Brendan Sanderson

Robert Fiander

At the Movies: The Interpenetration of Cinema and Virtual Reality

David Cronenberg, in an interview with Rob Blackwater on the subject of his most recent movie, eXistenZ, refers repeatedly to technology as an extension of the human body. Cronenberg, however, uses this definition as his own "belief 'and omits all reference to Marshall McLuhan, who scooped him on the idea in Understanding Media, 1964. McLuhan, that is, defined "media" as a blanket term referring to all extensions of the human body via technology and invention. Perhaps Cronenberg's reticence in mentioning McLuhan stems from his suggestive portrayal of an evil media theorist, Brian Oblivion, in Videodrome, a 1983 movie in which Mr. "Oblivion" cryptically observes that "TV is reality and reality is less than TV." Despite Videodrome's off-the-mark caricature, Cronenberg's eXistenZ, like. The Matrix, another recent film on virtual reality (VR), raises a question that would have interested McLuhan, if not a cinema audience: what is the nature of "reality" in a society so interested in a "virtual" version of it? Furthermore, is the incipient technology of VR - as it exists, for instance, in the innumerable video-games for sale today - beginning to influence the way movies are made -just as movies have already provided many of the action-oriented themes that video-games use? Two other recent and controversial movies, to be discussed in conclusion - Eyes Wide Shut and The Blair Witch Project - shed light on such a question.

Since it is possible, as Umberto Ecco points out, to think of the word 66 media" in the sense of "code" or "channel," McLuhan's unique use of the word shouldbe remembered: "Media," for him, are mediators of experience, and hence his definition of them as bodily extensions is a broad one. In Understanding Media, McLuhan illustrates the effects of "media" via the ancient metaphor of narcissus. This figure from ancient Greek mythology, as McLuhan sees it, did not realize that his reflection in a pool was an image of himself. thus, he drowned attempting to make contact with his own image. The Narcissus metaphor suggests that technology as self-extension has a hypnotic effect on its users. To the degree that media amplify any physical sense (or senses) at the expense of the others, they condition our behaviour. McLuhan's metaphor for humanity's relationship with its technological extensions thus has a cautionary side: the more involved we become with technological progress, the more important it is to see technology as an image of bodily and mental capabilities. Refusing to acknowledge precisely how technology conditions the way we do things creates the danger of losing whatever control we think we have over our own hardware and software media - hardware being our material selfextensions, from clothes to books to television, and software being our ideological, social, and intellectual ways of interpreting the world around us, from ancient myths and legends to the phonetic alphabet to Word Perfect 8.0.

The basis for the futuristic technology of Cronenberg's film is the "gastropod" - an organic game system that resembles a large glob of silly putty, the insides of which are comprised of recycled animal organs. Cronenberg bases this fictitious technology on computer research which explores the use ofprotein molecules as an integral component in computer chips. The pod is plugged into the central nervous system via a "bio-port" at the base of the spine. The VR experience facilitated by use of the pod is all but indistinguishable from an actual experience. eXistenZ begins with a group-test of the gastropod VR system, led by Allegra - (Jennifer Jason Leigh) the system's inventor. Allegra's fame and pre-eminence as a VR pioneer, however, meets with resistance from an anti-VR terrorist group which interrupts the test and wounds her, via a security-eluding, bone-andsinew gun (an interesting self-extension) that fires a human tooth into her shoulder. Allegra escapes with the help of Ted Pikul (Jude Law), and the runaway couple's subsequent investigation of who in their test-group may have been responsible for the betrayal constitutes the main movement of the picture.

A problem for eXistenZ's audience, however, is the elusiveness of "real" experience in the movie, for Cronenberg's story provides the distinct possibility that it is portraying a VR experience from beginning to end, with no interval of non-VR time; the very seamlessness of the characters' experiences makes it next to impossible to say with certainty where reality begins or ends. Hence, the movie's conclusion, with Allegra and Ted pointing their guns at a fellow VR group-test member, assumes special significance - for the first-person camera shot makes the audience itself into the bewildered person they are threatening to kill. Has the group-test of the new system ended, and is the murder threat real? Or is the gun pointing scene just another thrilling feature of the VR experience, obscuring the issue of what is "virtual" death: can one's dying experiences, that is, actually be mediated by technology? And what is the difference between life and "virtual" life when, at some point in the future, the transition from one to the other is next to impossible to discern? In this sense, Allegra's and Ted's adventures are retrospectively a source of great irony; for if the terror and pleasure in Allegra's and Ted's adventures are no more than a reaction to a pre-programmed scenario, then the choices made in relation to it lose their energy and vitality, however convincing the VR illusion. The sheer difficulty of deciding which of these moments is or is not outside the VR simulation makes the very issue of reality unreal - such is the way Cronenberg sets up his story on the big screen.

