Omegaville
by Tim Krause
Klaus Lowitsch in Fassbinder’s Welt am Draht
Welt am Draht (World on a Wire), Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Few, if any, film careers come close to the star-crossed wonder and terror that was the life and work of German auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who burst onto the scene in the late 1960s and who blazed, a baleful, maleficent, darkly beautiful comet across the nighttime sky of ’70s cinema, making a little over forty films in some thirteen years. These numbers alone are extraordinary, all the more so when looked at against the energy and turbulent life of the work, the high quality of so many of the films, and their daunting formal and generic diversity, ranging from the dramatic character studies of Fassbinder’s early and middle periods—Katzelmacher (1969, literally, Cat-Fucker) and Angst Essen Seele Auf (1974, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul) — to Fassbinder’s reinvention-by-destruction of the gangster film (Liebe ist kälter als der Tod: 1969, Love is Colder than Death), the Western (1971’s Whity, a Gothic-Western-family-incest-with-torture drama), and the historical-pastiche classic-novel-adaptation film (Effi Briest, 1974, from Theodor Fontane’s novel of the same title), to the great, definitive Bundesrepublik Deutschland, or BDR, trilogy, the crowning work of Fassbinder’s late period and career: Die Ehe der Maria Braun (1979, The Marriage of Maria Braun), Lola (1981, a retelling of Josef von Sternberg’s 1931 Der blaue Engel [The Blue Angel]), and Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss (1982, Veronika Voss).
Along the way Fassbinder created a genre of film reminiscent of Douglas Sirk’s but uniquely his own, the camp psychosexual melodrama, aided by a rotating cast drawn from a commune of actors, friends, and lovers. These films are devoted, unsurprisingly, to the troubled lives of flawed, conflicted people, many marginalized by outlook, habits, and desires (Fassbinder’s favorites, in art and in life, rampant drug use and all kinds of paraphilia and fetishism), all of them touching (and touched) in the manner of Warhol’s Superstars and People You Know: the film-scene trash of Warnung vor einer heiligen Nutte (1971, Beware of a Holy Whore), the fashion divas in Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant (1972, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant), and the gullible, innocent Fox in Faustrecht der Freiheit (1975, Fox and His Friends). Fassbinder wrote all of these films, as well as the others, and acted in many of them, even starring in some, further adding to his legend. Along the way he managed to turn out the fourteen television episodes of his adaptation of Alfred Döblin’s Berliner Alexanderplatz (1980, at 894 minutes, some fourteen-and-a-half hours long, one of the longest narrative films ever made), plus a number of plays and short films, — a demonic, almost satanic, output, redolent of folklore and myth, like the damnation of Faust, who traded his soul for unlimited knowledge, or Paganini’s rumored-at trading of his soul for a fiendish virtuosity with the violin. Unlike the breakout careers of many auteurs — Jean-Luc Godard’s unprecedented ’60s films, which yielded to his less-celebrated work in the ’70s and ’80s, come to mind, as does Robert Altman’s defining ’70s work, which ended with Popeye in 1980 — Fassbinder’s meteoric successes kept on coming until he died, from an overdose of cocaine and sleeping pills, at the age of thirty-seven.
One of Fassbinder’s works for television is the three-and-a-half-hour 1973 science-fiction Welt am Draht (World on a Wire), recently restored and on view at the Museum of Modern Art. While certainly not Fassbinder’s best work, World on a Wire has enough interesting and diverting moments that make it worth viewing; its style (if not its subject matter) and technique, in addition to its obscurity (it wasn’t screened in the United States until the MOMA run), make it a fascinating, if flawed, addition to his canon, a radiant cinematic gem, multifaceted and shimmering. A lot of this glitter is quite literal, a product of the film’s meticulous, on-a-television-budget set design: as with so many of his films, Fassbinder fills his interior spaces — here, largely a suite of offices and the private homes and playgrounds of the technocrats who staff the IKZ Cybernetics Institute — with all manner of mirrors, windows, screens, glassware, and other reflective and refractive surfaces. Often we see the actors’ faces and bodies broken into many shards by these image-making props, a formal quality that mirrors one of the film’s dominant themes, the fracturing and shattering of the human psyche and humanist philosophies of the self, language, and knowledge, by the assault of mass media and modern technology and by the challenges posed by twentieth-century philosophies and movements usefully labeled postmodernism. This theme, which displays several key postmodern concepts — the self as a performance, the contingency of identity, the instability of memory and perception; the constant presence of technology as a mediating agent between humans and the world; the challenging or discarding of enlightenment, humanist, and democratic values — is also reflected in the film’s plot, which centers on the scientist Fred Stiller (Klaus Löwitsch), who becomes increasingly paranoid after the mysterious death of his former superior at IKZ, Dr. Henri Vollmer (Adrian Hoven). Vollmer’s death is somehow connected to IKZ’s current project, the construction of Simulacron 1, a virtual-reality world that houses nearly a thousand electronic lives, all programmed by the doctors and scientists at IKZ to provide a dynamic model by which to predict future political, social, and economic events and long-term trends. As Stiller desultorily investigates Vollmer’s death—World on a Wire is part picaresque police procedural, a genre dear to many postmodern narratives — he begins to suffer an increasingly disturbing sequence of events: he first imagines the disappearance of IKZ’s security chief Günther Lause (Ivan Desny), only to learn that no-one, not even the firm’s computer, has ever heard of Lause; he cannot recognize, and cannot trust, the “real” security chief, Hans Edelkern (played with silky menace by Joachim Hansen); he suffers hallucinations, acts erratically at work and at home, and is almost killed in a bizarre construction accident. Worst is Stiller’s growing dissatisfaction with IKZ and its head, Herbert Siskins (Karl-Heinz Vosgerau), who has been promising private test-runs of Simulacron 1 for private corporations looking to make a killing in the brave new market of the cybernetic forecasting of the future: Stiller sees Simulacron 1 as having untapped social benefits that would be traduced by commercial co-optation and the dominance of his research by profit imperatives.
