The Slipstream of Mixed Reality: Unstable Ontologies and Semiotic Markers in the Thirteenth Floor, Dark City, and Mulholland Drive

1 The Slipstream of Mixed Reality: Unstable Ontologies and Semiotic Markers in The Thirteenth Floor, Dark City, and Mulholland Drive N. Katherine Hayles Department of English and Design/Media Arts Nicholas Gessler Department of Geography and Design/Media Arts University of California, Los Angeles “slipstream fiction,” works that occupy a A decade ago, a popular borderland between mainstream and construction of virtual reality saw it as a science fiction because they achieve a realm separate from real life, a science fictional feeling without the perception reinforced by cumbersome usual defamiliarizing devices.1 Polhemus helmets that entirely encased He the user’s head. That view has writes, “the heart of slipstream is an dramatically changed with recent attitude of peculiar aggression against technological developments such as ‘reality.’ These are fantasies of a kind, enhanced reality glasses that overlay but not fantasies which are ‘futuristic or simulations onto real landscapes, ‘beyond the fields we know.’ These embedded sensors, and wearable books tend to sarcastically tear at the computers. Now the buzz is about structure of ‘everyday life’” (n. p.). “mixed reality,” the promiscuous Remarking on this trend, Joan Gordon mingling of computationally-intensive and Veronica Hollinger in Edging into simulations with input from the real the Future: Science Fiction and world. As Simon Penny has remarked, Contemporary Cultural Transformation “Our children will not call [this observe that works set in the present are technology] virtual reality. They will becoming increasingly important in call it reality.” Similar trends have contemporary science fiction; “the marked the development of certain challenge for science fiction today is less strands of contemporary science fiction. to extrapolate a far future than to keep Darko Suvin’s famous characterization up with a permanently mutable present” of science fiction as “cognitive (2). They hypothesize that as the pace of estrangement” has traditionally been technological change accelerates, we associated with fictions that use perceive ourselves as already living in a extraterrestrial settings, futuristic science fiction world. As a result, technologies, alien creatures, and other conventional distinctions between strategies to defamiliarize the fictional science fiction and ordinary reality become increasingly difficult to world and create works clearly different 2 than mainstream fiction (3-15). By articulate and maintain. contrast, the last few years have seen the These developments set the stage emergence of what Bruce Sterling calls for narratives, including novels and 2 films, that have staked out a territory we construction? The questions intensify call the slipstream of mixed reality. In when the markers separating simulation mixed realities ontological and from reality are deconstructed as the film epistemological issues tend to be progresses. If mixed realities are foregrounded, for the represented worlds difficult to disentangle, can any level often cannot be assigned unambiguously claim ontological priority over another? either to science fiction or ordinary At once unsettling normal reality and reality. To investigate the dynamics of normalizing simulated reality, The the slipstream of mixed reality we will Thirteenth Floor occupies a middle explore three recent films that range position in the slipstream of mixed along a spectrum of possibilities.3 In reality. The Thirteenth Floor the limits of By contrast, Dark City falls on present technology are stretched to the science fiction end of the spectrum. imagine a computational simulated Its version of a simulated world emerges world in which “self-learning cyber from a distinction between implanted beings” become virtually artificial memories and staged indistinguishable from real-life humans. environments on the one hand, and on The humans who create the technology the other an ineradicable core of can download their consciousness into personality that retains its identity the simulation, temporarily displacing independent of these manipulations. the simulant’s consciousness and Again murder enters the narrative as the occupying his body. As the boundaries acid test opening the seams between separating the simulated and real worlds realities. When John Murdoch (Rufus become increasingly permeable, violent Sewell) wakens and disrupts the ruptures occur as borders are discovered, implantation of the memories that will leading to assaults and murder. construct him as a killer, he embarks on That all three films initially a journey of discovery that will pit him present themselves as murder mysteries against The Strangers, aliens who is not a coincidence. Plots tend control