Serial Experiments: Lain
Table of Contents:
The Matrix
Serial Experiments: Lain depicts not the subject as stuck within the virtual from which they then escape as in The Matrix franchise, but rather the line between the virtual and the real blurring; ’the Wired'.
“… there have been other films that treat the growing indistinction between the real and the virtual: The Truman Show, Minority Report, or even Mulholland Drive, the masterpiece of David Lynch. The Matrix’s value is chiefly as a synthesis of all that. But there the set-up is cruder and does not truly evoke the problem. The actors are in the matrix, that is, in the digitized system of things; or, they are radically outside it, such as in Zion, the city of resistors. But what would be interesting is to show what happens when these two worlds collide. The most embarrassing part of the film is that the new problem posed by simulation is confused with its classical, Platonic treatment[6].” - The Matrix Decoded: Le Nouvel Observateur Interview With Jean Baudrillard.
[6] “the Platonic treatment” refers to Plato’s allegory of the cave
Notes:
- Collective unconscious, the internet, speed of communication, intersubjectivity, the rhizome (“No matter where you go, everyone is always connected!”), swarm intelligence
- Egregores
- Baudrillard’s Simulacra & Simulation
- Comparison to The Matrix
- Zizek, Slavok - Reality of the Virtual
- Merrin, William - “Did You Ever Eat Tasty Wheat?”: Baudrillard and The Matrix
- Archetypes
- Lain’s 3 identities