Copyright Femspec Dec 31, 2004eXistenZ. Dir. David Cronenberg. Miramax, 1999.
There are many critical angles with which to approach David Cronenberg's eXistenZ, his 1999 film that slipped through mainstream movie distribution circuits almost immediately into video stores. Anyone familiar with the repertoire of Cronenberg's films, which include The Brood (1979), Videodrome (1981), The Fly (1986), and Naked Lunch (1991), will not be surprised that eXistenZ addresses virtual reality themes. In addition to acknowledging the fact that our identities are increasingly indistinguishable from the technologies that mark life in late advanced capitalist societies, other interesting issues emerge in the film. From a feminist perspective, the film provides an opportunity to reflect on gender and sexual themes. In fact, the film's conflicted sexual and gender messages mask a deeper political ambivalence characteristic of many dominant cultural offerings in this late capitalist era.
The film begins some time in the not so distant future, in a large warehouse-like room, where a group of individuals sit in a half circle on stage, with an audience watching attentively. A buzz of excitement is in the air; a new game, eXistenZ, is being introduced to this heavily attuned gaming audience. What's more exciting is that the game's melancholic creator Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh) has come to introduce her product. Everyone onstage becomes immediately cozy with their individual "gamepods," which are baby-sized mounds of flesh with indistinct nipples and knobs for participants to fondle.
When the group begins to play the game, an antitechnology terrorist (belonging to a "realist" group) steps out of the audience and attempts to assassinate Allegra onstage. Chaos ensues, and Ted Pikul (Jude Law), a public relations employee for Allegra's company, is asked to take her away from the scene. They head for the country and begin an awkward friendship that results in Allegra convincing Ted, who's never played virtual reality games before, to play the game with her. To do so he needs a "bio-port" -- a hole directly above the anus used as the outlet for the umbilical-like cord of the gamepod. Because of the attack at the warehouse, Allegra worries that her own gamepod, which holds the entire program of the game, is not working. Seeing her fixated on her pod, Ted agrees to play the game with her. After a homoerotically charged attempt to install Ted's bio-port by a male gas station attendant (William Dafoe), Ted and Allegra eventually hook up to the game.
Inside the game's near perfect virtual reality simulation, both Allegra and Ted begin to navigate their way through its various rooms. Things start to get more complicated when Ted, overwhelmed by the demands of the game, requests that the game pause and they return back to the safety, and boredom, of their room. After returning to the game again, Allegra ends up bleeding to death from her diseased pod, and so they disconnect from virtual reality again and return to their room. Back in their room, they suddenly hear an explosion, and a "realist" soldier machine-guns Allegra's gamepod into oblivion. Screaming with disbelief and flying out of control, only Ted's insistence that they are still playing the game calms her.
After a violent confrontation with the realist forces, Allegra kills Ted to win the game. The game thus ends and the focus shifts to reality, but to a different reality than expected. The game players now find themselves in another warehouse room. All of the characters from the game, including "Allegra" and "Ted" (now portrayed as a couple), are sitting onstage and completing a game called Transcendenz. We are left uncertain whether this new scene is reality or a game within a game (a quintessential Cronenberg theme of blurring the line between technology and reality). The final scene has Ted and Allegra as the antitech realists; they assassinate the male creator of Transcendenz and exit the scene.
On the surface level of representation, the film is refreshing in its gender role reversals. Allegra is the genius game creator who dominates the virtual gaming world. This is especially refreshing because films usually portray men as much more technologically competent than women. When Allegra introduces her game in the initial scene, she has an aura of expertise so strong that it would make any female viewer want to go back to high school and pay attention in that computer class. Even in the only sex scene between Ted and Allegra, she holds her own, actively seducing Ted rather than allowing herself to be seduced. In many ways, Allegra Geller appears to have all of the qualities of a twenty-first century cyber-superwoman. In contrast, Ted, the techno-virgin, is humorously portrayed as an uninitiated fool. He embodies characteristic marks of all virgins: insecurity, guarded suspicion, and an inquisitiveness that challenges the rituals of the game while other players are too absorbed to question them. Ted's virginity also has blatant sexual, and more specifically homoerotic, overtones, as the bio-port (the installed hole on the tailbone) is an alternate anus that needs to be lubed before penetration by the bio-port cord. This homoerotic theme is especially apparent in the fact that a man is the one who initially "penetrates" Ted's bodily surface with his big scary gun.
Throughout most of the film, Allegra is portrayed as autonomous and in control while Ted is left to play the role of the bumbling follower. Even when Ted is called to her rescue, there is still a sense that she is not dependent on him; he just doesn't have a "take charge" kind of personality. Yet, in the climax of the film, a curious reversal occurs which speaks to the more subtle sexual messages of the film. It is naive Ted who guides the technologically savvy Allegra through one of the last twists of the game; he helps her realize that they are still in the game at the moment when the realist soldier attacks her pod. Here, Allegra suddenly loses control, thus undermining the aura of gaming expertise that surrounds her.
