The Thirteenth Floor (1999) | Sci-Fi Saturdays

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Thirteenth Floor. Computer systems, simulated realities, existential crises. Going down.

The Thirteenth Floor is often compared to more popular films of its year about simulated realities. But its main thesis is simpler than those: it deals explicitly with the makeup of reality, offering a Twilight Zone-esque take on what is real, and what is an illusion.

First Impressions

Shades of The Matrix! The trailer seems to show scientists creating a computer simulated world based on events from 1937. But the danger seems to come from overuse of the simulation. Apparently the more the program is used, the more real the people in the world become. Plus the programmer’s discover that they may be living in a simulated world as well. What other strange happenings occur on The Thirteenth Floor?

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

The Fiction of The Film

Harmon Fuller (Armin Mueller-Stahl) exits a computer simulation of Los Angeles in 1937, having given a bartender a letter for his friend Douglas Hall (Craig Bierko). In the present day (1999) he is murdered by an unknown assailant. Hall, who runs the company with Fuller, is questioned by LAPD detective McBain (Dennis Haysbert), who believes that Hall is guilty. Hall is surprised to meet Jane Fuller (Gretchen Mol), a daughter to his partner that he was unaware of. She looks familiar to him, but he can’t place her.

Jane has come to shut down the company but her father changed his will before he was killed. The programmer of the simulation, Jason Whitney (Vincent D’Onofrio) explains how everything works to McBain as the investigation continues. Hall, convinced that something is wrong, enters the system against Whitney’s protestations. Fuller should not have been in the simulation the programmer says, and staying in longer than 60 minutes could be dangerous.

Hall enters the simulation, taking over his counterpart John Ferguson. He meets with Fuller’s doppelganger, Grierson, who has no memory of any time when Fuller entered the system. The bartender, Jerry Ashton–a doppelganger for Whitney, denies having any note from Fuller. Ashton eventually confesses to having read the strange note, directing him to “the ends of the Earth” which has evidently shaken the man.

Ashton attempts to kill Hall (whom he perceives as Ferguson) but Whitney pulls him out of the simulation in time. McBain returns to let Hall know that he was right when he said that Fuller didn’t have a daughter. Hall discovers a check-out girl at a local grocery store named Natasha that is the spitting image of Jane. He then begins to doubt his own reality. Hall realizes the note left in the simulation was meant for him, so he drives to somewhere he would never go, and sees the edge of the simulation he lives in; a computer wireframe continuation of reality.

Jane takes control of Natasha’s body from some higher plane, and explains to Hall that his world is one of many simulated realities. But this one is unique in it is the only simulated world that has created a simulated world within it. Jane explains that her husband David, who looks like Hall, was corrupted by visiting this reality (in Hall’s body). He thought he was a God, doing what he wanted to. David ended up killing Fuller, via Hall’s body.

Whitney decides to jack into the 1937 simulation to see what is going on. He is accidentally killed within the simulation and his doppelganger Ashton is able to return to the body in 1999. Hall realizes that this is not his friend and as he’s trying to figure out how to escape from this madman David takes control again and kills Ashton/Whitney. The man who would be God goes after Jane but McBain kills him. With the death of Hall’s body, possessed by David, Hall awakens in 2024 meeting the real Jane, and her father (whom Fuller was modeled after). The last scene is Hall and Jane looking into the sunset of a beautiful world when the image “turns off,” as one would with a vintage television set or monitor.

“These people are real. They are as real as you and me.” – Douglas Hall

History in the Making

The Thirteenth Floor is one of those films that appears to be a rip-off of another recent popular film. It comes from a long line of summer releases as studios try to capitalize on the popularity of (and perhaps confusion with) another more popular film. DeepStar Six and Leviathan both were released around the time of The Abyss. Volcano tried to capitalize on Dante’s Peak. Deep Impact attempted an early release to get a jump on Armageddon. Released two months after The Matrix (and a month after another similar story eXistenZ) The Thirteenth Floor tells a similar story about a computer generated reality, but doesn’t come off as slick or as interesting as its more famous sibling. In fact, you may not even have heard of this film.

The film is actually an entirely different story from The Matrix, even though they both deal with philosophical notions and simulated realities. Rather than an adventure story of slaves to a rogue artificial intelligence–who happen to be living in an artificial world, The Thirteenth Floor deals more with the nature of our reality and the way humans perceive what is real. The biggest difference from The Matrix is that when Doug Hall “jacks in” to the 1937 world, he does not become a digital representation of his self. Instead the characters take over or hijack a pre-existing character in that reality. The 1937 simulation contains a finite number of individuals, which the programmers “overwrite” with themselves.

But what of the title of the film? Why is this called The Thirteenth Floor? Given that the film is about a simulated 1937 within a simulated 1999 reality, and the characters of both worlds are ignorant of their realities, it’s obviously referring to a place that doesn’t exist. With rare exception, buildings do not contain floors labeled as 13, due to superstitions surrounding the unluckiness of the number. Of course, the fourteenth floor is actually the 13th floor, but labeling it as such was considered unlucky. So given that the offices of the computer project are located in this “non-existent” floor, it offers an early clue as to the nature of the film’s reality. It both indicates that the 1937 simulation does not exist, as well as poking a hole in the reality of the events in 1999 as well.

