The Philadelphia Inquirer, June 3, 1999
from The Philadelphia Inquirer, Thursday, June 3, 1999
(http://philly.com/inquirer)
=================================
Reel and unreal
In a wave of recent movies, characters grapple with the actual world versus
alternative worlds. They find it hard to tell the difference. What is that
saying about us?
By Steven Rea
INQUIRER MOVIE CRITIC
In The Matrix, everybody - save Keanu Reeves and a band of renegades in
way-cool sunglasses - walks around in a simulated universe, oblivious to the
fact that humankind is being manipulated by an evil artificial intelligence.
The question "What is real?" is asked more than once.
In eXistenZ, people plug into fleshy gamepods that transport their
consciousness to another realm - one that looks very much like the realm they
just left. After a while it becomes difficult for the players, whose nervous
systems are jacked directly into the game, to tell the difference. The
question "What is real?" is asked more than once.
In The Thirteenth Floor, a computer system transports people into an imaginary
otherworld - a Hollywood noir 1930s - that nonetheless leaves a palpable
impression, not to mention bloodstains, on the folks of millennial Los
Angeles. The question "What is real?" is asked more than once.
Invoking Plato, Descartes (The Thirteenth Floor begins with the father of
modern philosophy's cerebral sound-bite: "I think, therefore I am"), and pulp
scribe Philip K. Dick, Hollywood has discovered the paranoiac possibilities
inherent in the universe(s) of virtual reality.
These films, with their unfolding, Chinese box scenarios, are surfing a
zeitgeistian wave. As the definition of reality blurs and bends, pictures such
as The Matrix and eXistenZ reflect a growing sense that our culture is
fracturing, that a collective psychosis is descending on the land.
"VR movies have become a bona fide subgenre," says eXistenZ auteur David
Cronenberg, who made the heroine of his dark VR movie a game designer because
he sees her ilk as the new artists of the 21st century.
With $155 million in box-office receipts for the spring smash The Matrix,
Warner Bros. and filmmakers Andy and Larry Wachowski are already discussing a
Matrix 2. The director brothers say they have ideas for a Matrix 3 as well.
(They also have a series of electronic comic books, each with alternate Matrix
plots, on the film's Web site, http://www.whatisthematrix.com)
Neuromancer, adapted from William Gibson's seminal 1984 cyberpunk novel about
a digital cowboy who hooks into something very much like the Matrix, is being
developed by Seven Arts Pictures.
And Chris Carter, creator of The X-Files, has a Fox series called Harsh Realm
set for the fall. It, too, ventures into Matrix-land, with a hero who is
recruited to take part in a virtual-reality battle simulator. The catch: Once
he gets in, there's no way out. The government has put him into the "game" to
find and kill a bad guy who's been messing with everybody's reality.
Indeed, taking Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey several steps further,
virtual reality has become a Hollywood metaphor for the fear that humans are
ceding control of their lives to technology.
"We're in danger of becoming fodder for our own systems," notes Michael Heim,
author of The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality. Heim - who relayed his thoughts
on VR movies, appropriately enough, via e-mail - has coined the term AWS, or
Alternate World Syndrome. The Matrix, he says, "plays intellectually" with
that theme.
One needn't go as far as the Wachowskis to fear the cyber future, he says.
"It's not necessary for our systems to become super-intelligent for them to
make us fodder - or embryonic batteries - that serve them. We can become
fodder in more profound ways."
For Mark C. Taylor, author of About Religion: Economies of Fate in Virtual
Culture, VR movies raise a raft of issues. A professor of humanities at
Williams College, Taylor sees "explicit Baudrillard" in The Matrix. That's not
like explicit sex, but an espousal of the tenets of French philosopher Jean
Baudrillard about "simulacra" and the dystopic vision of "the desert of the
real." In other words, that the simulated has replaced the real, and that the
future will be a bleak and numbing place devoid of hope.
"Whoever did The Matrix obviously knows some of what's going on in
contemporary philosophy," says Taylor, whose work examines the way pop
culture, cyber culture, religion and philosophy overlap.
As the line between real and virtual blurs (look at the Web shrines dedicated
to cyber sex symbol Lara Croft, the Tomb Raider video-game heroine, and at
"synthespian" Jar Jar Binks in Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace) and
the wrap-around worlds of video games and CD-ROMS become ever more sensorial,
there's the danger of mounting cultural psychosis.
"Each year we take steps toward creating virtual environments that are
indiscernible from reality," says Richard Garriott, the Austin, Texas,
designer of the Ultima game series. Ultima Online - the Internet version of
the game - has 125,000 "citizens" who log on for an average of three hours
daily. That means there are some players who are investing many more hours.
"People are already spending half of their waking adult lives living in these
virtual worlds," says Garriott. "That's just an enormous amount of what then
becomes that person's life experience."
So as we toggle between alternate planes of being, or entertainment, the
question "What is real?" is increasingly difficult to answer.
VR movies - or any other film that serves as a means of fantasy escapism -
reinforce that sense of the virtual as real.
"Meet the girl next door, and you compare her not with what's in your own
experience," says Thirteenth Floor writer-director Josef Rusnak. "No, you
compare her to Meg Ryan or Catherine Zeta-Jones or to Gretchen Mol. We're
already living in a virtual reality, in a life influenced by computer games,
movies, advertising.. . . With the Internet and with these incredible fast
exchanges of data, things are just going too fast right now."
Professor Taylor sees corollaries between what is happening in cyberpunk, VR
fiction and film, and what's happenning on Wall Street, where millions are
being made on e-commerce, where millions are being exchanged on the Net.
"Materiality has become immaterial. It all comes down to bits of light running
around the world," Taylor observes. "We have an economy that's a completely
virtual economy, in terms of what's making the markets run. What begins to
happen, as you have what we might call 'the eclipse of the real,' is the panic
to produce that which appears to be real."
The paradox of the times, Taylor posits, is that you have both a proliferation
of simulacra - that which is not real but has replaced the real, such as VR -
and a return of religious and political fundamentalism.
"Those are flip sides of the same issue," he says. "It's precisely when the
real begins to slip away that there's the panic to produce it. . . . The
problem in this world that we're moving into, or that we're in. . . isn't the
absence of meaning, but its infinite proliferation."
With so many "realities," a collective uncertainty is emerging - and a craving
for meaning as well.
"You could always say the question is not what is virtual reality," observes
Taylor, "but what is not virtual reality."
� 1998 Philadelphia Newspapers Inc.
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Robert F. Tatman
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