eXistenZ and Inception (duhnduhnduhnduhnduhn..WOOOOOAAAAAHHHHNNNN)

One thing that really struck me about eXistenZ was its similarity to Inception in the exploration and questioning of reality. Though other films have certainly incorporated such themes (e.g., The Matrix), both of the films in question layer many different “virtual” realities in order to disorient the viewer from understanding which one is, in fact, “real.” Even the realities from which the protagonists plunge into their virtual worlds are called into question at the end of both stories: Leonardo DiCapprio's spinning top and the Chinese waiter's inquiry as to whether or not the players are still gaming. In the latter case, the gamers already rose from a virtual reality that was introduced as the true reality at the beginning of the movie, further emphasizing the ambiguity of realism.

Another interesting parallel lies in the construction of the game in eXistenZ. That is, a player's preconceived ideas and unconscious desires apparently help shape the way the virtual reality, the characters, and the goals of the game are formed. As a result of such ideas and desires, the game we witness reflects an ongoing struggle between “realists” and gamers. In the “real world,” the former accuse the latter of “deforming reality” by creating an alternate one in which people can indulge their time, their energy, and their dreams. This introduces the notion that the virtual world is a dangerous vice that tempts many into limbo and apathy, while continuing the discussion with respect to questioning reality. Furthermore, the inception of these ideas into the virtual world highlight the dangers of virtual reality as well as the power of human will.

From a game designer's standpoint, the balance of free choice versus structure and control likely exhibits the greatest challenge in designing a virtually realistic system. Allegra notes at the beginning of the film that eXistenZ is meant to be an entirely new gaming paradigm; perhaps this was meant to reflect a shifting of such balance. As a gamer, I understand the dilemma. The linearity (or lack thereof) of a game often correlates with its replay value; at the same time, if the gamer is given too much freedom, the storyline often suffers. In The Matrix, the machines encounter a similar problem after the failure of their first, utopian virtual reality. Their solution was to create the perfect illusion of free choice to keep the minds of their human batteries content. To really drive home the relevancy of this balance, Pikul asks Allegra shortly after being “plugged in” for the first time if there is any free will in her games. She replies, “Only as much as real life.”

Bad acting and accents aside, eXistenZ appears to be the Canadian predecessor to Inception in the genre of virtual reality mind****s. While both movies certainly incorporate other themes (e.g., Pikul's fear of penetration and revulsion at the organic game consoles), they both focus on the power of ideas, the importance of free will, and the dangers of indulging in dream worlds. Both also force us to ask questions such as: What is reality? How can we tell if we're really in it? How does our understanding of it influence our understanding of consequence and violence? Finally, can we truly choose our own destinies, or are we all part of a bigger game designed by someone upstairs?

Also, this has nothing to do with my post, but in case you don't get my title...

The Female in Snow Crash

In last week’s class we discussed how Neuromancer was in many ways made for the teenage boy. While some members of the class didn’t have a problem with this fact, others defended their enjoyment of the book and others (maybe just Professor Montez) disliked the book based on the idea that it was inherently for thirteen-year-old boys. Snow Crash seems to me to be even more overly written for a young male audience. Combining pizza, skateboards and high-speed cars in the opening pages of the book, what more could a teenage boy ask for?

As the book continues, I was a bit surprised to see a female character enter into the action. But Y.T. with her non-gendered initials doesn’t seem to be screaming femininity (maybe she shows more lady-like qualities later in the book and I’m just not there yet). There just doesn’t seem to be many women in the book. Y.T.’s mother is kept in the dark about her daughter’s job as a Kouier seemingly because she would disapprove of the danger in Y.T.’s job. But Y.T.’s mother also has a dangerous and secrete job working for the Feds. Both mother and daughter try to protect the other by not disclosing information about their choice of career.

But Y.T. must change out of her manly Kourier uniform into a dress before returning home. She uses a female friend as an alibi to fool her mother into thinking she is harmlessly socializing with other females, as opposed to steeling cars, zipping around on skateboards and chasing murders around the city with an older man (Hiro). Y.T. must hide her femininity from the outside male world, by dressing and acting like a man, but she also must hide this manly side from her female character at home.

But even with Y.T. as a spunky female character, I don’t know how a female audience would relate or does relate to Y.T. and this book in general. Although I can relate to Y.T.’s desire to ride skateboards and act like one of the boys, I find her need to separate her male and female sides troubling. Snow Crash seems to force her to be one or the other, not incorporating her feminine and masculine sides into one strong character.