Genre-fication

If audiences were asked to talk about a simulated reality film from 1999 that contained philosophical overtones, a vast majority would cite The Matrix as that film. It’s a no-brainer, since that film has endured and created a franchise for itself, while The Thirteenth Floor has been relegated to virtual obscurity. It does seem like a watered down version of the other film. However it does not get into the same level of existential questioning that The Matrix does, instead deciding to be more of a noir-inspired detective story.

The Thirteenth Floor is based upon a 1964 book by Daniel F. Galouye, called Simulacron-3. This sci-fi novel is very similar in an overall way to the film. It has characters with the same names, each with their own consciousness, who all live in a simulated world that they are unaware of. The novel is often credited as the first modern ideal of a virtual reality. It was previously adapted into a German telefilm in 1973 called World on a Wire which bears similar ideas as the film, even though it was created 25 years previous. So in a way, the creation of The Thirteenth Floor was derived from the same material that inspired The Matrix and other similar stories. But instead of a cyberpunk vibe, like The Matrix and Johnny Mnemonic, it has a neo-noir aesthetic.

While many modern noir films try to hide their inspirations, The Thirteenth Floor is a little less coy. It leans heavily into the noir aesthetic with detective investigations, smokey nightclubs, femme fatales, and a moody world. In fact McBain is right out of a Dashiell Hammett novel. He’s a cigarette smoking, fedora wearing detective that even utters the clichéd line, “never trust a beautiful woman.” And like any good noir film there are mysterious killings and mysteries within mysteries. But here, the protagonist gets the girl and lives a happy ending–at least it seems that way. The final imagery which looks like an older television set being turned off adds a final question: is this 2024 reality yet another simulation?

Societal Commentary

The film opens with the most famous quote from the French philosopher René Descartes, “I think, therefore I am,” or “Cogito, ergo sum.” This was Descartes’ belief that his five senses could deceive him about what was real, but that the idea that he had a consciousness in which to think, and doubt, is what proved he was real and existed. The Thirteenth Floor toys with that notion by creating characters in what is presented as “the real world” (aka 1999) which have consciousness and can think for themselves, but end up being simulations themselves. Descartes probably had no inkling of the sort of stories mankind would create in order to explain their existence, but probably had heard of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.

As discussed in the article on The Matrix, the Allegory of the Cave deals with rudimentary philosophical notions of reality. In that story Plato relates a notion about men chained to the wall of a cave that experience reality by observing the shadows on the wall of the cave. From their perspective, these shadows represent reality. But to the outside observer, the shadows are only muddy versions of the true reality which exists outside, or in a higher plane. Substitute the various simulations for the wall of the cave, and you have the story presented here. Except that The Thirteenth Floor takes this to another level by having “the reality” outside the cave be another series of shadows in a larger cave.

One other question that the film provokes is what happens to the people in the simulation that are displaced? John Ferguson (the 1937 version of Douglas Hall) exists in his reality doing the daily things that he does. When Hall “jacks in” to that reality, he takes over Ferguson’s body, supplanting that mind with his own. What becomes of Ferguson? The audience learns that the displaced person has no memory of the events, but perceives ideas about what may have happened; much like a nightmare that fades upon waking. It’s a similar context to the 1980s television show Quantum Leap, when Sam Beckett leaps into the life of a person. That individual’s consciousness is placed into a waiting room where they lose the notion of self–physically having been displaced from their body.

The Science in The Fiction

The displacement of the individual’s Ego creates a way for the filmmakers to explain natural phenomena that is not understood, primarily deja vu. Much like in The Matrix, where the idea of deja vu was a glitch in the Matrix (the machines rewriting code on the fly), the deja vu experienced by Hall and Grierson have to do with their bodies having met with other characters while under control of the individuals from the “higher world.” When Hall first meets Jane he feels like he knows her. This is due to Hall having been “possessed” by David, Jane’s husband, and having met her while under his influence. The same thing occurred to Grierson, while under the influence of Fuller. What an interesting way to explain a weird trick of the mind.

The Final Frontier

One of The Thirteenth Floor’s producers was Roland Emmerich, which is an interesting switch for this director known for films like Universal Soldier, Stargate, and Independence Day. He is German born, and as such was probably drawn to the material based on the German telefilm discussed above. The director, Josef Rusnak, is also German, and worked as a 2nd Unit Director on Emmerich’s Godzilla remake in the previous year. He directed a few other films including a remake of 1974 horror film It’s Alive, but nothing as notable as this film, especially in the sci-fi arena.

This film does not wow audiences in the same way as other films in the VR genre. It doesn’t have the same glitz and star power as The Matrix, or the vision of David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ. But it does ask certain fundamental questions about reality that plague human beings. It has some fun performances, especially by D’Onofrio, who had a reputation as an unstable bad guy (Full Metal Jacket, Men in Black, Strange Days). Audiences that know his work immediately assume his character is the killer, and while he does get to become a man that attempts homicide, he acts as more of a red herring. The Thirteenth Floor might have been better served if it came out a few years earlier than it did. The comparison to other works, and its simplistic outlook–at least in comparison to other sci-fi films of the late 90s–makes it a weak entry. However it’s still an interesting film to watch for fans of murder mysteries. It also may make viewers question their own reality, if even for just a moment. In which case, it transcends a virtual reality on screen, and affects the real world.

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