Cronenberg, incidentally, mentions that he calls his movie eXistenZ for a reason: the discovery that one will not live forever, he notes, is "the basis of all existential thought." In saying so, Cronenberg forgets the major thrust of Sartrean existentialism, which is about how terror comes from awakening to awareness of the influences - social, ideological, personal that control one's life, not to mention the absurdity of life as it is lived by those who do not realize they are condemned, as it were, to freedom. In this sense, the supreme irony of eXistenZ is the contemporary audience's lack of response to its characters' (real or unreal) experiences. Reviews of Cronenberg's movie show decided disinterest in issues relating to freedom of choice and reality/unreality; instead, they regularly express repulsion at the ugliness of the gastropod and of the gastropod factory which Allegra and Ted visit during their adventures. Even an experienced reviewer like Roger Ebert sounds ridiculously disgruntled by eXistenZ's failure to provide an unmuddied window on reality: Ebert doesn't get the joke when Allegra complains, at one point, about not being able to get access to the Virtual experience of her own game system as she investigates how her gastropod's technology may have been tampered with by anti-VR terrorists. The joke is retroactive, of course, but it relies for its effect upon seeing the near-impossibility of distinguishing between non-VR and virtual experience as Cronenberg's movie presents it.

The Wachowski brothers' film, The Matrix, also deals with the issue of how existential freedom is reduced to pre-programmed experience through VR technology - although unlike Cronenberg, they show no obvious interest in creating images that emphasize technology as bodily extension (The guns are "real" guns - at least real VR guns - not flesh and bone ones that fire teeth.) The movie's principal character, Neo (Keanu Reeves), inhabits an electronically-generated world identical to the United States in 1999; this VR illusion, or "Matrix," has been engineered by an artificial intelligence (Al) network which has won a cataclysmic struggle with its former human masters. Now the Al Matrix uses the energy of human bodies as a source ofpower: the bodies are all j acked into a common VR experience while ensconced in fluid-filled pods, which, in turn, are stacked in huge towers that form whole cities on the surface of the wasteland that the earth has become. Human bodies are exploited in this way because the Al network's former source of power - the sun - has been obscured by a "scorching" of the sky during the world-wide struggle which has occurred. Time, as such, has also been lost while the human race has been exploited in this way. Virtual experience has successfully supplanted human experience to the degree that humans no longer even know the extent to which their lives are technologically mediated. Here, the dark side of McLuhan's neo-oral, electronically connected and mediated "global village" shows its face.

As one might expect, ingenious paradoxes arise from the desolate scenario the Wachowskis create. Laurence Fishburne's Morpheus character, for instance, fulfills his symbolic role as god of dreams oddly by awakening people like Neo from their VR-induced illusion, only to re-introduce them to more of the same technologically-induced somnamulism as they seek to liberate the captives of the Matrix. Morpheus, after this pattern, offers a new "reality" to Neo - one which entails visiting the VR/Al network regularly for the purpose of liberating still more Virtually imprisoned human beings: Morpheus gets people away from the Matrix only to put them back into it after their physical and psychological convalescence. The future, furthermore, is like a video-game, one that is not without existential overtones - for the Wachowskis see Neo as a heroic figure, whose rebirth" as "the one" symbolizes an existential attitude of hard-headed independence. But Neo, like every other human in the movie, cannot escape the technological enviromment: nor does he or any other character wish to, it seems. In fact, he finds his spiritual "rebirth' while jacked into VR experience - an event which is emphasized by the movie's final shot, during which he zooms through the air of the Matrix like a Virtual divinity.

