Tainted Ether: All About Lily Chou-Chou

In the wake of the global COVID pandemic, about which a deluge of online misinformation and lies effectively complicated the process of getting out vaccine information and adequate medical care and put public safety at risk, it’s become clear that the potential of the internet as an engine for social harm is greater than many of us may have realized. Social media and search engines mine our personal data to learn what products to sell us. Algorithms subtly direct our lives. News content exploits our basest opinions and impulses and radicalizes us into believing harmful and hateful lies. Information that we might share to bring about social change is suppressed. At the time of this writing, Facebook is no longer fact-checked. Fake internet selves amplify all the worst behaviors that interacting with other people in person would normally force us to hide; the needy, the shady, the phony, the mean-spirited, the passive aggressive. We become jaded, spiteful, terminally incredulous and absorbed in a false mirror-version of ourselves.

Participating in the online world means essentially creating a double of yourself, whether one is aware of it or not. Your digital self that you show the world, one you want the world to believe is more wry, healthy, clever, well-adjusted, glowing, radical or interesting than the real you. This means a suffering or a decaying of the old self. The impossibility of living a double life without being able to distinguish which is the real you, traded perhaps for acceptance and validation within what passes for a social circle in an online community.

With the rise of the internet in the late 90s and early 2000s came the birth of an internet culture, something more ambiguous and unsettling. Management consultants like Tom Peters floated an idea that was picked up by outlets like Fast Company: that you should become a brand called “You.” The rise of the Marketing Mentality in daily life. People then refashioned themselves as brands, products or commodities, which must have been a nice deflection from accountability on the part of corporate upper management when confronted about mass layoffs in that same period. Our modern version of this would be selling Americans on gig jobs as Uber drivers or graphic designers for people they’ll never see, playing up their potential for personal autonomy as a means of hiding the waiving of their rights to benefits, healthcare, safety standards, or legal protection from dangerous business practice.

In the era of “content creators,” in which young people aspire to be influencers and have a following, a dynamic is created that further separates the individual self from their humanity and authenticity. Hence the pervading problem of loneliness in developed countries referred to as an Epidemic. Its externalized outcomes show up in various forms of bodily violence (suicides, mass shootings), declines in social interaction (decreased participation in community activities, lack of friendships and romantic relationships) and most of all, in various forms of online bullying. The anonymity of the internet provides forums that allow people to find comfort in like-minded groups and connect across racial, national, ethnic, religious lines. But an ingroup/outgroup mentality also begins to form, and as its callowness ossifies, an entrenched mindset can derange an unchecked mind. In the formative years of one’s adolescence, this is devastating, making teenagers especially susceptible to the dangers of insularity and duel-selfhood engendered by social media and internet subcultures.  

Pioneering this slow, downward development is Shunji Iwai’s All About Lily Chou Chou, an imperfect film, with some major detractions, but way ahead of its time in depicting the sense of isolation and estrangement exacerbated by the internet. Made in 2002, it predates the rise of social media, but it comprehends in this early stage what will become one of the defining social problems of the 21st century. Iwai’s previous feature, Love Letters in 1995 made similar use of the disconnect between online lives and offline interactions – the incongruities and inconsistencies between the self and the Other Self or the Digital Self – but that debut film developed these themes along the relatively agreeable lines of a romantic melodrama. All About Lily Chou Chou uses them to explore a darker place, one more familiar to anyone growing up after the advent of the internet. The 2024 film Didi carries the development of psychological disarray along further. In that film, American suburban kids have learned to use the internet to lie to each other. In Lily Chou Chou, which is more like Taxi Driver for the computer age, a closed internet community finds users who lie to themselves.

Didi (2024, Dir: Sean Wang)

We follow a group of students in a high school that looks to be a pressure cooker of victimizing, ostracizing and shaming. Already, the presence of cameras and computer screens in their lives plays a role in how they respond to their environment and interact with their peers. The group of students the quiet, introverted Yuichi (Hayato Ichihara) tags along with are shown stealing a briefcase from a man sleeping on the train, urinating off bridges or selling shoplifted CDs from one store to another. They have online lives. Or some of them do, or it might be that only Yuichi does. We can’t be sure whose alias belongs to whom in the online forum where posts are shared about a pop star named Lily Chou Chou, whom we also never see in the flesh. We also see Yuichi at his computer on the forum maybe once, using the screen name “philia” (presumably, I still can’t be sure), and the other members are not shown online at all. It’s possible that none of the other kids in the film are interacting with Yuichi on the Lily Chou Chou forum. So right away, because we can’t be sure who’s who, we start off without solid ground in the form of a shared reality upon which to stand.

