Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 11/20/23

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Monday, November 20, 2023

eXistenZ (David Cronenberg, 1999)

Jude Law and Jennifer Jason Leigh in eXistenZ

Cast: Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jude Law, Ian Holm, Willem Dafoe, Don McKellar, Callum Keith Rennie, Christopher Eccleston, Sarah Polley, Robert A. Silverman, Oscar Hsu, Kris Lemche, Vik Sahay, Kirsten Johnson, James Kirchner. Screenplay: David Cronenberg. Cinematography: Peter Suschitzky. Production design: Carol Spier. Film editing: Ronald Sanders. Music: Howard Shore.

It would be easy to ascribe the "body horror" of David Cronenberg's films to an adolescent desire to gross people out, but eXistenZ shows, more than perhaps any other of his movies, a deeper satiric intent. It establishes his kinship to authors like Swift and Kafka and D.H. Lawrence: a recognition of our alienation from the organic. I think the moment that shocked me most in the early part of the film came when I saw the console, the controller for the VR game that Allegra Gellar (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is demonstrating to her audience of potential players. Instead of a box of metal and plastic, it's a flesh-colored blob. It connects to the players not with headsets or helmets but with an UmbiCord, which is exactly what it sounds like: a fleshy rope that attaches to the player's spine, not with anything like a USB port but with an implanted orifice that's very like an anus. Throughout the film, we are confronted with the moist, the slimy, the irregular, from a gun that's flesh and bone and shoots teeth to a Chinese restaurant's "special" that makes the gorge rise. Cronenberg is intent on reminding us that though we are flesh and blood, we shy from the fact. When Ted Pikul (Jude Law) recoils from having a port implanted in his spine, he objects to the vulnerability of an opening directly into his body, whereupon Allegra simply opens her mouth and sticks out her tongue, reminding him that we already have physical openings to the world. On this premise, Cronenberg builds his intricate, recursive story, one that defies summary but carries a multitude of meanings. Yes, it's a satire on the videogame industry, and yes, it's a commentary on our notions of reality itself. It's often compared to The Matrix (Lana Wachowski, Lilly Wachowski), which came out the same year, but I think it's a superior, more layered film.