S/R 3: eXistenZ

In his film, eXistenZ, David Cronenburg explores the blurred lines between meat and machine as well as virtuality and reality in a futuristic world where anti-game realists come into conflict with game advocates. The story revolves around Allegra Geller, the world’s greatest game designer, and Ted Pikul, a supposed marketing intern for Antenna Research, a premier gaming company. To initiate the test launch of her newest game, eXistenZ, Allegra plugs into her metaflesh game pod – a convulsing, organ-like unit made of mutated amphibian tissue. The meat-machine theme continues when a realist assassin attempts to shoot Allegra with a gun made of bones with human teeth for ammunition. Allegra and Ted escape, but she worries her pod, which contains the sole copy of eXistenZ, has been damaged during the accident. To check the pod, she must jack into the game with a friendly partner. Allegra urges Ted to “break out of [his] cage,” and go beyond his body via the game world. Pikul, lacking the requisite biological socket for linking to the pod, relents and agrees to have a bio-port installed. When Geller and Pikul finally port into the pod, Ted is surprised by the lifelike experience of eXistenZ exclaiming, “I feel like me.” This faithful version of virtual reality soon fades when Ted senses involuntary urges as the game forces actions to establish the plot and characters. Ted feels vulnerable and disembodied, worried about his real self. He pauses the game and is extremely alarmed, finding it difficult to distinguish the virtual world from the real world. Pikul complains that free will is obviously not a major factor of the game, to which Allegra replies “It’s like real life, there's just enough to make it interesting.” Having returned to eXistenZ, Allegra tries jacking into a diseased pod which erupts, releasing a swarm of spores. The pair awakens outside of the game but, in another twist, is stunned to see the disease has travelled back with them infecting Ted’s bio-port and Allegra’s pod. Ted suddenly reveals he is a realist and the confusion intensifies when Allegra kills him. She and Ted wake up in a circle of other gamers – characters in eXistenZ – fitted with normal, electronic gaming units. Participating in the test run of another game, transCendenZ, Allegra and Ted had apparently planned to kill its creator, acclaimed game designer Yevgeny Nourish, for “the harm he has done… to the human race” in creating the “most effective deforming of reality.” With the real and the virtual nearly indivisible, they murder Nourish and as one participant begs to be spared, he innocently asks if they are still in the game. The catch-22 is that, even at this stage, there is no definitive way to tell if the game has ended and real life has begun. This concretizes Cronenburg’s message that virtual reality – with its limited free will, diverse characters, randomness, and ambiguous ends – represents a metonym for actuality.

The intense draw of virtual reality games in eXistenZ is, to me, unnerving and unhealthy at best. For instance, while within transCendenZ, game fans are gathered in what looks like a church and hail Allegra like a religious idol. At the fuel station, Gas prostrates himself at Geller’s feet professing that she has “changed [his] life.” He admits that he still operates a gas station but only on “the most pathetic level of reality,” claiming that Allegra’s games “liberated [him].” As a former Everquest addict myself, I can relate to the escapist, almost worship-worthy nature of games that Gas expresses. However, fantasy games, which usually involve fictional species, creatures, and geographies, represent a complete departure from reality. Even games such as The Sims, which closely resembles normal life, maintain the player as a controlling figure rather than injecting them into the plot. In Cronenburg’s world where virtual gaming is indistinguishable from real life, eXistenZ and transCendenZ are merely fake reproductions of reality where societal rules do not apply. What attraction do such games possess other than to allow individuals to indulge their basest urges with no consequence? Cronenburg exposes this ethical issue through his film. While in the eXistenZ game, for example, Ted and Allegra are compelled (supposedly) by the game to become intimate in order to “heighten the emotional tension of the next game sequence.” Also, when Ted shows apprehension at the prospect of killing the Chinese waiter, Allegra casually responds that “[he] wont be able to help it so [he] might as well enjoy it.” Furthermore, Allera shoots her close friend and mentor without hestitation, merely because she felt he was toying with her mind. Is Allegra, or Yevgeny for that matter, really worthy of praise when these virtual realities enable such sadistic behavior? Even today, the negative effects of games are palpable. Lack of sleep, decreased academic performance, disrupted real-life socializing, and a decline in health are common symptoms of the avid gamer. Graver situations also occur, where last year a South Korean couple spent so much time caring for a virtual girl in a role-playing game that they neglected their three-month-old baby and she died of starvation. Ethical issues aside, real world achievements have permanence, so that the never-ending “game” of reality is infinitely more satisfying and worthwhile than the temporary, escapist draw of virtual games.