eXistenZ raises questions about reality in a unique way as the greatest Sci-Fi films do. The fact that this movie was released one month after the beloved movie The Matrix, which it shares themes with, may have resulted in the movie not receiving the attention it deserves.
Over two decades after the release of these movies, stories about living in a simulation are everywhere. WandaVision is one of the most popular shows currently and deals with the Scarlet Witch living in a fantasy tv show reality that she is in some way responsible for creating. Season four of HBO’s Westworld, a show about people and robots living in a futuristic amusement park that is indiscernible from reality is on the horizon. Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One, a nostalgic trip involving a boy’s life in a virtual reality game was released in 2018 and a future movie installment based on the bestselling novel sequel to the source material is in the early stages.
David Cronenberg, the director of eXistenZ, is largely known for working in the body horror genre. This genre has origins in gothic horror fiction and also applies to a subsection of anime, like the classic Akira. Ususally, these stories involve plots that revolve around an elevated use of physical mutilation and deformities. The Fly may be Cronenberg’s most mainstream movie while Videodrome may be his biggest cult movie, and both fall under this genre.
The body horror elements in eXistenZ are toned down in comparison to most of Cronenberg’s movies but may still be shocking to some more squeamish people today. In the world of this movie, video game consoles are living pulsating flesh “pods” made from amphibian organs. People interact with them by flipping a part on them that looks like a nipple and they are connected to a user by inserting a cord called an “umbycord” into a port in their lower spine.
The Matrix is still justly considered to be one of the best sci-fi films of all time and its upcoming fourth installment is one of the most highly anticipated films of this year. The Matrix has body horror elements itself. In one scene, there is an extraction of a tracking robotic bug device from Neo’s body and in the scene where Neo wakes up from the Matrix, he wakes in a vat of slime with tubes protruding from the back of his head and down his spine. These tubes are also very similar to the game pod ports and umbycords in eXistenZ. These scenes are much less gory in The Matrix but it is almost bizarre how many similarities these movies share.
Both movies have a moment where the main character sees evidence that they are not in reality. In The Matrix, Neo sees a glitch as a black cat appearing and behaving in the same place twice consecutively. In eXistenZ, Pikul encounters an NPC who stalls when he isn’t fed a particular line of dialogue he was programmed to respond to. Without ruining the specifics of the ending, eXistenZ has a much more cynical view of mankind’s ability to escape life within a simulation. There is no Christ-figure like Neo in The Matrix.
eXistenZ also has a wrinkle like Inception years later where there are game pods in this game world and they enter a game within a game. Unlike Inception however, this layered non-reality structure does not become needlessly convoluted. There are elements from the game that begin appearing in real life like a two-headed mutated lizard. The further along Pikul travels, the more confused reality and non-reality become.
The movie begins at a church where the genius Allegra who is played by Jennifer Jason Leigh (Hateful Eight, Twin Peaks The Return, Annihilation) is product-testing her new video game, which shares its name with the title of the movie, with a lucky select few. The testing is interrupted by an assassination attempt by a member of a group who call themselves The Realists. The goal of this group is to bring an end to Allegra’s gaming company Antenna Research, and its competitor Cortical Systematics by any means necessary. Jude Law plays Ted Pikul who whisks Allegra away after she was the target of an assassination attempt. It turns out that the game pod with Allegra’s new game has become infected and Pikul agrees to enter the game with Allegra to save it.
The Realists see video games as weapons used to “deform” reality. This group of extremists could be considered to be reminiscent of the mobs of angry parents and media outlets pointing to video games, making false claims that they caused violence. The Realists themselves being violent highlights the hostility of this backlash at the turn of the century.
The idea of violence in relation to video games is complicated in a scene in which it seems elements of the game are pouring into what they think might be their reality. Allegra kills someone casually which leads to a conflict between her and Pikul who thinks that she may have killed a real person.
The world is now full of deep fakes and the term “fake news” is still thrown around liberally. It is increasingly difficult to discern which tweets are factual and which tweets are parody or intentional misinformation from bots. With technology being such an integral part of life it sometimes becomes difficult to parse reality from fiction.
There is a subreddit called Are We Living in Simulation? with nearly 18,000 members who seem to have various degrees of investment in this idea. Some posts are posited as interesting philosophical musings while others seem more like the creeds of a new religion.
Addictive games sometimes have an ability to rewire brains. Someone who plays Hitman 3 a few hours for a week and then goes to work as a security guard may feel like they are an imposter who is wearing a uniform disguise, for instance, or someone who spent hours playing Animal Crossing New Horizons might for a brief moment consider shaking a tree when passing one on a walk.
Imagine a game so close to reality that it could be described as Pikul does in one scene, “We’re both stumbling around together in this unformed world, whose rules and objectives are largely unknown, seemingly indecipherable or even possibly nonexistent.” Might this deforming of reality change the way we behave and could it possibly lead to violence being more likely in real life? This movie raises questions like these in interesting ways without giving answers. Cronenberg trusts audiences to draw their own conclusions.
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