Shaun de Waal Virtual reality movie of the
week
The great wit Dorothy Parker is reputed to have said: “I know on the surface I’m somewhat dry, but deep inside I’m really rather moist.”
It seems to be David Cronenberg’s mission in life to remind us constantly that deep inside we are really rather moist, even if new realms of techno-experience like virtual reality require a kind of disembodiment or at least a downgrading of the importance of our actual physical circumstances.
Cronenberg’s new movie, eXistenZ, has anatomical drawings over strange textures in its opening credits, and it goes on to explore a world (presumably in the future) in which virtual-reality role-playing games are very close to non-virtual reality.
It is interesting to compare eXistenZ to The Matrix, which used similar ideas to make an exhilarating action movie. The Matrix was allegedly about freeing humanity from the oppression of computer-generated delusions, but its biggest thrills came from imagining a space in which the mind goes far beyond the body and its limits – a space only possible in a seamlessly realised virtual world.
In eXistenZ, Cronenberg posits a virtual reality as seamless as that of The Matrix, but he pulls in a different direction. His future cellphones are like sea-rounded stones, but the “pods” we might one day use to play computer games are fleshy things made with neuro-circuitry ripped from mutant amphibians (which are also edible). In the world of eXistenZ, plugging into a designer head-trip is insistently physical, but then Cronenberg has always been very good with orifices.
The movie raises interesting questions about the value of the imagination and perhaps the art of film-making itself; about free will (“it’s like real life – there’s just enough to make it interesting”), but I was surprised Cronenberg didn’t go further. There is also, despite good performances from Jude Law and Jennifer Jason Leigh, something flat and affectless about the film: it never quite goes into hyperdrive.