How eXis­tenZ pre­dict­ed the gam­ing industry’s dark future

“I don’t like it here. I don’t know what’s going on, we’re both stum­bling around togeth­er in this unformed world whose rules and objec­tives are large­ly unknown, seem­ing­ly inde­ci­pher­able or even pos­si­bly non-exis­tent. Always on the verge of being killed by forces that we don’t understand.”

‘PR nerd’ Ted Pikul (Jude Law) is a new­com­er to vir­tu­al-real­i­ty gam­ing, and while his respon­si­bil­i­ty to keep super­star game design­er Alle­gra Geller (Jen­nifer Jason Leigh) safe from a shad­owy cadre of anti-game zealots requires him to plug in and play for his first time, div­ing deep into her con­struct­ed real­i­ty, his response to the all-encom­pass­ing expe­ri­ence is aways tem­pered with a mea­sure of resis­tance. ​“I’m feel­ing a lit­tle dis­con­nect­ed from my real life. Kin­da los­ing touch with the tex­ture of it, do you know what I mean? I mean, I actu­al­ly think there’s an ele­ment of psy­chosis here,” Ted tells Alle­gra at anoth­er time, before actu­al­ly paus­ing the game for a breather. The prob­lem is that there can be no real escape.

For eXis­tenZ – both Allegra’s lat­est beta release and David Cronenberg’s dizzy­ing B‑movie – makes the dif­fer­ent tex­tures of game, film and life increas­ing­ly dif­fi­cult to tease apart, as Ted finds him­self all at once seat­ed in an audi­ence, per­form­ing on stage, work­ing through stages and lev­els to no obvi­ous pur­pose, los­ing all sense of self (and all grip on auton­o­my), while also play­ing God. As Ted’s dif­fer­ent worlds begin cross-infect­ing each oth­er, his eXis­ten­Zial cri­sis match­es the dis­ori­en­ta­tion expe­ri­enced by any­one engaged in fic­tion – or indeed liv­ing life.

Cross-infec­tion, and the fear of viral con­t­a­m­i­na­tion, are key to a film made in 1999, when anx­i­eties over Y2K had every­one pan­ick­ing about the pos­si­ble dis­so­lu­tion of their online exis­tences, and the pro­found dis­rup­tion that this might cause to their real lives. Here, in keep­ing with Cronenberg’s usu­al obses­sion with what in Video­drome he termed ​‘the new flesh’, the pro­to­type con­soles used by char­ac­ters to port into Allegra’s vir­tu­al world are fig­ured as bio­log­i­cal ​‘metaflesh’ game pods – organ­ic, eroti­cised exten­sions of the body that have their own feel­ings and sus­cep­ti­bil­i­ties to dam­age and disease.

With nip­ples instead of but­tons, these grotesque objects are stroked and pal­pat­ed into action, and con­nect­ed to play­ers via an umbili­cus, as though gam­ing were a pro­cre­ative act. It is cer­tain­ly – and per­verse­ly – sex­u­alised. In order for Ted to get a gam­ing port, he needs to over­come his ​‘fear of hav­ing [his] body pen­e­trat­ed’, and to allow illic­it installer Gas (Willem Dafoe) quite lit­er­al­ly to rip him a new hole – a hole which lat­er will be rubbed with lube to make it more recep­tive to the inser­tion of ​‘umby cords’ and oth­er for­eign objects. By the end, Ted is no longer a gam­ing virgin.

As the now inti­mate­ly con­nect­ed Alle­gra and Ted explore their strange new envi­ron­ments togeth­er – para­noid places full of con­spir­a­cy, dou­ble-cross­ing and vio­lent rebel­lion – Cro­nen­berg may empha­sise the immer­sive, cor­po­re­al aspects of gam­ing, but he is no less inter­est­ed in their cor­po­rate nature. His gam­ing worlds are reflex­ive­ly pop­u­lat­ed by devel­op­ers work­ing in the gam­ing indus­try, and if their prod­ucts – seen by some as a pun­ish­able sac­ri­lege against real­i­ty, and by oth­ers as envi­able play­things, or even arti­cles of wor­ship – are adver­tised to the view­er, so too are the means of their production.

