"The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist, and its power is employed above all to enforce this claim. It is modest only on this one point, however, because this officially nonexistent bureaucracy simultaneously attributes the crowning achievements of history to its own infallible leadership. Though its existence is everywhere in evidence, the bureaucracy must be invisible as a class. As a result, all social life becomes insane." ― Guy Debord
Werner Fassbinder's "World on a Wire" was first released on German television in 1973. Forgotten for decades, it reappeared in 2010 with new prints and a theatrical release, at which point it was quickly embraced as one of cinema's hidden milestones.
Pre-dating "The Matrix", "Blade Runner", "Inception", "Existenz", "Dark City", "Ghost in the Shell", "Paprika", "Strange Days", "Star Trek" ("Ship in a Bottle", "Projections") and many other similar works, "Wire" stars Klaus Lowitsch as Fred Stiller. Stiller's working with the Institute for Cybernetics and Future Science, who are busy creating an artificial world populated by thousands of sophisticated A.I. "identity units". The film was based on "Simulacron 3", a 1964 novel by Daniel Galouye. Philip K. Dick's "The Simulacra" was published the same year.
"Wire's" first half plays with now familiar questions of phenomenology (what constitutes experience, perception and consciousness?), epistemology (what is knowledge and how is it acquired?) and ontology (what constitutes the self, existence and reality?). Here Stiller realises that he is in fact a computer simulation of the Real Fred Stiller. This baffles poor Fred, as he has also recently created a computer simulation of "himself". The film thus offers a series of nested realities, simulations boxed within simulations boxed within simulations. When the "identity units" recognise that they are "not authentic", they begin to view others as phony automatons, have little existential crises and slip into depression. Some exhibit the existence denial of Cotard's Syndrome ("I think that I don't exist!"). Others resort to suicide.
Like Fassbinder's "identity units", humans are themselves "machines who are not aware that they are machines". Each of us is mechanistically programmed by an unbroken causal chain, and what we "see" is itself a mental simulation or representational content. The claims of "naive realists" (the belief that senses provide direct awareness) are similarly false. Our phenomenal life unfolds in a world-model and we are always blind to the mediums through which "things" are transmuted en-route to us. Thinkers like Hume, Schopenhauer, Locke, Sartre, Daniel Dennet and many other modern neuroscientists have also dethroned the notion of the Sovereign Self. For them, selfhood only exists at the level of false appearances. It is an accidental byproduct of processes which misrepresent "themselves" for "itself", and even consciousness only arises "after the fact", always dependent on objects which the subject is inadvertently constructed in relation to. Other philosophers are equally, or overly, droll. "The brute fact is that there is nothing behind the face," Thomas Metzinger would say. "There's no one there." And Erwin Schrodinger: "To learn that the personality of a human being cannot really be found in the interior of a human body is so amazing that it meets with doubts and hesitation, we are very loath to admit it."
But Fassbinder, a neo-Marxist, has always been more interested in the political. Like many of his pictures, "Wire" thus paints late capitalism as a superstructure which co-opts everything it touches. This is a giant control society, a kind of giddily embraced techno-totalitarianism in which everything is under surveillance, personalities are managed and created, everyone is an automaton lost in their own private cyberspational urgencies, capitalism has fully colonised human consciousness and machines simulate reality whilst people simulate "individuality" and "authenticity". "You're nothing more than the image others have made of you!" characters say.
More than this, "Wire" portrays "reality" as a collective psychosis in which all social energy is sucked into a vortex of labour and simulated productivity. The simulations made by The Institute, we later learn, are themselves intended for the prediction of future market trends, the "identity units" (and the whole world itself) literally created for the purpose of monitoring buying, selling and consumption. More eerily, the simulations within the simulations seem designed to investigate how people react to certain forms of control; a dry run for a total conversion which will soon occur, or may already have. Regardless, with the help of the "identity units", Germany's economy can be meticulously pre-planned and engineered. This kind of Big Data Mining is already occurring – the superstore Target famously mailed pregnancy kits to a teenage girl, successfully predicting her pregnancy before the girl, her family, lover or father knew she was pregnant – computerised pattern detectors already surmising from and shaping behaviour. Elsewhere Fassbinder shows, not just the political cost of distraction, but how distraction and solipsism are desired by those on every level of society. The Real Fred Stiller programs himself as a suave ladies man, humans love the idealisations sold to them by their digital echo chambers and the Masters rake in the cash whilst everyone remains oblivious. Meanwhile, those pesky "identity units" who wreak the party are "deleted" or "suicided" with the flip of a switch. The film's overriding metaphor (Zeno's Paradox), points to a world in which everything moves but no distance is travelled and no progress is made.
Aesthetically, "Wire" gives us mirrored surfaces, alienating spaces and a style which mixes noir, SF and retro-futurism. Its signature song is Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde", used as an ironic commentary on the idealisations of Fassbinder's characters, but perhaps chosen because it was itself inspired by Schopenhauer's "The World as Will and Representation". The film ends with a playboy and playgirl in a box, spinning in false assumptions.
8.5/10 - Masterpiece but overlong.
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