Ok, wow, this is an avant garde work. It has an absurdist and dreamlike atmosphere, something spare and cold with long pauses in the dialogue that feels perceptibly 90s in a way that's hard to articulate. The plot is minimalist: a girl kills herself and, a week later, sends classmates emails. Maybe a total of 3 minutes are dedicated to this. The rest is spent working up the show's themes, symbolism, and atmosphere.
The immediate theme seems to be social disconnection and the role played by technology. The episode is blunt about this: a family dinner where the father is absent, bent on his own preoccupations; the older sister excuses herself from the family ritual in a dismissive fashion; and the mother ignores Lain despite the unusual content of Lain's speech. There's then a scene where Lain approaches her father about getting a new computer, and as he explains the wondrous ability of technology to connect us all he ignores Lain while staring rapt at images of people with absent heads.
Death also permeates the episode. Not just on the plot level, but in other blunt effects, including many of the compositions being spattered with what looks like blood, and dream images (portents? visions? symbolic reenactments?) of a suicide on a train that seems to grow out of both the immediate situation, the train suddenly stopping and a passenger wondering aloud if someone's been hurt, and the previous classmate's suicide. It’s like Lain's emotional state is colliding with some metaphysical force to produce portentous visions strewn with symbolism that are so powerful, they fracture her actual life into a seeming dream state. She wakes up, as it were, several times in the midst of activities, unaware of how she got there. Her reality seems to be crumbling.
The show's other theme seems to be the conjunction of metaphysics and technology. The email from Lain's dead schoolmate works the common cyberpunk idea of uploaded consciousness, but relates it in the language of spirituality. I'm guessing the show will explore spiritual ideas of transcendence and the nature of the soul, with technology as the leading metaphor. We'll see. The episode is heavy with technological symbols, like ominous shots of humming telephone wires, and the show's final image: Lain in a technological womb.
One of the most striking elements of the show's style is its use of silent-film-esque title cards, done in psychedelic swirls, to relate information from an unidentified voice. The voice can ventriloquize character thoughts and feelings, eg. when the student kills herself; but it also relates disconnected, gnomic phrases that contribute to theme or atmosphere instead. Whose voice is it? A character's? The filmmakers'? Dunno. The one that stood out read: “What’s it like when you die? It really hurts.
”. How weird and creepy.
I feel like I know where this is going without having a good sense of how it'll get there. I'm intrigued. Also, what kind of name is Lain? I've never seen a Japanese person with that name. Is it Japanese? Is it short for something? Very odd.