FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1999. All Rights Reserved
| Film by Cynthia Amsden eXistenZ David Cronenberg has been playing with his food again. The first thing you think when you see his new futuristic tour de force, eXistenZ, is that this film director has watched altogether too much Cronenberg. Then you speculate about how fast he could turn a curried chicken carcass into a gristle gun. Cronenberg arrives for his 10 a.m. interview in Toronto a little slow moving but warmly sociable, very good looking without invoking that early morning brooding intellectual action, and uncommonly supportive of the Canadian press. eXistenZ is his 14th film in two decades and he refuses to forget he is local talent, unlike many other successful northerners who require journalists to offer their first-born in exchange for a few minutes of their time. "(Being pro-Canadian) seems the most natural thing in the world for me," Cronenberg says. "I’m from Toronto. I grew up here and I draw all of my strength from my upbringing in Canada. I’ve never shot a film outside of here except for some scenes in M. Butterfly." eXistenZ is deceptively simple, which is a leitmotif in Cronenberg’s deviousness: Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is a games designer, but her games are organic, downloaded into humans via a "bioport" at the base of the spinal cord, connecting to the central nervous system and utilizing the body’s energy as a power source. But this new, highly advanced game, eXistenZ, has generated enemies as well as advocates, and when Geller is attacked by fanatics, only a novice security guard, Ted Pikul (Jude Law), is there to defend her. Together, they both enter into the game world as a way to take shelter from the attackers. There, in the world of eXistenZ, the game starts to feel realer than real. As in all of Cronenberg’s films, the cast is a hybrid of talent: Jennifer Jason Lee (Dolores Claiborne), Jude Law (Gattaca), Willem Dafoe (The English Patient), Ian Holm (The Sweet Hereafter), Christopher Eccleston (Elizabeth) Callum Keith Rennie (Due South) and Don McKellar (Last Night). This blending is one of the director’s innovations which mixes the best of Canadian actors with major names from outside the country. There is a consistent darkness to this new installment of Cronenberg’s celluloid psyche which is more organic than the Wachowski brothers’ (The Matrix) paranoid darkness, or Alex Proyas’s (Dark City) techno-darkness or even Tim Burton’s (Edward Scissorhands) hip-noir darkness. In response to the echoes of Cronenberg’s earlier films, some have said eXistenZ retreats to the safety of the notorious Videodrome. "The safety of Videodrome???" Cronenberg’s melodious voice goes tourniquet-tight. "Oh, I’ve retreated to safety, have I?" Safe or not, eXistenZ is a departure from the sexual transgressions of Crash, returning to the happy little harbour of mucous and discomfort. Sounds like vintage Cronenberg to me. Gleefully refusing (and gleeful is a relative term here) to engage commonly accepted images of the future, Cronenberg opts for the grizzle and guts and natural settings. "In a virtual reality movie, you expect a Blade Runner city, you expect a computer screen and you expect to go into the computer and see digital stuff. A lot of this film is by subtraction. I have no city, no computer screens, no TV, no phones, no clocks, no watches, no jewelry, no running shoes, and no patterns on peoples’ clothes, either." "You could say this film is existentialist propaganda. There are moments in this which are pure Heidegger when Pikul (Jude Law) says, ‘I hate being here. We’re stumbling around in the world and we don’t know what the rules are, we’re constantly being attacked by forces that want to kill us and there seem to be no rules or objectives.’ "That’s Heidegger, or my reinterpretation of him and what human life is. Pikul says this game is going to be hard to sell, and Allegra says, that’s the game everybody is playing." Historically, Cronenberg has been known to slide into profound philosophical reveries, which is the holy water of film journalism. He also cherishes his metaphors which give him an entrance to the morality free zone he knows as Life. "I never think of man vs. the machine. Ever. If you look at the imagery in this movie, the game pod, it’s the metaphor for technology as an extension of the human body. There’s some conflicts, but we penetrate ourselves with our technology. We absorb it." The bizarre visions so often found in his work are his way of painting a story. It’s also a form of cinematic aggression. "The metaphor is one of the weapons that you have and there’s not much cinema that uses it in the same way. My imagery is not images, but imagery. But people are literalists. I don’t know if it’s because of TV or what, but like censors, when they see something, it’s totally literal, they think it’s actually happening or that you will do what you see. "I’m not a literalist filmmaker. All art is an attempt to create virtual reality. Virtual doesn’t mean literal. It’s not digital." Which brings us back to the scene where Pikul sticks his tongue in Allegra’s bioport. Metaphor, you say? A comedic sensibility is more like it – comedic sensibility being the highbrow euphemism for laff riot. "I think the only movie of mine that wasn’t funny is The Brood," the director says. "Maybe if I saw it now, I’d have a few laughs, but most of my films are funny. "We have a lot of laughs on the set. But I understand Ingmar Bergman’s sets were pretty hilarious, too, it’s just the laughs don’t quite translate to the screen in his case." |
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