Choose Your Own Adventure

I haven’t gotten all the way through Snow Crash yet, but there were two things that struck me immediately when I began reading. One was the fact that I was being hit by a deluge of exposition – every acronym and aspect of industry and moment of technology (many which, in hindsight, I could understand without the assistance) got its moment of explanation. The second observation was that this amount of exposition didn’t inhibit my experience of the world of the book at all. In fact, it enhanced it. Though I was occasionally taken out for a moment to think, well, that was a lot of explanation, I was wholly engaged in the world that I was learning about in minute detail. I guess part of the reason I appreciated this level of detail is that, in my observation of the science fiction literature of the course, it often takes a while as a reader to get your bearings in a new world. Often I’ve spent a decent amount of a book’s opening passages overwhelmed by words and ideas I couldn’t quite get a hold on until pages later. This makes sense for stories about exploring the unknown or coming into contact with something alien. But since Snow Crash revolves around a world where nothing exists unless it is specifically coded, even a new explorer like me would have to be pretty well-acquainted with the world around her. The book uses words instead of code to build the Metaverse for readers, a decision which also makes sense in context, since words and code become so inherently linked later in the story.

My ability to build a world through written descriptions in the novel helped me to better understand the complicated questions posed by “A Rape in Cyberspace,” published just a year after Snow Crash. When I started the article, not paying attention to its date of publication, I imagined the rape taking place in an environment more like the Sims or I guess Second Life, full of visual representation of everything that had occurred. When I realized LamdaMOO was based instead on written descriptions of actions and characteristics, I was still disturbed by what happened there but initially had trouble understanding what it would be like to experience it. But the creation of the Metaverse for me as a passive observer in Snow Crash changed my perception. It was easy to become absorbed even if I was just passing through the world without changing anything in it. Looking back at the emotional impact of violent rape within Body Surfing, I shouldn't have been surprised that narration could be so affecting. If it has an emotional impact on people who participate by reading, it has an even greater impact on those building the story and casting themselves as characters within it.

I’m tempted to say that stories are becoming more interactive, and on some levels that's obviously true. The internet allows people from across the globe to build stories and worlds together, increasing everyone’s personal stake in the narrative because they built it. Any violation against a character is also a violation against a sort of unwritten contract that people will respect the process of crafting a narrative together. But part of the reason the process commands so much respect is because it isn't new technology at all. In light of Snow Crash’s fascination with the ancient, I'd rather connect our modern means of storytelling to the ones used before books were published or even written. Oral tradition allowed stories to continuously change and develop over time, with different people contributing and helping to build the world together. Thinking in the terms of colonialism we discussed from the beginning of this class, I think it would be a mistake to label our new ways of storytelling progress so much as a return to the way we’ve always told stories. Perhaps they are more powerful because we’re more fully engaged in our own version of the Metaverse, but I think stories can have a profound emotional effect any time we place ourselves in them, by relating to characters, becoming characters, or helping to construct the world of the story itself.

Signs of the times

Since the levels of simulation and reality in eXistenZ are pretty difficult to parse, it seems appropriate to abandon the usual mode of explicatory summary and simply re-present a number of the thematic “levels” on which I saw the movie operate, elaborating on each one even if I cannot put them into a hierarchy. These might be called “signs of the times,” the phrase by which Allegra named the mutant amphibian that proved to have been designed for the production of the simulation: wonders ultimately comprehensible by the logic of the narrative.

The nightmare of production. Here I’m thinking of what the project manager of sorts calls “the strong and deliberate anti-game theme” near the end, which guides the movement of the plot throughout. The play known up front as such (by which I mean to exclude the initial scene of “plugging in,” thwarted by the assassin, that we later learn to have been a simulation as well) begins with an act of consumption (the purchase of a new game system) that swiftly uncovers the nightmare of production (specifically, these systems’ manufacture). Cronenberg underscores the fantasy—that consumption might reveal something, however discomfiting, about production; some call this "the Kunkel fruit," after its most recent author—by redoubling it, insofar as it occurs within an interior simulation run on the purchased system itself. As it happens, that simulation occurs through a literal act of consumption, since the simulated game system must actually be absorbed within the body to function. And while the revelation of the (internally simulated) mode of production of the game system draws upon modern horrors of genetic modification and organ harvesting, it situates them in an oddly antique, even Californian setting: an airy and dusty wooden warehouse with a peculiarly large and unacculturated Asian population (more on whom shortly), as if the secret of late capitalist fantasy were its continuity with late American colonialism. Despite his disgust, Ted Pikul (Jude Law)—a “PR geek,” the model of a white-collar laborer and someone advanced modern enough into modernity to have developed a neurotic phobia of biological modification—finds himself laboring automatically, as an automaton. For all the truth of corporate malfeseance and biological exploitation may horrify us, it also comes to us consumers and producers quite naturally.

