| 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 |