the Dark City through “tuning,” deathward, as characters in Don their telepathic communication with DeLillo’s novels frequently assert, machines that nightly alter the because death (the inevitable result of citysppace according to their being alive) bestows consequentiality on experimental plans. The purpose, their events. Murders real and attempted minion Dr. Daniel Schreber (Kiefer occur in these three films but they prove Sutherland) explains to Murdoch, is to to be misdirections, feints calculated to discover what makes human beings conceal more disturbing truths different from them, which Schreber underneath. The Thirteenth Floor identifies as “our capacity for exemplifies the pattern, problematizing individuality, our souls.” Unable to death’s ultimate finality and displacing remember anything before his abduction its centrality with deeper ontological into the Dark City, Schreber, like all the concerns. How seriously should one imprisoned humans, must take on faith take bodily harm when the entity that there remains a core identity within. occupying the body is a temporary When Murdoch discovers that he has visitor? How serious is death when the undergone a mutation that bestows on entity in question is a computational him the alien capacity to “tune,” he 3 occupies a liminal status that restores the modified by the recognition that the human and liberates the city but at the film’s idiosyncrasies are themselves cost of becoming part alien himself. located in a broader cultural context that Like The Thirteenth Floor, this has been moving toward the slipstream ambiguous ending is able to recuperate a of mixed reality. In the slipstream, stable ontology only by fundamentally simulation and real life, science fiction changing the nature of that which has and everyday reality, merge to form an been recuperated. ontologically unstable amalgam that is, At the “ordinary” reality end of these films suggest, finally the only the spectrum is Mullholland Drive, reality we can call our own. which unlike the other two films does Leakage and Liminality in The not rely on science fiction tropes or Thirteenth Floor technological interventions to unsettle The slipstream of mixed reality is ontological security. Rather, its mixed visually suggested by the simulator’s reality effect comes from narrative portal, portrayed as a laser-like layer of sequencing that renders problematic the green light rays covering Douglas Hall distinctions between reality, dream, (Craig Bierko) as he prepares for the hallucination, and flashback. In contrast transfer into the simulated 1937 world. to other films that represent dream Emerging from his first visit in which he sequences after the viewer has been dangerously pushes his immersion time introduced to normative reality, thus to the limit, he jerks his head upward allowing a clear distinction to be made while his body is still under the rays, a between the real and unreal, Mulholland vivid enactment of a borderland in which Drive gives only the briefest initial clear-cut distinctions between real and glimpses of quotidian reality in contexts simulated worlds blur as the two realms that make understanding them as such begin to leak into one another. The almost impossible on a first viewing. cyberbeings in the simulated world are Rather, Mulholland Drive situates the haunted by the experiences their users establishing scenes in a “reality” that is have while downloaded into the already a dream. This narrative strategy simulation. The simulant’s was sufficiently opaque to confuse consciousness is put on hold while the reviewers when the film first opened so user’s consciousness takes over the that it was widely misinterpreted as a simulated body, and the user’s dream throughout.4 Careful study experiences manifest themselves to the reveals, however, that the film is stimulant as almost-memories they constructed according to an idiosyncratic interpret as déjà vu. As the memories but nevertheless coherent semiotic of intensify, they function more like reality markers that the viewer can learn hauntings. Grierson (Armin Mueller- only by watching the film. Mary Stahl), the sedate sixtyish antique dealer Sweeney observes in the documentary in the simulated 1937 world who has The Art of David Lynch that Lynch does been modeled on his creator Hannon not create his films by watching other Fuller, begins to recall with shame the films but by projecting into exteriorized amorous adventures in which Fuller form his internal landscapes. This indulged when he displaced Grierson’s insightful comment illuminates the consciousness and occupied his body to film’s signifying strategies; it should be have sex with young women. 4 Retrospectively, these hauntings user who occupies his body. When he is function as clues to the film’s central threatened

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