eXistenZ (1999)

 

Not only is this David Cronenberg movie is often compared with "The Matrix" from the same year, it also reminds me of Christopher Nolan's "Inception." It lacks the exuberance of The Matrix, but far outdoes Inception in its handling of multiple layers of game/dream. Perhaps more important, it is funny. It is playful with a wink and a chuckle, something that is not in Nolan's dictionary. 

To apply the psychoanalytical premise that fiction serves the same function as dream, games --- or movies, for that matter --- are the same. Cronenberg's dream is obviously more imaginative, more gross, and perhaps less inhibited than most people's, but I had a feeling of recognition with the organic game world in eXistenZ, even when I heard about it in 1999 but never watched the movie at the time. There are shared-dream elements in it, as bizarre as they are. It's not just the bone gun. There are creatures/objects in this world that are somewhere between machine and organism, or between dead and alive. Humans tend to regard other living species as either stupid enough to be no different from machine or smart enough to anthropomorphize. Are the "machines" or game pods living organisms or dead tools? Anyway, this is not necessarily a central concern of the movie, but the idea is lurking somewhere beneath the commentary about game/dream/fantasy. 

In 1999, people were not yet walking around with a smartphone permanently attached to their hands. Twenty-four years later, we are all sinking deeper and deeper into a mental existence further detached from our bodily existence. Perhaps there has always been a bodily desire to escape reality that has been discovered, exploited, and monetized only in the past decades. Perhaps this insidious but sweeping change to human existence is largely environmental. In terms of prescience, eXistenZ remains far more relevant than Inception and, to a lesser extent, The Matrix.