QAA Podcast - Premium Episode 237: eXistenZ Movie Night (Sample)

Episode Date: March 22, 2024

What if there was a videogame so indistinguishable from the real world that anyone who played it began to wonder if their entire life was nothing more than a game? What if there was a movie that, in depicting this, stumbled upon the unnerving truth of our present relationship to the internet? What if that movie came out one month after The Matrix and totally bombed while the Matrix would go on to release three sequels and establish the language of conspiracy theory culture? Get your bio-port fitted, lube up your game-hole and jack into this week’s QAA movie night, “eXistenZ.” Subscribe for $5 a month to get an extra episode of QAA every week + access to our archive of premium episodes and ongoing series like PERVERTS, Manclan, Trickle Down and The Spectral Voyager: https://www.patreon.com/QAA Music by Pontus Berghe. Editing by Corey Klotz. https://qanonanonymous.com

What's up QAA listeners? The fun games have begun. I found a way to connect to the internet. I'm sorry, boy. Welcome listener to Premium Chapter 237 of the QAA podcast, the Existens Movie Night episode. As always, we are your host, Jake Rockatansky, Liv Aker, and Travis View. we are back babies we have concluded for the time being our mini-series and we'll return to our regularly scheduled premium episodes so this is a movie that i have actually seen multiple times believe it or not it's not that i love the

film per se or that i'm a massive cronenberg fan it's more that it's just so damn weird coupled with the fact that until fairly recently there weren't a lot of movies movies with gaming and gamers as the central theme. So for whatever reason over the last, you know, 24 years, like, every now and again, I come back to existence. Because I guess, yeah, in 99, that was like cutting edge, new obscure thing. I guess if you heard of this stuff, imagine virtual reality video games. What would we be doing that?

Yeah, exactly. Surely not just, I guess, jerking off, which is probably what most people use VR for. Although Cronenberg was onto something, making the whole game experience, like, very, very sexual, which we'll get into. That's true. Now, you guys had never seen this movie before, correct? No, this would be my first time. What were your initial sort of reactions? I mean, did you have any idea what it was going to be going into?

Because you look at the cover of this film, and it's a whole hodgepodge. I mean, it's like napalm flames and, like, Jude Law. holding out a very weird looking gun. Yeah, the one thing that struck me was the way it's sort of alternated between, like, the grotesque and eroticism. It, like, grossed you out with these, like, pulsating sinew and teeth, you know, glands and, like, grody biological elements. And then it sort of transitioned to, like, I don't know, like, fucking licking a bioport in

in order to penetrate it, you know, it's like, well, this is, you know, getting kind of weirdly, ironic. My reaction to that scene, my girlfriend asked if I was okay. That's a valid question. Oh, yeah. I was not. I turned to my wife, like, at the end, she had never seen it either, and at the end of the movie, I turned to her, and I was like, what'd you think? And she goes, hated it. Why did you make me watch this? Yeah, just like straight up hated it. And, like, it's very rare that she, that she will, like, flat out hate something. And that's just just the review. there's no sort of like qualifying or you know nothing redeeming really about it so I think the movie is very polarizing yeah I went into it because you said it was like made similar time as the

matrix and so that's all I really I didn't even know it was a cronenberg film that took me to like the middle of it to realize like oh yeah it's fucking it's weird we're getting weird in here yeah and like we'll get into I do want to talk about this film in how it relates to the Matrix, because it actually came out much closer than I even realized. But at the time I remember when I watched it, it sort of felt like an anti-gaming film. I mean, you know, the video game consoles in the movie are like these bulging, pulsating blobs that use umbilical cords to jack into people's spines. Instead of, you know, like the sleek towers with futuristic looking controllers, like say

a PS5, you know, or even the, you know, the sort of the monolithic Xbox. Series X. The quote-unquote game pictured throughout the film was more like a dream than something with flashy graphics and cutting-edge art direction. Even though the film employs both production-wise, Cronenberg says that this was the first movie in which he worked with computer-generated graphics. And there's like this little kind of like dragon creature that you see very early on in the movie that's that's CGI. But apparently they built models for all of those things too so that the actors actually had something to interact with. But unlike lawnmower man, or even Nick Arcade,

it only felt like the characters were in a game because the movie told us they were. Otherwise, it just looked like real life. Y'all remember Nick Arcade? I do, I do. It's like the players of Nick Arcade always made the experience seem very awkward. Like they were never quite sure where they were in the space, waving their hands around and stuff.

