The script of the game “eXistenZ” is jumbled and confusing, but helped along by “game impulses.” Inside the game, Law and Leigh are no longer ruled exclusively by their own minds, but by the impulses of the characters they are playing. They want what their characters want—and that includes each other—and at one point Law announces “I feel like I should kill someone in this restaurant,” with horrific results. The artifice of free will extends to Leigh as well, who sometimes doesn’t seem to hear Law when he isn’t talking about something that will directly move the plot of “eXistenZ” along.
The movie also has a great self-reflective sense of humor. The battle cry of the realists is “death to the enemies of reality,” and we almost want to side with them—but wait, isn’t Cronenberg, the moviemaker a purveyor of non-reality? Especially with surreal films like “Spider,” “Scanners,” “The Fly,” “Crash,” and “Naked Lunch?” Is Cronenberg slipping in messages that he is ashamed of his craft? “eXistenZ” is, after all, a video game in which you play people out to destroy video games.
The movie has a budget which can be described as just barely enough. It is not a special effects picture and not even very future-looking, but it doesn’t need to be. His Chiseled-ness Jude Law is the movie’s strong center, with Leigh as his guide. Like a good sci-fi short story, Law behaves like a person with a history, even though none of it is mentioned, nor is it important to the outcome of the chase. All that matters is he conveys a certain degree of normalcy in the face of Leigh’s spacey arrogance. The cameos by Ian Holm and Willem Dafoe are appropriately hammy, the first as a technician and the latter as a fiendish gas station attendant. Cronenberg’s circles-within-circles plot is not the most original in the world (for more fun, check out David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive” or Chris Nolan’s “Memento”), but it is a fun chase, and his directorial style shows the jolly recklessness of his low-budget roots. The movie plays fast and loose with its own rules, and I am grateful for it, because it means Cronenberg wants us to think about the same questions he did, instead of simply congratulate him on making a sound mythology. “eXistenZ” really is a B-movie, and has a good B-movie’s love for being aggressive and brutal, but also surprisingly intelligent. It’s interested in shaking up our brains but not in handing us a specific conclusion.
“eXistenZ” had the misfortune of being released at nearly the same time as the wildly popular “The Matrix,” and the two films beg comparison. I will only say this: the makers of “The Matrix” played video games and decided to make a movie, while Cronenberg must have played video games, thought about what they meant, and then decided to make a movie. The Wonchowski brothers, who are behind “The Matrix,” have thrown their weight behind the second reality, the video game world, as being the “truer” one (ironically, this is a reversal of what’s physically in “The Matrix,” in which people in touch with “the truth” can move like they’re in a video game while people who get jobs and pay bills are the ones living a fantasy.) Cronenberg is not so sure which side to take. As a maker of fiction, he knows that artifice serves some deeper purpose and cannot condemn the phony world. But he knows better than to call it “the truth.”
As for “eXistenZ,” what fantasy is being fulfilled by those who play it? Maybe by putting a video game inside a video game, you get to indulge the fantasy of being able to turn on the damn thing and have it work right away.
Finished May 11th, 2003
Copyright © 2003 Friday & Saturday Night
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