The petty thefts look to give way to more serious and personal crimes. The bullying in the world of this film is extreme. Yuichi is sexually humiliated in a junkyard, and it’s shot as if by a silent bystander. The violence preceding this act is punctuated by repeated cutaways to online posts from philia (named supposedly for Lily Chou Chou’s old band before she went solo) and it feels like the mind of the victim is literally escaping the horror of the present moment. This is effective: fantasy is always ready to step in at the exact moment when things are too much for us to cope with. Fantasy seems to kick in almost at the immediate moment of mental overload. Yuichi’s mind seems wired to escape to the world of Lily’s music in a rough situation. The comfort of the forum and the atmosphere of calm, relief, affirmation and transcendence Lily’s fans attribute to her – referred to by members of the forum as the “Ether” – is now colonizing Yuichi’s mind. The fantasy he uses as a defense mechanism is slowly becoming his reality.

The posts by members in this Lily Chatroom frequently interrupt scenes, sometimes visually playing over them. They’re represented by short, rapidly-edited montages depicting the loading prompts, buffering screens and operational codes of computers, overlaid with the aggressive sound editing of keystrokes. It harkens back to the similarly patterned drug-taking montages of Requiem For a Dream and the crisply cut daily rituals in Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz that inspired Darren Aronofsky’s film. In all three cases, it’s a rundown of the isolated mechanics that produce the quick hit of a drug or habit as a form of relief. The brain is about to feel the rush of dopamine, the pleasure drug (scientists have spoken of likes, emojis and positive comments as inducers of dopamine-based reactions among dedicated social media users) and a computer is the easiest and safest way for a teenager to get it.

These children all have phones. They leave their houses at all hours of the night. Their parents have little to no presence in their lives. They seem to be never far away from cameras and screens. I like the way Iwai films them riding their bikes at night, as if they were under military surveillance. It’s a weird way to film at night – someone must have been riding ahead of them in a truck bed shining headlights on them – but it makes them look like specimens in a scientific experiment. The crowd Yuichi falls in with will eventually sexually blackmail and then pimp out a female classmate, attempt to film the rape of another girl in a warehouse and force a boy to lay naked in a muddy field. The real sadist in the group is Hoshino (Shugo Oshinari), though none of the other boys, Yuichi included, does anything to stop him. We are in Japan, the society of reticence and sublimated individuality. The safety of blending into a group rather than asserting one’s uniqueness and non-conformity avoids making one into the proverbial nail that sticks up and must be pounded down.

All of this seems like a bit much. This is what limits Iwai’s film almost from the start. These kids don’t feel real. They’re so hyperbolically cruel, repressed and violent that they feel like ciphers, projections of Iwai’s messaging. We’re always kept at a distance from knowing them. Maybe it’s Iwai’s tactic to make them so uninteresting as to highlight their marginalized humanity, making their fits of despair or depravity easier to believe. I don’t know. But because they’re often dull, the film can feel dull and redundant in spots. Sure, they’re high schoolers, children essentially, and children are not complete. They’re in the process of becoming, navigating a very difficult developmental human stage; the slow crystallization of an identity, beliefs, ethics, a reckoning with new and complex emotions as well as the onset of puberty and personal morality. But it’s hard to lament their lost humanity when we never see very much of it to begin with.

Another drawback for the film comes in a long sequence depicting a class-sponsored trip to Okinawa. We see the trip entirely through footage shot by one of the kids on a DV recorder and there are moments when the kids seem to be having a good time. We might surmise that this little oasis in the razor’s edge walk that is their social lives back home is Iwai’s suggestion that traveling and doing things out in the real world, away from the home computer will broaden their minds and alleviate the despair of isolation. Of course, the kids are filming everything with their handheld video cameras, which eggs on a dubious performance of self. The camera is everywhere, even swimming in the bay with them, and we sense there’s never a lessening of distance from direct experience that would come about by shutting the cameras off. We didn’t have studies on it in those days.

Unfortunately, in this overlong film, this sequence plays like a digression. There’s a shockingly underplayed development on the beach, followed by the sight of an auto accident involving a pedestrian, someone the boys met on their trip. Again, the camera (another screen) as a means of gawking at the suffering of others, as if to legitimize the absence of concern for suffering (while allowing the motorists to blame the victims, using the camera to absolve themselves), is an impediment to our capacity for a sentient and mindful life. It ties in loosely with Iwai’s expose of this new internet-stoked anomie but detracts from what should have been a tighter focus on just one or two elements of a massive subject. One gets the sense Iwai has bitten off more than he could chew.

