When he’s back at his computer, his aloof exterior will melt, and he will share emotionally charged messages with the BBS. He’s soothing his troubles with Lily’s music. Their messages grow ecstatic as the film continues to cut back to the shot of the kid in the electric green grass. Lily is “the Ether personified,” someone posts. The “Ether” is a nebulous theme channeled by the superstar that her fanbase adopts to describe their connection to one another online, the ways her power creates a feeling of intimacy, and just her overall ethereal vibe. Most of all, the users write about how her music makes them feel. They comment on her media appearances and share facts about her life, like that she was born on December 8, 1980, at the exact moment when John Lennon was shot. We don’t see much of Lily in the film but learn about her through the music and the obsessive mythmaking by her fans in the BBS. It seems that he’s hiding from someone and also that this time alone provides him some relief.īewitching music plays while the film skips back and forth from the boy in the grass to the brief bits of white text on a black background. He’s still dressed in his school uniform, all mop-top hair and gangly posture, listening to a CD on hisĭiscman. Someone else types, “This sounds like a cult.” The opening scene presents one of the users out in the physical world: a fourteen-year-old, alone in a bright field, wading through pristine grass that comes up to his waist. “The Ether heals my pain,” posts another. A permeating imagine of pain fills the gaps of serotonin,” writes one of the users. “The shadows SHE releases into the Ether sublimate its wavelengths, transcend the spectrum, reach the transparent beyond.
The messages are intense and awkwardly poetic.
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The BBS code is janky, and users must frantically reload the pages to decode text from garbled Western glyphs into Japanese characters. We can hear the clack of an old keyboard and another tap to refresh. Posts on an online forum devoted to Lily Chou-Chou, a mysterious pop singer, first appear in a mojibake jumble of accented Latin characters. Director Shunji Iwai evokes the gaps and hesitancy in early internet communication through the depiction of character encoding across the screen. Twenty years after the release of All About Lily Chou-Chou, I can’t think of a film that better depicts what first drew people to the internet, and certainly none that matches its expressive use of content-type header errors. All About Lily Chou-Chou, Shunji Iwai, Summer 2021