Out in the real world, in real time: Fassbinder's "Welt am Draht" ("World On Wire")

By the time he’s become con­vinced that the world he inhab­its is in fact just a com­puter sim­u­la­tion of real­ity, stressed-out tech maes­tro Fred Stiller (seen above in “action” mode) is also con­vinced that he can prove this, by either cre­at­ing or uncov­er­ing a “glitch” in the sim­u­la­tion. He believes he’s already seen at least one; if not the into-thin-air dis­ap­pear­ance of his friend and col­league Lause, dir­ectly pri­or to the rev­el­a­tion of a “wild” pro­nounce­ment by anoth­er, recently deceased (under mys­ter­i­ous cir­cum­stances, of course) co-worker, then the “dis­ap­pear­ance” and reappear­ance of an entire street while out driv­ing with the enig­mat­ic and seduct­ive Eva, the daugh­ter of the dead man, who Stiller hap­pens to be repla­cing on a huge pro­ject. That pro­ject, nat­ur­ally, being…a com­puter sim­u­la­tion of our real­ity, set some­time in the future, whose rev­el­a­tions could prove quite bene­fi­cial to cer­tain cor­por­ate interests.

As Stiller sets about seek­ing his glitch—which, he the­or­izes, would be the res­ult of either some fried cir­cuitry or imper­fect software—the view­er of Welt am Dracht is likely to have exper­i­enced sev­er­al glitches him­self. Director/co-writer Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s epic two-part 1973 film, made for German tele­vi­sion, is about as mind-bending as movie­mak­ing gets, and not just because of the sci-fi premise. The film is sim­ul­tan­eously con­stantly piss-taking and deadly earn­est, a labyrinthi­an riot of scenes seen solely via reflect­ive sur­faces, set in an only vaguely futur­ist­ic world where char­ac­ters do their expos­it­ory walk-and-talks around a small indoor swim­ming pool whilst a male Marlene Dietrich imper­son­at­or swoons about.* the film, the riches of which include an exten­ded scene that pays snarky homage to both 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange, some­times resembles a mind-meld of Kubrick and Alfred Jarry, Fassbinder and lensers Michael Ballhaus and Ulrich Prinz run­ning the show on screen with wildly anarch­ic cre­ativ­ity while the char­ac­ters in it are in near-constant tor­ment over who’s run­ning their show. Characters in zom­bie makeup out of Carnival of Souls pop in and out of the film’s two (at least at first) depic­ted “worlds,” one ostens­ibly “upper” and the oth­er “lower,” and while one realm is not ever depic­ted as more mater­i­ally desir­able than the oth­er, those who “know” that they are “sim­u­la­tions” become des­per­ate to trans­fer to the upper world, because then they will have the assur­ance of being “real.” That indi­vidu­als in the upper world are dis­cov­er­ing that they them­selves might lack “real­ness,” well, you can ima­gine the prob­lems this can cre­ate. Zeno’s para­dox is invoked, as is Einstein, but the ques­tion that anim­ates Stiller’s quest cen­ters on that of “real­ness,” although the char­ac­ter nev­er steps back and asks “What’s the dif­fer­ence?” Perhaps it’s the hope that the world above his own is a bet­ter one than he inhab­its. Where this all leads is…well, very much worth experiencing. 

There is not a dull frame in this 207-minute film, a thread­bare mas­ter­piece that pos­it­ively rev­els in its lack of tra­di­tion­al “pro­duc­tion val­ues,” not to men­tion a pur­pose­ful dis­join­ted­ness. (Incidentally, its source mater­i­al, a nov­el by Daniel F. Galouye, was later the basis for the far more con­ven­tion­al 1999 sci-fi pic­ture The Thirteenth Floor.) That it’s acted by a cast of Fassbinder regulars—including Klaus Lowitch as Stiller and Horrors of Spider Island bomb­shell Barbara Valentin (left) as a bomb­shell secretary—easily recog­niz­able to fans of the film­maker gives the whole thing a familiar/odd effect that it might not have had on German TV back in the day. But that effect will cer­tainly come into play for view­ers lucky enough to be able to see the North American première of the film, in a ver­sion restored by the museum and The Fassbinder Foundation, begin­ning April 14 at Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art (full screen­ing sched­ule is here). It might be early in the year to say such a thing, but I hon­estly can­’t ima­gine a North American film event top­ping this one in 2010. (It may fur­ther blow your mind, after see­ing the film, to con­tem­plate that Fassbinder was only 28 years old when he made it.) And no, I can­’t wait for the DVD ver­sion of this, although no word on a domest­ic one has come around yet. There’s a German edi­tion, but I’m keep­ing my fin­gers crossed that this gets a Berlin Alexanderplatz-worthy treat­ment from Criterion. It deserves one. 

*As our friend Chuck Stephens points out (in his way, in com­ments), Solange Pradel, who plays the Dietrich imper­son­at­or in Welt am Draht, is in no sense “male,” and, hav­ing seen Rollin’s Le viol du vam­pire, I had been aware of this fact…and failed to call it up when rush­ing out this rave. But I think Chuck will agree with me that Pradel per­forms the Dietrich stuff very much in the man­ner of a drag queen, and it registers that way, mak­ing the mind-fuck involved all the more complex.