Dennis Biba

Anyone who finds this film familiar upon first viewing is either living in a simulation or mistaken (probably both), because the period around the turn of the millennium, due to the technological advances of the 1990s, brought a veritable simulation hype. In 1998, the intelligent (and therefore rather tragic) comedy The Truman Show had been released, and soon after, the first Matrix film conquered cinemas, leaving little room in the public consciousness for another simulation film. However, The 13th Floor by Josef Rusnak, with the participation of Roland Emmerich, certainly deserves attention and is more than just an American remake of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s television film World on a Wire, which was made twenty-six years earlier. Rather, the latter two are different adaptations of the novel Simulacron-3 by Daniel F. Galouye (1964).

In 1999 – the film’s narrative present and release year being the same – Hannon Fuller (played by Armin Mueller-Stahl) heads a tech company that has recreated a Los Angeles of 1937 in an elaborate virtual reality simulation. The virtual entities within the simulation believe themselves to be alive, possess their own personalities, but are visually modeled after real people. The simulation is thus not a historical representation, but a fantasy version of the past, likely a prototype for commercial simulations, similar to the theme park in the film Westworld, but entirely virtual. Before the testing phase is complete, however, Fuller is murdered, and his colleague Douglas Hall (played by Craig Bierko), who has no memory of the events, becomes a suspect. Hall then sets out to search the virtual world for clues to the murder, most notably a letter that Fuller left there before his death.

While the scientific experimental nature of the simulation still predominated in Fassbinder’s film World on a Wire, the simulation in The 13th Floor is more heavily influenced by gamification, thus initiating a media discourse that refers primarily to film, but also to video games. The aim is not knowledge, but rather distraction. The medium serves as a projection screen for the consumer’s desires, and so it is no wonder that in this world programmed by men, it has been primarily used by Fuller for sexual adventures. The artificiality of the simulation, which in Rusnak’s film is not emphasised by a lack of realism, but rather by lighting – here the film already anticipates the aesthetics of social media filters – also forces viewers to become self-aware. The 13th Floor is also rife with references. Both the set design and the camera work strongly recall Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, and the influence of Michael Ballhaus, who was the cinematographer on World on a Wire and also involved in the production of The 13th Floor, is clearly evident. Furthermore, the name John Ferguson (the role Douglas Hall slips into in the simulation) is an allusion to the character of the same name in Alfred Hitchcock’s famous 1958 film Vertigo – a film that takes vertigo both literally and figuratively (something that works better in German, where the words for dizziness and fraud are identical), and after which, incidentally, the Vertigo effect (also known as Dolly Zoom) is named. The closer you look, the more the scales of reality seem to shift, and perhaps that’s why Craig Bierko appears rather bewildered for most of the time.

As expected, during a car trip to the edge of the world, Douglas is confronted with the fact that his own reality is also just a simulation and that he himself is modeled on a real person. And, just like in World on a Wire, the real twist comes right at the end. For when, after all sorts of action scenes, he finally manages to break out of the simulation, the apparent reality of the year 2024 is almost too shiny to be true. The audience, who willingly exchanged their own reality for Douglas Hall’s for 100 minutes, is ultimately left to decide whether to return to their own more real reality with relief or unease.

Josef Rusnak (1999): The 13th Floor [Film]. USA.