eXistenZ: One More Try
It’s a game everybody’s already playing alright, including us, which is why we can’t help but begin this week by noticing what you’ll already have noticed, dear enemies of reality: we are as guilty as the machines of replicating structures. In fact, as a new friend said to an old friend in our car the other night zipping past the freeway construction on the way back from the latest talk (albeit more optimistic than usual, sorta) about the inevitable restructuring of everything North into everything South, “You’re totally old school!” By which we mean, if we mean hung up on value, we suppose we all are. So while we enjoy a good ontological puzzle and can’t resist quoting “I don’t think I want action, me I mean, the bearer of the excited body-port!” next to “I can’t get me in or it out!” for the pure pleasantries of dorm-room humor, we confess we’re about to get grouchy again on the fantasy that asks “How could truth hide inside a game forever?” as though box office sales weren’t the answer to its cheeky tongue-in-cheek self-parody. (Oh but what the hell, we admit we giggled over the faux innocence of “Are you friendly or not?” and rather appreciated the moxy of Jennifer to Jude in the exchange naming that special “psychosis” produced by blending Ethos into Mythos: “your nervous system is fully engaged with the architecture of the game.”
So schematics: In the beginning and the end there was a Church, inside which smitten customers assist the manufacturer of a new game/system with working out the bugs, in exchange for which they will receive a certificate to purchase back their labor at, um, a discounted rate. Sound familiar? In between, bracketed by what we initially assume is reality and the next level (Transcendenz), the content of eXistenZ Hegel knew as the game-itself likewise turns out to consist of supplying the necessary labor to produce the system (now known as Trout Farm) that supports the experience of, yep, being in the game itself—merely to get into which involves purchasing the gear the labor of game play makes in the store that is, sigh, the portal to the other plane. Plus sex, the new (body-port) old (y’know) compensation of the tired fantasy of biological interface that is now hardware (ditto: body-port), software (part of the programmed experience of the game content itself), and—we’re sorry but we are compelled by our analysis to say so—wetware (hello saliva, chapstick, motel rooms on dark and stormy nights!). eXistenZ, or the game itself, is just the most recent version of the perfect product, as always more perfect than ever before, this time because the weaponry and food is people. The content of the game, in other words, is the labor of producing the system that manages the game, performed in a world that looks a lot like ours (with a few touches of vaguely Ewok-like scenery strained through the Orientalized Tokyo hash dreams of Blade Runner) where no compensation is desired in exchange other than the pleasure of playing, with the option to pause (what we call vacation, or for the privileged among us, “summer break”) just long enough to resurface with the meat of the body in a drab motel where even the sex isn’t as good as the memory of virtual wetdreams, now that play and labor, pleasure and wages have become identical. Mean density is constant indeed.
Here is where our old friend Perky Pat enters center stage as more than a twice lingered lovingly upon bag of name-checked potato chips for our self-congratualtory viewing pleasure (aside to David C: dude, really), since it affords the very structural layout whereupon ontological tomfoolery-cum-corny special-effects meets the matter and machinations of value production. It isn’t just, in other words, that eXistenZ uses the compensation of sex to seduce players into the game where play equals maintenance of the game itself. It’s that the game also consists of the labor of reproducing oneself as a subject who plays the game where it doesn’t even need to be Saturday everyday anymore but can openly be declared Monday in the factory of manufactured dreams built of animal parts, hooked as we are on our administered doses of just enough free will “to keep it interesting,” as J says to J on the way back from lunch to blow the whole works up and get to the next level–where we finally get to be the customers testing the product we just made for its market-run, albeit a bit confused about whether there is an inside or an outside here and whether we’re it or it’s us. But at least there’s that certificate supposedly somewhere in the mail for buying back a portion of our labor, reminding us free will is the freedom to trick ourselves into thinking we’ve chosen to take pleasure in such ontological niceties.
So while we readily admit what we’ve said here before in saying that the formal discourse of free will clouded by real virtual-becoming-real virtual experiences troubles us (when it doesn’t bore us) insofar as it obscures the real exploitation and immiseration that is its sole content, what we find truly troubling is what is always least interesting in the games/films/novels themselves. And least interesting, we suspect, because it is most real and least desirable: the comedown’s still a bitch. Coming to in Cheap Country Motel where even sex is better without the body is a case in point, but consider the following passages, in the context of what precedes them. As Nathaniel Hawthorne’s descendant Anne Hathaway put it in a not so distant past of a future near us, then, “If the map is not the territory, the pot is not the potter. So don’t talk ontology, Barney; don’t say is.” Except it’s worse than that, really, since the pot is the potter, and the map is the territory, insofar as the one can be exchanged for the other. And thus all our talk is as of is, since what bleeds back and forth between eXistenZ and transCendenZ is nothing other than value, in all its homogenous glory reproducing itself for its own sake as the end-game that that which Palmer Eldritch became (or that which became Palmer Eldritch?) announced is marked by -Z:
“I’d like to know,” Barney said, “what you were trying to do when you introduced Chew-Z to our people.”
“Perpetuate myself,” the creature opposite him said quietly.
He glanced up, then. “A form of reproduction?”
“Yes, the only way I can.”
With overwhelming aversion Barney said, “My God, we would all have become your children.”
“Don’t fret about that now, Mr. Mayerson,” it said, and laughed in a humanlike, jovial way. “Just tend your little garden up top, get your water system going…”
-The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (224)
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