The masturbating, alienating woman. It’s difficult for me to elaborate on a projection of sexuality onto the scenes of “play,” in part because it’s difficult for me to interpret them in any other way. One distinction I could draw, however, would note the total absence of sexual tension between Ted and Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh) until they enter a level of simulation consciously understood as such—specifically, in the back-room of the video game store, where they seem to come onto each other despite themselves. Before then Allegra is alienatingly aloof, while Ted’s neurotically so. His reserve appears to be due to his “phobia about getting penetrated—surgically, I mean,” which needs little explanation (except to maintain that Ted’s repression reads more as square than closeted, to me, anyway). I can risk the appearance of sexist essentialism in saying that Ted’s too meek to introduce any element of sexuality into his relationship with Allegra—which we learn, at the end, is an ongoing real one, making the gradual reintroduction of interest appear more like therapy than anything else—because it’s explicitly a failure to, well, give her what she wants. Allegra insists at least twice on her desire to “play eXistenZ with someone friendly” because it takes that many for Ted to overcome his phobia; before then, she is shown retreating into the game in a scene that (given Cronenberg’s perversely nipply controllers) strikingly resembles an act of masturbation. (In confirmation of this reading, I can note that Allegra is introduced as someone who “spends all her time alone in her room designing games. I think she’d like it best if she never had to show them to anybody.”) This scene alienates Ted and aggravates his phobia, unsurprisingly; the penetration of the self through masturbatory fantasy both cuts to the heart of his problem and cuts away at the livelihood of their decayed relationship.

Multiculturalism as theater of the absurd. To finish without concluding, I’ll throw up my hands in bewilderment at the function accents serve in the movie. The characters themselves are bewildered, from Ted initially to the players/actors themselves at the very end. At a loss to closely read here, I’ll wildly speculate that the interior fiction stages multiculturalism as a kind of nonconsensual element within the consensual hallucination of late capitalism (or something). Imposed upon actors earnestly attempting to acquire a starring role, these “bad” accents at once throw the entire simulation into an uncanny valley and the starring white couple in flattering relief; whatever necessitates them is the same force that ineluctably carries the recognition of difference into the stereotype. Once explicitly addressed by the frustrated players/actors, they even come to seem like a technique for the subordination of the majority necessary to the elevation of the individual promised by capitalism and narrative fiction alike.

Going Where We’ve Always Already Been

First revolted and then delighted, Cronenberg’s film eXistenZ was an exciting, if confusing, romp through reality. The film follows Allegra Geller and Ted Pikul through a series of realities as they attempt to escape an anti-virtual reality terrorist group. To say that there is a single, consistent plot, however, is to ignore the multitudinous ways in which realities fracture and collapse throughout the film. Allegra Geller’s escape from persecution is the driving theme of most of the film but towards the conclusion of the film we realize that this was simply a part of the game, her persecution an element in Yevgeny Nourish’s game creation. And yet when this story arc ends and Allegra and Ted awake from their virtual slumber they are once again thrown into a similar plot, only the names are changed. It would be easy to read this film as a prophetic warning about the dangers inherent in tuning in, turning off and dropping out of our shared sense of reality but such a reading denies the clear emphasis Cronenberg places on problematizing easy separations of the real and imagined.

Cronenberg uses wrote, over the top dialogue to signal what we as viewers already know about the film. This tactic creates a level of self-awareness in the film which is atonce uncomfortable and familiar. The characters in the film act as if they are characters, well aware of the limitations and incompleteness of their own story arcs and the world they occupy. IN one scene Ted Pikul announces, to no one in particular:

We're both stumbling around together in this unformed world, whose rules and objectives are largely unknown, seemingly indecipherable or even possibly nonexistent, always on the verge of being killed by forces that we don't understand.

Ted, like the movie watching audience, is watching a confusing array of events unfold before eyes with little choice in how they occur and what his actions should be. Like a movie-goer, Ted is told how to feel and how to react. Music, clothing, dramatic dialogue and over-the-top action signal game players and audience members which emotions and actions are suitable responses at any given moment in the film/game.

Incantatory VR

All three works for this week involve Virtual Reality, and feature the almost magical power of words in the creation of VR. On the one hand, this is obvious, that words have power in a construct made out of words. But with Neuromancer, the forms of interaction with VR were so visual, so tactile, that they almost obliterated the foundations of that interaction. Coding is words. Maybe some numbers, but in its purest form, is communication with a computer (add this, xor those).