I learn (online ironically) that yes, in fact, bullying and scapegoating among schoolchildren in Japan is Next Level. In 2023, there were 732,568 reported cases of school bullying (or “Ijime”) according to The Japan Times – a record high for the third consecutive year. Statistics reveal that suicide ranks among the leading causes of death among individuals aged 6 to 18, with up to 514 students below the age of 18 taking their lives in 2022. One can choose to blame the perpetuation of this insanity on the head-in-the-sand mentality of Japanese society in the face of a problem severe enough to cause a six-year-old to take their own life. Or the bureaucracy and other barriers to trying to take action in holding the administration or the individuals involved responsible. The “Shame Culture” of Japan and its emphasis on saving face perpetuates the scourge of Ijime but to the detriment of Iwai’s film, we come to know next to nothing about why young people come to behave this way with any specificity. The dye seems to have been already cast. Some of these kids are simply sadists. They are essentially adrift on the tides of Dog Eat Dog, playing out within extreme notions of socially enforced conformity. They’re unknowable, making the film a continuation of that refusal to deal with the problem head on, rather than depicting, with very little actual drama, its externalized outcome.

Added to this is the effect of a life lived from behind glowing screens. Yuichi’s activity as a Lily fan enables him to suppress or ignore whatever is going on inside him. This is what our digital lives offer us that the real world cannot in some cases; a sanctuary. The brilliance and solace of the Lily forum’s Ether is what today we would call a Safe Space. We see interactions in which people are opening up about their pain and being comforted by total strangers. And the space becomes the neighborhood town square for the twinned selves of the users. Online we can present ourselves as whatever we feel is lacking offline and this twinned digital self represents our highest aspiration. It’s an eternal soul, a kind of ephemeral being that outlives our bodies. But this digital life can also be a mask, worn both to us and to others. We can hide our cruelty behind our twinned online selves, or our phoniness, neediness, and passive-aggression. We can hide those parts of us that are repressed or depraved that we can’t bear to live with in the real world, where other people can see them. It’s as if the mere existence of Yuichi’s online self creates a dissonance in his life, making his loneliness and isolation apparent. So he must fight harder to colonize his inner life, expand and furnish the dwelling of his hidden self. A more elaborate fantasy world, to mediate an increasingly toxic life.

No discussion about anything not related to Lily Chou Chou appears to take place on the forum. And as the film progresses, philia’s posts sound more detached and desperate as Lily Chou Chou and the Ether take on an almost supernatural or religious stature. Suffering is all around and the detachment from self not only applies to individuals but also to entire societies that are divided and polarized. The internet eases the process by which individuals partition themselves in various camps - unknowable and always at war with each other, until this unmoving tension between factions becomes society as we know it. Only those things we find solace in online become real, as our demand for the dopamine hit increases.

The actual music of Lily Chou Chou – moody, early-aughts-sounding tunes vaguely reminiscent of Blur or Radiohead – becomes an emotional lodestone in the bottomless abyss of online fandom. Yuichi is without a creative outlet to mediate his anxiety, unlike Kuno (Ayami Ito), repeatedly shown playing Debussy’s Clair de Lune or Arabesque on the school’s music hall piano, even after being shamed into cutting off her hair (a Japanese gesture of atonement). Walking her home, he makes no attempt to console the distraught girl, who’s selling sexual favors to older men and being filmed meeting them by her snickering male classmates. Whether being bullied, scolded by his teacher or his mom, or faced with the consequences of his actions, Yuichi’s head is perpetually pointed down, face blank. He’s a non-participant in his own life. The movie’s often repeated shot of Yuichi standing in a tall grass field with his CD player, listening to the same Lily Chou Chou CD reveals that it’s the only time he looks to be at peace.

There’s a term for the disorientation and disillusionment caused by this twinning that was used by the Mexican philosopher Emilio Uranaga in 1952: Zozobra. It’s the Spanish word for existential anxiety and gloom but Uranaga used it to evoke a certain wavering between selves that has destructive potential: “a mode of being that incessantly oscillates between two possibilities, between two affects, without knowing which of these to depend on.” He writes, “in this to and fro, the soul suffers. It feels torn and wounded.” In her characteristically spot-on 2024 book Doppelganger, author Naomi Klein looks into this scary, unreal digital mirror world. She quotes Uranaga in discussing author Phillip Roth’s “other self” in his Operation Shylock. The incredulous novelist called the havoc wreaked on his life by his duplicate “too ridiculous to take seriously and too serious to be ridiculous,” – which might be a useful general mantra in this uncanny period. I remember when it would have seemed absurd for a computer chat room where young people talk about music they like to fan the flames of private insanity – not worthy of attention. But where Iwai’s film should get major credit is in noting this detachment system as a serious shift in our world that needs urgent reckoning.  

