Thanks to the Internet, it’s now relatively easy for anyone to acquire and ingest the entire canon of films by dead masters such as Ingmar Bergman, Luis Buñuel, Alfred Hitchcock, Akira Kurosawa, or François Truffaut, but the oeuvre of the ridiculously prolific Rainer Werner Fassbind
er continues to resist closure. How many Americans can claim to have seen even half of the more than 40 films which Fassbinder directed in his abbreviated 16-year career, let alone all of them? Until April of 2010, the safe answer to the latter half of that question would have been zero, since World on a Wire (Welt am Draht), one of Fassbinder’s most curious cinematic endeavors, had only been screened in the U.S. a single time. Fassbinder occasionally subverted the reality of his films by synthesizing physical and psychological perceptions (Despair, Querelle, and even Berlin Alexanderplatz) and many of his works incorporate performative and presentational strategies of the theatre (Katzelmacher, The Bitter Tears of Petra Van Kant), but as a rule, he never strayed far from the rigorous verisimilitude which infused his best known and most successful works. Finally, Americans (at least New Yorkers) will have access to the remarkable exception that proves the rule.
The Museum of Modern Art in New York recently acquired and debuted a newly restored 35mm print of World on a Wire, a two-part miniseries that Fassbinder made for German television in 1973, in which he indulges in a wholly fictional universe for the first and only time in his career. Based on the 1964 novel Simulacron-3, by American sci-fi writer Daniel Galouye (which also served as the source material for the 1999 film The Thirteenth Floor), World on a Wire conjures a peculiar future where humans have created a computer program capable of exactly fabricating the conditions of existence, complete with virtual citizens who are unaware of their status as simulations.
To say that this is a significant cinematic event is the essence of understatement. Even if the film had been directed by a Hollywood hack, it would hold plenty of fascination purely as an archaeological sci-fi artifact which prefigures the paranoiac and recursive conceits of Blade Runner, The Truman Show, and The Matrix. Even if the film had been merely another of Fassbinder’s morose depictions of estrangement and alienation, it would enhance, damage, or at least further complicate his prominent place in film history. The fact that World on a Wire combines the best of both these descriptions, and a great deal more, is simply unprecedented. This is not Fassbinder’s best work, but after marinating for 37 years, it can certainly be called his most entertaining film, as its extended absence has allowed its artistic blemishes and enthusiastic eccentricities to mutate into an aura of humorous exuberance which enhances its allegorical address of our commodified, tech-crazed culture.
It is indeed rare when a film simultaneously succeeds at the level of story, aesthetics, theme, and relevance, but World on a Wire hits all four targets in tight proximity to the bullseye. The narrative drive of the story, in which computer scientist Fred Stiller (Klaus Löwitsch) struggles to determine whether his world is “real” or an artificial simulation, is now probably the least intriguing aspect of the film, as the novelty of this concept has been irreparably eroded by numerous subsequent depictions in movies, books, and video games. But Fassbinder’s creation of a future which can best be described as “analog fantastic” is consistently a joy to behold, and probably holds greater resonance today than when the film was made, due to present concerns surrounding the proliferation of disposable devices and the viral spread of technology. In lieu of special effects, Fassbinder enacts a future of sheer accumulation, by stuffing every set full of gauche objects, faux affluence, plastic plants and technological detritus, letting the sumptuous clutter suggest both the culmination of our rampant consumerism and the ephemerality of fad and fashion. Although the film is meant to depict an unspecified future, our discerning contemporary sensibilities detect antiquation and inelegance in every scene–plaid jackets, chest hair, elbow patches, extra buckles, polyester leopard prints, DOS graphics, conspicuous ashtrays, egg-shaped chairs, taxidermy, phones with big plastic buttons, cars like tanks, festering webs of electrical cords, video monitors striped by poor reception, men with ominous charm and aggressive facial hair.
The film exemplifies the cycle of “camp,” wherein elements of the production which reflect audacity and earnestness eventually come to seem humorously naïve to future generations. This plane of entertainment thrives on the audience’s ability and willingness to convince themselves that they are privy to an order of knowledge which is somehow superior to either the producers of the text or to certain fellow members of the audience. For example, while getting dressed the morning after bedding his secretary Gloria Fromm (the ever-voluptuous Barbara Valentin), Stiller eyes her seductively as he methodically draws up the zipper of his pants (which are pulled halfway up his chest). Today’s viewers ostensibly believe that, given the sophistication we’ve supposedly acquired over the last 40 years, we recognize the incongruity and prurience of this silly display of virility better than the actors who performed it, which amplifies the amusement of an already bizarre antic.
To fuel another type of camp response, Fassbinder filled the bit parts of his cast with members of the German film community and once-prominent actors whose stardom had considerably waned, allowing his extant audience to savor the subtle thrill of recognizing an obscure though familiar face amidst the otherwise anonymous extras. Most of these cameos, including an appearance by the recently deceased director Werner Schroeter, will be understandably overlooked today, with the distinct exception of Eddie Constantine, the French actor who is best known for his starring role in Jean-Luc Godard’s single exploration of the sci-fi genre, Alphaville. It is safe to say that most people who are drawn to World on a Wire will have some familiarity with that film, and will thus derive an auxiliary flush of satisfaction from making the connection. Whereas camp reception of a film is commonly diminished as shallow and superficial, here it definitely carries some critical relevance, in that it relies on an illusory hierarchy of awareness, which is the very subject the film is exploring. Just as Stiller comes to realize that his perceived ascendancy over the synthetic entities within his computer is inherently false, those of us delighting in our ironic enjoyment of archaic or artistically inferior texts need to realize that our own tendencies and trends will soon enough be the subject of similar derision from our descendents.
Fassbinder challenged his masterful cinematographer Michael Ballhaus by constantly obstructing the camera’s line of sight with doors, windows, lamps, curtains, fishbowls, or whatever other knick-knacks happened to be at hand, and by layering his sets with as many reflective surfaces as possible. This motif allowed them to extend, distort, and fracture the frame at their discretion, adding to the atmosphere of skewed normality, and also let them get playful with their compositions, as when a character’s head bloats like a balloon when it is shot through a convex vase. Fassbinder’s fetish for visual echoes lends each scene aesthetic complexity and depth, but it also extends the themes of the multiplicity, ethereality, and artifice of our existence. This depiction of a sterile, counterfeit world strewn with useless accessories and antique advancements might just resonate through our reception of the film and out into our more immediate perceptions, polluting our minds with a whit of ambiguity and doubt as we return to our own immersion in a virtual universe of avatars, downloads, ear buds, feature creep, megapixels, txt msgs, cloud computing, fiscal equity, ATM receipts, and the persistent sprawl of the world wide web.
Phillip Maher's Blog 
Man, you can write! Thanks, just discovered this film on Hulu!