eXistenZ, by David Cronenbery, is the story of a game. Allegra Geller is a world-famous game designer, the best in the world, and she testing her newest game, eXistenZ, with a focus group. Unfortunately, a member of the Realist Resistance is there to assassinate her. He manages to shoot her in the shoulder using a flesh-and-bone gun with teeth for bullets before he is taken down and Allegra escapes with Ted Pikul, a marketing trainee. Worried about her game pod, Allegra tells Ted, “the only way I can tell if everything is OK is to play eXistenZ with someone friendly.” Being as no one else friendly is available, Ted, incapable of game play because he lacks the necessary bioport implanted in his spine, accepts a faulty bioport from gas station owner/bioport dispenser Gas so that he can play. Gas turns out to be not-so-friendly when he attempts to kill Allegra, only to be shot by a terrified Ted.
After getting some repair work on the pod and a new, functional bioport for Ted from Allegra's friend Kiri, Allegra and Ted plug into the pod to begin play. Ted’s initial amazement at the game world—how it looks so much like the real world—begins to fade as his sense of what is real and what is not also slips away. He pauses the game to re-check in with reality, only to discover that what he thought was “real” also feels like a game now. At Allegra’s urging, they return to the game, where Ted finds the gun from the focus group in their lunch. He kills the Chinese waiter with it, eliciting praise from a fellow factory-worker (Nourish) who claims to be one of the Realist Resistance, but blame from a game store clerk (Hugo) who is also one of the realists. Hugo warns Ted and Allegra that Nourish is a double agent for the gaming company and not truly a member of the Realist Resistance, which seems to be true when Nourish tries to kill Allegra.
Ted and Allegra wake up from the game to find out that Allegra’s pod is infected along with Ted’s bioport. As Allegra frantically tries to save her pod, which contains the only copy of eXistenZ, a gun-wielding Hugo bursts in: the resistance has begun and he has come to save Allegra. Ted realizes they are still in the game, and in the course of the confusion Hugo, Kiri, and Ted are all killed because they are agents of the gaming company.
Ted and Allegra wake up again, this time in a focus group for Nourish’s new game, tranCendenZ: they’ve been playing someone else’s game all along, which Allegra won as the last person standing. But as Ted and Allegra leave, they kill Nourish because of the evils of his game. So, is the game really over?
Reality in eXistenZ is shaky from beginning to end. After stepping into the game for the first time, Ted tells Allegra, “I feel really vulnerable. Disembodied,” and even when Allegra tries to reassure him that what he feels is part of the game-playing experience, he persists, “I feel a little disconnected from my real life.” While our modern-day games do not have the level of virtual reality that Allegra’s eXistenZ does, this feeling of disconnect can haunt those who spend a lot of time in front of screens, or even reading—it’s possible to get so lost in a story that reality fades away. Even when the gamer or reader puts away the controller or the book, there is still some fuzziness in the brain while it adjusts from story life to real life. That disconnect that Ted felt is exactly the point of playing a game or watching a movie: to escape, however temporarily, from real life and enjoy an alternate one for a while.
Much like many real-life gamers, Allegra seems to prefer her alternate reality to her real one. After she has visited the game via her pod, Ted asks, “Where were you?” and Allegra replies, “eXistenZ. I like it there.” Considering that her actual reality at that moment consisted of people wanting to kill her and a “bodyguard” who had no weapon and no gaming experience, eXistenZ must have seemed a very friendly environment indeed. This also has parallels to our world: Some people are so locked into the games they play (or the movies they watch, or the books they read) that the real world seems boring, or possibly scary, by comparison. Even when present in the real world, these alternate-reality junkies are often thinking about their game, or book, or movie. Much like Case in Neuromancer, they are jacked into their alternate reality, and real life fades away; it's hard to interact with the gamer who is in this state of non-presence.
The movie's end has another real-life parallel: a dream sequence in which the sleeper dreams of waking up, only to realize a few minutes later that she is still asleep. So she wakes up for real and starts her day, only to discover once again that she is still sleeping. This cycle may repeat itself a few times, as in eXistenZ, where the movie ends with characters still “dreaming”, or at least still playing a deadly game. The audience is left to wonder if Ted and Allegra are ever going to wake up.
I really like your post but I have a couple questions. If the way that we learn about the mediated or simulated nature of experience is itself through a simulation of reality, can the film really be seen as a tirade against art as escapism? In other words, do you think the film is really criticizing the act it is engaged in itself? Or is that the reason why the film is a mockery of people who would criticize the world for being so simulated? Or those that would try to distinguish between what is real and what is simulation?
ReplyDeleteI think you lost me there. I don't think the film is a tirade against escapism so much as it's a clever sci-fi film that plays with levels of reality for entertainment value.
ReplyDeleteI didn't feel that the film was a mockery of critics-- if anything, it might have been a condemnation, since the realists were into death and destruction but the game-players were just out for a thrill. But between Ted and Allegra, it seemed pretty well balanced between those who embraced virtual reality and those who were skeptical of it.
For me, it's not so much that the world is simulated, since there is an actual world available for looking at and interacting with, as it is that we're dangerously close to only interacting with the world via a screen. So I guess that makes me one of the ones who want to distinguish between real and virtual. I'd rather touch a tree than look at a picture of it, in other words.