eXistenZ. Excellent science fiction nightmare of a game

The film increasingly plays with presenting computer reality, although it is constructed more as a backdrop, a spectacular set filling an expanding surface of the film tape. And most importantly, science fiction cinema feeds on the computer usually as a generator of civilizational changes. David Cronenberg, an explorer of the psychological depths of the human mind, created for the first time a drama, one might say, a computer drama. The computer in the lead role, not as a special effect, but as a being, almost biological, influencing the human spirit and the perception of time and space. Here is the game. Quite unusual, but going with the current spirit of the times, we will come to something similar. Because this game can’t be called anything other than a drug. It is a loss of consciousness – a group of several random (or not) people tests a new game with the enigmatic title eXistenZ. Its creators offer testers a different experience, meaning nothing less than exciting. Human curiosity fueled by hedonism triumphs because is there any certainty that elsewhere is better, which can lose in the confrontation with boredom?

There is a loss of space. They wake up in new places, although these are too real. The presence of bio-ports in the spine says that it is indeed a game. But virtual worlds often change. In this unreal-real world, characters touch things that take them into the further depths of computer realism. Somewhat like games within a game.

There is a loss of time. Characters playing eXistenZ, waking up in undefined places, lose a sense of time. The world seems to suddenly stop and allows for transitioning to a higher level of the game when they complete a mission. But it is unknown what the goal of the game is. It would be easiest to say that it is the longest survival, although the trap in which the characters find themselves does not suggest that this is a good answer. Treating the computer as something with a real shape, characters get even more lost. Humans live in a continuous line – minute by minute – contrary to the machine, which makes wild jumps. The world of ambiguity, symbols, poetry, language richness, word flexibility is perceived differently – the computer expects a “yes” or “no” answer and does not tolerate objection (after all, it’s just a program). It expropriates thinking, issues commands, expecting one of the proposed possibilities to be followed. One has to adapt to it because these are the rules of the game.

The computer mentality has become natural life, although it might seem that nothing is more distant from a human than a computer. Human reasoning and feeling have a different (obvious) character. The computer is beyond the possibility of grasping it with the senses, reaching its essence. It helps but demands the cessation of thinking because it is guided by invisible forces that are elsewhere. In the film eXistenZ, there is a symbiosis of man and machine. The entity created by man takes control over him. Cronenberg, not for the first time, spins catastrophic visions of humanity in a state of intoxication with the drugs of civilization. In Crash, he depicted masochistic passions related to cars unprecedented before, and certainly not foreseen by the creators of the car engine. In eXistenZ, fetishization embraced the machine, which changed humanity on an unprecedented scale.

Cronenberg’s eXistenZ can be described as an extraordinary trap, like a Chinese box that consists of an increasingly smaller sequence. Confusion, uncertainty, constant oscillation cause a kind of schizophrenia born of a culture that can be described as computerized. It brings no certainty, only numerous illusions. The director offers no prescription. The choice remains: to be or not to be oneself…?

So, shall we play the game?”