The Unofficial Wim Wenders Fan Club

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. 

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