitfully as some other works. I don't know. This is all me. You can have your own sentiment but this sentiment is all me.
