The A.V. Club has a list of 11 unintentionally ridiculous depictions of virtual reality, which the commentors find intriguing primarily for what is not included (e.g. Unix-girl in Jurassic Park, which then inspired a spirited defense, etc.), and I’d add Hackers, though, as with Jurassic Park, it’s more about the GUI than VR. But I felt a need to contest one of the included entries, number four on the list: David Cronenberg’s 1999 feature eXistenZ.
I’ll first quote from the list entry:
The future virtual-reality game world of eXistenZ isn’t all that visually ridiculous; it looks much like the real world, except a little smoother and slicker, with stars Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jude Law wearing enough pancake makeup to look like slightly fake versions of themselves. It’s more conceptually ridiculous, albeit in a thoroughly Cronenbergian way. Players have grotesque spinal rectums installed as ports so they can plug into the game; the game consoles are fleshy masses resembling human organs, while the controllers are squishy pink things with obscenely familiar-looking nipples as joysticks […] but while all the grotesqueries are disturbing […] it’s also pretty silly watching the characters parade through this world of ubiquitous bloody artificial umbilical cords and heaving detached flesh.
Before continuing, perhaps the first question that needs to be raised or answered is, by “ridiculous depictions” do they mean [a] what a virtual reality environment would “look like,” or [b] the gear and/or technology used to achieve it? I suspect more of the former, though latter comes into play both here, to an extent, and, for example, in entry number 5 on the list, Johnny Mnemonic, regarding which they critique all the blocky gear Keanu must assemble to make his “long distance call.” Regarding the former, however, we have critiques of bad wire-frame modeling and polygons (see also: Disclosure, 1994; The Lawnmower Man, 1992), along with putting characters into knock-offs of popular mid-90s 1st-person shooters, and weird costumes meet iffy green-screening / compositing to provide a “hyper-realistic” feel.
Looking at both of these features we see that—as the list / article rightly points out—a problem has to do with predicting the near future. The near future is always close (near) enough, by definition, that instead of making wild leaps (e.g. it’s 2012, and in 2014 we’ll haveStar Trek-style transporters on every corner …) we extrapolate from what we already have. We attempt to fill in an unknown in a reasonably rational manner by making best guesses. When it comes to movies and television we have the technical constraint of what the production team can actually put together on a buget. We should not overestimate the creativity of producers, directors, and writers. We get bad wireframes and polygons because that’s what the special effects teams can do on a budget, and it’s what the production team, rather lacking in imagination, thinks things would look like or what the audience will accept.
Again: we’re filling in an unknown with knowns, but sometimes we cann’t rationally extrapolate; we don’t have a trend or a rule to follow, but the other way we fill in the blanks is with metaphors, often with analogs and occasionally with more interesting leaps. In Disclosure not only do we have bad 90s wireframe models, but we get the data archive as a cathedral of filing cabinets. Moving to user interfaces, in Hackers we get the computer and file system as a cityscape. It’s a wonderful visual analogy: chips and circuits and so on on a board mimicking the layout of streets and intersections and buildings in three dimensions.
But back to eXistenZ. What makes these other virtual reality scenarios “ridiculous” has to do to a great extent with looking at products of the 90s (primarily) and seeing how they mis-extrapolated the early 21st-century. First of all computer graphics progressed more quickly than anticpated by the movies, making wireframes and polygons somewhat quaint; on the other hand we do not have ubiquitous VR goggles and the like. The VR phase and craze faded, as did, I suppose, cyberpunk. They involve a lot of stereotypical 90s hackers on archaic personal computers typing away, they involve interface metaphors that seem very played out, and their post-production results seem antediluvian in a post-Matrix, post-LotR world. eXistenZ, on the other hand, plays with other metaphors and avoids most of the other traps indicated in the other list items. Furthermore, because of the game-within-a-game (and so-on down or up the rabbit hole) aspect, I find it problematic critiquing either the VR “gear” or “representation,” mainly because it’s hard to pin the movie down as claiming this is what VR will be like. The other list items are not only from specific years (often the early-to-mid-90s), but they’re also set in specific near-future milieu’s in “the real world.” In contrast, the VR scenarios of eXistenZ are all embedded within other VR/game scenarios.
Just as I would answer those who felt that Jurassic Park or Hackers belonged on the list by saying that those deal with GUIs rather than VRs, I wished to counter the inclusion of eXistenZ by saying, too, that it’s not about VR … but I’m wrong. It is. But in contrast to the divide between gear and representation the other films (Johnny Mnemonic being my go-to example), here they are intertwined. Here we have an analog to the syntax-semantics or form-content divide breaking down; every formal container containing content appears, itself, to be content for another container, as the movie’s conclusion reminds us. More importantly it seems to thematize our conceptual metaphors at every level. The accepted-reality of much of the movie is a little future bio-steam-punk in a way: we have the gooey game pads/pods and spinal apertures, but we use regular ol’ mechanics, oil and grease and pistons, to create them, much like piercing ears. Further “within” the game we move away from technology and more toward biology, even toward constructing weapons and game parts from harvested organs, from our teeth, and so on. And in the outermost provided level we have shiny carapaces that shimmer between metallic-mechanical and insectoid (our extremes are inner organs and exoskeletons, with self-other interfaces along the way).
When I look at the is-it-or-isn’t-it-real movies of 1998 and 1998—eXistenz, the Matrix, the Thirteenth Floor, Dark City—, three of which deal explicitly with ‘reality’ as a VR construct, of course they all seem “dated” in a certain sense, the Matrix perhaps least so. Their “visual aesthetic” is of its time, the film-making is of that time. Several were shot on limited budgets and all were shot before shooting with digital cameras became almost a norm; you’d never mistake them for movies made in 2012. At yet unlike Disclosure, Johnny Mnemonic, The Lawnmower Man, the television epidodes/shows on the list, etc., they don’t come across to me as “products of their time.” And maybe that’s why I’d remove Cronenberg from that list.
