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?
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 questions like: can you become someone else there, someone you are supposed to be? What can the astral plane reveal to us about the human condition or about your own true nature, rather than simply what it takes away?
And most of all, I think the film abandons its most original premise too quickly - the game as a lifeform. Does the game 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 being part of the architecture of a screenplay in cinema. Please write me if you can think of anything earlier.
Made with Bullet