Have you read any of Ray Kurzweil’s stuff, Nathan? I’ve heard him speak, and if he’s right, we’ll be “cyborgs” in a few years, so “downloading content into our brains” could be close at hand.
I don’t know if Nolan watched eXistenZ before Inception, but both films tap into a current shift in our concept of reality (also community, selfhood, among other things). The internet and the various internet based media (facebook, twitter, etc.) has been the primary impetus for this shift, and those two films—in addition to others like Matrix, Dark City, The Island are coming out of this shift. Marshall McLuhan said that artists are more sensitive to the type of effects of media and they deal with these changes in their art. I think these films are examples of that.
i’ve been thinking about this for years… since i first became interested in science, cronenberg, and…. i don’t know. all i know is the future is going to be awesome, scary, normal or something else. it scares me.
and yes, virtual reality is inevitable. people want it, so people will make it and sell it
I Own eXistenZ and Inception at Best Buy.
Nathan M.
After watching David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ last night, I came away with a couple of thoughts that I wanted to throw out at the MUBI community.
- Do you think that the type of reality depicted in the movie is possible one day? Maybe we won’t be making guns and gaming systems out of organic components, but will there ever be a time when we plug a gaming system or some other computerized device into ourselves so that we can download content into our brains? Maybe not any time soon, but one day, perhaps even hundreds of years from now.
- Do you think that Christopher Nolan looked at eXistenZ before making Inception? Though I realize that Nolan’s film deals with porting into various strata of dreams and subconsciousness, and Cronenberg’s is about porting into various levels of a game system, the ideas seem to be similar. Nolan even uses “level” imagery throughout Inception, suggesting a link to video games. Whatever the case, both movies feature characters who enter into a virtual reality (of sorts), going deeper and deeper into those realities throughout the film, even to the point where by the end of the film we are not entirely sure if we are in the real world or not…or if we were ever in the real world at all.
On an evaluative level, I thought Cronenberg’s film was conceptually interesting, but otherwise it didn’t resonate with me, which is about the same way that I felt about Inception.
I know there have been a few threads out there to discuss Cronenberg in general, and I welcome that as a part of this thread, but I am particularly interested in your thoughts on the above two points.