Guns made out of the bones of animals which shoot bullets made of teeth. Genetically mutated insects which may be the basis of pseudo-alive computer chips. Characters who slowly lose the ability to tell what is real and what is not. And, of course, lots of violent death.
Could eXistenZ be anything other than a David Cronenberg film?
The film is about a designer of immersive games, Allegra Geller, who is testing her latest opus, eXistenZ, with a group of people. The game connects directly with the brains of its players, developing its story from what is in their heads. This becomes a problem when a political group, concerned that the game will ultimately replace reality for its players, tries to assassinate Geller; the game narrative subsequently develops an air of paranoia where Geller and Ted Pikul (a PR man who enters the game with her) cannot trust any of the people they meet. eXistenZ
Although ostensibly about virtual reality, the term does not appear in the screenplay, and, in fact, Cronenberg says his inspiration came from a completely different source: an interview he did for Shift magazine with Salman Rushdie. “Talk about virtual reality! I don’t really think of eXistenZ as a virtual reality movie, only because I think that it has rapidly become a kind of a very narrow sub-genre of science fiction, and I don’t think I was trying to do the same thing. It began, really, with the concept of an artist who was on the run because his art had been proscribed. Condemned. And he had been condemned to death.” [1]
So, Cronenberg started the screenplay with a character whose experience parallels that of Rushdie. To make this connection stronger, at one point in the screenplay he has a character refer to what is happening to Allegra Geller as a fatwa, the term used by the Ayatollahs to describe the death sentence brought down on Rushdie. [2]
There is another way of interpreting the rhetoric of the film’s anti-gamers. When one character describes their position as “…they say we’ve gone too far psychologically, medically, socially, you name it,” [3] he could also be talking about critics of Cronenberg’s films. Cronenberg allows that there is some parody there, although the anti-gaming rhetoric is minimized in the final film.
He points out that there is a more direct parody in the film: that of marketers and distributors. “In the beginning, of course, Allegra Geller is doing market research, and is not enjoying it. She is forced, really, to connect with her fans in an attempt to see how her game is working. That definitely comes out of my own experience doing preview screenings… I would say that more than anything that has to do with critics. This has to do with the actual process of filmmaking.”
In any case, the interview with Rushdie brought out another idea which would become central to eXistenZ: “One of the things that I had discussed with Rushdie, actually, was whether a game could be art. Could you create a game that was also art? We had an interesting discussion about that. So, I gradually came to the idea of a game designer who was an artist…”
Early in the film’s conception, Cronenberg had not intended to show the actual game at all. However, as he was writing the screenplay, he realized that “I wanted to see that game. I wanted to see what happens. So, the whole focus and emphasis of the movie shifted to what you see now.” Cronenberg argues that the fact that we did not see the actual game in his original version of the story shows that he was not interested in the technology.
Yet, virtual reality seems like an obvious place for Cronenberg to develop themes which had appeared in his previous films. One prominent theme, for instance, is whether we can trust our perceptions of the world. This is most obvious in Videodrome, where the main character, Max Renn, has increasing difficulty telling what is real and what is a Videodrome-induced hallucination, although it also an important element of Naked Lunch, Dead Ringers and even M. Butterfly.
As different levels of the game begin to merge in eXistenZ, especially in the third act, the film appears to rework this theme of not knowing what is real and what is artifice. “It wasn’t intentional or calculated,” Cronenberg claims, “but certainly it’s true.” He takes it a step further, however, comparing what his characters go through to a natural life cycle:
you struggle as a child and a young adult to come to some understanding of what reality might be, what your reality might be. You get to a point where you feel you have some grasp on it, and then, as you get older, you realize how structured, how artificial, how created that reality is. And then, you find that your understanding of reality changes — radically — as you get older. If you are observant, if you are alive, if you are still growing, if you haven’t succumbed to the comfortable conventions of what reality is. So, in a way, the movie is really about aging, not about gameplaying.