Fassbinder (second and third from left)
Stiller, like so many postmodern antiheroes trapped in worlds and narratives not of their own making — one thinks of Pynchon’s Tyrone Slothrop in Gravity’s Rainbow, also from 1973, or any number of Philip K. Dick’s slouching, addled, incompetent protagonists (of which Jason Taverner, whose official identity disappears, all records of his life gone, in 1974’s Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, is not a bad example) — is quite clearly losing it, but the film is clear from the start that “it” wasn’t much to begin with, a bit of neural smoke and mirrors, linguistic computations, false memories stored and looped again and again, but nothing approaching a stable, whole, grounded human psyche or soul, as earlier generations had maintained. Many of the scientists are aware of this, and discuss epistemological issues while tinkering on Simulacron 1 or sitting in meetings — “You are nothing more than the image others have made of you,” is one such chestnut, a line both dorkier and more portentous than most water-cooler chatter, but one that nevertheless serves to reiterate the film’s themes. If all of this “Do-We-Have-Souls” chatter begins to sag a bit during Stiller’s quest — along the way he learns that his reality is itself a computer simulation inside the “actual” Simulacron 1, a fun idea but one that’s been drained of its shock by later films like The Matrix and The Thirteenth Floor (both 1999, the latter based, like World on a Wire, on Daniel F. Galouye’s 1964 novel Simulacron 3) — one has to give Fassbinder credit for trying, and on television, no less: the film is a bit dutiful in its exposition of the ills of postmodern, corporatized, mediated life, but it’s a beautiful dutifulness, all chrome and fluorescent lights and long echoing corridors (themselves an echo of the long echoing corridors of Godard’s 1965 film Alphaville, an important predecessor for World on a Wire and whose star, Eddie Constantine, makes a brief cameo here, a nice film-geek mise-en-abyme), with chunky, bright-colored plastic telephones and thick glass ashtrays, each meticulously arranged object seeming somehow weightier, more solid and real, than the humans moving and speaking among them. Seen in its cultural contexts, among novelists like Pynchon and Dick, or critical and cultural theorists like Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard — whose The Society of the Spectacle and Simulacra and Simulation, published respectively in 1967 and 1985, thematically and temporally bookend World on a Wire—the film is both of its time and uncannily prescient, an anticipation and dress-rehearsal, if not for the total affective heat-death of the modern world, then for the various challenges to (and opportunities for) life and survival that are posed by our own post-postmodern, post-human, post-everything present.
If anything, World on a Wire is a sunnier, more naïve version of post-humanism than the ones we’re steadily being acclimated to, with our apocalyptic visions of anthropogenic climate change, the Pacific and Atlantic Garbage Gyres, resource wars, economic crises and looming energy crunches: if the world of the film is only a simulation, at least it’s one in which the omnipresent, sinister security staff (one of whom is played by Fassbinder regular El Hedi ben Salem, who is unforgettable as Ali in Angst Essen Seele Auf) wear immaculately-tailored pinstriped suits and echt-’30s-gangster fedoras. Fassbinder’s vision of an icy, mortified, denatured future is infinitely preferable to our own present’s rape camps and forced migrations, paramilitary assassination squads, and illiterate child soldiers. This is a vision of a weightless, gleaming postindustrial information age before cyberpunk — in the form of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) and William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) — came along and finished it off with its edgy haircuts, body mods, leather jackets, and mirrorshades. World on a Wire presents postmodernity without the crumbling cities and the ubiquitous grime and drip of these later works: a kinder, gentler dystopianism, a vision of the world as an endlessly gleaming shopping mall-cum-office park, as if the city-in-a-dome of Michael Anderson’s Logan’s Run (1976) had been populated with the dissolute elites and murderous professionals of J. G. Ballard’s High-Rise (1975) and Super-Cannes (2000). Fassbinder’s ruling passions — gay sex, cruelty, drugs, transgression — may be largely absent from World on a Wire, but his directing, all sinuous glides and quick close-ups, and the overall look of the film make it compulsively watchable; while not his best work (a fraught notion with a director as prolific as Fassbinder) there are nevertheless brilliant glints of fire and light at the heart of this icy diamond.
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