Serial Experiments Lain
Layer 13: Ego
That electronic voice, eh?
What isn't remembered never happened. Memory is merely a record. You just need to rewrite that record.
Wow, you can really feel Lain's sadness after Alice hits her and draws blood, can't you? Look at that quivering bottom lip. The detail in the close-up of Alice's tearful, bloodshot eyes is superb too; the opening scene of this closing episode brings the atmosphere again. Alice is finally reduced to the same uncommunicative state as Lain's old sister, and Lain is in pain, despondent at how badly everything has panned out.
And so Lain resets everything, editing her very existence out of reality. We see a familiar sequence of shots that track her journey from her home to school.
But she is not in any of them.
By rewriting people's collective memories to remove herself from them, it's the same as if she had never existed from the beginning. Now that Lain does not exist on a physical plane, she instead exists everywhere, elsewhere. She is omnipresent. She learns from her other equally non-existent self that, by that very definition, she is God.
This is why others should love her, because "Lain" is their deity.
But not now. Because that world — of Lain of the Wired and of Lain and her many, many selves, one for each person who ever knew her — no longer exists anymore. The ripples sent out by Lain's press of the reset key extend out in all directions. We have learnt that it is perfectly possible to receive information before it has been disseminated, and that memories, records, can be of future events too. If the two Men in Black have memories of finding gainful employment as telecommunication engineers, and their employers hold the records of their employment and their payroll numbers, and passers-by recall seeing them replacing the cables just a little further down the same road yesterday, then this is the world as it is and always has been. Perhaps Eiri will finally tell his employers to stick their job.
It is just Alice alone who began with the vague recollection that things were once different. But memories fade. Memories are retrieved and rewritten with each recall, much like the function of any electronic archival system. By the time Alice is a young woman — and old enough to forget her past — she remembers, or at least thinks she might remember, a young girl's face. But the name "Lain" convinces her she is mistaken. She has never encountered anyone with that name before.
Even Chisa is with us again. She never left us. No-one remembers her suicide in that old world, because this is the only world that people can recall, and so this is the only world that anyone alive can conceive of. How are you doing, Chisa? How have you been?
The world of the Wired will never trouble anyone in this world again, because Lain has deemed it so. At the end of her trials, this sequence of events with its unexpected outcome, this is the answer that Lain has arrived at, the world that she has created. This is the world of Serial Experiments Lain. Close the world. Open the next.
Layer 13: Ego
That electronic voice, eh?
What isn't remembered never happened. Memory is merely a record. You just need to rewrite that record.
Wow, you can really feel Lain's sadness after Alice hits her and draws blood, can't you? Look at that quivering bottom lip. The detail in the close-up of Alice's tearful, bloodshot eyes is superb too; the opening scene of this closing episode brings the atmosphere again. Alice is finally reduced to the same uncommunicative state as Lain's old sister, and Lain is in pain, despondent at how badly everything has panned out.
And so Lain resets everything, editing her very existence out of reality. We see a familiar sequence of shots that track her journey from her home to school.
But she is not in any of them.
By rewriting people's collective memories to remove herself from them, it's the same as if she had never existed from the beginning. Now that Lain does not exist on a physical plane, she instead exists everywhere, elsewhere. She is omnipresent. She learns from her other equally non-existent self that, by that very definition, she is God.
This is why others should love her, because "Lain" is their deity.
But not now. Because that world — of Lain of the Wired and of Lain and her many, many selves, one for each person who ever knew her — no longer exists anymore. The ripples sent out by Lain's press of the reset key extend out in all directions. We have learnt that it is perfectly possible to receive information before it has been disseminated, and that memories, records, can be of future events too. If the two Men in Black have memories of finding gainful employment as telecommunication engineers, and their employers hold the records of their employment and their payroll numbers, and passers-by recall seeing them replacing the cables just a little further down the same road yesterday, then this is the world as it is and always has been. Perhaps Eiri will finally tell his employers to stick their job.
It is just Alice alone who began with the vague recollection that things were once different. But memories fade. Memories are retrieved and rewritten with each recall, much like the function of any electronic archival system. By the time Alice is a young woman — and old enough to forget her past — she remembers, or at least thinks she might remember, a young girl's face. But the name "Lain" convinces her she is mistaken. She has never encountered anyone with that name before.
Even Chisa is with us again. She never left us. No-one remembers her suicide in that old world, because this is the only world that people can recall, and so this is the only world that anyone alive can conceive of. How are you doing, Chisa? How have you been?
The world of the Wired will never trouble anyone in this world again, because Lain has deemed it so. At the end of her trials, this sequence of events with its unexpected outcome, this is the answer that Lain has arrived at, the world that she has created. This is the world of Serial Experiments Lain. Close the world. Open the next.
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