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).

Discussed in Sylvie Magerstädt's Body, Soul and Cyberspace in Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema, which see at link.

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