EXistenZ

eXistenZ (Crimes of the Future, working title). David Cronenberg, dir., script. Canada: Alliance Atlantis Communications (prod., dist. Canada and UK) / Miramax (dist. US) et al., 1999. 97 min. Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jude Law, Willem Dafoe, Ian Holm, featured players.

See IMDb for the very complex "et al." for production and distribution. In what we will call the initial framing reality, Allegra Geller (Leigh) is a designer of VR games who has twelve people in a focus group slaved to her pod—a bionic game deck—for a game of eXistenZ. Significant here that within the world of this game, people are attached to the pod by a very umbilical-looking umbilicus that fits into a bio-portal at the base of the spine, that the software for the game enters the players' brains through the cords, and that the most significant game mechanisms are bionic machines made from mutant amphibians, with the notable exceptions of a biomechanical gun that shoots human teeth and impressively mechanical tools used for inserting the port. In the final framing reality (where existence has yielded, perhaps, to transcendence), the thirteen people in the group are attached to the machines by electrodes that appear to be metallic vertebrae. In the central reality, it is Ted Pikul (Law) who initially claims to have reservations about his bodily integrity being transgressed with the spinal ports and Allegra Geller who seduces him into getting the port and supervises his penetration (double-meanings intended). We are not sure what all this means, but note well the po-mo play with gender and other boundaries: biological/cybernetic, mechanical/biological. In a modern(ist) film, people have the mechanical, electronic, and/or cybernetic superimposed upon their organisms; in this postmodern(ist) film we get a similar theme, esp. at the conclusion, but for most of the film the cybernetic is imaged as organic. (Veronica Hollinger usefully suggests comparing and contrasting W. Gibson's use of technological metaphors for organic things in Neuromancer, " a similar blurring of these two disparate realms.") (RDE, 12/05/99)