In Snow Crash, the concept of the nam-shub becomes recast in computer terms, as it is the only present world in which it works in the same way as it did in the thousands of years past. The Metaverse looks like a globe with roads and buildings, but in its "actual" form is just blocks of code. When Hiro built his house, what he was building was text that described how he wanted the house to act, what he wanted it to look like, what capabilities he wanted it to have. When Hiro and his friends built the Black Sun, Hiro coded the sword-fighting algorithms and the tunnel system, both mechanisms that he uses (if not frequently then prominently in the novel). Having coded these gives him power over them.

In "A Rape in Cyberspace", the MOO is a virtual world entirely made of text. Every interaction with this environment happens through text (typical early MUD/MOO). The power of using text usually remains with the player, and part of the violation of the rape in cyberspace is the removal of that power from the player's hands. The player is reduced to an observer to the actions that their virtual body enacts. This position, however, is a parallel position to that of a reader or viewer, except for the attachment to the virtual body as a representation of their self.

In eXistenZ, there is that moment where Allegra and Ted are looking for a "country gas station", and then they find a "Country Gas Station". This moment reveals the power of words to affect the (virtual) reality in which they find themselves. Either their words affect reality on an instantaneous level (what they say becomes real), or their words reflect their construction of reality (whoever wrote the game knows its parts).

In Virtual Reality, more so than in Real Reality, words have power because the world is a construction that depends on words to exist. All of the texts for this week reflect this power, some more directly than others (I'm looking at you, Snow Crash).

Is this real?

In a movie, does it matter which world is "real"? I kept coming back to this question as I watched Existenz and found myself wondering, again and again, "Is this the real world or the game? Is he really dead?" The obvious answer, from an extremely cynical point of view, is that it was not the real world, and that the characters were not really dead, because all of the events only occurred with the context of a movie. The director yelled cut, the actors went home, and that was the end of that. But this pragmatic perspective jars with the experience of watching the movie, where I really cared, in each moment, whether the events were just the game, or were actually occurring in the movie's reality.

The typical explanation of this would be "suspension of disbelief." I was absorbed into the movie's world, was tricked into believing, at least on an emotional level, that the events were real, and so cared about the characters and their fates. However, although I think this explanation is good in general, it cannot explain my own reaction to Existenz, as my disbelief was not suspended for even a second. I found the dialogue unconvincing, the accents painful, and the two protagonists endlessly irritating. I never believed in any of the characters in their own right, and consistently thought of them as "Jude Law with a bad accent," "The Doctor" and "Bilbo Baggins." I felt no emotional connection to the story (and was frequently repulsed by it), and so shouldn't really have cared whether any one of them died "in the game" or "in reality."

I therefore think that movies like Existenz succeed in making us ask "Is this real?" partly because it constitute a challenge to the viewer's intelligence, and partly because it plays off viewer insecurities about their own perceptions of the world. I am the sort of person who cannot help trying to guess what the "twist" of the movie will be. I declared "all of this is a game" a minute into the movie, and enjoyed the puzzle of "Is this the game? Is this reality?" throughout the course of the film. Although I would enjoy the film more if it outsmarted me and gave me a twist I truly didn't expect (as indeed I was more impressed by this movie when it turned out that the protagonists were actually the "realists"), there is a sense of great satisfaction and security in knowing that you "outsmarted" the movie, and that you weren't taken in by the tricks that it played.

Yet I think it also plays upon the terrifying fact that none of us can always tell the difference between dream and reality. Have you ever had a dream that was such a perfect copy of real life that you thought it was real? Have you ever woken up from a dream and questioned whether it was something that actually happened, or remembered something and been unable to tell whether it happened in real life, or in a dream? Perhaps I am just particularly susceptible to such things, but I have been so unsettled by bad dreams that I have called my family to check that they were OK, and have yet to forget nightmares I had as a child where I "woke up," only to find the monster in my room. Even outside the context of dreams, people sometimes become disconnected from reality after traumatic events, such as the death of a loved one, or world changing moments like 9/11. People ask, "Was that real? Did it really happen?" not only because they don't want it to have been true, but because everything begins to feel like it must have been a dream. When watching movies like Existenz, we therefore ask "Is this real?" and attempt to outsmart the movie because we want the reassurance that we can tell the difference, that we are smart enough to figure out when something is a dream or a game, and when something is actually happening to us.