eXistenZ: Biological Video Games and New Arousal

Are moviegoers and entertainment seekers bound to gradually incorporate more and more computer technology into their daily life until they are indistinguishable from a mutated piece of software? Well, yes. The transformation has begun: digital technology is everywhere and it mediates everything, work and leisure, from telecommunications to interactive video games. Is a convergence between digital computation and human consciousness banished to the realm of science fiction? Ray Kurzweil answers in the negative.

In his writings he imagines a 21st century world in which quantum computers and nanotechnology change mankind’s proscriptions for the mind and the body. Foreseeing an age of neural implants, he predicted that by 2007 “haptic” interface technology would provide the human mind with alternative sources of sensory input, drawn from virtual reality environments. Well, he was a little off–but still maintains that in the near future there will be computer displays built into eyeglasses and digital “objects”, like movies, video games, and music, distributed as data files through the wireless network. The real world will gradually become fused with virtual reality, and human subjectivity will grow increasingly integrated with technology.

Surely, the moviegoer pleads, somewhere in the cinema’s vast annals of science fiction reels there are forewarnings of such a mind boggling transformation. Indeed, there are many (far more than the following list): Blade Runner, 2001, Alphaville, Tron, Johnny Mnemonic, The Fifth Element, Strange Days, Minority Report, A.I, The Matrix, and existenZ all confront aspects of cyborg culture, or the human-computer interface.

eXistenZ approaches near-future speculation from a different avenue: the video game industry. Directed by David Cronenburg, whose scripts often dabble in bio-technology, the film depicts a world in which video game and virtual reality technologies biologically converge. Jennifer Jason Leigh plays Allegra, the “game pod goddess”, a VR game designer and guru for the company Antenna. The first scene introduces Allegra’s latest game, eXistenZ, and situates its first test enclave, whom she will provide with 12 prototype meta-flesh game pods. The game pods– through she which she downloads eXistenZ into each player– look like rubber fetuses, fidgeting and whining. They are virtual animals, “grown from fertilized amphibian eggs stuffed with DNA” and charged by the gameplayer’s body.

Before the test enclave can begin its game, an assailant (whom we will later learn is a ‘Realist’) attacks Allegra. She escapes with Ted Pikul (Jude Law), a marketing trainee, who rushes her to a car and out into the countryside. We are to assume this is part of reality. Soon, Allegra convinces Ted , who has never played one of her games before, to be fitted for a bio-port (it takes some work, for Ted has a phobia of being penetrated). Afterward, they lube up one another’s bio-ports, which pucker excitedly, and insert the umbilical cord-like firewire.

Throughout the film, the process of downloading a game takes on an overtly sexual nature, culminating when Ted performs fellatio on Allegra’s bio-port. eXistenZ imagines a game world of polymorphously altered bodies, in which the bio-port has become both an invitation to play out fictional romances, as well as a new organ, subject to arousal and penetration.

By game’s end, the film, having supposedly disengaged from the interwoven game sub-plot, reveals that the entire test enclave scene was not even grounded in reality, but was actually part of the eXistenZ game. And Allegra is not the true game designer. That was her particular game avatar. In whatever ‘game-reality’ of eXistenZ the film started off in, Allegra and Ted work for the Realist cause, seeking to destroy eXistenZ before it bleeds into reality. As the film draws to a close, the final question– ultimately left unanswered– is whether the characters are still playing the game. The characters can no longer decipher what is real and what is game-based.

Cronnenburg’s sub-textual implication is that the film itself evolves into a version of the game, a blueprint for an interactive virtual reality game. Its gamers (film viewers) are left free to draw their own conclusions as to where fiction ends and reality begins. Of course, just as in the game, Cronnenburg provides “just enough [free will] to make it interesting.”

-Jake Anderson

Top Five Movie Mind-Benders

[note: from the 90's onward]

5. Dark City (1998)  We relive the same day, over and over, as part of an experiment run by a dying alien race. John Murdoch discovers what’s up and uses his psychokinetic powers to fight back, ultimately uncovering an even more horrifying reality. This film has a massive cult following, and for a reason. A stunningly original neo noir SF aesthetic, haunting imagery, and a fun performance by Keifer Sutherland make this a flick that will be remembered just as long as the Matrix, which was released the same year.

4. Moon (2009)  Sam Rockwell plays Sam Bell, the ‘solitary’ over-seer of the automated harvesters which extract helium-3 from the lunar surface. After a near-death accident, Sam realizes he’s not alone, and his new friends are an awful lot like him. This film poses a complex biotechnological nightmare and follows it to its logical conclusion. Directed by David Bowie’s son, Moon is a masterpiece that will receive its due thanks later this century.

3. Shutter Island (2010) No, not Inception, Shutter Island, the other Leo DiCaprio 2010 mind-bender that is actually much better (I’m currently working on a post that explains why). Legendary director Martin Scorsese’s first thriller takes your mind out, rearranges your thoughts, puts it back in and then sits back and watches you scramble to make sense of reality. If you think you have this movie figured out watch it again and ask yourself what’s really going on in the lighthouse. If you’re smirking right now I’m talking to you.

2. Primer (2004)  This movie is about two guys who invent time travel in their garage. Beyond that, you’re on your own. Watching Primer is kind of like taking not enough bad acid.

1. eXistenZ (1999) David Cronenberg’s impregnable tale of organic virtual reality gaming. You play by allowing a hole in your lower back to be penetrated by a rubber fetus-looking console. Jude Law and Jennifer Jason Leigh are game players who are never sure what game characters they’re playing. Pinned against a cabal of neo-terrorists, they find themselves trapped in multiple levels of unreality- a game within a game within a game, etc. The audience, too, never discovers the objective environment of the film, who the good guys and bad guys are, or even what year it is, creating a near future in which truth and reality are mediated by apocryphal entertainment vendors.

Honorable mentions: Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, 12 Monkeys, A Scanner Darkly, Fight Club, Vanilla Sky, Donnie Darko, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind….Inception….Matrix

-Jake Anderson