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| Author |
Title |
Publisher: |
Date |
Format |
| David Cronenberg |
eXistenZ |
|
1999 |
Film |
| Suggested
By: Alan Liu |
Added:
3/5/2000 |
| Last Modified:
|
Comments:
(Mini-Review by Alan Liu)
Directed and written by David Cronenberg, this film about virtual reality and the online gaming subculture is one of the most intellectually compelling of recent film fantasies about "VR." VR is supposed to be the most viscerally real form of fiction, and Cronenberg drives this point home into the viscera by inventing a baroque imagery of organic VR technology--variously sensuous, wet, or (with some of the "Alien" hideousness of the quintessentially exoskeletal) bony. And yes, the technology is parasitic, or at best symbiotic. The fact that this organic technology evolves increasingly toward mutated and deformed variations is of a piece with the lightly sketched political plot of the film (something to do with the assassination of VR artist-programmers by the faction of the "Realists"). From the viewpoint of realists, VR = mutation and deformation.
All of this sounds pretty theoretical (reality, hyperreality, surreality, virtual reality, etc.). But when realized with graphic, wet, and squishy splendor on film, it is something else. (The relation of film to VR is a further issue to be explored. Is eXistenZ a meditation on VR, or ultimately on film?)
This film is clearly part of the Cronenberg corpus. It may be seen, for example, as a dead ringer in its themes and its imagery for Cronenberg's 1988 Dead Ringers, in which the plot about twin surgeons anticipates the issue of virtual reality while the twisted, surreal surgical instruments anticipate the theme of deformed reality.
A fault of eXistenZ is that it does not think about "gaming" per se, though it uses the subculture of digital gaming as its backdrop.
eXistenZ stars Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jude Law; runtime 98 minutes. For more information, see Internet Movie Database entry.
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This page created by Eric Feay (concept and design)
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