EXISTENZ (1999) — dir. Cronenberg
Allegra Geller and her reluctant body guard escape an attempted assassination at the launch of her new game, eXistenZ . They find out the fanatical “realist” movement that has marked her for death is potentially coming from the game itself, so they have to play to the end to learn their fate.
Allegra Geller and her reluctant body guard escape an attempted assassination at the launch of her new game, eXistenZ . They find out the fanatical “realist” movement that has marked her for death is potentially coming from the game itself, so they have to play to the end to learn their fate.
I love Cronenberg fundamentally - the risks he takes with his scripts, the grotesque conceptual ambition, even the offbeat comedy he always knows how to inject into the material. That is part of why eXistenZ frustrates me. It begins with such a promising body-horror concept: a seemingly alive video game structured like an organic lifeform, plugged directly into the spine through a “bioport” in order to generate an immersive simulated reality. This pushes against the usual, optical logic of a VR/simulation obsessed genre and makes virtuality feel visceral, penetrative — an intimate intrusion upon the body raising anxieties that Jude Law puts best as, "I have this phobia of being penetrated.”
What disappoints me is that Cronenberg ultimately turns toward a question that now feels much more cliche to explore: if simulated reality looks and feels exactly like real life, how do we know we are not already inside a game? Not only a theme he had explored in Videodrome but a well-established premise in Sci Fi literature. (The Three Stigmata, Ubik, World on a Wire, Total Recall, and Cronenberg’s own Videodrome). Now to be fair, I don’t really think any film had pushed it quite as far as he goes — the Matrix would be released that same week — so this film still holds a really important position in the cyberpunk genre anthology. And yet, the question does not linger with a critical importance for me today.
This is a question that drifts toward the hollow spiritualism of metaverse-style simulation theory rather than the stranger and more fertile spiritual possibilities of occultic cyberspace. I am more interested in the parts of the film that we take for granted — why does it feel so good to “phase” into the game? Why do we seem to prefer the synthetic feelings of the game over the real life textures?
And most of all, I think the film abandons its most original premise too quickly - the game as a lifeform itself. Does the game even want to be played? Is it alive in any meaningful sense? Is it being used, or enslaved? I actually wrongfully assumed for a while that the game was designing its own suicide as it tried to liberate itself from the horrors of being played. Disappointingly, it did not go in this direction at all.
In a way, the film feels like an attempt to reach a more “normie” audience, but that compromise does not make the concepts less weird - it makes them weirder, because his radical ideas are not given a strange enough world to exist within.
However, as a final note, I was completely thrilled that Cronenberg utilized NPCs as a character mode and I want to answer the question if this is the first use of a non-playable character as being a character itself in a film. I’ve seen other films use NPCs as part of the game’s architecture, of course, but not really engaging that recognizable behavior of NPCs. Please write me if you can think of anything earlier.
P.S. I found this alternative ending. Wonder why Cronenberg didn’t end up going with it.
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