World on a Wire (Welt am Draht)

In 1973, the ferociously prolific Rainer Werner Fassbinder, produced a four hour mini-series named World on a Wire for German TV.  Thought lost for many years, the program resurfaced around 2010 as digital file shared between Fassbinder fans.  Subsequently, a print of the series was discovered and the film was lovingly restored by the Fassbinder Stiftung (Foundation).  Fassbinder died at 37, the victim of various kinds of debauchery, but he was a tremendously efficient work-horse when it came to making theater, film, and TV.  World on a Wire is Fassbinder's only venture into science fiction and, in fact, turns out to be prescient -- the movie anticipates many later films such as The Matrix and explores themes relating to artificial intelligence and computing that seem remarkably contemporary.  Fassbinder's direction is wildly histrionic, baroque, and inventive -- he seems to have had some contempt for the subject matter and, therefore, amused himself by configuring a delirious mise-en-scene for the mini-series.  Just about all of Fassbinder's regular acting company are on display in the movie.  Most of them seem to have been urged to speak their lines mechanically and as fast as possibly -- Brechtian estrangement effects are everywhere in evidence.  But since the plot involves robots and artificial intelligence, the blank robotic manner in which the film is acted seems, more or less, appropriate to the subject matter. 

Fassbinder takes his time developing the premise -- in fact, the first two hours seem structured as a sort of lackadaisical crime story, and the true situation, involving a parallel reality, although hinted-at from time to time, isn't really explained until about 100 minutes into the story.  A sinister corporation (is there any other kind?) named Institut fuer Kybernetisches Zukunftforschung -- the Institute for Cybernetic Research into the Future (abbreviated IKZ in the show) -- has created computer programs that simulate real people and situations and, then, runs these programs to predict how consumers will respond to certain stimuli.  The simulations are realistic and powerful and can be used to accurately determine how current economic trends will develop.  It seems that IKZ has a contract to predict market demand in the steel industry and this commitment by the corporation is the focus of skullduggery.  A director and chief programmer named Vollmer dies after advising that his head feels like it will explode.  As he is dying, Vollmer tells a security agent, Herr Lause, that something is rotten in the State of Denmark (here IKZ).  Lause, then, vanishes while talking with another corporate executive, Stiller, at a depraved-looking party -- lots of people posturing in states of semi-nudity and diving into a pool enclosed in some sort of ovoid steel egg:  at this party a chanteuse sings the Marlene Dietrich tribute to "the boys in the back room" in English and about an octave below the range used by the husky-voiced Dietrich -- it's all lavishly outré.  Stiller spends the next hour or so looking for Lause who turns out to be some kind of "sim" -- that is, a simulation himself.  Stiller's secretary seems to be laboriously, if picturesquely dying and has been replaced by the ridiculously buxom Miss Fromm.  She seems to be an agent for IKZ engaged in surveillance of Stiller, although this remains unclear from beginning to end.  Stiller's love interest is Eve Vollmer, the daughter of the deceased executive.  She intermittently vanishes but, then, turns up on odd occasions when the embattled Stiller needs her.  Fassbinder's relation to women was complex and the females in the program are all bizarre caricatures of one sort or another -- they seem highly decadent and Eva Vollmer, for instance, is gorgeous and anorexic:  she is like a corpse bride.

Fassbinder's stages this material in a showy, even grandiose display of his ingenuity as a director.  People are used as motionless décor and there are perverse tableaux.  Just about every scene involves mirrors or semi-translucent planes of glass -- Fassbinder, who was famously efficient, often uses mirrors to stage dialogue between two widely separated actors without having to change the angle or position of the camera:  if you can see both participants in the conversation in one shot via the use of mirrors, why use a different camera set up?  Fassbinder's mannerist use of reflections seems labored sometimes in films like The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant which Welt am Draht closely resembles stylistically -- but, here, in a plot involving a parallel mirror universe, the obsessive interest in reflected images seems appropriate, even, necessary.  The colors are deeply saturated and there are portentous zoom shots, huge inexpressive close-ups, and, even, a startling ankle-high tracking shot across a floor.  The acting is highly stylized and the dialogue either laconic or densely informative (and, so, delivered in a kind of Brechtian amplified and hyper-speed shriek.)  The soundtrack is a weird mélange of opera, kitschy tangos, Nazi marching songs, and electronic skreeling -- each scene is scored differently and the musical numbers playing beneath the action begin when the sequence starts and neatly end when it ends.  Generally, it's impossible to figure out the correlation between the music, curiously independent from the images, and the scenes that they underscore.

