Who Do We Think We Are?

How you react to "Molotov Alva and His Search for the Creator: A Second Life Odyssey," a half-hour documentary airing Thursday on HBO, Cinemax, YouTube, iTunes, and possibly on the soles of your sneakers, is likely to depend on your familiarity with online gaming, virtual reality, and other high-tech ways of dribbling away your time.

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For the uninitiated, Second Life, the subject of this documentary, is an online community in which people can live a virtual existence either as themselves or as Kate Moss look-alikes, multibillionaires, or unicorns. Whichever, your online persona is what's known as an "avatar." Second Life is reputed to have 9 million members, or "residents" (though others say only 38,000 users are online at any given time), and it has already been parodied on "South Park," "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart," and "The Office" — which isn't to say it shouldn't be taken seriously. Reading the mile-long entry about it on Wikipedia is both fascinating and terrifying.

There's a bit of both (fascination and terror, that is, along with a hefty dose of mind-numbing tedium) in "Molotov Alva," which is the avatar of filmmaker Douglas Gayeton, who has worked in animation and alternative reality games, and collaborated on the video-game version of the film "Johnny Mnemonic" with the legendary science fiction novelist William Gibson.

The project Mr. Gayeton documents here was his own desire to drop out of what he calls the "carbon-based world" — could he be Al Gore? — and continue his existence, more or less as a replica of himself, in the imaginary, user-generated world of Second Life. Presumably he was unable to avoid the unpleasant reality of having to sit in front of a computer all day long while doing it, but if so, he's not letting on.

"Molotov Alva" is full of ingeniously pretty and colorful graphics, if your taste runs to semi-realistic animation, but the script — delivered in relentless voice-over by Mr. Gayeton, accompanied by quick cuts and action that often speeds up to get us to the next cut even faster — is often laughable. Justifying his retreat into the online universe, he argues that even if its mountains and beaches and skyscrapers are created of nothing but pixels, his previous existence (which he also refers to as "analog life" and "straight life") was full of imitation objects as well.

"My leather sofa hadn't been real leather, nor was the non-dairy creamer in my coffee," he says regretfully. At this point, we begin to understand. Non-dairy creamer made out of fake leather poured into one's first coffee of the day would be enough to drive anyone to seek another life, even a Second Life.

Most of the film is taken up by Mr. Gayeton's attempt to find a look, a home, a life, a girlfriend, and, ultimately, the "creator" of this strange new world in which he finds himself. (That would be Philip Rosedale, CEO and founder of Linden Lab, which owns the Web site, but never mind.) Mr. Gayeton and his fellow travelers are after something more transcendent.

A woman he meets, a bare-bellied brunette heavy on the eyeliner, describes her attempt to find God. "I transformed myself into a cyberpunk," she says in the precious, dry tones of a hip bookstore clerk. "Sadly, I found no answers about the Creator. Then I became an anime character straight out of a Japanese cartoon, but even that brought me no closer to the truth."

Good grief, as Charlie Brown would say.

The "search for the creator" seems to be a poor strategic choice for a program like this. Surely, it would have been more illuminating to focus on the sociological aspects of Second Life, which are sufficiently like real life to be positively spooky, if reports are to be trusted. To start with the sensational, Islamists are rumored to search for recruits there, though this notion was predictably laughed out of court by Mr. Stewart when "The Daily Show" tackled the Second Life phenomenon. On the other hand, the French National Front leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, opened an "office" on the site, leading to virtual race riots (probably led by white men with black "avatars") and an article in the Guardian.

There's more: Universities hold seminars there, Reuters has a Second Life correspondent, embassies have been established, businesses such as American Apparel have set up shop, and rock bands hold virtual concerts. There are strict codes of conduct, lawsuits, endless rules about sexual harassment, and problems with child pornography, not to mention ways of making real-world money. (Linden Dollars, the site's currency, can be converted into actual greenbacks.) Just thinking about the blurring it engenders between virtual and actual reality is enough to give anyone a migraine.

In Mr. Gayeton's depiction, however, it's all about him — and the "Creator." We do encounter various Second Life "communities," some arguably of passing interest. One is dedicated to constructing a simulacrum of 18th-century life, its members being delicate buds unsuited for the 21st-century version. But even this seems dubious. Surely such people would do anything to stay away from computers?

Mr. Gayeton does find companionship online with a woman named Abigail. They need special "animation balls" to make love or even embrace. They have an apartment, but don't need one, because they're not real. (An intractable problem, that — what do you need if you're not real?) "Over time we grew apart, so we went shopping," Mr. Gatyeon intones mournfully. It's a sentence of which even that bleak French novelist Michel Houellebecq might be proud.

The prevailing tone is one of social atomization and melancholy questing — space exploration for people without rockets.

bbernhard@nysun.com