Some thoughts on eXistenZ, twelve years later

Sometimes I find myself in the mood for David Cronenberg’s style of weird, which means diving into his older filmography. Cronenberg of late has been turning out gritty action movies with Viggo Mortensen (A History of Violence, Eastern Promises), films which are satisfyingly psychological but lack the visceral punch of, say, Videodrome or Naked Lunch. And I do mean visceral: Cronenberg loves his viscera.

So last night I was pleased to discover that I could stream both eXistenZ and Naked Lunch on Netflix. I’ve seen Naked Lunch a few times and would have streamed it had Jake been in the movie-watching mode. (This, by the way, followed a fifteen or twenty minute low-level argument wherein I was trying to convince him to go see a movie, Thor perhaps or Bridesmaids, but nothing apparently could lure him away from the charms of Civilization V.) Naked Lunch, Cronenberg’s homage to author William S. Burroughs, is the better movie; anyone who has ever seen film or listened to spoken word recordings of Burroughs would see that Peter Weller became Burroughs for that role. Really a remarkable performance.

It isn’t easy to summarize Naked Lunch, other than to compare it to another author-homage-film, Kafka, wherein Jeremy Irons played both the author and a number of his characters. So too does Weller become both Burroughs and several of Burroughs’s characters, dramatizing the author’s life but also living through some of his wilder stories. IMDB’s precis is thus misleadingly bizarre:

After developing an addiction to the substance he uses to kill bugs, an exterminator accidentally murders his wife and becomes involved in a secret government plot being orchestrated by giant bugs in an Islamic port town in Africa.

. . . which is like summarizing Lawrence of Arabia, “British officer visits the deserts of Arabia, goes native, and leads a rebellion against the Turks.” Technically accurate but misses the spirit of the film, you know?

Back to eXistenZ, which was, if you get right down to it, a modernization of Cronenberg’s earlier masterpiece, Videodrome. More below the fold, unapologetically laden with spoilers.

In eXistenZ, star game designer Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh) hosts a beta-testing seminar for her latest innovation, eXistenZ, a virtual reality simulation that is so effective that players have a hard time distinguishing game from reality. She has accomplished this by nurturing a symbiotic organism derived from amphibian embryos, a creature that plugs into a port at the base of the player’s spine. The critter has intestine-like appendages — think of them as biological HDMI cables — that allow players to live and breathe in a consensual reality which they take part in creating. It’s like an MMORPG server. With breasts or testicles and a bunch of noodles attached.

This is not your son’s Gameboy.

The beta-extravaganza has just begun when a member of the audience takes out a concealed weapon, declares “Death to Allegra Geller!” and shoots Allegra in the shoulder with a gun that looks like a steamed Chinese restaurant fish after six hungry diners have had a go at the Lazy Susan. Incidentally, the Chinese restaurant analogy must have occurred to Cronenberg, since the restaurant complete with Chinese waiter appears later in the film (within the game world) to provide Ted Pikul (Jude Law) with a weapon: another bone gun, which Pikul must piece together from the less gooey bits of his main course.

The movie is predictable (though not nearly as predictable as the similarly themed Inception). Once you get the whole “game within a game” concept handed to you on a platter, it’s not a reach to realize that the initial setup — the beta-testing seminar — was also part of the game. Cronenberg drops lots of hints to that effect, such as the two-headed salamander Allegra Geller finds while she and Pikul are on the run from the reality-loving extremists who want her dead, or the delight she takes in the textures, smells, and sounds of her world. Anyone who has ever paused in the middle of an MMORPG just to appreciate the richness of the gameworld will recognize this behavior.

But don’t think this movie is Cronenberg going all neo-Luddite on our asses. He’s not so much making a comment about the dangers of VR as he is commenting on reality itself. Ultimately, how do we know that the world around us is real and not a construct? (I wrote about this way back in 2005, here, and concluded that the only way to tell reality from a sufficiently realistic dream is that reality lasts longer.) The question is likely as old as the study of philosophy, and of particular relevance is the “everything is mental” idealism of George Berkeley*. These days, how often do movies tackle the big questions?

The tip-off to Cronenberg’s true focus comes in the movie’s closing moments. He has already set up the idea of scripted actions — that there are moments when the player loses free will and has to deliver lines written by the game designer. Subtle physical clues let us know when the characters are compelled to say these things. And when Ted Pikul and Allegra Geller deliver their terminal lines, they appear to be delivering scripted lines (which, of course, they are. How meta!) For the slow people, Cronenberg has one of the minor characters (who is playing with something that looks suspiciously like an iPhone) say the movie’s last line, “We’re still in the game, aren’t we?”

You can take this as a heavy-handed ploy, a la Woody Allen flashing “Author’s Message” in What’s New Pussycat? But I see it instead as Cronenberg goading us to ask ourselves how we would tell the game apart from reality.

Not all that different from Inception, IMO, but eleven years earlier.

D.

*Go Bears!