Ghosts in the Machine
BOTTUM, J. & LAST, JONATHAN V.
Ghosts in the Machine The Computer as Hollywood Villain By J. Bottum & Jonathan V. Last The best way to wreck the art of movie-making is to think that movie-making is an art. Especially a high...
...the man who tried to film William Burroughs’s unfilmable novel Naked Lunch in 1991...
...Especially a high art, a deep art, a weighty allegory whose skewed camera angles symbolize the crooked timber of humanity and whose fractured story lines illustrate the incapacity of human reason to grasp the moral of the universe...
...As in so much of popular deep thought nowadays, the sci-fi pulp fiction writer Philip K. Dick visited the notion back in the 1950s, predicting specifically that computer simulations would displace the real world...
...Strangelove, WarGames), and sometimes the Russians were to blame (every James Bond movie up through The Living Daylights), but the moviegoer always knew exactly what the eschatological demon was...
...Movies need big threats to the future of the human race for their heroes to fight against, and for the longest time directors had the atom bomb...
...Henry James once complained that the heavy-handed Anthony Trollope was not gifted at the “science of naming,” but Hollywood screenwriters make the names in a Trollope novel sound positively subtle...
...It’s always worth noting when two films appear at the same moment with the same theme...
...Morpheus (played by Laurence Fishburne) explains to the befuddled Neo that the entire human race has been enslaved by something called “the Matrix,” and he offers Neo a way out...
...The Canadian director David Cronenberg is a paragon of pretension who’s bent on conveying really deep thoughts, and as a result eXistenZ is an unwatchable and meaningless mess...
...But he really wants to play at metaphysics...
...Allegra Gellar (Jennifer Jason Leigh), the designer of the latest and most sophisticated game, “eXistenZ,” becomes the target of a fatwa issued by members of a realist subculture that believes too much virtuality is dangerous...
...They must be right, because everyone inside the game meets a grisly death...
...Morpheus and his small crew, however, have escaped the evil clutches of computers, and they enlist Neo in their attempt to destroy the Matrix from within and save humanity...
...It’s a little peculiar to be told this by a movie, when, after all, we go to movies to escape the real world for an hour or two...
...J. Bottum is Books & Arts editor and Jonathan V. Last a reporter at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...Cronenberg plays cinematic three-card monty with his audience, daring viewers to guess which reality is the game and which reality is real, all the while, trying to distract them with unnecessary and objectionable gore...
...This is the man who turned a campy Vincent Price horror movie from 1958 into the unbearable remake, The Fly, in 1986...
...the man who put together one of the most pretentious movies ever made with Crash in 1996...
...But the Wachowski brothers rightly worry little about the existential questions this might raise: For them, there’s only one good world, and that’s the real one...
...and the unreality of perceived reality was the theme of last year’s The Truman Show as well...
...That is the reality the artsy David Cronenberg has lost all touch with and the craftsy Wachowski brothers still seem to understand...
...The success of The Matrix—over $120 million in gross receipts so far— has come as a surprise to the movie industry, but it shouldn’t have...
...Accepting, Neo finds himself thrown into reality—which turns out to be centuries later than the 1999 he thought he was living in...
...Players no longer sit at computers, but now have “bioports” surgically inserted into their spines so that they can plug into games that sedate them with total sensory immersion...
...And now they’ve demonstrated again that the best thing a director can do is find a lean, tight story and concentrate on the craft of filming it well...
...Morpheus lives in a cramped, dingy ship eating gruel, while the people in the Matrix happily dine on steak and drive their Toyotas...
...Sometimes the Americans were to blame (Dr...
...There was a war, you see, between men and machines, and the machines won...
...And they’ve turned the human race into living batteries by hooking them up to the Matrix and harvesting their mental energy to fuel the machine world...
...But in this case what the movies mostly prove is the superiority of artlessness to artiness...
...There are two movies playing in theaters this week—the Wachowski brothers’ The Matrix and David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ—with the same basic device at their center: the paranoid notion that what appears to be real life is actually a computer simulation, a virtual reality into which we’ve all been plugged by some malevolent metaphysical force determined, like Descartes’s evil genie, to deceive us...
...Andy and Larry Wachowski, who wrote and directed The Matrix, have a lot of skill in their craft and only a few pretensions in their art, and the result is a sleek, entertaining movie...
...even the film’s last frame strikes an arch pose to ask—oh, so deeply—where the game ends and life begins...
...The Wachowskis’ The Matrix tells the story of a computer hacker named Neo, played by Keanu Reeves— whose slightly wooden acting makes him perfect for the role of a confused man forced awake from a comfortable delusion...
...There’s even a third one, The Thirteenth Floor, due out on May 28...
...Ugly, too...
...With eXistenZ, however, David Cronenberg has made another kind of story altogether...
...Now, with films from The Truman Show to The Matrix and eXistenZ, we’re invited to fear that electronic simulation is making us lose touch with reality...
...And the general idea of nested levels of reality descends to Cronenberg by a hackneyed sequence that runs from horror flicks like A Nightmare on Elm Street through drug movies like Altered States and eventually, if one wants genuine metaphysics, back to the Allegory of the Cave in Plato’s Republic...
...So we’ve been treated in recent years to dinosaurs (Jurassic Park), plagues (Outbreak), and asteroids (Deep Impact, Armageddon...
...But a film with this as its central theme can still work, as long as it doesn’t forget its first job is to entertain...
...Neo is living placidly enough in modern Chicago, until he’s contacted one day by a mysterious man named “Morpheus” (the ancient Greek god of the morphing, shifting shapes of dreams...
...The Wachowskis showed considerable promise with their debut film, the 1996 Bound, a taut and economical crime caper starring Joe Pantoliano, Gina Gershon, and Jennifer Tilly...
...The effect of eXistenZ is mostly boredom, because, well, this isn’t what you might call a new idea...
...Then one day, the Berlin Wall came down, and the threat of global thermonuclear destruction evaporated...
...And where can a poor director find these days a credible instrument of ultimate doom...
...In eXistenZ, he examines a time in the near future when video games have reached a frightening level of virtuality...
...The irony is that the real world is much less attractive than the dream one...
...But why the current obsession with the dark side of computers...
Vol. 4 • May 1999 • No. 32
