In 1986’s America, Jean Baudrillard described the desert as possessing a dual valency in contemporary American culture. On the one hand, Baudrillard argued, the desert operated as a symbolic reservoir of the real – a reminder of the materiality and facticity of the world before it has been operated on by media representation. Yet this very status, Baudrillard posited, also made the desert an unrivalled resource for hyperreal appropriation, a blank canvas whose connotations of the real were more conducive to mediation than any other space on the continent. In 1999’s Limbo, John Sayles takes that proposition and applies it to a very different kind of desert, or desert-adjacent zone: coastal Alaska. Opening with an antiquated tourist film that celebrates Alaska’s “countless islands and passageways” and pays homage to “the relentless and mysterious salmon,” Sayles’ screenplay moves with the scope and ambition of a great novel to dramatise Alaska as the Last Frontier in the showdown between the real and the hyperreal animating late twentieth century America.

Sayles establishes the coordinates of this showdown in the opening scene of the film, a wedding celebration in the small coastal town of Port Henry, a cipher for Juneau, that becomes a point of divergence for two types of labour. Here, we are introduced to the three main characters, all of whom are performing subsistence labour – Joe Gastineau (David Straithairn) is a handyman who we meet working around the fringes of the celebration; Donna De Angelo (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) is a torch singer who is providing the live music for the happy couple; and Donna’s daughter Noelle (Vanessa Martinez) is waiting tables. As the narrative unfolds, and Joe and Donna form a relationship, we learn that each of these characters have left the prospect of social mobility deep in their pasts. Joe used to be a fisherman but has long since abandoned the water, Donna almost made it as a singer only to fade into obscurity, and despite being the youngest, Noelle yearns for an even deeper and more mythic past, a past that possibly never was, in her idealisation of her father, who she hasn’t seen for many years, and barely even remembers in a distinct way.

However, there is another form of labour on display at the wedding, personified by Ricky, a local booster played by Herminio Ramos, who uses the event to promote Alaska as a “land of opportunity.” Ricky represents the point of transition from the traditional Alaskan industries of pulp mill and salmon canning to a new regime based on reducing this heritage to tourist-friendly simulacra. “History is our future here,” he asserts in front of a wedding cake in the shape of a giant cruise ship, before he demands that a local timber merchant refrain from felling forest on the shoreline, not from a sense of environmental custodianship, but because it will compromise the view from these cruise ships, packed with the Floridians that become the subject of Sayles’ next film, Sunshine State: “We do not show them deforested hillsides and logging equipment.” Ricky seeks a world of pure spectacle, capable of compressing and flattening the time and space between Alaska and Florida, a world in which images surpass reality: “not bigger and better facsimiles of nature, but nature itself – think of Alaska as one big theme park.” Ricky argues that the rearguard of canners and fishermen would do well to pay heed to “Mr. Disney’s innovation,” which was to put his “carnival ride attractions into a story context, where you can imagine yourself as a character” and asks them to reimagine Alaska as a sequence of “themes,” such as “Lumberland” and “Kingdom of the Salmon,” in which they can perform these “characters.”

In this way, Sayles imagines Alaska as a final convergence of and frontier between the real and hyperreal, so it feels appropriate that Limbo was also Haskell Wexler’s penultimate film as cinematographer (his last would be another Sayles film, 2004’s Silver City). Wexler’s 1969 film Medium Cool was a McLuhanesque manifesto about the ways that media were eclipsing reality in American culture and took the form of a mockumentary in which the audience followed a documentary film maker as the threshold between reality and spectacle started to break down around the peak of the post-war counterculture. What was the province of an evil television network in Wexler’s film has been both decentralised and normalised by the time we arrive at Sayles’ vision, which unfolds amidst an entire economy that revolves around the circulation of images. The central moment of Medium Cool occurs when an actual teargas cannister lands near the crew during the riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, as the now iconic warning cry “Look out Haskell, it’s real!” obliterates the cusp between film and world and transforms Wexler’s vision back into straight documentary despite itself. Yet that collapse has become routine in Limbo, as we see in the trails of tourists who eerily enter the film at the most incongruous and intimate moments. On the night after the salmon plant shuts down for good, the former employees are commiserating in a Port Henry bar when one of these tourist trails weaves amongst them, headed by a guide who loudly rattles off “quirky” and “local” trivia: “This painting documents the only recorded bout between a domesticated wolf and a black bear.”

