eXistenZ

Keeping in mind this week's reading concerning bodies, senses, biomedia, cybernetics, and new media, answer one of the following questions about eXistenZ:

-- What point is the film making about the interaction between bodies and machines? How does the film blur the boundaries between machine-like bodies and biologically "alive" machines, and what is it saying about the differences and similarities between them?

-- What does the film propose are the limitations of virtual reality? Can a virtual world be more real than the real world when one is removed from one's real body, and when one's virtual body is forced to do things beyond its control? Or does a virtual world realize possibilities concerning the body that are actually limited by the physical laws and mental repressions of the real world?

-- Dialogue from eXistenZ:

"We're both stumbling around together in this unformed world, whose rules and objectives are largely unknown, seemingly indecipherable or even possibly nonexistent, always on the verge of being killed by forces that we don't understand."

"That sounds like my game, all right."

"That sounds like a game that's not gonna be easy to market."

"But it's a game everybody's already playing."

If life is a game along the lines Jude Law's character describes, then what does it mean that in the film people play virtual reality games that merely amplify real life rather than completely escape from it? Is it because we are still so attached to our bodies that we cannot completely transform into "the new flesh" envisioned in Videodrome? Or is it because we are less in control of our bodies than we like to think and use games to more fully let go of any control over them?