In the beginning, whether or not it’s really the beginning, of eXistenZ, a group of gamers is given the opportunity to test the newest creation of Allegra Geller, the gaming world’s best and most famous game designer. Before they get a chance, however, Allegra is attacked and shot by a realist, a person who wants to end the influence of gaming’s alternative reality. Ted Pikul, a marketing person for the gaming company, is sent away with Allegra and told that she is in great danger. When Allegra believes she is somewhat safe from the attacks of the realists, she brings up the trauma that her game pod, a fleshy object that we later learn is made with animal innards and synthetic DNA, must have gone through, and that she needs to check on the game by playing it. Allegra convinces Pikul to have a “port” inserted into his spinal cord (an enhancement she is shocked he didn’t have to begin with) so that they can play the game. After multiple complications with Pikul’s port, the two are finally able to play eXistenZ. Once in the game, Pikul is surprised to find that he feels he’s really there, like his body in the game is real. Allegra and Pikul work their way around, soon going into a game in the game. Pikul realizes that in the game he can’t tell what’s real and that he has no idea what’s going on with his real body. After pausing the game and finding that they seemed safe, Allegra convinces Pikul to return to the game. In the game, Allegra and Pikul find themselves realizing that they don’t know who their friends or enemies are, and both in the game and “out”, later on, they find themselves willing to kill people that they don’t truly know the motivations of. Finally, Pikul realizes that he is Allegra’s true assassin, but she is one step ahead of him, and she blows him up through a bomb she inserted in his game port. Suddenly, all the characters we recognize from the game are sitting in a semicircle, taking off headsets, and being told that the trial of a brand new game, tranCendenZ, is over. They’ve been in the game for twenty minutes, though it feels like days. In the final moments of the film, Ted Pikul and his somewhat timid girlfriend, Allegra Geller, shoot and kill the designer of tranCendenZ, using the wording of the original realist shooter, leaving the characters and the audience to wonder whether or not the game is still going.
Throughout the movie, the characters bring up the question of reality. Like in the Matrix, characters are given the choice between the game and reality, but in eXistenZ, the preferences and subconscious thoughts of the players create the world in which the game operates. As in the real world, those playing the game both bring their own thoughts to create the game and are changed and manipulated by the game itself. Pikul’s objection to the world of the game and its not giving him much free will leads Allegra to say “it’s like real life – just enough to make it interesting.” We have free will, Allegra the Designer would argue, but only so much as we’ve been given by our circumstances. This critique of life, by a woman who is intent on staying in a game that she created to mimic life, brings an audience to consider our own lives. It seems the game is both an imitation and a critique of the lives we lead. In a way, characters in the game are like people we deal with in our lives. We can at no point determine their true motives or know how their stories will cross with ours. We are at once a being that gets to make conscious choices and one that cannot decide for itself its next steps. We are constantly being shaped by the role we were given when entering the “game” and by the other players. When considering whether or not we have free will, many people determine that humans don’t have any. On the other hand, even people who believe that humans have free will would be remiss to ignore the fact that our position in society, the game character we’ve been given, has a huge impact on what we become, or even on what it is possible for us to become. The question of where our motivation comes from is a more complicated one, but it doesn’t take much a logical leap from here to see that the world we live in has a huge influence on what we desire. Reality, it seems, creates us and is in turn created by who we become.
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