Premium Episode 237: eXistenZ Movie Night (Sample)
What if there was a videogame so indistinguishable from the real world that anyone who played it began to wonder if their entire life was nothing more than a game? What if there was a movie that, in depicting this, stumbled upon the unnerving truth of our present relationship to the internet? What if that movie came out one month after The Matrix and totally bombed while the Matrix would go on to release three sequels and establish the language of conspiracy theory culture? Get your bio-port fitted, lube up your game-hole and jack into this week’s QAA movie night, “eXistenZ.”
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Music by Pontus Berghe. Editing by Corey Klotz.
https://qanonanonymous.com
Welcome, listener, to Premium Chapter 237 of the QAA podcast, the Existenz Movie Night episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rakitansky, Liv Aker, and Travis View.
We are back, baby.
the movie.
It's more that it's just so damn weird, coupled with the fact that, until fairly recently, there weren't a lot of movies with gaming and gamers as the central theme.
So, for whatever reason, over the last, you know, 24 years, like, every now and again I come back to Existence.
Because I guess, yeah, in 99, that was like cutting edge, new, obscure thing.
Hey guys, if you heard of this stuff, imagine virtual reality video games.
What would we be doing then?
Yeah, exactly.
Surely not just, I guess, jerking off, which is probably what most people use VR for.
Although Cronenberg was onto something, making the whole game experience like very, very sexual, which we'll get into.
That's true.
Now, you guys had never seen this movie before, correct?
No, this would be my first time.
What were your initial sort of reactions?
I mean, did you have any idea what it was going to be going into?
Because you look at the cover of this film and it's a whole hodgepodge.
I mean, it's like napalm flames and like Jude Law holding out a very weird looking gun.
Yeah, the one thing that struck me was the way it sort of alternated between, like, the grotesque and eroticism.
It, like, grossed you out with these, like, pulsating sinew and teeth and, you know, glands and, like, grody biological elements.
And then it sort of transitioned to, like, I don't know, like, fucking licking a bioport in order to penetrate it, you know?
It's like, well, this is, you know, getting kind of weirdly erotic.
My reaction to that scene, my girlfriend asked if I was okay.
That's a valid question.
Oh yeah.
I was not.
I turned to my wife like at the end, she had never seen it either, and at the end of the movie I turned to her and I was like, what'd you think?
And she goes, hated it.
Why did you make me watch this?
Yeah, just, like, straight up hated it.
And, like, it's very rare that she will, like, flat out hate something.
And that's just the review.
There's no sort of, like, qualifying or, you know, nothing redeeming really about it.
So I think the movie is very polarizing.
Yeah, I went into it because you said it was like made similar time as The Matrix.
And so that's all I really I didn't even know it was a Cronenberg film that took me to like the middle of it to realize like, oh, yeah, it's fucking it's weird.
We're getting weird in here.
Yeah.
And like, we'll get into I do want to talk about this film and how it relates to The Matrix because it actually came out much closer than I even realized.
But at the time, I remember when I watched it, it sort of felt like an anti-gaming film.
I mean, you know, the video game consoles in the movie are like these bulging, pulsating blobs that use umbilical cords to jack into people's spines.
Instead of, you know, like the sleek towers with futuristic-looking controllers like, say, a PS5, you know, or even the, you know, the sort of the monolithic Xbox Series X, the quote-unquote game pictured throughout the film was more like a dream than something with flashy graphics and cutting-edge art direction, even though the film employs both production-wise.
Cronenberg says that this was the first But unlike Lawnmower Man or even Nick Arcade, it only felt like the characters were in a game because the movie told us they were.
Otherwise, it just looked like real life.
creature that you see very early on in the movie that's that's CGI but
apparently they built models for all of those things too so that the actors
actually had something to interact with. But unlike Lawnmower Man or even Nick
Arcade, it only felt like the characters were in a game because the movie told us
they were. Otherwise it just looked like real life. Y'all remember Nick Arcade?
I do, I do.
It's like, the players of Nick Arcade always made the experience seem very awkward, like they were never quite sure where they were in the space, waving their hands around and stuff.
Yeah, if I can sidebar, Nick Arcade was a show on Nickelodeon that's hosted by a guy.
If you go back and watch the clips, I mean, he looks like he's on speed the entire time.
I mean, he's unhumanly fast and energetic.
And the final round for every episode was that the contestants went into a video game.
And it's them with a big green screen in the background but they project this game but they sort of have to like duck and dodge things they must have been watching themselves on a television screen where they could see like what they had to dodge and stuff and it always yeah like Travis said it looked really weird and kind of uncomfortable and yeah it didn't really work but I mean if you're a kid watching it was pretty cool And so herein lies the question asked by David Cronenberg's 1999 film Existence What is real?
Now, keep in mind that in March of that year, almost exactly one month before Existence hit theaters, another movie asking a similar question had been released to almost unanimous acclaim.
That, of course, was the original Matrix film.
Yeah, that's tough.
I would have assumed this was like a ripoff, but it's like a kind of convergent idea thing.
It's just unfortunate timing.
Yeah, two ideas.
And yes, two very different takes on what it feels like to be inside of a video game.
Right off the bat, there are a lot of similarities.
A port that plugs into your body that takes you in and out of the game.
The lead character is some type of programmer.
And that there are these evil forces within and outside of the game hunting the main characters.
And yet, the two films couldn't be more different.
Existence was shot on a $15 million budget and made $5.5 million at the box office.
And The Matrix was shot on a $63 million budget and made $467 million at the box office.
Yeah, this feels like a very strange film to go see in theaters.
Yeah, maybe if you're like a Cronenberg person and you're like, oh, this is the guy who did Scanners or Videodrome, because this was, Existence was Cronenberg's first original script since Videodrome.
I mean, I remember when when The Matrix came out because I was in high school at the time and like, oh, I remember like everyone I knew was buzzing about this, like, oh, you got to see it.
I just want to talk.
I want to talk to you about it because like it's so it's just like the themes and like, you know, the special effects was mind blowing.
I don't remember this film coming out at all at that time.
No one no one talked about this.
The Matrix was like, I mean, I can still remember seeing the trailer for the Matrix before it came out and it ending with, you know, Trinity and Neo swinging on this huge sort of repel line towards the screen and then the screen, like it almost looked like your TV screen smashed as they hit into it and being like, what?
And You know, they invented this whole camera system to do these 360 degree sort of fluid shots.
I mean, I mean, we were talking about the Matrix.
The Matrix was watched.
It was talked about.
It was rent.
You know, it was always out at Blockbuster once, you know, once it came to video.
This one is interesting because it really does feel so much more like a bad dream.
Like the dream nature of this.
I know in The Matrix they reference like Baudrillard and the simulacrum, but this kind of gets the simulacrum more where it's like the copy makes the reality feel fake.
Totally!
And you kind of like it blends in in that way.
And yeah, I mean, I had written almost exactly that.
You know, in many ways the Matrix contributed to the actual development of games themselves.
You know, the idea of bullet time almost instantly appeared in Remedy's classic Max Payne just two years later.
The Matrix also created imagery that is still used today when discussing belief structures.
You know, the red pill, the blue pill, waking up from the Matrix.
I mean, it has this real staying power.
Yeah, it's more video game where you pop in and then you, like, learn kung fu and you shoot a bunch of bad guys.
Right.
You are more powerful within the simulation, whereas in this film, yeah, not so much.
Smirky bad dream, yeah.
Yeah.
So today, though, I'm going to try and make the case that when you look back at Existenz through today's lens, the film does a much better job at predicting that people might choose a virtual reality over a finite one.
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