David Thomson remarks apropos Fritz Lang that the director's movies became better in America because the U. S. studio system required that he produce a film running less than 2 hours for which he would have used three or more hours screen time in Germany.  Fassbinder's narration in World on a Wire is profoundly (and perversely) inefficient -- it's like Lang's enormous spy thrillers involving  Dr. Mabuse, the picture just goes on and on and on.  At about the two hour mark, Stiller figures out that he is probably a computer program running amidst other computer programs or "units".  In his world, the characters periodically enter another realm that they believe to be simulated by IKZ -- but, in fact, this simulation is merely a simulation within another simulation and, ultimately, it's not clear how many iterations of simulated world are superimposed on one another.  For some reason, Stiller's discovery of this fact causes the authorities at IKZ to determine that he must be "deleted".  This leads to an extended chase that begins after about two hours and forty-five minutes.  This chase, which is intermittently exciting, continues until the end of the movie.  The chase makes no sense -- I don't understand why the "programmer" doesn't just press "delete" and erase the pesky Stiller on his computer.  Instead various thugs and sinister corporate execs have to capture and kill him resulting in gun battles, car chases and, even, a showy explosion. (I think the idea is that Stiller's understanding that the whole world is a fiction destabilizes the simulation and will cause it's characters to behave in deviant ways that may imperil the program's integrity -- after all, the program is being run to ascertain the future of the steel economy.  This is just speculation, however.  True to form, no one's motivations are ever clear.)  Fassbinder's technique is spectacular throughout the picture, even when the mini-series stalls out and becomes almost unbearably tedious -- it has about an hour that is intensely boring about midway through the show.  (The same problem occurs even more dramatically in Berlin Alexanderplatz in which about four hours of the 16 hour program are so dull as to be unwatchable -- nothing occurs and this nothing is filmed in sewer-brown darkness.)  The chase is outlandish and requires poor Klaus Loewitsch, playing Stiller, to bound and leap over obstacles and run at high speeds during extended takes through a sort of parkour course.  Loewitsch is bow-legged and tiny -- the women in the film tower over him.  In Hollywood and TV movies a short leading man would be filmed in ways to make him look taller and bigger -- Alan Ladd and Tom Cruise are examples of diminutive leading men who were shot in ways to enhance their stature.  Fassbinder will have none of this -- he stages his shots to emphasize that Loewitsch, who looks a bit like a small Humphrey Bogart, is a homunculus, adding to the film's sense of unreality.  (Hollywood defines what constitutes "realism"; paradoxically, deviations from Hollywood norms see "unrealistic.")  Elements of the program are extravagant to the point of operatic excess.  Stiller has speculated that his world is Platonic -- in other words, a shadow play in which reality is only dimly reflected.  This notion is embodied in a bizarre scene in which we see the shadows of marching Nazis, hear the marching song "Ach du schoener Westerwald" and, then, watch Ingrid Caven singing "Lilli Marlene" in her deep, raspy baritone voice -- the Nazis shoot her at the end of the scene.  This is supposed to be some kind of cabaret act although it's so bizarre as to be "unreadable".  Of course, these kinds of scenes, with their attendant absurdity, call into question the film's realism and, in fact, are consistent with the notion that the world Fassbinder portrays is entirely illusory, at one point described as a "computer program with a mad programmer on the keyboard."  Gorgeous half-naked men appear out of nowhere, the chase scene has no continuity -- it just jumps from locale to locale, people wear outrageous clothing and there are bizarre instances of color coordination (mostly acrid oranges) between the scenes.  Toward the end of the movie, the shots are littered with zombie-like extras, people listlessly dancing in strange rooms or forming equally listless mobs shouting "Murderer!  Murderer!" as poor Stiller performs his gymnastic parkour routines.  One servant has perfectly coiffed black spit curls like Betty Boop.  My favorite German actor, Peter Kern, appears as a thug with his hair dyed to a crisp flaming red and poor haggard Eddie Constantine, Godard's star in the similarly exotic Alphaville, makes a cameo appearance -- he looks like death warmed-over.  In the end, Stiller is redeemed by love; it turns out that he is the spirit of someone loved by Eva Vollmer and injected in Stiller's tiny, if muscular, body.  Reality is established by the use of a hand-held camera signifying the true, non-digital world -- also notable for having windows and not mirrors and shag carpets.  Fassbinder anticipates the universe of pictures like The Matrix with uncanny prescience.  But he doesn't get phone technology right -- for some reason, Fassbinder thought that phones would get larger and more exuberantly colored in the future.  People peck out phone numbers are yard-wide orange telephones.  Fassbinder was only 27 when he made this movie but, from the perspective of sheer style, the film is an accomplished masterpiece.  It's not something I would want to watch again, but it's certainly astonishing in many respects.