David Cronenberg’s 1999 film, eXistenZ, conveys a world where the lines between reality and virtual reality blend with the advancement of virtual reality game pods that have replaced mechanical consoles. The film involves two main characters named, Allegra Geller, the game designer, and Ted Pikul, a marketing intern for Antenna Research. At a seminar, Allegra tests her new game, eXistenZ, with a focus group by connecting flesh-like game pods to each player’s spine through a bioport. While the game downloads, a realist assassin from the audience of the seminar shoots Allegra in her shoulder. After the assassin is gunned down, Ted Pikul helps Allegra escape from other potential realist assassins who think Allegra has degenerated reality with eXistenZ. Allegra worries that her pod, which contains the only copy of eXistenZ, has been damaged during the assassin. To test it, she needs to play with “someone friendly,” so she convinces Pikul to get a bio-port installed so that they can play the game together. Allegra and Pikul trust a gas station attendant to install the bioport, but the attendant secretly installs a faulty bioport in Pikul because he is a realist who wants to destroy eXistenZ. Before the attendant tries to kill Allegra, Pikul saves Allegra, and they evacuate to a lodge owned by Kiri. When Allegra and Ted finally port into eXistenZ, a video game shop owner (D’Arcy Nadar) gives them micro pods, that transports them to a factory. At the factory, they meet Nourish who claims to be their contact in the realist world. With an order from Nourish, Pikul kills the waiter at a neighboring Chinese restaurant. However, Pikul later realizes that the waiter was actually their contact and that Nourish was a double agent. Pikul and Allegra decide to destroy the game pods with a diseased pod, but Allegra becomes infected. Nourish finally destroys the pod by setting fire to the pod. Suddenly, Allegra and Pikul find themselves back at the ski lodge, but oddly, the fire and disease were brought from the game into what they thought was real life. Although the ski lodge seems real, Allegra still thinks she is still in the game and kills Kiri. After Pikul questions whether they are still in the game and whether Allegra was justified in killing Kiri, Allegra decides to kill Pikul because he is a realist assassin. In another convolution, the events in eXistenZ, were part of a layer of another game called tranCendenZ. After the tranCendenZ focus group converses about the game, Allegra and Pikul, decide to kill the tranCendenZ game designer (Nourish) because he should pay for distorting reality. As they leave, they aim their weapons at the guy who played the waiter, but the waiter asks, “Are we still in the game?” The ending is ambiguous and left for the audience to decide what was real and what was virtual.
eXistenZ brings in a thought provoking question of what constitutes the “real” and the “virtual.” eXistenZ probed at the desire to still believe that there is a distinction between the unreal and the real. We often associate movies like eXistenZ, Tron, and The Matrix as representations of a virtual reality that is still to be invented. Although we might view eXistenZ as unreal, we in fact do live in a world where the “real” and the “virtual” are part of a mixed reality. With ATMs, online virtual worlds (Sims, Facebook, etc), and video games (World of Warcraft, Fallout 3, etc) we can experience worlds of sufficient detail to the point that we can be tricked into believing that we are experiencing reality. When Pikul questioned whether Allegra and him were still in a game, and whether Allegra’s decision to kill Kiri was justified, I was reminded of how the volunteers of the 1960’s Milgram experiment felt. This experiment showed people’s propensity to follow orders even if they knew what they were doing was wrong; just as Allegra killed Kiri in the game. Similar to Allegra’s development of virtual characters within eXistenZ, Milgram developed a virtual reality experiment in which he recruited volunteers to play either the role of a “virtual teacher” or a “virtual student.” Each participant who took the role of a teacher would deliver a shock (varying from slight shocks to severe shocks) to the student every time an incorrect answer was produced. While “virtual teacher” believed that he was delivering real shocks to the “virtual student,” the student was actually a helper in the experiment who was simply pretending to be shocked. As the experiment progressed, the “teacher” would hear the “student” plead to be released from the painful shocks. Some of the test subjects felt so uncomfortable that they actually stopped participating and left the virtual reality environment. Some also wanted to leave, but said they did not because they kept telling themselves it wasn’t real just like Allegra thought after she killed Kiri and Pikul. This virtual reality experiment like eXistenZ, represented the ways in which the lines of reality and virtual reality are blurred. Both the volunteers of eXistenZ and the Milgram experiment knew they were given virtual reality roles in a “game,” but it became so realistic that they could not decipher the real and the unreal. The only difference was that the Milgrim experiment was reality and eXistenZ was just a film. Thus, as we become more technologically advanced, we will have to continue to ask ourselves what is virtual and what is real.
