Until The End Of The World
The Unofficial Wim Wenders
Fan Club
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Kublai Khan: “I do not know when you have had time to visit all
the countries you describe to me. It seems to me you have never moved
from this garden.”
Italo Calvino "Invisible
Cities"
Wim
Wender's film of 1991, Until The End Of The World, set in
1999 during a possible nuclear millenniel meltdown, explores many
connecting themes; identity, the nature of reality, the heroic
journey, as well as being a love story and having an extended
series of chases between the characters, pursuers and pursued
dogging and dodging each other throughout like pieces on a
chess-board. This enables the plot location to change rapidly, and one
is continually aware of the protagonists crossing geographical
boundaries, and changing identities.
Towards the end of the film, the hero’s father invents a machine
which can record one’s dreams and replay them. The female lead gets
so hooked on watching her dreams that her personal boundaries crash
around her as her waking and sleeping states merge and she starts
losing her mind. As she desires more and more to live only through her
dreams, her connection with her external reality disintegrates.
In order for some kind of dramatic resolution to occur, she must
be rescued from her obsession, which is in one sense an obsession with
herself, and in another, an obsession with her Self. It seems as if,
in one stroke, Wenders was reflecting on the human quest for psychic
integration, or individuation, and foreshadowing the downside of the
internet revolution.
The internet has moved the goalposts as well as removed the
boundaries behind which information was accessed. The word
“identity” has taken on a completely new meaning. Anyone can have
any number of virtual identities, and communicate globally in seconds.
Personal boundaries, defensible space, have become shielded by
computer monitors. One can surf, roam, swim, glide and fish without
getting up from the chair. We all know all this, so I won’t labour
the point.
What happens to the Wenders character is that she gets seduced by her
unconscious - what happens to most of us when we sit in front of our
own, admittedly more mundane but nevertheless incredibly
poweful, dream- machines is that we experience the boundary shift as a
simultaneous expression of intimacy with the rest of the world - and a barrier. Internet dreams are, at best, shallow reflections of
our desires. At worst they can become a retreat into madness.
The physical exchange of energy between consenting and unconsenting
beings fuels the survival of the species. The virtual exchange of
energy which soon will be a common daily experience for the greater
part of the developed world needs a new entry in the manual of
psychic exploration for the species to evolve.
Smiling crashes boundaries, but replaces the loss with an extension of
energy. So does shouting, Love and violence and the many states
between all deepen our humanity, and allow us to grow. The anonymous
exchange between an individual and her or his computer screen, a solid
object with a moving window to the world, depletes our real connection
to the rest of humanity, (the mind is present but the body is not),
whilst promising a greater source of knowledge and wisdom through
search engines. Engines have engineers and the knowledge engineers,
the magicians of our age, have constructed a world without boundaries, inside a box, which has
enabled people to make fortunes, fall in love, go shopping etc, and speeded up time.
In Wender's film, the woman has to choose between time as in Now or
time as in Forever. She yearns so much to be at one with her
unconscious, which is timeless, but has to be brought into awareness
of her state - to turn off the machine.
Our sense of what is possible in time, and with whom, has been altered
by the internet, and I only wonder what this is doing to our
unconscious, both personal and collective.How will it respond to the
constantly shifting boundary awareness which is not actually real? What gap is being filled by internet dreams and what new gap are they
creating? Is the internet becoming a modern metaphor for the
unconscious, a supposed short cut to the unfathomable? How will this
affect our relationships with one another? Will we continue to have
relationships? Why do people use chatrooms? Will the flowers one day
forget to bloom, or just not bother because no-one is looking.?
To quote again from Invisible Cities, written in 1972: “A voluptuous vibration constantly stirs.....If men and women
began to live their ephemeral dreams, every phantom would become a
person with whom to begin a story of pursuits, pretences, misunderstandings, clashes, oppressions, and the carousel of fantasies
would stop.”
P.S. If you find the internet/unconscious idea too far-fetched, and to
end on a positive note, the information age is already a symbol of
global consciousness, a "unity of all peoples", an
electronic representation of our interconnectedness, which parallels
a growth towards spiritual unity and the discoveries of quantum
physics and as such, it is a wonderful expression of new possibilities
- a lot of those boundaries out there need to be
destroyed. I hope we can tame the technology to further the creation
of a global community, never forgetting that the true value of
community lies in trust, which is dependent on our unique identities
being known and honoured and that we share our lives fully, not as
disembodied pseudonyms.
info@physikgarden.com
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