What is this movie about? Reality, Games, Movies, and Sex.
Movies: It's implicit in the whole structure of the movie that the game eXistenZ is (among other things) a metaphor for movies themselves, but an explicit hint is provided right when Allegra and Ted first enter the game and he asks if the transition from reality to game is always a "smooth interlacing from place to place," and she replies that "you can get jagged, brutal cuts, slow fades, shimmering little morphs" all of which are film terms. If this had come out after the new Star Wars, she might have added the wipes that Lucas still favors.
I believe the main reason the film inserts this idea, that eXistenZ is similar to movies, is to comment, with a certain amount of wry humor, on the quality of writing in movies today. In fact, watching this movie is, sometimes depressingly, like being in a Hollywood story conference.
For two examples, when Allegra and Ted are in the storeroom in eXistenZ and start to make out, at least somewhat against their wills, Allegra murmurs that this is obviously "a pathetically mechanical attempt to heighten the emotional tension of the next game sequence." This was especially funny since I saw this movie right after seeing The Matrix, which inserts a sudden and unconvincing romantic subplot near the end of the film for exactly this reason.
The other example first appears right before the make-out scene I just mentioned, which is when D'Arcy Nader goes into a game loop, waiting for the line of game dialogue he needs to hear in order to continue. As Allegra says, "There are things that have to be said to advance the plot and establish the characters, and those things get said whether you want to say them or not."
In other words, things get said whether or not they're in character. This is a comment on the sloppiness of most movie writing, where (for example) characters, even supposedly intelligent ones, cheerfully do and say things which every single person in the theater knows are a bad idea, but they make the rest of the plot possible (see "The Spanish Prisoner").
A canny director like Cronenberg can exploit how resigned we've become to this sort of thing. There are things throughout the movie which hint that even the non-game reality of the movie is a game, but they are all things which movie audiences are trained to put up with these days, since they look like sloppy writing and/or careless direction. When I saw Robert Altman's The Gingerbread Man, there's a scene near the beginning where Kenneth Branagh's character, a high-powered and rather slimy attorney, has just given a very attractive woman a ride home from an office party where she'd been working for the caterer. She becomes alarmed that someone's been in her house and asks him to come in with her. Once inside, she immediately starts taking her clothes off. At this point, a man somewhere in the theater behind me yelled, "That never happens to me!"
He was mad at what he thought was sloppy writing, sending characters into motion with no convincing motivation (no motivation at all, in fact) except that the plot needed to go in that direction. Well, I've been seeing Robert Altman's movies for about thirty years, and while he has his flaws they've never included carelessness or stupidity, so I suspected there was more to this than sloppy moviemaking, and I was right. It was a set-up, Branagh's character was being led around by his libido.
Getting back to eXistenZ, it's interesting to note that movies are the only non-game form of entertainment mentioned in the entire movie. (Allegra to Gas: "Don't you ever go to the fucking movies?"). The implication is pretty clear that these games have almost totally replaced all other forms of recreation (Allegra to Ted: "Oh, come on, Pikul, nobody actually physically skis anymore, you know that"). And, to take the idea even further, both game demonstrations take place in churches.
Also, there is an amusing comment on the fan mentality:
Gas: "Allegra Gellar, you changed my life."
Ted: "What was your life like before?"
Gas: "Before?"
Ted: "Before it was changed by Allegra Gellar."
Gas: "I operated a gas station."
Ted (looking around): "But you still operate a gas station, don't you?"
Gas: "Only on the most pathetic level of
reality."
(one almost expects him to pull out a lightsaber, or put on
some Vulcan ears)
I have three other comments:
First, many aspects of the film seemed to baffle the critics, but the thing they seemed to miss the most was how funny it is. All the "sexual" by-play between Allegra and Ted, the amusing juxtaposition of dialogue and image (like Nourish asking Ted where he's going to have lunch right when one of the most disgusting mutant amphibians is getting gutted), and the simple fact that the bad guys (if they are the bad guys, of course) are called "the Realists."
Secondly, one interesting thing which Cronenberg did was to suggest that the action takes place in a world different from ours not by adding unfamiliar elements which would convey definitely "This is science fiction!" but instead by removing selected familiar things from our world, so the world in the movie seems to be unlike ours, but it's not immediately clear why. The things which don't appear in the movie are: computers, monitors, televisions, telephones, clocks, watches, running shoes, suits, jackets, ties and jewelry.
Finally, some reviewers have compared Allegra and Ted to some of Hitchcock's couples on the run, but (while this is true) the movie isn't fundamentally Hitchcockian, since Cronenberg withholds information rather than revealing it. Hitchcock often concealed his themes while revealing his plot, while Cronenberg reveals his themes (you can't avoid them) but conceals his plot. For a modern science fiction movie which really follows Hitchcock's blueprint, see 12 Monkeys.
What is this movie about? Reality, Games, Movies, and Sex.
Return to the eXistenZ
Review
Credits
Official eXistenZ Web Page
Written and Directed by David Cronenberg
Allegra Gellar : Jennifer Jason Leigh
Ted Pikul : Jude Law
Kiri Vinokur : Ian Holm
Gas : Willem Dafoe
Yevgeny Nourish : Don McKellar
Hugo Carlaw : Callum Keith Rennie
D'Arcy Nader : Robert A. Silverman
Seminar Leader : Christopher Eccleston
Chinese Waiter : Oscar Hsu
Merle : Sarah Polley
Noel Dichter : Kris Lemche