Dennis Biba

How much artificiality can art tolerate? Immersion is a key concept in visual storytelling. The more detailed and realistic the imagined world is depicted, the better, or so one might think. However, the so-called suspension of disbelief – the deliberate acceptance of a fictional story – works just as well with narrative forms that don’t prioritise exact mimesis, such as animated films. 3D technology and hyperrealism don’t necessarily make fiction more believable; in fact, they can unintentionally create an uncanny valley effect when the proximity to familiar reality is precisely what causes discomfort. Things get interesting when fictionality itself becomes the subject of discussion within the fiction, when the narrative medium tells a story about itself. How can reality and fiction be represented within fiction, and is it even possible to distinguish between the two? A whole series of science fiction films have grappled with this problem, most prominently certainly the Wachowski siblings‘ Matrix series or Peter Weir’s Truman Show. Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s two-part television film World on a Wire from 1973, however, is likely better known among cinephiles. Like Josef Rusnak’s film The 13th Floor, released a quarter of a century later, it is an adaptation of the science fiction novel Simulacron-3 by Daniel F. Galouye (1964). Simulacrum means something like mirror image or illusion: in order to deceive the viewer, a possible reality must be recreated; otherwise, it is fiction, but not a simulation.

But how do we know that our reality isn’t a simulation, too? Perhaps the oldest known philosophical story of simulation is the allegory of the cave in Plato’s Republic. In this allegorical thought experiment, the real world outside is simulated through shadow play for those chained in a cave. Only when someone is led out of the cave into the daylight, they ‚d be able to see through the deception. Plato, however, wasn’t trying to doubt the authenticity of our reality. For him, the world outside the cave symbolized a realm of ideas, beyond human senses and accessible only through philosophy. Science fiction, on the other hand, inspired by the digital revolution, can take Plato’s allegory literally and transpose it into a cyberpunk setting. Through the medium of film, viewers become philosophers, able to see through the simulation of the fictional reality in the film and apply it to their own.

In Fassbinder’s fictional 1970s Germany, a supercomputer has been developed to simulate life in a small town. The identity units operating within it are unaware that their reality, including themselves, consists solely of electrical circuits. Fred Stiller, a scientist with the demeanor (and hairstyle) of a privy councillor, played by Klaus Löwitsch, is appointed the new technical director of the Institute for Cybernetics and Futures Research after an unexplained death. While he is still struggling to communicate with the identity units in the computer simulation via a contact circuit, one of them manages to escape the simulation by exchanging its consciousness with that of a colleague – how exactly this works is, unfortunately, not revealed. As if that weren’t enough, Stiller must realise that he, too, is merely a part of an intricately nested simulation. Unlike in the Matrix films, the person trapped in the simulation is not a literal brain in a vat, but rather a construct of circuits, which is a more radical idea because here consciousness no longer needs a human body (or parts of it).

While Fred Stiller grapples with existential doubts, the plot twist fails to resonate with the audience, as Fassbinder went to great lengths to make the bleak office setting appear as lifeless as possible. The acting is poor in a Brechtian fashion – it seems as if the actors are shouting at the audience that it’s all just an act – the dialogue is wooden and poorly dubbed – the latter a deliberate stylistic choice to alienate the spoken word. The atmosphere is cold, the music too shrill, the pacing endlessly slow. Even Michael Ballhaus’s undeniably sophisticated camerawork, spanning different image planes or using multiple mirror images, reinforces the impression of unreality. While all these intentional or unintentional artistic devices underscore the artificiality of this artificial world, they also deprive the viewer of any illusions from the outset. Even worse: they replace illusion with boredom, because the two-part film takes over 200 minutes to elaborate on what the images reveal in every single shot. On the other hand, there is no stylistic break at the end of the film, where the simulation transitions into reality. The real world seems indistinguishable from the simulation, thus simultaneously suggesting the possibility that reality itself is just another level of simulation. But if simulations can have any number of levels and are not recognised as such from an introspective view, then this questions the very concept of reality. Therein lies the film’s true achievement: not in exposing its own reality as a simulation, but rather, conversely, in making the terms simulation and reality synonymous. Whether World on a Wire is therefore actually the better Matrix or merely the earlier Matrix is ​​left to the viewers to decide. Film critics, at least, are quite charitable to big names like Fassbinder. The lack of resources for the technical realisation of a philosophically ambitious story becomes clearly apparent, and so World on a Wire ultimately remains more of an extremely long-winded film noir than science fiction, struggling to translate the novel’s novelty into an audiovisual medium.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1973): World on a Wire [Film]. Federal Republic of Germany.