“The materialists
say that ‘Thought is conditioned by Being,’ and not ‘Being is conditioned by
Thought,’ and that Being - with its basis in itself – is conditioned by itself.
…But it forgets that without thought, Being is No-Being. Being comes into Being
only when it becomes conscious of itself. As long as God is content with
himself, he is non-existent. He must be awakened to something that is not
himself when he is God. God is God when God is not God, yet what is not God
must be in himself too. And this – what is not himself – is his own thought or
consciousness. With this consciousness he departs from himself and at the same
time returns to himself. You cannot say that thought is conditioned by being,
and that Being has its basis in itself. You must say that Being is Being
because of Thought, which is to say, that Being is Being because Being is not
Being.”
"The world starts only when there is a mind that appreciates, a mind critically aware of itself." -Daistez T. Suzuki
At the end of part one (literally
the last seconds), Fred Stiller is made privy to what a modern audience has likely
suspected since Günther Lause’s split-second disappearance and certainly since
Stiller’s drive to where “the road wasn't finished”; that Stiller’s world is a
simulation. This means that Simulacron-3 is actually a sub-basement of reality,
and furthermore that a dimension exists above Stiller’s world. What isn’t clear
is precisely how many worlds are wrapped around one another (at the least,
three), who is “real” and who is not (who is a Contact and who is merely an
identity unit), and whether there is a way to escape the nowhere Stiller finds
himself occupying; a nowhere more literally no-where than any other film in the
Occupy catalogue for its “existing” in the digital abstract. Ironically though,
Michael Ballhaus’ (The Departed, Quiz Show) cinematography has been asserting
the notion of space, surface, dimension, and geometry with every sleek, gliding
shot the whole film long.
Stiller’s persistent investigation
along the hypothesis of corporate conspiracy, which stems from Vollmer’s death
and Lause’s disappearance, takes on the concern of his world’s falsehood in
Part Two. Stiller goes through a full course of emotional states, much like a
grieving process as he negotiates a changing perception of reality, addled by a
reality that keeps rearranging itself,
and shaken by the question of personhood as he may in fact be just an identity
unit. Is this not the same dismay or deflation one might feel about the notion
of intelligent design, perceived as an existential challenge against ones own
autonomy and agency rather than an infusion of purpose? Stiller’s ultimate insistence
of his corporeality and intentionality splinters the preconception that
personhood is an exclusively biological event.
World on a Wire questions
where imitation ends and authenticity begins and posits a common science
fiction bent that “something like human consciousness” could aspire to “become
consciousness.” Thus, as Buddhist
scholar Daisetz Suzuki discusses in the opening quotation, Consciousness and
Being qualify one another. Suzuki proposes that only through Thought – what he
considers necessarily external to the individual’s autopilot existence - does
Being quantify into Being (in the full sense of someone able to contemplate
their own existence). Stiller rises from like-consciousness (or rather the
no-consciousness of complacency) to consciousness by negation. He ideologically
negates his inclusion in a reality determined to be a simulation. Thus he is
able to differentiate his intent (conscious decision and opinion) from his
action (his basic functions as an identity unit). Though yet to be proved as
more than a computer program, Stiller is able to actualize and appraise his own
Being-ness by verging against the medium in which he floats. In the language of
Suzuki, Stiller is Stiller because Stiller is not Stiller, meaning that he comes
into Being not when he is passively told he is no-being (an identity unit) by
his mind-hacked coworker, but when he has proved it actively by unraveling the
perceptual veil which aims to perplex him into subjugation.
Suzuki remarks of Zen that, “When
we say that we live by Zen” …rather
than simply living zen, which all life supposedly does passively…“this means
that we become conscious of the fact,” and therefore active. Relational to Wire, it is Stiller’s achievement of “thought,” that brings him to
a critically self-aware state, able to assess, dissect, and contradict
Simulacron by degrees. Even though he verges against the virtual system of
which he is a part, it is through that painful effort of consciousness (reflected
in his dizzy spells and migraine) that Stiller, who merely lived simulacron, comes to live
by simulacron, in a sense.
From that attainment of differentiation,
Stiller is able to endeavor towards a kind of transcendence of nowhere, or at
least is able to want and to fight for it. It is only with the aid of the much
sought-after Contact from the real world - inhabiting Stiller’s world as
Professor Vollmer’s daughter Elena Vollmer, who falls in love with Stiller,
reveals that there is a less than desirable “real Stiller” and switches their
minds at the moment the virtual Stiller is killed – is he able to bring his
practice of negation to completion. Ascended finally to what is presumably the
real world, and into corporeal Being, Stiller is as giddy as Ebenezer Scrooge
on Christmas morning, elated about his Being and fully aware of it. Juxtaposed
against the bullet-riddled Stiller on the roof of a car, he and Elena hold each
other, roll on the floor, kiss, and laugh; which, though starkly opposed to one
another, are the first moments of the entire film which feel….real. 
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