I never thought I would find a Fassbinder film that I absolutely hate.
_World on a Wire_ is one of Fassbinder's few output with a rich, upper management-level protagonist, and it is virtually unwatchable.
(Another with an entrepreneur protaonist is _Despair_, which, come
to think of it, is pretty awful too.) The 4-hour long TV miniseries
burrow into a paranoid conspiracy worldview that the characters are
electronic simulations inside a computer -- even as they themselves
conduct simulations of quasi-human subjects inside their own computers.
The burrowing gets slower, more obvious, more ludicrous, and yields ever smaller returns, as it goes on. The main silver lining is a character
played by Mascha Rabben, who quits acting almost immediately afterwards,
and turns to writing about UFO abductees. Fill in your own punchline.

The miniseries was made in 1973, sandwiched between _The Bitter Tears
of Petra von Kant_ and _Ali: Fear Eats the Soul_ in his oeurve. It
shows just how much variation there is in the quality of his output.
I have seen only a few of his made-for-tv features, and I wonder
how much I'm really missing.

The idea is adapted into an American film, _The Thirteenth Floor_,
which is shorter and marginally more watchable (at least that's
my recollection). The virtual reality premise now seems hopelessly
dated. _World on a Wire_ is however very timely in an unenviable
way: it is almost a walking catalogue of sexual harassment techniques.
The protagonist Fred Stiller, a director of a computer research
institute, sleeps with all his secretaries, meets them in bathrobes
and underwear, gropes and punches his coworkers ... and all the
women find him irresistable! Industrial training folks will be
thrilled.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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