On one level, it is no surprise that during this scene it is Ted (a man) who reveals they are still in the game. After all, he is the one who constantly reminds viewers of the boundaries between fiction and reality: he pauses the game, he asks about the rules as he's playing, and, finally, he helps Allegra win by coaching her to give up on her pod and continue playing. But there is also another way to understand these mixed gender roles. Allegra and Ted are caught up in a virtual game -- eXistenZ. Yet on a more subtle level they are involved in the game of sexual difference. In Feminine Sexuality, Jacques Lacan argues that this game involves a symbolic realm of signifying rituals that give men the power to signify "reality"; this power positions women as signifiers of this supposed reality. In the film, we are reminded of the rules of the game even as the characters reverse the rules. For example, one of the key elements of the heterosexual game is vaginal intercourse, but anal penetration is the main sexual motif of the film. Even before Allegra and Ted have a sexual encounter within the game, Allegra lubes Ted's bio-port. This focus on Ted's bio-port "issues," including the idea that his bio-port is "disease" (HIV?), represents Ted's own dis-ease with the (heterosexual) game.
Gender themes are further complicated when the traditional rules of the sexual difference game return; when Allegra thinks realist soldiers killed her pod, she changes from a cyber she-woman to a hysteric clinging to her pod (baby). In many ways this suggests the classical psychoanalytic notion that women lack the phallus (the power to signify reality) and they thus seek fulfillment through a variety of substitutes -- including having babies. From the beginning, it is clear that Allegra has a maternal relationship to the pod. In a typical and worn out heterosexual ritual, Ted shakes her "to her senses" and challenges her hysterical attachment to her pod/baby.
The film begins with a strong woman and an effeminate man, but the film's conclusion undermines these images. In the final scene, when we realize that eXistenZ is a game within Transcendenz, the woman who played "Allegra" defers to her boyfriend who played "Ted" in a return to more conventional gender roles. Such a move is typical. Think of The Matrix's Trinity as she is transformed from kick-ass cyber-revolutionary to loving, supportive girlfriend. Why is it so necessary to portray Ted and Allegra as lovers? Why couldn't Cronenberg have settled for leaving their relationship ambiguous? Why this awkward shift from homoerotic themes while playing eXistenZ to the reconfirmation of heterosexuality at the end of the film? And finally, for those concerned with the pernicious insistence that gender identity is a natural extension of biology, why weren't any of the players able to switch genders during the game (men played male characters, women played female characters)?
The establishment of the plot as a game within a game is a clever commentary on the hold that technology has on our imaginations, but it also leads to some less clever representations more in line with the culture industry's dominant ideology -- the ideology of target groups. There are plenty of different identity groups whose interests are covered in the film. For the feminists among us, there is a strong, cyber-savvy woman gamer. She is a romantic recluse, yet she is also fashionable. Although presumably hunched over her game programs all day long, she also takes the time to match her clothes and crimp her hair. Allegra's hip style is intended for viewers who may be uneasy with a non male-identified strength and autonomy; these viewers might prefer the new "Sex and the City" type of feminism that claims women can be independent, smart, and (most importantly?) sexy too. If fashion isn't enough, Allegra's fixation on her pod reassures viewers that she really wants to be a mother. It can be argued that the pod was her life's work, hence her fixation. But making the pod into such a blatant fetal image works the mother/infant association pretty heavily. For the queers among us, there's a sensitive guy/P.R. nerd who suffers through most of the film trying to learn the rules of the (heterosexual) game. But for those viewers uneasy with all of Ted's "bio-port" issues, we are reassured at the end that Ted is a man's man; he has a goal, a gun, and a girlfriend.
In addition to viewing eXistenZ's "game within a game" format as a provocative commentary on technology's transformative effects on subjective experiences of reality, the film's mixed gender/sexual messages reveal that this format is also the perfect vehicle for yet another movie plot lacking any clear political commitments. If distinct political views on technology, besides the recurring Cronenberg commentary on how virtuality cannot easily be separated from reality, can be gleaned from the film, they are not necessarily progressive views. We are never actually informed of the realists' political principles. They could be neo-Luddite eco-anarchists, a movement that has received much press since the Unabomber case and the Seattle demonstration that shut the WTO meeting down, but they could also be antitechnology Christian fanatics. The final scene in which the white armed heterosexual couple shoots up a warehouse eerily evokes the Christian right's back to the basics, demonize the Internet, stick a gun in the face of an Asian, blow up the abortion clinic, "family values" mentality. But when they were playing eXistenZ there was a woman in charge and allusions to anal penetration -- evoking feminist politics and queer pornographic content. This is the stuff of which the Christian right's nightmares are made.
In conclusion, the film eXistenZ reveals how sexual and gender themes can serve larger ideological goals compatible with this era of market-niche, ambivalent, pseudo-rebellious capitalism. From a feminist perspective, the film's conflicted sexual/gender motifs (cyber-genius turned hysterical mother/techno-virgin turned man's man) help fulfill the ultimate goal of the contemporary culture industry's own monotonously administered game. Various identity groups -- feminists, post-feminists, queers, heterosexuals, technophiles, anti-tech eco-anarchists, and even Christian fundamentalists -- many of whom are seriously at odds in today's contentious political climate, can leave the film feeling happy that their interests were represented. Or at least they can feel relieved that once again they have been spared any specific political affinities in favor of late capitalist social, political, and cultural ambivalence.
WORKS CITED
Mitchell, Juliet, and Jacqueline Rose, eds. Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the École Freudienne. Translated by Jacqueline Rose. London: Macmillan, 1982.
Article copyright Batya Weinbaum.
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