Food fight in the abattoir
eXistenZ
Directed by David Cronenberg
Starring Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jude Law, Willem Dafoe, Ian Holm
I'll say this right up front. David Cronenberg does
repulsive like no one does repulsive. Not to take away from the man's many other
talents as a director - and I'm loath to mention the repulsion factor at all, really,
because people who think at all about Cronenberg often fixate on the gross-out mouth
foamings in Rabid, the exploding heads in Scanners, and practically every frame of
Naked Lunch (Naked Lunch, for chrissakes! What other director would have the más
cojones to tackle Burroughs' most abstruse work?) - but if you've an appreciation
for the moist shlupping sound of probed alien viscera, for a close up look at the
underside of life's lunch counter, then there's certainly a lot to love about eXistenZ,
Cronenberg's latest film.
The scene is our near-future, a world where the computer and entertainment worlds
have merged completely, and games makers are vast corporations with the power of
multinational banks or weapons manufacturers. Reality here has become a dull substitute
for the total sensory immersion of games, where players "jack-in" via a
portal tapped into their spinal column.
Jennifer
Jason Leigh plays Allegra Geller, designer of the new game eXistenZ, and focal point
of a clandestine meeting of enthusiasts (all non-Luddites: they've already had the
spinal interface installed) set to test the most involved, "real-est" game
yet made. Geller takes several of the participants through the game, including dorky
Ted Pikul (Jude Law) as her chosen player for the other main role. But as they progress
through the game (their assigned characters making them say and do things they have
little control over) - tramping through a fetid meat packing factory, sampling the
gut-churning specials in a decrepit Chinese restaurant - something veers the fantasy
from its programmed path into an unexpected and creepy direction.
As Cronenberg deadpanned in his spots for the Bravo! network, there remain the same
preoccupations with images "...full of disturbing orifices and strange fluids"
that mark so much of his work. But as always, these scenes are presented with the
blackest humor. Here's someone who's given a lot of thought to the proper depiction
of goo, and to what sound a finger digging around a spinal aperture should make (one
imagines Cronenberg sitting behind the camera, chuckling: "Oh my God, that really
IS disgusting, isn't it?").
The
body was always Cronenberg's field of battle: the fear of violation, of bodily infestation,
of decay - these are the corkscrew that he turns in you. The horror of eXistenZ is
that the body is reduced to a passive vessel: it flops on the bed while the mind,
jacked in, plays in its virtual host somewhere in game world. Worse still, participants
have only a limited say in what will happen, in what they might do. The sensation
is of an increasing loss of control in a hostile environment: players aren't sure
if they're out of the game, or if some elements of the game have reemerged in the
"real" world.
Cronenberg has once again used cinematographer Peter Suschitzky
and production designer Carol Spier; the team he's worked with in his film adaptations
of J.G. Ballard (Crash) and W.S. Burroughs work. Cronenberg himself wrote eXistenZ,
and the overall effect seems, indeed, a return in some ways to the Burroughsian "Interzone"
of Naked Lunch - a demimonde of odd characters in a world that resembles our own,
until reality begins to drift, control and direction are subverted, and hallucinatory
images creep in.
It's a funny, jarring, brilliant piece of movie making. Go see it.
- Neil Brouillet
eXistenZ is playing now everywhere.