Prolific and multifaceted Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s diversity as a director is encapsulated in World On A Wire. If you thought his televisual genius was restricted to the sublime Berlin Alexanderplatz be prepared for a surprise in a VR science-fiction series which is way ahead of its time: “A living world in a box full of microchips” reveals a corporate cybernetic scheme of business dominance in societies both real and virtual, where “you can add and delete people at will.” World on a Wire is a philosophical conceit that explores human nature and the existential understanding of reality in a way that is frighteningly modern, even if the film is perfectly contemporaneous to 1973 rather than obviously futuristic.
Professor Henri Vollmer (Adrian Hoven) is the instigator behind IZK’s major project, the Simulacron, a supercomputer which creates a virtual world within its parameters with digitally engaged personalities that may or may not exist in either virtual or corporeal form. Vollmer dies in bizarre computer-based extenuating circumstances and Fred Stiller (Klaus Löwitsch) is determined to figure out what has happened, even as the existence and reliability of certain collaborators such as Günther Lause (Ivan Desny) remain unclear. With a developing relationship with the ex-scientist’s daughter Eva Vollmer (Mascha Rabben) and concern about the disappearance or even existence of Günther Lause (Ivan Desny), Stiller has to engage in corporation shenanigans, existential personification and assassination attempts within a world that may not be real, or perhaps may not be his persona’s conceptual realisation of the world.
Part feature film, part television series, World On A Wire is an oddity that is tricky to define as it is both a product of its time yet distinctly prescient. Its total running time is just shy of four hours, the two-episode format appropriate to the central narrative construct – the multiple versions of the virtual and the real leading to rehashes of scenarios or persona that would seem more like a conceit similar to Westworld (1973) than a defined single narrative. But this takes us away from that concept in a manner that is closer to a modernistic philosophical noir mystery about existential reality than a simple episodic construct. The basic premise is that this is science fiction set in a real world – not some future fantasy, but something distinctly contemporary and therefore believable even in its imaginative constructs of a developing technology that was, at the time, very much in its infancy. This is not a future world but an alternative 1973 that is surprisingly closer to the modern reality of 2019 than might otherwise seem apparent: Addressing themes of cyber corporation instigation into consumer trends and sales potentials linked with business acumen within a media environment that is curtailed by those very corporations is all too appropriate.
The environment of World On A Wire is one where a digital universe of 10,000 people has been created and people can be hacked into or out of their alternate individuality which is indistinguishable in apparent memory and existence from any other real or digital version of themselves so that often they have no concept of reality and similarly neither does the viewer. The whole construct of the society is presented as “normality” that may be actuality in a physical or digital sense. Fassbinder visually enhances this misconception of reality in the visual style of the film which is often based in reflections or perceptions of the protagonists within glass or mirrors, often having characters converse with each other off direct shot but through entrances, reflections or rooms which questions their actual presence for the viewer. As his cinematographer recollects, “we even had a bunsen burner under the lens to create a swirling effect” on their 250mm lens! In the modern world of cyber-normality or even existence within a digital environment it may seem passé to discuss science fiction as humorously dated. But World on a Wire is predominantly contemporary yet horrifically precipitous in its foresight within a narrative that thematically recalls such films as Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 and Goddard’s Alphaville, also placing matters in a post – Clockwork Orange scenario that has the debauchery, clubs and drugs but places it into an all-too-believable corporate background.
It is a distinctively anti-corporate film which explores consumerism, concerned with corporations hacking into consumer expectations through cybernetic and AI manipulation that will affect their perceived desires and enhance long term profitability and business plans. So people, be they real or virtual, can be removed in a way that is as if they didn’t exist, or at least not to other denizens in the reality as it is perceived by the person subject to this reality. Philosophically and contextually this is a smorgasbord of intellectual debate. That would normally be anathema to televisual narrative but with Fassbinder conceptual normality is not sacrosanct. World on a Wire makes for essential viewing.