The Wachowskis' virtuous, anti-Matrix squad is thus so caught up inusingtechnologyto "defeat"te.chnology, they have become somnambulistic in a way that McLuhan, and perhaps even Cronenberg, might find amusing. The movie focuses exclusively, for instance, on how the characters spend most of their time either exploring the VR Matrix, or devotedly using their own computer technology in an effort to overcome the Al beings. This, of course, raises a question about the wake-up calls that the humans from the real" world" are so busy dispensing: Do Neo, Morpheus and Trinity have any right, as characters who have escaped the Matrix, to disrupt the somnambulistic trance ofthe human beings who have nice "lives" in the VR scenario created for them by the victorious Al beings? To answer "Yes"to this question is, apparently, to come down against technology's mediation of a willingly mesmerized humanity's experience; to,answer "No" is to capitulate to artificially manufactured fantasies that keep peciple happy in an impossibly advanced technological world.

A character in the movie who comments on this very issue is Cypher, played by Joe Pantoliano; his character acts as the traitor in the anti-AI group of humans outside the Matrix. Cypher is the only one to ask Neo whether he wishes he had not accepted Morpheus's offer to free him of the Matrix's VR illusion. Later on, Cypher answers his own question by betraying his comrades in the shabbiest fashion possible, showing psychopathic indifference to their fates. In exchange for allowing the AI beings to trap his ex-friends, Cypherwill receive a new identity in the Matrix - that of someone rich and famous; in addition, he will have his mind purged of memories about himself as someone who once knew that the Matrix world was concocted by AI beings. Before making the decision to be a turncoat, however, Cypher's interview with the AI agent reveals his preference for the illusion of VR, even though he knows it to be an invasive manipulation of his whole sensorium. He looks lovingly at a steak he is eating and the wine he is drinking, noting that even though he knows it isn't real, he prefers it to the disgusting rations he and his comrades consume in the grim world outside the Matrix. Apparently, when technology offers options in the fon-n of illusions, people can be tempted to take the most seductive and least ethically demanding ones; and while movies don't have to refer to technologically mediated experience in order to comment on the relationship between ethics and reality, some recent contemporary movies are beginning to comment implicitly on just such an issue.

Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, for example, the very title of which suggests the flicker of the movie projector at work - now open, now closed - could be Kubrick's subtle way of commenting on cinema as an evolving medium on the one hand, while casting a dark glance at human sexuality on the other. Kubrick, significantly enough, had anticipated producing a work on Artificial Intelligence prior to this movie; the project, however, did not work given the advanced nature of his screen concept in relation to the technology of cinematic art. To compensate for his inability to pursue such a project, he appears to have given special attention to creating a web of photography and narrative that is highly suggestive of a video-game scenario. In this vein, Tom Cruise, the film's protagonist, makes a transformation from his regular role of attractive, macho leading man into a kind of bland, and not highly individualized hero-figure, Dr. Bill Harford. Nicole Kidman is Alice, the doctor's wife, who remains in the background for much of the story, except when she emerges as a similarly generic, if nightmarish, presence in Cruise's imagination, as he contemplates her in the adulterous arms of a naval officer. As Eyes Wide Shut unfolds, it does indeed take on the pattern of a sophisticated video-game, featuring increasing degrees of difficulty as its player (Cruise) advances from level to level of the game' s theme of marital infidelity: and because Kubrick's movie follows such a plan so well - even to the point ofmaking the highest "level" of Cruise's adventure into a castle that requires a password for entrance - it is tempting to say that Kubrick deliberately set his movie up as a parody of how far the psychology engendered by video-game patterns and technology has penetrated the medium of cinema.

Eyes Wide Shut opens with Dr. Bill Harford and his wife Alice attending a lavish social function at the house of Victor, their millionaire friend (Sydney P611ack); both are propositioned by members of the opposite sex in a way that defies belief - unless the silver-haired, Hungarian masher who dances splendidly, quotes Ovid, and casts lingering, flattering gazes at Kidman's character Alice is a standard feature of high society - or unless one finds it not unusual that Cruise's doctor character is brazenly approached and sandwiched by two attractive women at a time, signaling a ménage à trois to come. Even though both Bill and Alice are conveniently diverted from actually committing adultery, this is still a stereotyped beginning to a film which features two of Hollywood's prettiest people. Kubrick, by starting out in this fashion, lays the groundwork for a series of events and scenes which show that the game of adultery in the twentieth century is played, at least by the affluent, like a video-game: in the process, he allows his unwitting actors to bring their talents to a vast cinematic metaphor, where both stars are quite lost, even though they struggle bravely.

