eXistenZ
Rated
R
http://www.existenz.com/
Opens Friday, April 23
David Cronenberg is an artist of such rare
and unparalleled vision that one would be hard pressed to
find a modern director as worthy of the term "auteur." Throughout
his fascinating career, he has prophesied the specters of
AIDS and bourgeois, controlled-environment living (Shivers),
postulated on bizarre off-shoots of psychology (The Brood)
and studied gynecology with lurid fetishism (Dead Ringers).
Cronenberg also created brilliant cinematic versions of two
novels that some thought unfilmable: William S. Burroughs'
drug-induced Naked Lunch and an adaptation of one of
the greatest novels of the 20th century, J.G. Ballard's Crash.
Cronenberg claims to have no real cinematic influences,
and this appears to be true. His films create no sense that
he is hearkening back to old masters. Yet it seems obvious
that the director has a literary influence, and that is
J.G. Ballard. The writer and director work in an almost
symbiotic aesthetic, sharing a vision of the future that
has been far ahead of its time for almost three decades.
Like Ballard, Cronenberg creates futures we can easily
visualize. He's not messing around with simplistic warning-call
movies about The Future (e.g., Gattaca). Instead,
he shows that the coming time is cold, diseased and dangerous
but also alternative, erotic and creative. Like anything
new, it is remote, alienating and unsettling, but not necessarily
bad. Again like Ballard, he doesn't moralize on this new
future; he is instead fascinated by change.
In the 1977 essay "The Future of the Future" Ballard wrote:
"In the dream house of the year 2000, Mrs. Tomorrow will
find herself living happily inside her own head. Wall, floors
and ceilings will be huge unbroken screens on which will
be projected a continuous sound and visual display of her
pulse and respiration, her brain-waves and blood pressure.
The delicate quick-silver loom of her nervous system...the
sudden flush of adrenaline...the warm, arterial tides of
emotion...all these will surround her with a continuous
light show."
Ballard could easily be talking about Cronenberg's latest
film eXistenZ, in which heroine Allegra Gellar (Jennifer
Jason Leigh) is the creator of such futuristic dream houses.
Allegra, a virtual-reality game goddess worshipped by the
millions who blissfully plug into her products, is the genius
behind a new entertainment system called eXistenZ. The game's
hardware is a pod made of flesh that resembles a human kidney
and is turned on by the tweaking of a nipple-like knob.
Made from amphibian eggs and filled with synthetic DNA,
the pod is a living animal that is susceptible to disease.
To hook up, one must be fitted with a bioport that links
the pod to one's spinal cord. Once downloaded, the game
charges itself off of the human nervous system, metabolism
and energy, transporting players to their own movie-like
dreamscapes that feel and work like reality.
This "reality" has seriously upset some people, and they're
bent on destroying Allegra. She runs away from imminent
assassination with a security guard named Ted (Jude Law),
a bioport virgin who is assigned to protect her.
Though Allegra's flight fuels the movie's plot, Cronenberg
doesn't focus solely on the danger at hand. Instead he takes
the viewer into eXistenZ's game world, a place we
are itching to visit. It is there that Ted and Allegra take
refuge, but also where they explore the reality they create.
The nebbish Ted becomes more authoritative; the nerdy, computer-obsessed
Allegra becomes sexier; and both become more and more excited
by the illusions they are creating.
Like all Cronenberg films, eXistenZ carries a super-sexual
charge that doesn't translate easily into typical male-female
relations. Yes, there is an ultra-hot make-out scene between
Ted and Allegra. But in true Cronenberg alienation style,
it is snuffed just when it appears the pair may actually
get it on--the overheated game immediately takes Ted to
a scenario where he's slapping a fish onto an assembly line.
And it is Ted who is afraid of being "plugged"; before being
fitted with a port he says, "I have a fear of penetration."
When Allegra finally gets to hook him up, she licks her
cord sensually before sliding it into his hole.
But there is much more to eXistenZ than science
fiction and eroticism. Just as Helmut Newton (another aesthetic
sibling of Ballard and Cronenberg) cannot be easily compartmentalized
with the label "fashion photographer," Cronenberg is more
than a genre filmmaker. eXistenZ is a funny, splendidly
acted, tension-filled picture. It is also a rich, evocative
conceptual-art piece full of futuristic dread, psychosexual
intensity and potent hallucinatory imagery. It is Cronenberg's
aesthetic--one no other filmmaker can emulate.
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Willamette Week | originally
published April 21,
1999
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