For as devel­op­ment costs and prof­it mar­gins are cit­ed, and brand names and cor­po­rate slo­gans get bandied about with mantra-like reg­u­lar­i­ty, we also glimpse the uneth­i­cal exploita­tion of nat­ur­al resources (in this case mutant rep­tiles and amphib­ians) to pro­duce the game pods, and the insalu­bri­ous work­ing con­di­tions in the fac­to­ries where they are put togeth­er – all a reminder that these games have more than one kind of occult attach­ment to the real world.

At the same time, the gam­ing worlds offer a metacin­e­mat­ic space where­in, even as the sto­ry unfolds, Alle­gra and oth­ers offer ongo­ing com­men­tary on the qual­i­ty of the dia­logue, accents, etc. exhib­it­ed by the var­i­ous ​‘char­ac­ters’ that they encounter or inhab­it along the way. ​“Don’t you ever go to the movies?” Alle­gra asks at one point, incred­u­lous that Gas can­not see the pre­dictable tra­jec­to­ry of his nar­ra­tive path. Mean­while, one of the strongest hints that the ​‘real world’ with which eXis­tenZ opens may already be part of the game is the obvi­ous rear pro­jec­tion of back­grounds out­side the car in which Ted helps Alle­gra flee her would-be assassins.

Here the arti­fices of cin­e­ma and the vir­tu­al real­i­ty of games are indi­vis­i­ble, as Cro­nen­berg takes us on a ​“wild ride” through both. As the game taps into his brain and ner­vous sys­tem, replac­ing phys­i­cal with imag­i­nary expe­ri­ence while still retain­ing ves­ti­gial, mutat­ed echoes of the real, new­bie Ted serves as both cicerone and mir­ror to the view­er. After all, both are nego­ti­at­ing their sus­pen­sion of dis­be­lief as they strug­gle to find their con­flict­ed place in an amaz­ing, alien­at­ing world that they simul­ta­ne­ous­ly wel­come as their hos­pitable vaca­tion spot and reject like a cancer.

Ulti­mate­ly, though, eXis­tenz is as con­cerned with the nature of real life as with the unre­al worlds of movies or games. Ted’s con­fu­sion, his occa­sion­al delu­sions of grandeur, his inex­plic­a­ble and irre­sistible urges, his para­dox­i­cal desires both to stop and to con­tin­ue (or, as Alle­gra puts it, ​“to see what’s so spe­cial about the spe­cial”), his not always hap­py sur­ren­der of con­trol to a sys­tem or high­er author­i­ty that he nev­er quite com­pre­hends – these are recog­nis­able parts of the human con­di­tion, as Cro­nen­berg cap­tures us all as needy, fright­ened, horny, com­pul­sive beings in search of escapist, tran­scen­dent expe­ri­ence that always lies just beyond our grasp. This quest is apt­ly framed in qua­si-the­o­log­i­cal terms. In the film’s open­ing sequence, the game eXis­tenZ is being pre­viewed to ador­ing fans in a build­ing that is clear­ly a church.

When Gas recog­nis­es Alle­gra, he pros­trates him­self before her, because, he says, her ​“very spir­i­tu­al” game Art­God changed his life. And the boun­ty placed on Allegra’s head by a fac­tion of fer­vent­ly pro-real­ist ide­o­logues is express­ly styled a fat­wa (indeed, Cro­nen­berg got the idea for eXis­tenZ after inter­view­ing Salman Rushdie in 1995, when he was under a fat­wa for writ­ing The Satan­ic Vers­es). For when gamers vie with each oth­er and even with the maker(s) to sur­vive and find mean­ing in a com­plex, irra­tional cos­mos, they are con­front­ed with issues of free will and deter­min­ism, and with an exis­ten­tial angst and ecsta­sy, that mark them as lit­tle dif­fer­ent, mutatis mutan­dis, from ourselves.

eXis­tenZ is released on Blu-ray by 101 Films’ new Black Label on 21 May.