The Velvet Light Trap

Hotchkiss, Lia M.
"Still in the Game": Cybertransformations of the "New Flesh" in David Cronenberg's eXistenZ
The Velvet Light Trap - Number 52, Fall 2003, pp. 15-32

University of Texas Press

Lia M. Hotchkiss - "Still in the Game": Cybertransformations of the "New Flesh" in David Cronenberg's eXistenZ - The Velvet Light Trap 52 The Velvet Light Trap 52 (2003) 15-32 "Still in the Game": Cybertransformations of the "New Flesh" in David Cronenberg's eXistenZ Lia M. Hotchkiss Cyberspace is more than a breakthrough in electronic media or in computer interface design. With its virtual environments and simulated worlds, cyberspace is a metaphysical laboratory, a tool for examining our very sense of reality. --Michael Heim, "The Erotic Ontology of Cyberspace" Michael Heim's description of cyberspace as a metaphysical laboratory recalls David Cronenberg's Naturalistic remark in a 1989 interview that he "look[s] at each film as sort of a lab experiment" (Hickenlooper 4). This coincidence of description is particularly appropriate in light of the director's film eXistenZ (1999), which features a virtual reality game whose contingency and inferred, rather than explained, rules and objectives are designed to mimic the frequent uncertainties of life itself as an unfolding process. Not only is the game eXistenZ, in the words of its designer, Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason-Leigh), "a game everybody's already playing," but, run through and powered by the players' nervous systems, it is a game interface and world whose particular gaming sessions or plots incorporate and hence manifest the individual players' preoccupations, in this instance, the potentially...