Before the Pills

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What if this life is just a computer simulation? It's not a new idea, sure, Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1973 series, World on a Wire, is based on a 1964 novel. Fassbinder does a lot of interesting things to conjure the sense of a simulated world with minimal special effects and I like the ambiguous sense of panic undergirding the whole story.

Klaus Lowitsch plays Fred Stiller, the new technical director at an institute housing a supercomputer that hosts a complex simulation. But the truth of the matter isn't even that simple.

The production design features a lot of reflective surfaces and a pretty consistent blue/white/orange colour scheme. There are suggestions of artificiality in the dialogue and the people whom Stiller interacts with. Why do beautiful blondes keep turning up? Why is Stiller consistently compared to James Bond?

It's understandable why people would want to escape an entirely simulated existence but mainly on an instinctive level. Would the real world really be better? How could they know? At least life in the real world wouldn't just be someone else's interpretation of reality of how reality ought to be. That's the real suffocating part of it, I'd think. No-one can come to grips with reality when everything is fake. The film may be less a commentary on technology and more of a satire of a country dominated by propaganda. It's one of those things that makes me think science fiction may be the only genre capable of honestly analysing human society.

World on a Wire is available on The Criterion Channel.