THE THIRTEENTH FLOOR

THE THIRTEENTH FLOOR (vt THE 13TH FLOOR). Josef Rusnak, dir., script (based on adaptation by Ravel Centano-Rodriquez). USA/Germany: Centropolis Film Productions (prod.) / Columbia (dist. and "author" for legal purposes), 1999. Credited source: Daniel F. Galouye's Simulacron-3 (New York: Bantam, 1964). Craig Bierko, Gretchen Moll, Dennis Haysbert, Vincent D'Onofrio, and Armin Mueller-Stahl, featured players.

Epigraph to film is R. Descartes's "I think, therefore I am"; more directly relevant would be the Daoist story of how the philosopher Chuang Tzu dreamt he was a butterfly and awoke to think that he might really be a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Tzu. See 13th FLOOR for conceit of our world (or at least scientists in Los Angeles) developing a VR parallel universe, while in fact, in the film, we are a VR universe of simulacra. Note also people in these VR universes being «possessed» by people from a «higher» or more real reality—and the image during personality transference from our world of the superimposition of a laser-light pattern on a person lying, shoes off (for some reason) among banks of supercomputers. Production interview with dir. by Chuck Wagner in Cinefantastique 31.6 (June 1999): [18]-19. According to one caption, "The film explores the possibility of computer-simulated universes, where people only believe they are real," in this case with a plot "concerning a murder mystery which becomes embroiled in the machinations of a parallel universe contained in computers. The parallel universe is set in 1937" and the VR experience there is said to be "somewhat like playing a kill-thrill video game where . . . you forget about everything around you and start to become the character . . ." (19). Earlier pre-release publicity and stills in Chuck Wagner's "The 13th Floor," Cinefantastique 31.4 (April 1999): [10]-11. Cinefantastique coverage notes intermediate source for film as R. W. Fassbinder's Welt am Draht (see also the nearly simultaneously released MATRIX). Note S. Lem's stories "The Experiment . . ." and "The Seventh Sally," and C. M. Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl's Wolfbane (q.v. under Fiction).

5. DRAMA, RDE, 12/V/99, 4/VI/99