eXistenZ is Cronenberg doing what Cronenberg does: making the body the site of horror and the technology that interfaces with it the vector of corruption. The bio-ports, the organic game consoles connecting directly to the spine, the game-meat assembled from mutant amphibians, all of it expresses Cronenberg’s consistent argument that technology and biology are not separate categories and that their merger is disturbing in direct proportion to how intimate it becomes.
My rating: 7 out of 10. A good Cronenberg film instead of a great one, below Videodrome in formal ambition and below The Fly in emotional impact. But it’s doing something specific, doing it consistently, and the bio-organic design work alone justifies the rating.
The Body Horror Foundation
Cronenberg has spent his career exploring what happens when technology becomes too intimate with human biology. Videodrome grew a VHS slot in Max’s stomach. The Fly dissolved Seth Brundle’s body into something combining human and insect. eXistenZ creates game consoles that are grown from biological material, connect directly to the spine through bio-ports, and interface with the nervous system in ways that make the boundary between game experience and real experience permeable to the point of dissolution.
The bio-ports are the film’s most concentrated image. The installation of a bio-port in the lower back, the specific sensation described in terms that are simultaneously technical and visceral, the wrongness that comes from having something biological inserted into your body that your body didn’t grow, communicates Cronenberg’s argument more efficiently than any dialogue could. Technology this intimate isn’t neutral. It changes the body it enters and the consciousness it connects to. The game and the player are not separable after the connection is made.
The game-meat hardware, organic game consoles grown from mutant animal parts, warm to the touch, requiring care and maintenance like a living thing, extends the logic further. Cronenberg isn’t interested in the clean, minimal aesthetic of most science fiction technology. He’s interested in what technology looks like when it’s made of the same stuff as the bodies it’s designed to serve.
Cronenberg’s body horror approach demonstrates that technology becomes interesting in fiction when it has a specific relationship to the bodies of the people who use it instead of existing as neutral tool. The bio-port’s wrongness communicates everything about eXistenZ’s argument in a single image: this technology doesn’t just interface with you, it enters you, and nothing that enters you leaves you unchanged. When you’re designing technology for your fiction, ask what it does to the bodies of the people who use it. Technology that changes bodies generates horror. Technology that leaves bodies unchanged generates mere convenience.
The Nested Reality Structure
The film’s narrative structure, a series of nested game levels where each apparent return to reality may represent a deeper layer of virtual experience, is handled with more discipline than most films of this type manage. Cronenberg doesn’t tell you when you’ve left the game because the characters don’t know either. The disorientation is the point, not a problem to be resolved.
What makes the structure coherent instead of arbitrary is the consistency of the tell. Each layer of the game has a slightly-off quality, characters behaving as if following scripts they didn’t write, situations resolving too conveniently, the quality of a world designed instead of grown. That consistent quality distinguishes game-world from real-world in ways the characters can sense but can’t verify, which is the correct amount of ambiguity for a film whose argument is about the loss of that distinction.
The final scene, the reveal that what we took to be reality was also a game level, followed by the question “are we still in the game?”, is the correct ending for a film that has been arguing that the question may no longer be answerable. Cronenberg earns the ambiguity because he built the structure that makes the ambiguity unresolvable instead of merely unresolved.
Versus Videodrome
Videodrome is the better film, more formally ambitious, more emotionally disturbing, more willing to follow its own logic into places that genuine horror requires. eXistenZ is the more accessible film, operating with conventional thriller mechanics alongside the body horror and nested reality elements in ways that make it easier to follow without fully sacrificing what makes Cronenberg’s approach distinctive.
The accessibility is both the film’s strength and its limitation. eXistenZ reaches an audience that Videodrome doesn’t, and that’s not nothing. But the accessibility comes at the cost of some of the formal radicalism that makes Videodrome feel dangerous. eXistenZ is Cronenberg in a mode that allows the audience to maintain analytical distance. Videodrome doesn’t allow that distance and is worse to experience and better as a film for it.
The Verdict
eXistenZ earns its 7 as a technically accomplished Cronenberg film doing something specific and doing it consistently throughout. The body horror design is original. The nested reality structure is handled with discipline. The ending is correct. The film doesn’t reach Videodrome’s formal ambition or The Fly’s emotional impact but it’s doing something specific to itself instead of being a diminished version of those films, which is the most you can ask of a filmmaker working in an established mode.