The medium cool media of Wexler’s film have thus become much colder in Sayles’ Alaska, requiring rigorous participation from both spectators and performers to keep the spectacle alive. Sayles thereby provides an early iteration of what we now call the precariat – a limbo in which everyone is “sort of” working but nobody is really staying afloat. Over the first half of the film, water becomes a cipher for the lost future of traditional work, starting with a lyrical montage sequence of the salmon factory employees washing down their machinery at the end of their last shift, proud in the meticulous dignity of their labour to the last. Joe hasn’t been on the water since a few friends died on his watch and worries to Noelle that even the slightest shift in environmental factors can cause salmon to migrate to a different patch of water. In another subplot, Frankie (Kathryn Grody) and Lou (Rita Taggart), a couple who have made the seachange from the city, take a fishing boat from local trawler Harmon King (Leo Burmester) as collateral, and when he can’t make good on the payment, they are forced to keep the boat, even though they don’t know how to use it and he can’t conceive of himself without it. Frankie, Lou and Harmon’s subplot sets up a recurring image in the film – people gazing plaintively or defiantly from the shore to the water, or from the water back to the shore, as when Harmon sets up a rowboat outside Frankie and Lou’s place and abrasively blasts country music to ruin their water view. It feels right that Frankie and Lou, as newcomers, squabble about the difference between the word “boat” and “ship,” since undercutting all these precarious visions of the Alaska sounds is the transformation of the waterway from a nurtured fishing resource to a conduit for cruise-centred spectacles.

Throughout all these interweaving plots, Sayles demonstrates a mastery for the tender and the lyrical. In one beautiful sequence, Joe’s first haul after tentatively returning to the water is intercut with Donna performing a plangent song at the local bar; at other times, Sayles scripts poignant conversational moments when this emerging couple evoke the whole texture of their past, the trail of their former relationships, the mood of their life at specific moments in time, in just a few words, a turn of the head, a slight inflection, with a self-deprecating and melancholy acceptance of the different experiences that accrete to form a life. In other words, Sayles’ directorial style is an object lesson in how to evoke the dignity of this world and its labour without instantly transforming it into a theme park. There’s also an indie resistance to easy emotion on display here, notable in Sayles’ soft fades to black at unexpected moments, as if to make you reconsider how scenes resonate in retrospect.

This lyrical drama between the real and hyperreal converge midway through the film in the form of Bobby Gastineau, Joe’s half-brother, played by Casey Siemaszko. Unlike Joe, Bobby has a firm foothold in the world of Alaska spectacle, working as a charter pilot for media groups who are keen to invest in the wilderness aesthetic, from National Geographic to Hollywood real estate moguls. We learn that Joe and Bobby shared a violent father but also that Joe has managed to turn him into a “character” with which to enchant his clients: “the old salt, the old prospector.” Bobby gets in touch with Joe because he needs him to play a role in this performance of self, asking him to be the captain for his next trip north so he can play the part of admiral for a particularly important suite of clients, and while he may be a little surprised when Joe brings along Donna and Noelle, he’s happy for them to go along with the part, since a larger crew can only look more impressive for his potential investors.

The third act of the film now unfolds as an intensely melancholy and ambivalent meditation on the prospect of recovering the real from the hyperreal. On the one hand, this water journey feels like a tentative return to the real, and Joe certainly sees it this way, describing both his fishing and Donna’s singing as an affirmation of “the thing itself…everything else is second hand.” Sayles somewhat shifts the style of the film too, bringing in uplifting music for the first time and immersing us in the first really rousing scenes on the water after so many shots of people gazing at it (or from it) with longing. Finally, after so many years, Joe is back on the water, and Donna is overcoming her fear of the water (an earlier plot point), so it’s hard not feel that we’re experiencing a line of flight from the precarity of the town, especially because Sayles also chooses this point to introduce his first flying shots, sweeping panoramic perspectives that revel in the beauty and sublimity of Alaska from the air. Yet there’s something in the style of Sayles’ flyovers that recalls the promotional boosterism of the new Alaska, not least because of how uncannily they anticipate the aerial shots of Christopher Nolan’s Insomnia, which presents a considerably more exoticised version of the state. And of course, everyone on Bobby’s boat is playing a role, much as Bobby deliberately chooses the “scenic route,” which lengths the journey considerably, mapping out the topographical coordinates that he’s planning to harvest and market to these new clients.

