Belief
in reincarnation satisfies a longing for immortality, or at
least a feel that we can do better in the next life. Similarly,
older people often look back upon their life as a time of
missed opportunities; if only we could relive the past and
make different choices, we might have found greater self-fulfillment.
With the advent of computers, it is becoming possible to simulate
the future and the past. In The Thirteenth Floor,
directed by Josef Rusnak, adaopted from Daniel F. Galouye’s
1976 novel Simulacron 3, the four main characters are able
to travel into the past bodily through a simulation machine,
assume a different identity, and play out fantasies or search
for answers. The tagline of the film is "Question reality.
You can go there even though it doesn’t exist." For elderly
Hannon Fuller (played by Armin Mueller-Stahl), who finances
the simulation, the fantasy is to go back to 1937 with access
to plenty of money and have sex with beautiful women, but
he is killed. When Whitney (played by Vincent D’Onofrio),
a technician who handles the controls of the simulation, learns
that Fuller wants to destroy the simulation, he stabs Fuller
in the role of a hotel bartender during the 1937 simulation.
For Douglas Hall (played by Craig Bierko), one of the developers
of the simulation, the quest is to find out who murdered Fuller
when he becomes the principal suspect for detective Larry
Bain (played by Dennis Haysbert). Jane Fuller (played by Gretchen
Mol), Hannon’s daughter, tries to persuade Hall not to destroy
the simulation by informing him that he is playing a role
in 1999 that is itself a simulation. When the film begins,
Descartes is quoted, "I think, therefore I am." When the film
ends, filmviewers are presumably to leave the cinema asking
whether they are really exercising free will or are instead
programmed by an external force in an endless reincarnation
simulation. The film takes the same postmodern premise from
Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 (and Gödl's theorem)
that the meaning of life is elusive because determined outside
ourselves, but we are then left with mindless hedonism as
the only way to transcend mindless conformity, the only two
options presented by both Rusnak and Kubrick that are open
to humans. However, the dialog of the film deals with mundane
rather than profound matters, and the film offers only 100
minutes of escape that are unlikely to bring about Cartesian
self-exploration. MH
I
want to comment on this film
