If only the Matrix hadn’t been released in the same year, eXistenZ would now be famous for having introduced a generation to Descartes’ dream argument. (It’s like the Christ’s clothes controversy all over again!) The plot is like this: in the near future, you can play immersive virtual reality video games, in which…
…you play a virtual reality video gamer on the run… into a virtual reality video game in which… OK, you get the idea. Or actually, you don’t, because what you thought was reality at the start of the game, uh, film, was really another game.
Besides the obvious “how do you know what you’re experiencing is reality, when you could be fooled by a video game?” theme, there’s also the “moral holiday” issue. When you’re playing a video game, you take a moral holiday; the Nazis in Castle Wolfenstein aren’t real, so you aren’t hurting anyone when you mow them down with your chain gun. (Showing my age now.) But what if you’ve played so many games within games that you’ve lost track of which was the top level (as Allegra Geller seems to toward the end of the film)?
One cool filmic thing is that we take for granted, because it’s a Cronenberg film, that the prop design will be signature Cronenberg; and indeed it is - the game consoles are all made of flesh. Creepy. But in the final reveal, the consoles are realistically depicted electronics. That’s the real twist: we were being told all along that it was a dream and we didn’t pay any attention because we thought that that’s just how reality is in the world of the fiction.
If you meet me in real life, address me with a cheery “Death to the demoness Allegra Geller!” and I will respond in kind.
Philosophical themes: Descartes’ dream argument, moral holiday
Filmic awesomeness: David Cronenberg
Until September 2016 I am a Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy at Corpus Christi College and an Associate Professor in the Oxford Philosophy Faculty. From then on, I'll be a Senior Adviser at the New Zealand Ministry of Transport.
My intellectual interests are mainly in metaphysics, philosophy of language, and ethics, and of course transport policy.
