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And… this is where I’m going to stop. What did you think? Wasn’t that Merriam-Webster thing awful? I did that once in college, thinking it made me sound smart. Apparently it makes you sound insecure and douchy. The point is, if you are not familiar with Cronenberg, or you're not patient enough to let a confusing story play out a bit before making up your mind, that’s the movie you’re going to see. The majority of eXistenZ is a confusing mess. There’s no setup or backstory, the visual effects are haphazard in a very specific way, and if there’s a specific narrative theme to be found, you may end up stabbing your eyes out trying to find it. If you turned this movie off halfway through and rage quit out of frustration, I wouldn’t blame you. This is what watching a Cronenberg film is all about, and I can’t sit here and say that eXistenZ has a specific agenda, because I’m not sure it does. I think the film isn’t making a point so much as it is posing a question:

What is reality, and what does it mean to exist?

That’s a pretty big question, but name of the titular game is literally a play on the word “existence.” I don’t want to spoil anything for those of you stout enough to make it through the first hour of this movie, but there’s a “twist” near the end that lends a certain amount of perspective to things. It doesn’t answer questions so much as it reinforces the ones already hanging in the air at that point. Remember when I lauded eXistenZ for its take on virtual reality? This movie was released the same year as The Matrix, another film that played fast and loose with reality and perception. But while The Matrix was a fun, mind bending sci-fi romp, eXistenZ takes a similar fundamental concept much further, posing a genuine existential conundrum in the process.

For eXistenZ, video games are really just a metaphor for a larger issue facing just about everyone, every day. Most people spend a lot of time meticulously crafting alternate realities to engage, even as we withdraw from the reality we actually inhabit. Television, movie, video games, drugs, sex - you name it. All of these are potentially useful forms of fun and entertainment, but to withdraw yourself from reality is, some would argue, an illusion. Cronenberg seems to suggest that the machines we create to entertain us do not separate us from reality; they merely introduce us to a subset of it. Everything that exists is a part of everything else and believing that you can run away from one part of it or another is the biggest joke in the universe.

And the best/worst part is, the characters in eXistenZ “port” into the simulation the same way the characters from The Matrix “jack” into cyberspace - but in the world of eXistenZ, the simulation is so indistinguishable from reality that if you “jack” into the simulation while you’re already INSIDE it, you could end up in an Inception style hall of mirrors, never sure for the rest of your life if you’re actually “out” or not. This becomes a point of philosophical contention in the film, and a political movement forms around it. The idea is that as a community, we’ve become so fat and happy that there’s nothing left to do escape to a fantasy world while reality crumbles around our limp, drooling bodies.

In the end, eXistenZ offers no opinions on this, and makes no effort to answer its own questions, or to point you in any particular direction. It simply offers food for thought - what does it mean to exist? And when we willingly disengage from reality too deeply or for too long, do we become less human? Do we come to value life and living less? I’m not sure anyone knows the answer to this, but maybe it’s because not enough of us are asking the question. Like most Cronenberg films, I can’t say that I like eXistenZ very much, but I do “get” it. I am pretty sure I’ll never watch Videodrome, Naked Lunch, or eXistenZ ever again. But I’ll think about them, and I’ll think about the questions they posed, and it will keep me up at night.

Whether I enjoy it or not, if that’s the only thing a film like this accomplishes, then it’s done its job.

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