In the not-too-distant future, consumer electronics are based on biologically engineered flesh devices rather than conventional circuitboards and wires. Forget your Nintendos, Segas, and PlayStations – game consoles these days are “game pods” which you interface with by plugging them into a bioport installed on your spine, the better to deliver cutting-edge VR experiences. Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is a superstar of this medium, the star game designer of Antenna Research whose latest creation, eXistenZ, is going to be the basis of an entirely new game system.
As Allegra participates in a seminar unveiling the new game to a rapt audience, Allegra is attacked by Noel Dichter (Kris Lemche), a member of the anti-VR terrorist movement known as the Realists, who shoots at her using an organic gun that shoots teeth (the better to smuggle it past metal detectors and the like). She’s only winged, but the seminar leader (Christopher Eccleston) is severely – perhaps mortally – wounded defending her. He grabs Ted Pikul (Jude Law), a company employee who’d been on door duty, warns him that there’s very likely infiltrators within Antenna, and urges Pikul to get Allegra far away as quickly as he can.
Pikul duly hustles Allegra away – but Allegra is worried about the integrity of eXistenZ, for the attack happened midway through the demonstration and it’s possible the game got corrupted as a result. It’s time for Allegra to pop the cherry on Pikul’s bioportussy so the two of them explore eXistenZ together. As they explore the levels of the game it becomes apparent that something has slipped in that Allegra didn’t intend – an allegory for the real-life rivalry between Antenna Research and their arch-rival, Cortical Systems, and the extremist intentions of the Realists who want them both to fall… or is it all a PilgrImage to transCendenZ?
Written and directed by David Cronenberg, eXistenZ was the Canadian body horror maestro’s first movie based on an all-new Cronenberg-devised story since Videodrome. The Dead Zone, Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch, and Crash were all literary adaptations, M. Butterfly adapted David Henry Hwang’s stage play adaptation of Madame Butterfly, and The Fly was, of course, a remake. All of those had enjoyed Cronenberg’s distinctive creative touch – especially Naked Lunch, where Burroughs’ original novel defies reduction to a linear narrative so absolutely that the movie is not so much a direct adaptation as it is Cronenberg communicating the vibes he gets from it using his own story.
Subsequent to this, Cronenberg would go back to adaptations or movies written by other hands – it wouldn’t be until 2022’s Crimes of the Future (not to be confused with his early student film of the same name) that he’d do another all-original Cronenberg-devised story. The long breaks between Videodrome and eXistenZ and eXistenZ and Crimes of the Future are probably no accident. Between Shivers, Rabid, The Brood, Scanners, and Videodrome, Cronenberg pursued a very distinctive creative vision which was eventually perfected with Videodrome, in which his body horror themes were used as an allegorical means of exploring the possibilities of new mediums of communication and major social trends.
Scanners and Videodrome, in particular, can very much be read as metaphorical explorations of the rise of computer networking and the new medium created thereby through plot devices like psychic powers or television channels which interact with and reshape their viewers. Maybe that wasn’t the conscious motivation at the time Cronenberg made them, but it’s certainly a reading that’s become increasingly relevant as the passage of time has made them seem more and more prophetic. It makes sense that Cronenberg would only go back to this particular well if he believed he had something genuinely new to say which hadn’t already been covered by his original late 1970s and early 1980s body horror classics.
Hence eXistenZ popping up in the late 1990s – a period when not only had videogames been well-embedded in the cultural landscape for a couple of decades, but the medium itself had been taking on increasingly adult subject matter as the age profile of gamers broadened. Of course, it was kind of overshadowed on release by The Matrix, which gets into similar subject matter with fancier special effects and in a way less likely to squick mainstream audiences. Still, in some respects eXistenZ is a bit cleverer than The Matrix due to its multiple layers of reality; it’s a bit like Inception before we got Inception.
The object of eXistenZ-the-game seems to be to progress down through increasingly deeper layers of virtual reality by gaining access to increasingly esoteric game pods, the pods becoming more invasive and grim as you progress. Increasingly it’s like Allegra and Pikul are junkies, Allegra enabling Pikul and dragging him down into addiction – and then the last twist is that they’ve been in a virtual environment the whole time, implemented with much more plausible technology than all this biopod nonsense, and that they’ve actually been playtesting a game called transCendenZ by a company called PilgrImage.
It’s a bit spoilery to put that out there, but for two things: firstly, this movie is a quarter of a century old, the statute of limitations has well and truly passed. Secondly, an audience which has digested The Matrix and Inception and many many subsequent years of VR-based stories will probably guess this twist. Thirdly, eXistenZ is markedly improved if you go in knowing that the first 90% or so of the movie is a videogame environment, because a lot of the way Cronenberg telegraphs that is to have everyone behave in a much hokier and more cliched manner than they do in the “real world” segment at the end.
