The Thirteenth Floor
VR Porn leads to an old man’s death, since his climax led to clarity about the system of the world. World on a Wireless Headset.
“Our generation’s Einstein” invents some sort of VR MMO, simulating the cool parts of the 1930’s. This took years, but it is done, it really works. As a test, the old fart jacks in, throws some money around, and gets jacked off by a cigarette girl. When returning to the real world he goes to a dive bar, finds a tall dark stranger, and this time he is the one being penetrated, in this case by a switchblade.
The second in command wakes up from amnesia, and has to put the pieces back together, both in the real world and in the simulation. He’s helped by his boss’s daughter, which apparently exists.
After plenty of noir adventures, not only some simulated subjects are becoming self-aware, he himself is part of another superior simulation! Nobody expects the recursive simulation. There are apparently ways to move up and down this stack, by killing people, but the rules are driven by the plot.
This is a modest film released a couple of months after The Matrix, so it’s all but forgotten now, like Dark City. All three are special in their own way.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.