A Scientist at the Movies Reviews by Greg Paris

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Title: eXistenZ

Date Viewed: 5/22/99

Details:

Jennifer Jason Leigh

Jude Law

Willem Dafoe

Ian Holm

Director: David Cronenberg

Score: 1/2

The Review: The answer is: pay attention to hairstyle.

This movie is one of a continuing series, once sporadic but now a virtual flood (no pun intended), with virtual reality themes. They fall into at least two general architectures. One I term the "dreaming butterfly" model, from Chuang-tsu's conundrum: "Am I a butterfly dreaming a man, or a man dreaming a butterfly?" This form admits to a home reality ("the truth is out there"), and an alternate virtual reality: two sides to a coin as exclusive binary alternatives, with a well-defined boundary and transition, even if the difference is not always initially known to, or sensed by, the audience. Witness The Matrix. Another I term the "recursive subroutine" model, based on a software design permitting near infinite regress as one subroutine calls another subroutine (even itself), and then when finished returns the thread of execution (the "flow of consciousness") up the calling hierarchy. This form creates a roughly ordered set of levels, distinct from one another and not at all binary; the deeper you are, the farther you seem from home or ground reality. Witness eXistenZ. To my knowledge, no other model architectures for this genre of movie have emerged, but it would be a fruitful field for the imagination.

The eponymous eXistenZ is a newly developed immersive virtual reality game system by the company Antenna. As a marketing ploy, several people are solicited to "test drive" the game with its creator and programmer. The experience soon takes some sinister twists and turns, and one is rapidly rather deep in a very strange, and curiously self-consistent, world. Jennifer Jason Leigh plays the game creator; Jude Law plays her marketing agent and reluctant bodyguard. Willem Dafoe has a small role as a renegade socket installer. Some of the development and pacing in the first third is rather slow, all too easily allowing the audience to lose interest; for this reason I am less than enthusiastic. In addition, you have to deal with director David Cronenberg's near trademark use of gore and body parts -- albeit, not human. Watch for the cute cameo by a mutant two-headed salamander.

However, with respect to plot and mood, with respect to puzzles and distortions of reality, and to some extent the body count (but they are virtual bodies; do they count?), this film has more in common with Total Recall than with The Matrix. After the audience is shown how things work, The Matrix becomes unambiguous; navigation is clear. However, both with Total Recall and with eXistenZ, the ambiguity persists through the last scene. There are always clues, but these are seldom obvious on first viewing. Some would find this confusing; I found it an interesting puzzle, and for that I can recommend it. But I suspect most viewers (including me) will be tricked into making the same (erroneous) assumption; we are driven that way by the screenplay. One question arises as a problem in navigation: how to keep track of how deep in reality subroutine execution you are? Return. Return. Return.

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