For instance, take the accents: Christopher Eccleston is doing a really poor American accent, Ian Holm shows up doing a European accent which can’t be pinned down as anything more specific than “European”, and both of them are doing this in the first level of simulation we see. Then, in the game-within-a-game, Cronenberg regular Robert Silverman is doing an absolutely horrible Irish accent, and Oscar Hsu shows up as a highly stereotypical Chinese restaurant waiter; Allegra and Pikul notice this and comment on it, thus flagging fakey accents as a sign that we’re in a simulation.
This isn’t the only clue to pick up on. Extremely fakey back projection on the early driving scene which seems to be an early tipoff that we’re not to trust what we see. Initially, Allegra is an autistic-coded weird nerd, who dresses nice and can mask reasonably but hates public speaking and can’t really relate to Pikul unless he’s willing to play videogames with her, but then she’s abruptly more socially confident with people she knows are (or believes to be) in the subculture, and then increasingly her personality – and Pikul’s just sort of drifts.
And then there’s the two-headed lizard they encounter at one point, which sits more or less entirely outside of the parameters of the counterfactual the movie has established for itself. There’s no sign that it’s engineered in any respect like the game pods or the phones, it’s a total thematic and diegetic non sequitur, and when Pikul and Allegra acknowledge it, it’s clear that it’s not the sort of thing they are used to seeing, but equally their response to seeing it is subdued – like intellectually they know it makes no sense for it to be there, but equally they don’t regard seeing an impossible two-headed lizard as being the sort of thing it’s worth getting overexcited about, like how we note that a lot of the aesthetic conceits of videogames can be a bit odd but we don’t make a big fuss over them as we play.
Perhaps most cleverly, on the initial level of simulation we see, which is the layer immediately below the one where the characters are playing transCendenZ using non-biological equipment – we can start to infer some properties which are later attributed to transCendenZ but not eXistenZ. Within the fiction of the Antenna Research universe, Allegra is an auteur designer, in principle there shouldn’t be very much in eXistenZ she didn’t write. However, transCendenZ is more of a collaborative effort between the players – the game picks up on ideas and thoughts and preferences the players have and uses that to dynamically come up with a scenario on the fly.
That being the case, when Allegra queries why Pikul doesn’t have a gun and he explains that he’s a marketing trainee who just happened to double up on door duty rather than specifically a security guard, we’re initially meant to take that as a reveal of pre-existing setting information, but it can equally be transCendenZ yes-anding a way to cover an apparent inconsistency in the game setting. Likewise, when Pikul needs to get a bioport installed and the duo are out in the sticks late at night he sarcastically suggests that they just go down to the local “country gas station” to get it installed, and lo and behold there’s Willem Defoe playing Gas, the game-crazed operator of the local country gas station, which has COUNTRY GAS STATION written on the side.
All of this is in service to a concept which is very much picking up where Videodrome left off. (Almost literally – at the start of this someone shoots a flesh gun whilst shouting ideological condemnation of a new medium of communication, that’s kind of how Videodrome ends up.) The one thing Videodrome didn’t really do was delve that deeply into the content on the channel itself, beyond glimpses here and there; in contrast, eXistenZ is all about the content, hence much of the movie immersing us in said content. Both the eXistenZ pitch meeting and the transCendenZ playtest are taking place in what is obviously a disused church, which is simultaneously quite heavy-handed when it comes to comparing the new worldviews offered by this new medium with the shattering of the medieval Church’s paradigm heralded by the printing press and also feels like it’s touching on the fringe religious movements of Videodrome.
This is all rather clever to contemplate afterwards, but is a bit cheesy to sit through in practice, not least because Cronenberg is asking his cast to deliberately provide shallow, superficial performances as part of the gimmick. Perhaps wisely, Cronenberg keeps the action to a brisk 97 minutes, which feels about right – this is the sort of concept that can get old if you keep the plates spinning for too long.
And if, despite the brevity, you can’t take the movie entirely seriously because it’s fairly directly telling you “most of this is virtual and isn’t real”, at least you can amuse yourself with how much Cronenberg commits to the “videogames = assplay” visual metaphor. Bioports specifically look like anuses, Pikul is afraid of being penetrated so he’s never had a bioport fitted and can’t play until he gets one installed, Allegra gently applies lubrication before she penetrates him, and so on. You can absolutely read whole scenes of the movie as being allegories for Allegra coaxing Pikul into trying out pegging.
Still, if you have Jude Law plays a character called Pikul for an entire movie based exclusively around videogames, and at no point does anyone say “Pikul-chu, I choose you!”, you’ve kind of missed a golden opportunity. eXistenZ is fun, but it’s fun which isn’t doing a whole lot that hasn’t been covered better by other hands – what Cronenberg didn’t already implement brilliantly in his own back catalogue, the Wachowski sisters were pinning down in The Matrix in the same year. It’s good, but it’s not on the level of Cronenberg’s best.
