Forget The Matrix — Existenz is the film for our odd times

In 1999 there were a handful of films that made the strange journey into cyberspace. The best known was The matrix. But despite all the effects of this film on culture and filmmaking, it is less seen existence that feels more relevant to the real world, more than 20 years later.

I liked the matrix. I still do. But for me it works more like a perfect film from the late 90s: dark city mood, black leather, Y2K fears and a combination of comic films in the Batman style of the 90s and early cyberpunk. Yes, it redefined how an action movie feels, and it provided a template for the science fiction story of superhero origins years before Batman Begins and Iron Man.

But we are now in 2020. It is existence.

Existence (or Existence, if you want to spell it correctly) has never been so easy. David Cronenberg’s strange, strange film about virtual worlds and players felt strange, even when I first saw him in a theater in San Diego in April 1999. The pace, the biological objects … the awkwardness.

I love David Cronenberg films. Before the recent critical favorites like Crash and A History of Violence, the 77-year-old Canadian director was a pioneer of the “body horror” movement and in the 1980s worked his way from meaty exploitation films like scanners and video drums to more polished films like The Dead vor Zone, The Fly and Dead Ringers. (His novel “Consumed” also folds into consumer technology: he is one of my favorites.) I think I love his films because they have a strange oddity in their flow. For Cronenberg, existence doesn’t move comfortably either. It feels like a B-movie: low budget and full of performances that … feel bad. It feels like a joke sometimes. Is it a joke it knows? For me, Cronenberg films always have a distancing effect, an alienation. Existence maximizes it.

I was unsure: glad that Cronenberg took over games and online presence, a bit frustrated with the result. But it stayed with me.

The matrix consists of massive rows of bodies linked to a terminator vision of robot dominance. Existence has … mutated growing things. People play on shrunken pink “metaflesh” pods that vibrate and have twisted umbilical cords … that are stuck in damp holes in people’s backs. People’s phones light up rubbery eggs. There are bones and flesh weapons. Game systems consist of mutated frogs and salamanders that grow in ponds.

None of this makes sense … and everything does.

The Matrix always felt one step ahead, because The Matrix falls into classic cyberpunk, while existence leans into biopunk. OK, the matrix also had bioports on people’s backs … and used people as batteries. But The Matrix is ​​about leaving that behind while existence leans in as a crazy way forward. Existence has bone cannons and electronics factories that look like amphibious tanks, and the game console is a breathing, pulsating … thing. At that time, only a few books or films examined what biopunk actually meant. (Paul di Filippo’s short story collection, Ribofunkwas an exception that I remember and that of Rudy Rucker Goods books researched some ideas.)

The film’s undercurrent of politicized antigaming now reads like a twisted mix of gamergate and social rejection of social networks and screen addiction. The struggle for reality takes place between Protestant factions. Meanwhile, discussions between game developers and focus groups remind me of the actual workshops I attended. There is realism in absurdism.

The sense of humor of existence lies beneath most scenes and expands every time I see it: the reality is absurd and most of the game’s bizarre storylines seem to be some kind of cosmic joke. In 2020, the whole notion of porting to another universe through a mutated meat tentacle sounds like a Rick and Morty episode. It is no longer a jump.

But there is something else that makes me return to existence … it is the feast of immersion. People gathered, became intimate and wanted a shared experience. This is a feeling that I saw in the immersive theater. This feeling is in escape rooms. This feeling is like in theme parks Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge or Universal’s Wizarding World. It is our struggle to overcome. And it’s also about companies that rely on our need to overcome and manipulate it. I feel it in immersive theater, in VR, all over.

Claire L. Evans, author and lead singer of YACHT tweeted recently This existence is perhaps the truest Philip Dick adaptation ever made, although it is not an adaptation of Dick at all. But maybe in a way. Cronenberg has adapted so many other non-filmable authors: DeLillo, Burroughs, Ballard. It makes cosmic sense.

I still don’t know exactly what existence really is about. But I remember the last line. I won’t repeat one now, just in case you haven’t seen it. It stays with me. Because what is reality now? And do you have the feeling that you can escape it?

Maybe Cronenberg can help.