Bill and Alice, for instance, whose undisguised public behaviour Riainly shows that neither is a particularly faithful partner, discuss the evening later on, and quaffel while under the influence of a joint they have smoked. The baffle-gab argument they get into features Cruise's character maintaining how he knows, deep in his heart, that his wife would never be unfaithful to him (But in view of the preceding dinner party, who is he kidding, the audience or his wife?) He only retreats from this position when Kidman's character, after scoffing at him repeatedly, openly confesses that she has been tempted before, which confuses Bill, who appears never to have entertained the notion that his wife could have such thoughts - even though he himself obviously has. Far from representing plausible adult characters here, Cruise and Kidman are merely inhabiting roles with which neither probably feels comfortable. The spat is interrupted by what else the phone. Bill has to go out on a house call (Do doctors still make them, even to rich people?) Alice fades into the background - except as she 'emerges in Bill's imagination - until towards the movie's end. The mechanically unfolding sequence ofevents which has already begun to roll is now gaining speed, the theme of infidelity having been well established.

Dr. Bill visits an attractive woman whose father hasjust died- and, in remarkable consistency with the theme that has been un-subtly laid down, this bereaved woman confesses her previously hidden love for the doctor and tries to seduce him. Bill resists the overture, hurries away, embarrassed and confused as always. On the mean streets of the big city, he is roughed up a bit by a street gang which considers him too affluent looking to leave alone; the cartoonish and rapid-fire pace of this scene makes it just a bit too bizarre to belong to a sophisticated, de-plotted scenario which relies on uncertainty for an aesthetic effect - and Kubrick's later introduction of an "explanation" as his movie ends shows that he is not, in any case, really interested in a de-plotted film as such. This scene is simply strung together with all the others to give the effect of a character blundering around in territory he does not really understand. Cruise, in short, resembles a neophyte who is learning how to play a complex video-game; his run-in with the street gang simply means he has chosen the wrong pattern.

More adventures follow, in which Cruise's character appears to get back on track with the fidelity/infidelity theme: he is propositioned by a hooker, and then he is saved from the hooker by a cell-phone call from his wife, which twinges his conscience. He then wanders past a bar where a musician friend of his - Nick - has previously told Bill he will be performing (Nick has also conveniently appeared in the opening scene as Bill's long-lost friend.) The doctor learns that Nick is now playing piano blind-folded for a secret society. Bill, in spite of the danger Nick warns him of, insists on infiltrating the society. Acting on information from Nick on how to dress, Bill rents a costume from a friend of a patient late in the evening, and gains access to a scenario which is a combination of a black mass and an orgy. Prior to the disturbing castle scene, Cruise has been busy introducing himself as a doctor to the various characters he randomly encounters: that he always does so via his official doctor's identity card further makes his late-night meanderings resemble a video-game with protocols for advancing through various levels. Throughout this remarkable evening, the doctor never does succumb to infidelity, which would appear to indicate how well (or poorly) he is playing the game - depending, of course on what the as-yet undisclosed criteria for "winning" are. In this sense, the movie makes mechanical use of Victor the millionaire as a demystifying presence, who explains and clarifies the night of mystery: but even though Victor's comments ultimately lead Dr. Bill to a more honest relationship with his wife Alice, the millionaire's chastising tone indicates that the name of the game has been infidelity, and that Bill has done rather poorly. All considered, Cruise as Bill Harford in Eyes Wide Shut wanders about Iiie a lost child looking for candy, never quite knowing what is going to happen or what has happened, and never really understanding why things are unfolding the way they are. He may as well be a neophyte who is leaming how to play a difficult new video-game, perhaps one by the name of the Castle's ironic password-"Fidelio."

