Operation Jane Walk

Operation Jane Walk by the Austrian collective Total Refusal takes the viewer on a virtual journey through a grim reflection of New York City created by the game developers of Tom Clancy’s The Division. In this popular online computer game, the Big Apple lies in ruins. The story is set in the near future, where the law of the jungle prevails on the streets. Armed militias roam the digital landscape of rubble and smoke, whilst abandoned cars on the avenues stand as silent witnesses to a terrible disaster or civil war.

Amidst all this, a heavily armed yet pacifist tour guide leads three tourists through this ancient city of yesteryear. With his serene, irony-free voice, Jacob Banigan is the ideal man for this excursion: an American city guide who comments on the post-apocalyptic urban landscape in a matter-of-fact manner. His reflections are always witty, but his morbid poetry also goes down well: he describes the incessant thudding of an ‘extra’ beating a body with the butt of his rifle as “a metronome” that sets “the rhythm of this dead city”.

Yet New York was once a wildly vibrant city, as is evident from the carefully mapped-out route along which the guide leads us. As he takes us through key architectural landmarks (the UN Headquarters, Trump Tower), he outlines the history of a city in full bloom, always framed by the social aspirations and ways of thinking of the time. During a visit to the desolate motorway, he describes the ideological tug-of-war between urban planner Robert Moses, who transformed the city into a sanctuary for motorists, and activist Jane Jacobs, who advocated for a city with plenty of green spaces and room for its residents. We see the climax of this struggle reflected in a pickup truck that has crashed into a bike-share docking station.

In doing so, Müllner and Klengel not only offer a slice of urban-planning history, but also cleverly place the virtual alongside the historical. The physical world gives way to a new city built from digital fragments. By setting the tour in a hyper-realistic simulacrum of a future New York, the filmmakers also reflect on the changing role of these virtual playgrounds. The deliberate absence of spectacle—when hostile players attack the group of tourists, the scene cuts away—points to Müllner and Klengel’s belief that the copy holds as many meanings and possibilities as the original.