Late in the film, an upcoming live Lily concert is all Yuichi can think about. We get the sense he might finally meet the forum member with the alias “blue cat” (I have my own theory about who blue cat really is, which I won’t get into here). At the concert, an unhinged fan bothering people in the ticket line – what we would call a Troll today – highlights the toxicity of fandom in the 21st century. There’s a crucial and revealing development outside the show involving Hoshino, stemming again from Yuichi’s blank, quiet passivity and it’s in his subsequent action that the lines delineating fantasy are dissolved and Yuichi’s connection to reality is severed. This film, despite being about characters I didn’t believe or believe in for much of the running time (even though the performances are well tailored to the material), is presciently illustrating the way we can burrow so deeply into the rabbit holes of internet subcultures looking for connection validation that real life people once familiar to us become unrecognizably altered.

The prophecy of All About Lily Chou Chou is its achievement: cinema’s first representation of a destabilized social network engendered by the internet. And this is 2002: Cell phones didn’t yet have full internet capability, but Myspace had begun to blow up. Facebook’s rise is on the horizon. The rise and eventual descent of Twitter and Instagram into the cesspools they are now feel like eons away, to say nothing of the internet’s threat multipliers in the real world; 9/11, the COVID pandemic, the Trump presidency, the rise of the misinformation industry and other disaster machines pushing us even further away from the notion of a shared, stabile reality and a consensus on the basic principles of authenticity, goodness, truth and selfhood. We are pushed into the Uncanny, which Freud described as a species of frightening where the once familiar becomes strange. Or to paraphrase The Doors’ song, People Are Strange: “Faces look ugly when you’re alone”

To underline this detachment, Iwai films most scenes with consumer-grade handheld digital cameras, their shakiness highlighting the sense of disorientation. Dramatically tilted shots show us a world out of balance, off its axis. Interaction and experience feel irreconcilably unreal, as if the presentation of this story is showing a reality on spin cycle. Faded, washed out, over-exposed images show a world less vibrant, less urgent and somehow less tangible and worth caring about than we know it to be, as if life outside the warm bath of the Ether looks drained of its vitality in comparison. Digital filmmaking in the early part of this new century’s first decade gave us new imagery to interpret this more mediatized age. I have to give this film credit for deploying its visuals in service of the story. The style serves these themes more consistently and fluently than The Celebration, Chuck and Buck, 28 Days Later and other muted-looking releases from this period.

The final credits for the film play out against shots of Yuichi and his peers listening to Lily in their rolling fields, their hands brushing the tips of the tall grass as it sways in the dusk wind. Yuichi’s meeting with his teacher, in which we see that his downward trajectory is assured, ends with Kuno being told to stop playing Debussy in the music hall because it’s time to leave. This natural, soulful solitary piano playing has stood for a kind of realness and individual beauty. Other scenes, in which it seems the reality of pain and loneliness is losing to the evil in these kids, are scored with songs by Lily Chou Chou. But here, as the montage of the kids plays out, still with jarring forum postings interrupting things, we hear a Lily song called “Glide” up front and in its entirety. It’s a rather beautiful ballad of longing and desire for transcendence and harmony and surely, it’s no coincidence that the song was used in the 2022 Kogonada film, After Yang. How ironic that songs by the artist in the movie are popular enough to be covered by amateur fans and artists in real life - a real life example of melding or blurring of reality and fiction inspired by a fictional story about it.

Covered in that amazing film by the artist Mitski, the song is the final puzzle piece in a similar story about technologized dehumanization concerning the question of whether an automaton’s retained memory of a deep friendship he had with a former owner is proof of a consistent emotional memory in his robotic circuitry. If that film is like a rather downbeat final step in humanity’s process of willingly shackling its grand storyline to technology – an abdicating of all that makes it human to robots and AI – then All About Lily Chou Chou could be like the initial step into this strange new world. The Digital Age’s book of Genesis. Tragically, it’s a first step made by the most vulnerable of astronauts; kids searching for the wonder and longing and curiosity and innocence that was stolen from them by an indifferent society in the uncanny valley of cyberspace, thinking the whole time it was the knowing, guiding hand of the Ether. The violence of the collision between their fantasy and reality.

There’s a word for when fantasy and reality merge. We call it a nightmare.

Join the Ether - listen to the original Lily Chou Chou Glide above or here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV_R2mwrQ_w