Early in his career, Cronenberg was more interested in literature than films. Although now he hesitates to site them as influences, he does allow that when he started reading Vladimir Nabokov and especially William S. Burroughs “it was like a recognition of stuff that was already percolating in me.”
Cronenberg admired Nabokov for the richness of his language, and, thinking that he might have a career in a university teaching literature and writing fiction, enjoyed Nabokov’s ironic take on the academic life. Cronenberg found that “There was a time when I would try to write, and what I was writing would be very Nabokovian. But I could see that that was very much a dead end, that that was very imitative. And, of course, I hadn’t lived his life.” He feels the same way about Burroughs. Although he found affinities with their work, he felt that he had to find his own creative voice.
The decision to go into filmmaking, rather than attempting a career as a prose fiction writer, made this easier because the language of cinema is completely different. When he made a film version of Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, for instance, Cronenberg felt he needed to find “how it felt in terms of cinema, cinematic imagery.” In fact, the film combines elements of the original novel, another Burroughs novel (Junkie), fictional treatment of actual events in Burroughs’ life (for example, the shooting of his wife) and Cronenberg’s original ideas (ie: the insect typewriters), making it his original vision.
Cronenberg uses insects (which are featured prominently in, among other of his films, Naked Lunch, eXistenZ and, of course, The Fly) to describe one aspect of his creative process. “For me,” he states, “Nabokov’s interest in insects is closer to the way I approach ‘insectness’ than Burroughs. Burroughs had no affinity for insects whatsoever — they were the alien, the Other. I don’t feel that way…” He goes on to point out, though, that he was a junior entomologist who collected insects before he was 10 years old, so his interest in the subject predates reading either author.
One way Cronenberg’s interest in prose fiction has affected his screenwriting is in his understanding of metaphor, which he believes is one of the foundations of prose writing which, for the most part, has not been translated properly into film. “The Eisensteinian direct metaphorical project, his attempt to use metaphor in a direct way, which is that when people stood up and roared like a lion, you would cut to a lion roaring, proved to be ludicrous, even to Eisenstein. It didn’t work. And that was the most direct cinematic equivalent to the prose use of metaphor.”
Cronenberg claims that he has always been concerned with finding cinematic metaphors. For him, however, they do not appear in the screenplay, which is “a template and a coded message for your crew, and a kind of seduction for actors and producers” where only the dialogue will actually appear in the finished film. For Cronenberg, “It’s really when I’m on the set, and we’re doing pre-production design that I’m actually dealing with the literary aspects of filmmaking. It’s a kind of irony, but you’re not really dealing with that very much when you’re writing your screenplay.”
In addition to these literary considerations, Cronenberg has often said that being Canadian has had a lot of influence on his filmmaking. Like many Canadians, he begins by explaining that being Canadian means not being American. “I get scripts often for movies that are too American for me. I would be faking it. I feel that I would be looking at other American movies and trying to make it up from that. I don’t really feel that connection. And, of course, American producers, studio people or agents who might offer you the script, when I say, ‘You know, I don’t get it,’ they think I’m kidding. They don’t recognize this difference themselves.”
What exactly is the difference? Cronenberg claims that the Hollywood style, which is the dominant paradigm in filmmaking today, puts the “stress on narrative momentum, a very rigid act structure, and what constitutes character. [There is the need] of having sympathetic characters, for example, the feeling that you cannot involve an audience in filmmaking unless you have a character that they can quote identify with unquote.” He goes on to say that “all of these things are not natural to me, and for me, also, are very hard to accept as imperatives of filmmaking.”