This brings us to the most profound limbo the drives the film – does this third act truly represents the return of the real or the emergence of a more mercurial hyperreal? It’s a question that only intensifies when Bobby confesses to Joe that he has become a marijuana smuggler, that he dumped a load overboard when he was spooked by water police, and that he is now meeting with the dealers to account for why he wasted their produce; these are the “clients” waiting at the end of the trip. No sooner has Bobby confessed this than a couple of the dealers hijack the boat and murder him, forcing Joe, Donna and Noelle to swim to an island, gunfire rattling over their heads, and contend with the elements. From one perspective, this is reality at its rawest, as the trio are forced to remain alert in case the dealers return to finish them off, find a way to subsist on the island without any supplies, and contend with the fact that nobody back in Port Henry has any idea where they are. Yet this shift to both the crime and survival genres also feels like part of the hyperreal process, as if the characters are inhabiting one of the booster’s “themes” (“survival in the wilderness”) with the assassins, whose faces we never see, playing the role of supporting “characters.” Accordingly, Sayles’ lighting becomes more stylised and attuned to genre, suffused with deep greens and blues that anticipate the tropes of survival reality television: the shortness of the night, shedding clothes to dry, huddling together to remain warm, the exotic primitivism of regular Americans forced to contend with the “reality” of the wilderness; indeed, Donna notes that “people pay money to come on trips like this.”

In the first few scenes on the island, Joe, Donna and Noelle almost appear to have shifted to one of the alternative realities that cropped up on the cusp of millennium in films like The Matrix, eXistenZ and The Truman Show – films that ends with characters only appearing to have returned to the real as we once understood it. While this possibility remains to the end, Sayles also chooses this moment to outline a third possibility that exists between the real and the hyperreal – the mythic. Our first glimpse of this mythic zone occurs when the trio take shelter in a ruined farmhouse, where Noelle discovers a diary written by a young girl, whose family moved to the island decades ago to rediscover a subsistence lifestyle. This anonymous girl describes how her father was unable to work in logging after a serious fall and didn’t want his family working at the Port Henry cannery, so moved them to the island where they began to raise foxes for pelts. As Noelle’s nightly narration of this diary starts to take over the dialogue, it becomes a mythic object, overlapping with epic montages of the landscape, accompanied by synthesized panpipes, and ushering in the most gorgeously expansive shot of the film – an enormous pullback from Joe wandering along the beach to finally depict the sheer scale of the island, in all its awe-inspiring isolation and sublimity.

It is in this mythic dimension that we also see an extension of Sayles’ previous film The Secret of Roan Inish, which revolves around the Irish and Acadian folklore of selkies – seals that can shed their skins and transform into humans. As in Roan Inish, the trio spend most of their time suspended between land and sea, in a littoral and liminal zone that takes on a mythic resonance as they light fires to attract planes and harvest algae, shellfish, seaweed and sea cucumbers in their own version of subsistence farming. Like Roan Inish, too, the seashore becomes a metamorphic space where human, animal and environment begin to blend. It is here that Bobby’s body, wreathed in seaweed and crabs, is discovered by Noelle, who becomes the focal point for this mythological metamorphosis, which is prefigured earlier in the film by a poem she reads to her Port Henry class about a child who was born with gills. Noelle in turn blends into the girl writing the diary, who recalls how her mother warned her that she too would grow gills if she ate any more fish, and starts to imagine herself as paired with various animals: “Maybe I am the soul not of a she-wolf but of a soaring bird that flies south every winter.” It feels right, then, when it turns out that most of the diary is empty, and that Noelle has been channelling the experiences of this young girl into her own mythmaking in real time, inventing a mythical character whose direct synergy with her environment cuts through the threshold separating reality from representation.

And Sayles never leaves that limbo between the real, the hyperreal and the mythic, keeping us suspended to the very last by way of Jack Johannson, a pilot played by Kris Kristofferson, who is a relatively minor character in the first two-thirds of the narrative but comes to embody all of the film’s ambivalences when he spots the trio’s fire and brings his sea plane into berth. Regretting that he doesn’t have enough petrol to transport them back to Port Henry, confessing that he is in league with the drug dealers, and promising that he will return to rescue them, he might either be a saviour or a murderer, and so the film ends with Joe, Donna and Noelle a few days later, gazing up at the sky as another plane arrives, presumably at Jack’s instruction, or with Jack behind the wheel, that might mean their rescue or destruction. The effect is not unlike the “ending” of The Matrix, eXistenZ or The Truman Show – characters standing on a mythic beach, staring up at the ether, poised to discover something fundamental about the reality of their world that remains unavailable to us as Sayles fades to white in a final limbic gesture. Even then, it’s hard not to escape the nagging sense of simulation, of a “wilderness experience,” in this final image that is at once chaotic and beautifully poised, one of the high points of Sayles’ vision as American director.