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An absorbing exploration of virtual reality, although it is not yet clear how much the director himself intended. This film deliberately takes you through several layers of artificial reality, leaving only subtle clues about which layer of virtual reality you are in, positing an ontological confusion for the viewer to ponder.
Also can be seen as a satire of video games-- the whole movie though may fall into the fallacy of imitative form here. It seems unable to escape from the video game genre which it imitates; thus the satire becomes problematic.
A number of interesting ideas crisscross throughout though: the biological mutant is one; the interface of technology and biology, the cyborg urge to transcend reality-- and philosophical allusions such as the title's to Heidegger, along with existential questions: i.e., the game characters are partly scripted or determined and yet partly free to alter their fate, and they wonder at how strange that feels in the game. One character then notes that this existential confusion is just like real life, thereby erasing again the distinction between the virtual and the real. Likewise with the observation that it is unpleasant to stumble around in a world where you don't know what will happen next and you're not sure how to play since you have to stumble around just to find out the goal and the unknown rules. A virtual game within the game is titled "TranscendenZ". Also a critique of how virtual violence makes us unable to feel the effects of real violence. Even the heroes at every level of ontological existence find themselves confused about violence. They don't like it but it is thrilling and part of the "game", which then they fear is real.
The game creator, the god of the system, is assassinated in the end; yet that very scenario is played out in direct parallel to a video game we've just witnessed-- and the onlookers believe that it is still just part of the virtual reality. In the end, the film does not resolve the doubt about whether or not this is "real" but the point is clear (to me anyway). Existenz means Da-sein: You are there. You are thrown into a set of rules and mysteries at every level. Ontologically, virtual reality recapitulates reality. And its common game motifs express, like a royal road to the unconscious, our own fascination with violence.
Nevertheless, while Cronenberg affirms these philosophical allusions in an interview about the film, he claims that he is very much against the "Reality ... {underground name of terrorist group} portrayed in the film both in the game and in the 'real' level." Seems that Cronenberg himself did not put that much thought into the film, though his impressive education comes through. The interview in Cineaste gives the impression of a middle brow intellectual who's trying to be avant-garde by inclination. Cronenberg is simply on the side of free imagination -- the clichéd bourgeois modernist credo-- despite the acknowledged ambivalence there. (My impression here might be due to one limited interview.) Still, Cronenburg seems to miss the point that his film betrays the fallacy of imitative form (here imitating computer games while doing a satirical critique of them, but a critique that is unable to "transcend" the same form) probably because he actually thinks that it is "imaginative" and radical. Yet the film's imaginative world is less bearable, and more jejune, than our own all-too-real world. It remains trapped in the computer game worldview.


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