Cronenberg sees himself as more European than American in his concerns and style (although he will admit to having American influences as well). He believes that staying in Canada, rather than moving to the Los Angeles to work, as many of his early contemporaries (most notably, Ivan Reitman) did, allowed him to follow his own cinematic interests. Had he moved, Cronenberg claims, “I would no longer be able to see any other [storytelling] possibilities.”
eXistenZ is Cronenberg’s first original screenplay since Videodrome. In that time, he has shot three films based on books (The Dead Zone, Naked Lunch and Crash), one based on a stage play (M. Butterfly) and one based on a newspaper article and non-fiction book (Dead Ringers). Cronenberg allows that this was a shift in his filmmaking: “I used to be very intolerant of any concept other than writing an original screenplay. I realized very quickly that you don’t create anything out of a vacuum, whether you acknowledge the newspaper article that gave you the kernel of the movie or the source of the dream that you had, you live in a context, and that’s where your material comes from. It’s not created completely through isolated willpower or creative power. So, I began to not worry quite as much — well, I stopped worrying entirely about whether what I was writing was original or not.”
As it happens, eXistenZ was written before Crash, and there was a period when Cronenberg was trying to get both made. Had the funding been different, eXistenZ might have been made first, so the sequence of original and other material is not as it might seem. Cronenberg says he now chooses material on the basis of whether it feels “vital and primordial to me.”
The screenplay for eXistenZ contains a couple of elements which are new to Cronenberg’s work. One is references to Jewish culture. At one point, a storekeeper refers to his joint as Haimische, a Yiddish word which, loosely translated, means “tasty.” [4] At one point in the screenplay, a character, referring to the bioports by which players jack into the game, states: “Do both of you realize that neither of you can be buried on hallowed ground because of these…these mutilations?” [5] This seems to be a reference to the Jewish tradition against any form of body modification, which would result in a person not being brought back to life in the time of the Messiah. As well, some character names (ie: Geller and Nader) are traditionally Jewish.
Another element new to Cronenberg’s work is self-reference. At one point, Geller refers to another person as “Not a very well-drawn character. And his dialogue was just so-so.” [6] This, and one or two other lines in the screenplay, could be referring to the film itself. Cronenberg acknowledges using this device, which “forces the audience to take a more oblique stance on what they’re seeing.”
However, the device is used sparingly; Cronenberg does not want to his film to become another in a series of deconstructionist exercises. “[eXistenZ] is not Scream and Scream 2. It’s not a kind of deconstructionist irony, which is something I don’t find all that fruitful. Even in Shakespeare in Love, at one point I had to say, ‘Enough deconstruction, already. I got it.’ Deconstruction as comedy, I guess that is.”
Self-reference and Jewish references are nuances which enrich a film which otherwise fits quite comfortably into Cronenberg’s oeuvre. As we have seen, the subject of eXistenZ, as in much of his work, is the nature of reality. Commenting on his critics’ view that the violence in his films, especially when it is coupled with sexuality, is harmful to individuals and society as whole, gives Cronenberg the opportunity to explain his view of reality:
In terms of the destruction of reality by movies, there’s an irony there, because the basic understanding that I have is that reality is a created thing, anyway. Whether it’s created by movies or religion or philosophy or capitalist democracy or whatever, it’s a created thing. It’s not an absolute. So, I wouldn’t say that movies have created our new reality, or television. That’s not really saying much. You’re just pinpointing the current form of reality creation. If you want to get to a higher level of understanding, you have to say that this is something that we’ve always done and continue to do, and there is no absolute for a human. There is no absolute reality. We must, we are forced to, it is our destiny and it is our nature to constantly recreate reality. Sometimes, on a daily basis. So, the question is, if you’re talking about morals and ethics and what’s good for the future of mankind, you have to discuss what kind of reality we want to create, rather than talking about burrowing down to or stripping away all falseness and coming to an understanding of absolute reality. There is nothing there. You have to accept the burden of creating your own reality.
Notes
1) All quotes come from an interview with Cronenberg conducted by the author on Tuesday, January 19, 1999.
2) David Cronenberg, eXistenZ, 38.
3) ibid, 73.
4) ibid, 44.
5) ibid, 70.
6) ibid, 48.
This article first appeared in Creative Screenwriting, Volume 6, Number 2, March/April 1999.