The Thirteenth Floor
With Armin Mueller-Stahl, Craig Bierko, Gretchen Mol, Vincent D’Onofrio, Dennis Haysbert, and Steven Schub.
I have to admit that The Thirteenth Floor kept me hoping for the first half hour or so, before it turned into another virtual-reality boondoggle. The press screening was held the morning after the prizes at the Cannes film festival were announced. Since I didn’t attend I still have months or in some cases years to wait before the movies showing there have a chance to disappoint me. You might say that this is my own virtual-reality game, playable in different ways in terms of both The Thirteenth Floor and the Cannes festival I didn’t attend, though the difference between waiting half an hour and waiting several months is not to be sneezed at: in the latter case, for instance, I have to worry more about all the misinformation that’s likely to gum up my expectations in the interim.
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I haven’t read Daniel Galouye’s 1964 novel Simulacron-3 (also known as Counterfeit World), which this movie is based on, but it evidently belongs to the parallel-universe branch of SF that had a long and venerable history well before digital technology and virtual-reality movies became coin of the realm; Murray Leinster’s 1934 novella “Sideways in Time” and some of the more provocative sections in Olaf Stapledon’s 1937 Star Maker are two examples that spring to mind. Admittedly I might have been more receptive to a digitally enhanced contribution to this tradition if I hadn’t just seen three other virtual-reality movies. But even if I’d approached this movie more innocently, the flatness of all the characters, which becomes increasingly apparent as the generic violence and grinding plot machinery take over, and the derivative look of the visuals–Hall’s flat a recollection of Blade Runner, the 1937 nightclub a recollection of The Shining, Gretchen Mol disappearing and then reappearing as a gum-chewing working-class stereotype like Kim Novak in Vertigo–would have discouraged me anyway.
Even the presence of Mueller-Stahl seems predictable. He also turned up in The Game (1997), which might be pegged as the first virtual-reality thriller in the present cycle (unless one includes all those De Palma thrillers from the 70s onward in which gruesome climaxes turn out to be only bad dreams, a cliche revived in The Thirteenth Floor as well). And as a German actor in an English-language Europudding produced, written, directed, and shot basically by Germans–one of those stateless monoliths that “benefit” in their relation to contemporary reality from being neither American nor German–Mueller-Stahl seems right at home. Because the bottom line in these pictures is to say as little about the world as possible, it goes well beyond the lightness (or liteness) of a Star Wars movie, which at least has the temerity (or innocence) to plunder the rest of the world to create an all-American cosmos composed nostalgically out of colonialist and imperialist longings–longings that still have a history and some national identity.
On the other hand, it’s hard to deny that Miramax conquers markets that true independent distributors are unable to penetrate. Visiting my tiny hometown of Florence, Alabama, earlier this spring, I discovered that Life Is Beautiful was playing even there. It might have been the first time a subtitled film had shown there theatrically in four decades, since those few years in the 50s when my family’s chain of theaters was independent. (Trying to show an independent film at a nonindependent theater is usually fruitless, though as long as you call Miramax a distributor of independent films the problem vanishes, and Reagan’s decimation of independent theaters gets elided.)
“In the framework of film-cultural globalization two fake alternatives have evolved: the Miramax idea of U.S. ‘indies’ and the reduction of European and Asian cinemas to a few ‘masters’ who can transcend all national borders and dance in all markets (Kieslowski and Zhang Yimou might be two good examples [to which one might add Almodovar and Chen]). I am much more interested in filmmakers who speak in concrete words and voices, from a concrete place, about concrete places and characters. I like the image of the brothers Dardenne…standing somewhere in the middle of industrial Belgian suburbia, looking around and saying, ‘All these landscapes make up our language’ [which also might be said of Dumont standing somewhere in rural France]. Next to the filmmakers we’ve often discussed (like Ferrara, Assayas, Egoyan, Kiarostami, Wong Kar-wai, et al.) there are many more if lesser-known examples of such a kind of cinema. Their dialects are much too specific to fit into the global commerce of goods–in Austria: Wolfgang Murnberger (today), John Cook (in the 1970s); in Germany: Michael Klier, Helge Schneider. Or in Kazakhstan: Darezhan Omirbaev. And even in Hollywood: Albert Brooks.”
