“I’m very worried about my body,” says PR nerd turned accidental bodyguard Ted (Jude Law), his lamb-like eagerness turning to dread as his charge – the rebel game developer Allegra (Jennifer Jason Leigh) – fumbles his fly.
In the 1999 sci-fi curio Existenz, Ted is forced to pursue Allegra on a grubby odyssey through virtual underworlds after a group of fanatical hackers attempt to assassinate her over her latest virtual reality game, eXistenZ.
Ted has good reason to worry about his body: he is recovering from his first “bio-port” installation, which involves a puncture wound to the spine administered by an unsanitary gas station attendant named Gas (played by an eternally zealous Willem Dafoe). The procedure is the price of entry to eXistenZ, to which one can only connect via a hub resembling a gnarled teat. On top of this, Ted must also leave his actual body laying on a stranger’s bedspread while his avatar goes inside the game.
Corporeal anxieties are a familiar subject for director David Cronenberg. Over the Canadian body-horror maestro’s four-decade career, he has contributed a teeming archive of grotesquery to the popular imagination, from humanoid insects with exploded viscera to surgical mutilations savoured with erotic delight. Yet, as his films course with themes of submission, fetish and fate, their psychic tremors far outlast gore’s initial shock.
Existenz’s oblique internal logic sees Ted and Allegra navigate various “game urges” which, Allegra explains, one’s character is bound to carry out, even if they lead to humiliation or death. But are these impulses the result of the game’s insidious hijacking or a product of the subconscious?
Distinguishing it from more popular dystopian cousins such as The Matrix, which came out only a few months earlier, Existenz’s sense of rousing ambiguity is one of its most hypnotic features. Where The Matrix hinges on opposites – the red pill of fact versus the blue pill of fantasy – the thrill of Existenz lies in the coiled interdependence of the two. As supporting characters falter – their heads lolling as they await reanimation – Cronenberg embraces the offbeat whimsy of a still-gestating world, replete with glitches and nebulous boundaries.
Before the ubiquity of artificial intelligence and virtual reality, Existenz evokes a fickle, entangled relationship between technology and biology. When Ted asks Allegra how bio-ports avoid infection despite technically being open orifices, she proudly responds by sticking out her tongue and pointing to her mouth. eXistenZ, she will come to explain, is powered by the central nervous systems of its user population.
Rather than imagining our bodies being made redundant by technology, Cronenberg speculates about the tendency of humans to merge with their industrial environments – a process that at once incites agony and pleasure, terror and lust. This was also the drive behind Crash, the director’s controversial 1996 thriller about a cult of car accident devotees, and 2022’s Crimes of the Future, in which “accelerated evolution syndrome” sees performance artist Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortenson) grow surplus organs, to the delight of his audience.
Existenz abounds not just with an eerie prescience, but a strange, mutant beauty. Despite its cyberpunk premise, the subgenre’s usual aesthetics of skyscrapers, neon and smog are replaced with lakeside forests and glistening, three-headed lizards, as if the future has somehow looped back into a primordial past. This odd tranquility is only heightened by Denise Cronenberg’s elegant minimalist costuming: neutral linen, dark satin and gentle draping.
The cast performs with a suppleness and sensitivity befitting of their outfits. In the same year that he lounged all over Italy in The Talented Mr Ripley, Law inhabits the role of Ted with an endearing, adolescent fretfulness on the cusp of camp. In a thrilling reversal of gender roles, Jason Leigh dominates as the so-called “demoness” of game design. Although its helix of twists is better witnessed than described, the thrust of Existenz is, in the end, as soothing as it is tormenting: technology offers little protection from our abasements and appetites.
Existenz is available to watch on SBS On Demand. For more recommendations of what to stream in Australia, click here