Yeah, if I can sidebar, Nick Arcade was a show on Nickelodeon that's hosted by a guy, if you go back and watch the clips, I mean, he looks like he's on speed the entire time. I mean, he unhumanly fast and energetic. And the final round for every episode was that the contestants like went into a video game. And it's them with a big green screen in the background, but they project this game, but they sort of have to like duck and dodge things. They must have been watching themselves on a television screen where they could see like what they had to dodge and stuff, and it always, yeah, like Travis said, it looked really weird and kind of uncomfortable, and yeah, it didn't really work, but, I mean, if you're a kid watching,

it was pretty cool. And so herein lies the question asked by David Cronenberg's 1999 film Existens, what is real? Now, keep in mind that in March of that year, almost exactly one month before Existence hit theaters, another movie asking a similar question had been released to almost unanimous acclaim. That, of course, was the original Matrix film. Yeah, that's tough. I would have assumed this was like a rip-off, but it's like a kind of convergent idea thing. It's just unfortunate timing. Yeah, two ideas. And yes, two very different takes on what it feels like to be inside of a video game. Right off the bat, there are a lot of similarities. A port that plugs into your body that takes you in and out of the game. The lead character is some type of programmer,

and that there are these evil forces within and outside of the game hunting the main characters. And yet, the two films couldn't be more different. Existenz was shot on a $15 million budget and made $5.5 million at the box office, and the Matrix was shot on a $63 million budget and made $467 million at the box office. Yeah, this feels like a very strange film to go see in theaters. Yeah, maybe if you're like a Kronenberg person and you're like, Oh, like, oh, this is the guy who did scanners or video drum.

Because this was Existence was Kronenberg's first original script since Videodrome. I mean, I remember when the Matrix came out because I was in high school at the time. And like, oh, I remember, like, everyone I knew was buzzing about this. Like, oh, you got to see it. I just want to talk. I want to talk to you about it because, like, it's so it's just like the themes and, like, you know, the special effects with mind blowing. I don't remember this film coming out at all at that time. No one talked about this.

The Matrix was like, I mean, I can still remember seeing the trailer for The Matrix before it came out and it ending with, you know, Trinity and Neo swinging on this huge sort of repel line towards the screen. And then the screen, like, it almost looked like your TV screen smashed as they hit into it and being like, what? And, you know, they invented this whole camera system to do these 360 degree sort of fluid shots. I mean, I mean, we were talking about the Matrix. The Matrix was watched, it was talked about, it was rent, you know, it was always out at Blockbuster once, you know, once it came to video. This one is interesting because it really does feel so much more like a bad dream. Like the dream nature of this, I know in the Matrix they reference like both you are in the simulacrum, but this kind of gets the simulacrum more where it's like the copy makes the reality feel fake. And you kind of like, yeah, it blends in in that way.

And yeah, I mean, I had written almost exactly that, you know, in many ways the Matrix contributed to the actual development of games themselves. You know, the idea of bullet time almost instantly appeared in a Remedy's classic Max Payne just two years later. The Matrix also created imagery that is still used today when discussing belief structures. You know, the red pill, the blue pill, waking up from the Matrix. I mean, it has this real staying power. Yeah, it's more video game when you pop in and then you like learn Kung Fu and you shoot a bunch of bad. guys. Right. You are more powerful within the simulation, whereas in this film, yeah, not so much. Smirky, bad dream, yeah. Yeah. So today, though, I'm going to try and make the case that when you look back at Existence through today's lens, the film does a much better job at predicting that people might choose a virtual reality over a finite one. You have been listening to a sample of a premium episode of QAnon Anonymous. We don't run any advertising on the show, and we'd like to keep it that way. For five bucks a month, you'll get access to this episode, a new one each week, and our entire

library of premium episodes. So head on over to patreon.com slash QAnonanonymous, and subscribe. Thank you. Thanks. I love you. Jake loves you. I don't know.