This just got a DVD re-release--a much needed one. It is not as well-known or as widely loved as other 90s sci-fi anime series that helped to shape the form into what it is today, but watching it alongside those others is like putting the last puzzle piece into place: Cowboy Bebop explores the future via action and loving references to (mostly) extinct genres of film, Neon Genesis Evangelion deconstructs that most enduring of futuristic anime genres (mecha) and explores psychology in a surreal post-apocalyptic landscape, and Serial Experiments Lain free-falls into the horror and mystery of the future--even Neon Genesis Evangelion, infamous for its final avant-garde and metafictional chapters, is more linear than this.
Serial Experiments Lain is a cyberpunk fever-dream--clocking in at only thirteen episodes, it nonetheless feels much longer than its contemporaries. Like sickness-induced nightmares, it moves slowly and persistently, repeating itself when necessary, with little regard for logic or conclusion. Forward momentum is a side effect of its meandering, rather than the purpose. It maintains its unique mystery and character by frustratingly delaying viewer gratification--important scenes end before their purpose is revealed (so that the characters, who 'stay' in the scene after we've already left it always know more than we do), subplots come and go with little or no explanation, and many of the most important characters have no more than a handful of lines or appearances--and their motivations are kept securely out of our reach.
Like the shorter, ADD-addled FLCL, the pieces of the plot do not begin to fall into place until the half-way point has been passed. Surrealism is the name of the game here, which the writers and animators justify by making clear early on the malleability of reality. If humans were the batteries of the Matrix, then here, they are its neurons. In SEL's world, reality is determined by consensus. I'm reminded of the superb computer game 'Planescape: Torment,' which took place on a plane of existence that was formed and held together by belief. If you created a false identify for yourself and enough people believe in this identity, your false identify will eventually be extruded from the chaos and made a living being. This is an evocative idea, and one that lies at the heart of this series, as well. At one point, the heroine threatens to wipe a date's memory clean by force feeding him a circuit board that would do just that to a computer--within the rules of Lain's world, this is actually a legitimate threat--consensus (hers and his) dictates that this is so.
If it all sounds like a bit much--it is. Like NGE it's pretentious and over-reaches, and it frequently abandons clear narrative in favor of expounding on whatever high-minded concepts strikes its fancy. Cowboy Bebop explores important questions (arguably some of the same questions that NGE and SEL ask) without ever falling back on purposeful obscurity--it gets bonus points for that. But wouldn't it be boring if stories and storytellers were afraid to reach too far? Where would directors like Kubrick, Malick, and Lynch be if they were held-back by story-telling conventions? What about authors like Pynchon and Joyce? Where would musicians like John Cage be if held back by conventional song-writing? Convention is not a bad thing--it creates order, allows for logical progression, and guides us as we advance along art's many roads. Structure is important--but it's not the only path to meaning and catharsis in art. Where would we be, without our dreams?
