Attaloom’s musical work I Can’t Wait expresses the simultaneous connection / isolation of the contemporary age, as viewed through the bittersweet lens of one friend mourning the loss of another, and feeling overwhelmed by their desire to reconnect. The sort of reconnection which is often promised (though rarely in so many words) by our digitally networked and infinitely backed-up post-internet world. Promised, but never delivered upon, of course, as it is the desire itself which these platforms profit from. Attaloom’s piece perfectly crystalizes this twisted knot of feeling and expectation, and elaborates upon its core themes of loss and longing and disconnection with a highly affective tenderness. Its clear and vulnerable lyrics are perfectly contrasted by cool synthetic beats which seem to perpetually recede away from the listener, yet never fully fade, akin to the grief they speak to.
Naturally, it immediately reminded me of a (possibly obscure) horror anime from the 90s. Because that’s what we do here.
The anime in question is 1998’s Serial Experiments Lain. I remember this show being all the buzz at the time, to the limited extent that non-mainstream buzz was possible in those early days of the net. It’s been a very long time since I’ve heard it mentioned however, and I truly don’t know where it lands on the spectrum of well-known classic to obscure cult darling. It’s intensely 90s pseudo-religious fever dream style doesn’t help with this, as it’s very much the kind of show that one feels they could have imagined while on cold medication.
The series is a strange, sad, often unsettling (and occasionally outright horrifying) look at isolation in the then still-burgeoning age of digital connection. Its titular character is a young girl, struggling with extreme loneliness, and finding herself increasingly drawn into and subsumed by a second life online. One through which the protagonist becomes more and more isolated even from herself, losing gaps of time to a nocturnal alter ego that exists both online and occasionally IRL. A second self who is capable of forging the connections she longs for, but which is also cordoned off from the actual, authentic core of her being. A version that others can see and talk to, but never truly know; just as the real Lain is cut off from knowing them in turn.
It shares a lot of the same DNA as Perfect Blue, which was discussed in a previous response. Both works deal with isolation, identity, and mental health, specifically through an online lens. But where Perfect Blue deals with external forces, (in keeping with its simultaneous exploration of fame) in S.E.L. the call is most definitely coming from inside the house. Rather than a pop idol turned actor, with millions of eyes on her, Lain is an ordinary middle-schooler, largely neglected by her parents (in ways that are banal and understated, rather than rising to identifiable abuse) with no friends to speak of. The ironic loneliness of fame is replaced with its garden variety counterpart, experienced all too often by actual children.
Where Lain overlaps with I Can’t Wait, at least in my own admittedly niche read of the song, is rooted in their shared longing for figures not present. Attaloom describes I Can’t Wait as being about a friend lost too soon, but the lyrics themselves are left open enough for us to cast whoever we like as the one we ‘can’t wait to see again.’ Whoever the subject becomes for us, we see nothing of them in the work itself, able to define them only by the negative impression of their absence. They exist, essentially, as an extension of the singer’s own longing and loneliness, eternally out of reach. Someone who they are forever seeking, chasing through the void, but who both they and we the listener know they will not find. A distant reflection in a hall of mirrors.
While S.E.L. is much more overt about the object of its protagonist’s desire being their own alter ego, their own distant reflection so to speak, both works ultimately present us with someone desperate to (re)capture a version of themself who is no longer incomplete. No longer desperate to fill the absence of their missing other half. Both also frame the search itself, the attempted flight from loneliness, as only further entrenching their POV’s isolation. In the case of Lain, each new online avenue she explores, and each new digital rabbit hole that she allows herself to fall down, only intensifies the divide between her two selves, and between the digital and physical facets of her life which are desperate for unification.
As with the singer of I Can’t Wait, Lain is stuck, oscillating between desire and despair, with the gulf of her disconnection from both herself and others widening in front of her. As she delves deeper and deeper into her own loss, and further afield within the increasingly broken channels of current day social networks, the span between the unification she seeks and the desperate loneliness she lives continues to grow. Her digital universe is ever expanding, but just as in our own world, that expansion consists mostly of empty space; nothing more than vacuum and void.
Ultimately, for all that the digital world has been lauded for its connectivity, the screen remains forever at arm’s length. Who we are online will never be more than a distant other half, offering tantalizing bursts of real connection and identity, but never enough to bridge the material divide between our two selves. In its infinite capacity for longing, and tentative, stuttering capacity for actual realization, it embodies loss and mourning much more so than it does true connection or reunion. The digital, and the systems within which it operates, will always be far better at promising than delivering. Better at keeping the wound fresh than actually healing it.
Whatever it is we seek there, whether new connections or old, the distance between ourselves and our screens will never be closed; at least as long as our networks remain in service to the isolating mechanisms of contemporary life. Until we can realize a version of these networks free from the ceaseless, all-consuming consumption of capitalism, they will never be sites for our own realization. As long as we remain at arm’s length from the mediums through which we seek each other, our longing will continue to give way to mourning, and grief will find no end.