Vanished into thin air

When a Fassbinder film is plot driven you know you’re in trouble. There’re hardly enough metaphysical ideas in World on a Wire (1973, Rainer Werner Fassbinder) to sustain its 3 hour runtime, but as one of those arthouse movies that try to pull you into its mechanics like genre films do it will probably satisfy a few followers. Not me.

     FRED STILLER is technical director of cybertechnics corporation IKZ, a software company sanctioned by the state to develop Simulacron 1. Major plot twist Fred isn’t real nor is the world he lives in, it’s just another simulation. Throw in some elementary existentialism like if I can think doesn’t that mean I’m real, or does it not? and you’ve got the extent to what this movie has to offer. It’s tedious. The whole first half is so aggravating because they keep building, milking this huge reveal which everyone can tell minutes into this thing is that they’re living in a simulation and not real.
     Maybe I’m part of the problem though. I don’t really care for animals. But I wouldn’t want anyone to hurt them. On the other hand however in movies I don’t at all care for robots or whatever. I don’t watch any Blade Runner cuts after 1982 because Deckard isn’t a replikant. He’s a paid assassin. And no I don’t feel bad when he kills Nexus-6. Oh boo hoo I’m 6ft tall blond attractive and in peak physical condition please tell me who made me and when I’m going to die, they’re so obnoxious. In World on a Wire there’s a twist ending where Fred is brought into Simulacron 3, which is what we know as reality, through having his consciousness switched with the computer programmer who designed Simulacron 2 and happens to look just like him and share the same name, so he can live happily ever after with EVE VOLLMER, who saved him.
     When a Fassbinder film has a happy ending you know you’re in trouble. Applying a doom tone he’s most adept at, Fassbinder easily attributes this narrative with a foreboding, alienating sense of fear and despair. And if you want to stretch you can go and find more of your own interpretations like the philosophical ones: the programmer getting enormous pleasure from Fred’s fear and despair could be people’s perception of fate as cruel and meaningless; to the religious like the Devil’s tactics to get Christians to kill, steal, and destroy. Fassbinder’s films are full of Christian iconography. Broad moral themes like these are too flexible. For Eve to switch Fred with the megalomaniac programmer it could be read as either existential replacing the world before you with one that more closely corresponds to your desires or spiritually as her replacing Satan with Christ through salvation.
 
But the material is too vague. Placing the responsibility on the audience of projecting their own meaning onto it is asking too much in this instance. What drives World on a Wire is a projection, or as they call it a bundle of electronic circuits, realizing that their world isn’t real and then being deleted from the program lest they risk corrupting the rest of the world. That’s enough source of external conflict to keep the plot going.
     In Fassbinder’s hands Simulacron 2 feels all too human. And when I said I don’t have empathy for robots, it’s not that Fassbinder’s getting me to care about an artificial reality, it’s that he gets me to generate an emotional connection with a counterfeit world that simultaneously gets you to ask yourself how real is your real world? Or doesn’t it all feel fake sometimes? Which yes goes all the way back to Plato. And yes any idiot can see the parallels between cinema and cyberspace as added levels of the, what World on a Wire calls, the aboves and belows.
     Okay Simulacron 2 is rad. The scene where Fred approaches a stranger on the street and asks her for a light then inexplicably a ton of bricks fall from the sky crushing her and all you see is her scalp and other bits in the rubble, including a lighter that he uses to light a cigarette and then puts back is pretty audacious delight fun. And near the end that nightclub singer the soldiers execute in the snow, when she refuses the blindfold to apply lipstick to her reflection in that saber and they leave her face down lying dead is the most moving moment in the film yet also the furthest removed from what’s considered reality.
     No okay and there are some rad social commentary blips too. Like that GLORIA FROMM secretary, the way she’s this sex industry convenience with no soul who later has this dialogue scene where she asks herself if she should leave the man she’s with or why she’s with him. And despite having said it’s for money and sex, when she asks these questions aloud she’s bewildered by them. That moment gets more closer to the human conflict of the internal world than any other. It’s profound. It sticks with me. I identify. I think. It gets me to ask questions about do any of us ever really know if what we’re doing when it comes to matters of the heart is what we should be doing? Hmm maybe this movie doesn’t totally suck as bad as I’d thought.
       And the funniest society program bit is after HAHN’S car plunges into the bay (oh and seriously too fun is Fassbinder getting the shot of him submerged underwater and that fish swimming by it too good) and the mob of normies all in unison like zombies yell at Fred “murderer.” It’s like people don’t think for themselves as much as they form their beliefs and values based on what everybody else in society says. They’re removed from what Fred actually did wrong. All they know is to chant the word murderer because they’ve been made to. Not too far off from people today.