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Shift from a play within a play to something more like Poe's "Dream Within a Dream" and, this week at least, you'll run into David Cronenberg's latest oozing phantasm, eXistenZ. Taking a decidedly earthier approach to the juxtaposed-realities concept than either The Matrix or The Thirteenth Floor, Cronenberg continues his flesh fascination in a story that shares elements with The Game, William Gibson's "Sprawl" novels, and his own Videodrome. Jennifer Jason Leigh stars as Allegra Geller, a cyberpunk Veronica Lake whose reputation as the world's most talented v.r. game designer has earned her a following only slightly smaller than the Pope's, but with Bill Gates' fashion sense. While they're plugged via spinal ports into a throbbing little "metaflesh" game pod "grown from modified amphibian embryos," someone attempts to assassinate her, using a tooth-shooting gun made of bone and sinew, on behalf of a low-tech terrorist group convinced that ever-growing hordes of computer-gamers are hastening the downfall of Civilization As We Know It.
The chase is on, as her impromptu bodyguard Ted (Jude Law), an ill-equipped marketing yob, whisks her into the countryside for safekeeping. There they meet a questionable gas-station attendant (Willem Dafoe) who also does unlicensed neurosurgery, hole up at a virtual-ski lodge run by a fan with a really odd accent (Ian Holm, who, while doing some biomehcanical surgery, looks just like his character Ash examining the facehugger in Alien) when her pod gets damaged (try that as an excuse next time you're suffering some sort of temporary functional disability: "Sorry, honey, that's never happened before, but my pod's been damaged."), and wind up stepping into her game-world to look for clues. What they ultimately find won't be a great s surprise to anyone who's been paying close attention.
Frankly, I worry about David Cronenberg's mental health. The guy undoubtedly has a gift for telling creepy stories through disquieting images (the opening credits run over an enthralling montage that might be tattoos, or cave paintings, or sand sculptures, or extreme close-ups of skin, or all of these). But every single thing he's done deals with disease (either physical or mental, or both) and distorted bodies. While some features of eXistenZ recall the work or H. R. Giger, the Swiss surrealist whose techno-organic creations include the nightmarish creatures in the aforementioned Alien (Geller's game pod is a quivering lump of pink parts whose controls look like nipples and genitalia), Cronenberg can be considerably more inelegant, if not downright nauseating. The scene where Ted assembles another bone gun from his lunch of greasy stir-fried mutant amphibian may put you off the MSG for a month. Still, despite all the nastiness, he manages a few thoughtful metaphors about pleasure vs. health, game vs. life, in an era fraught with both sexually transmitted disease and computer viruses. To his credit, his direction, keeping the camera close-in with no wide shots to establish a literal location, effectively suggest being trapped inside a program.
But he's definitely an acquired taste – kind of like blood pudding. C
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