eXistenZ is a film directed by David Cronenberg that shows a world in which humanity has access to games that allow us to fully engage as active citizens in a virtually real world through the use of “game-pods” that connect into our body through “bio-ports” in our spine. Allegra Gellar is introduced as the “world’s greatest game designer,” and the film opens with her leading a test group of consumers through a trial of her newest game called eXistenZ. After an attempted assassination on Allegra’s life, marketing trainee Ted Pikul evacuates the area with Allegra. Fearing that the game may be corrupted, she believes she can only fix it by bringing “someone friendly” into the game with her. A man at a gas station who is bent on killing Allegra injects Ted with a bio-port despite him having a “phobia about having his body penetrated surgically” so that he can go into the game with her, but the bio-port ends up being faulty and damages Allegra’s game-pod. When the game-pod is repaired and Ted receives a new bio-port, both Allegra and Ted enter the game. Involved in a new virtual world, Ted finds it difficult to distinguish between real and virtual. “What about our new identities?” Ted asks. “They’ll take care of themselves,” Allegra responds. Ted finds himself doing things that Allegra says are his character and not him, offering the viewer the question of whether or not virtual reality can go too far and blur the lines between what is reality and what is virtual. Feeling compelled to act uncontrollably, Ted builds a gun from his food at a Chinese restaurant and kills the waiter thinking he was an enemy. Ted eventually finds out that the waiter was actually their contact and that a man named Nourish is a double agent. Allegra almost bleeds to death after an infected pod is cut from her body, but she survives and stabs Nourish in the back. Allegra and Ted wake up in the ski lodge where they started, but a game character comes in the room showing them that they are not yet back in reality. Allegra kills Ted after she believes he is conspiring against her, and they both wake up to find themselves in a room hooked up to a virtual reality game called tranCendenZ. Ted and Allegra eventually kill the designer of tranCendenz, but the viewer is left uninformed about whether this occurred in real space or in the virtual space.
eXistenZ continually projects a world saturated in technological innovation and virtual realities where the line between virtual and reality is blurred to the point of confusion. Ted is faced with multiple situations throughout the film where he has anxiety about the nature of the virtual space and is compelled to say and do things he doesn’t want or intend to say or do. “I find this disgusting but I can’t help myself,” Ted says as he eats a meal of obscure and unappetizing creatures. Cronenberg communicates a world that allows us to be someone we are not, and proposes that there are instances in the virtual space where we are compelled to be something we are not. In the virtual world, Ted proposes that there “is an element of psychosis.” The world according to eXistenZ is a world that occurs in the virtual space. A feeling of psychosis, according to Allegra, is a sign that “the body is fully engaging with the gaming architecture.” Fully engaging in the virtual world means loosening the grasp on what is real and what is imagined or programmed. At one point, Ted pauses his virtual life in eXistenZ to return to his “real life.” When he gets there, however, he says that his life feels “completely unreal.” eXistenZ explores the world according to technology and ultimately argues that technology is shaping our reality. The viewer is intentionally unsure of what is reality and what is the virtual world, exploring the ramifications of a reality unified with technologically created spaces. In this world, eXistenZ argues, we are no longer unsure of what is real around us, we are unsure of what is real within us as well. Identity takes on a more fluid form, bending and transforming with the external environment. At the end of the film when the group is in the appearance of reality, the game designer says, “we’re back but I have a feeling some of our crew doesn’t realize it yet.”
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