The interpenetration of video-game protocols with cinematic narrative and character development that can be traced in Eyes Wide Shut thus shows that Kubrick was capable of implicit commentary on media other than cinema, but not that he was the first to do so; other not-so-old movies, such as Total Recall, for instance, (not to mention countless Star Trek episodes on television), show a similar intuitive awareness of VR and role-playing in relation to games as a contemporary phenomenon. Today, as Baudrillard might say, all that remains of "reality" is the various simulacra of the real; the very issue of reality, that is, in relation to the re-created (and massproduced) kind, represents a leap far beyond the pre-VR (or pre-Post Modem) world, when the "real" had more to do with ideological, philosophical, or religious differences. In this sense, The Blair Witch Project is a recent movie which caters rather cunningly to a western public's desire to participate empathically with the "reality" of other people via the illusion that they are watching the "real" thing. Witch Project foregrounds the camcorder as the only link its audience has with a trio of student film-makers' botched documentary project. The film's premise - that these students disappeared in the woods, never to be seen again in their search for a legendary coven of murderous witches - is admitted to be a hoax as the movie's credits roll. Retrospectively, however, it is curious that many viewers paid to see a movie that relies for its scariness on a "reality" that is bogus and yet "authentically" represented at the same time. Witch Project is supposed to be scary because of the way the frightening experiences of Heather, Josh, and Mike (the real names of the students) are recorded. The camcorder only shows the realistic essentials which one assumes would have been recorded spontaneously prior to whatever disaster finally befell the tyro film-makers. These essentials are: the students being lost, being angry with each other for getting lost, becoming more frightened by each other the more hopelessly lost they are, and getting even more frightened when one of them finally disappears. The idea here is plain: the fear we are supposed to feel has its source in the unseen menace threatening the innocent students. We are also meant to cringe at the supposed plausibility of the events as they are unpremeditatedly (and "realistically") recorded while they "actually" happen.

Although Witch Project is interesting, it is not really frightening, and its brand of realism is only modestly successful. In a formal sense, the film represents an opportunity to see how the producers dealt with (as opposed to "solved") the problems of representing unseen hoffor- minus the usual fall-backs of non-diagetic music, special effects and cunningly planned camera shots. More interesting than any of this, however, is the widespread pretence that Witch Project is a landmark in horror cinema. Roger Ebert, in conformity with such a fad, puts it this way:

 We're instinctively afraid of natural
 things (snakes, barking dogs, the dark)
 but have to be taught to fear walking into
 traffic or touching an electrical wire.
 Horror films that tap into our hard-wired
 instinctive fears probe a deeper place
 than movies with more sophisticated threats.
 A villain is only an actor, but a shark is
 more than a shark.

Unfortunately, there is no achievement of such a "real" presence in The Blair Witch Project: nor is there even much ofan approximation of one. The makers of this movie handled its marketing well (The way for the film was paved by a TV documentary on the same subject.) In spite of their shrewd instincts for promotion, however, the Witch Project producers are really just as lost in their ineptexperimentalism as are their protagonists in the new England forest. Who, for instance, would think to take a camcorder to the river with her - as Heather does - in order to film her own horrified reaction to finding a body-part wrapped in what resembles the clothing of a friend who has just disappeared? Who, while lost in the woods, would enter a deserted old house late at night, camcorder and lighting equipment in tow, when the sounds of human voices, howling in agony, can be heard in the distance? These things happen in Witch Project, and remind us that Heather et. al are no different from any other characters in horror movies, who tend to do obviously imprudent things in order to keep an audience interested.

In the society of Narcissus, few people recognize that their own seeing eyes are technologically-extended via the eye ofthe cinema camera; hence, few see the ironies of movies that deal with reality as an issue. Cronenberg's eXistenZ, despite its attempt to impart an existential resonance to the big screen, cannot eliminate the technological hypnosis which immunizes most of its audience from the exquistite sense of uncertainty in its events and conclusion. The Wachowski brothers' Matrix, similarly, loses significance as a cautionary tale by getting lost in its own recycled mythology and thrilling special effects. In the process, the Wachowskis , although they playfully mock their own cinema clichés, forget how much they themselves are competing with the emerging video-game, VR culture with which cinema interpenetrates. Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, conversely, even as it embodies its director's awareness of cinema in relation to emerging VR technologies, takes on too much audience expectation regarding the star presences of Cruise and Kidman to have much contemporary impact as a movie about movie-making; Kubrick, in fact, was probably amused by such a "reality." Finally, the Blair Witch Project producers, even though their experimentalism does not work well, have inadvertently tapped into the most interesting phenomenon to emerge lately from the world of cinema - the existence of a vast audience/market which is starved for the real experience (pun intended).

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