Reading Eric Packer Through Takeshi Miike's 13 Assassins

13 Assassins

13 Assassins is a wonder to behold. Incredible violence, yes. But not meaningless as in action movies from Hollywood. And not the relentless violence permeating our everyday lives as totalitarian techniques crush us.

Shinraemon is the last master Samurai in the Edo period of medieval Japan. The film takes place in 1844. At the same theater Meek's Cutoff was also playing and that too took place in 1844. Interesting. Shinraemon has been summoned to assassinate Lord Aritsugo who will be the next Shogun. Aritsugo's atrocities have been more atrocious than atrocious, the usual violence usually overlooked and excused. Aritsugo is more violent, more sadistic, more perverse, more evil, an excressence of such evil that he must be killed (imploded) before attaining power and plunging Japan into endless war.

Shinraemon is full of joy that he has been chosen by fate to answer this calling to die as a true Samurai should die.  He is the last master Samurai as the Samurai warriors are dying off or being absorbed into mediocrity. He has outlived his world. He is to die and disappear with his world. That he has been elected to do so brings him great joy.

When he died he would not end. The world would end. (Eric Packer C 6)

12 assassins are recruited and they tell their stories. A final mountain man joins them making 13. He is Koyata who presages the new enlightened messenger, the Zen master.

13 Assassins - official site

The assassins pledge their life to Shinraemon, their death belongs to him now. He says he will use their lives wisely. Their will, their destiny now belongs to Shinraemon. It has been transferred to their master. All die except Shinraemon's nephew, whom he tells to now go his way and do what he wills. The life of the Samurai is at an end.

The Samurai have paid a warlord ruler of a great clan, whose daughter-in-law was ravished and killed and his son murdered by Aritsugo. The bridge is closed and Aritsugo crosses to meet with the humiliated father who is still alive only to have borne witness to the atrocity. Aritsugo's protectors advise him not to cross but he does, saying:

Aritsugo:Watch and learn.


Eric Packer sees Elise outside the theater with a cigarette in her hand. He gets out of the limo. He forced open the door and walked across the street and Torval was at his side, ably containing his rage.

Torval: I need to know where you're going.
Eric: Wait and learn. (C 116)

Everyone has been killed and now Shinraemon and Aritsugo meet. Shinraemon slays Aritsugo himself. First he ridicules Aritsugo's decorative sword and Aritsugo plunges it into the body of Shinraemon, who then mortally wounded by his own choice, then plunges his own sword into Aritsugo and kills him. He chooses his death and chooses his disappearance now that his world is at an end. 23 years later the shogunate rule will end.

This film expresses the beauty of ritual and ceremony. Of lethal ritualistic violence.

And again:

If man must reach the outermost bounds of his possibilities, then he must also go so far as to destroy himself. For that possibility is neither the least, nor the least glorious. - Saul Bellow (Baudrillard - The Intelligence of Evil Or The Lucidity Pact, Berg, p.115)

Dying its nothing. You have to know how to disappear. (Baudrillard - Cool Memories 1980-85 p. 12)

One way of dying is to make your death alter the state of things in such a way that you no longer have any reason to be a part of it. Thus death can have the effect of a prophetic disappearance. Such were the deaths of Barthes and Lacan. I believe the world has taken another direction since, in which these subtle figures would no longer have any meaning. The death of Sartre, by contrast, left the world unchanged and seems an ineluctable, but insignificant event. Before dying, he was already to live in a world that was no longer his own. (Baudrillard - Cool Memories 1980-85 p. 114)

A Rat Became The Unit Of Currency

Report from the Besieged City

Zbigniew Herbert      

For the complete poem:

".......

I write as I can in the rhythm of interminable weeks 

monday: empty storehouses a rat became the unit of currency
tuesday: the mayor murdered by unknown assailants
wednesday: negotiations for a cease-fire the enemy has imprisoned our messengers
we don't know where they are held that is the place of torture
thursday: after a stormy meeting a majority of voices rejected
the motion of the spice merchants for unconditional surrender                          

friday: the beginning of the plague saturday: our invincible defender
N.N. committed suicide sunday: no more water we drove back
an attack at the eastern gate called the Gate of the Alliance

......" 


Rats multiply and multiply like capital. Rats are a plague, they bring disease like capital. They destroy crops, kill infants, infest the city, homes, buildings, empty lots until they are everywhere. Like capital. They breed and breed.  Everywhere you go the rats are there. Like capital. Cyber-capital is global, circulating in an orbit around the planet. Rising and setting like the sun. Twirling around and around. Twirling. Circulating. Irreversible.


FRACTAL THEORY
Interview with Nicholas Zurbrugg 1990                            

Baudrillard Live 168-70


NZ: The ferocious theorist!


That's right! Almost the terrorist!


NZ: Do you enjoy being a theoretical terrorist?

Yes. I think it's a valid position - for the moment, I can't envisage any other. It's something of an inheritance from the Situationists, from Bataille, and so on. Even though things have changed and the problems are no longer exactly the same, I feel I've inherited something from that position - the savage tone and the subversive mentality. ...

... For example, in an article that I recently wrote for  Liberation on the Rushdie-Khomeini affair, I defended its subversive potential. When all is said and done, I'd very much like to be the Rushdie of the left, and become unacceptable - by writing unacceptable things.

... Yes. Well, if the Ayatollah was basically defenseless in the global context, he had one symbolic weapon, the principle of evil, which was a very strong force, and which he used with great skill.  Perhaps this concept is a little extreme, a little too moral and too close to negative theology. But all the same, I'm on the side of the principle of evil!

... All the same, I feel we are forced to work in that direction,because it is no longer possible to assume a purely critical position. We need to go beyond negative consciousness and negativity, in order to develop a worst possible-scenario strategy ... given that a negative, dialectical strategy is no longer possible today. So one becomes a terrorist.

... in the sense that there's a sacrificial strategy involving the principle of evil, the politics of the worse scenario possible, or the strategy of intellectual terrorism. Ultimately I don't believe in it. It is not the consequence of any particular faith, but simply an act of defiance, a game. But it seems to me to be the only enthralling game. At the same time, it's often an act of provocation.  Perhaps the only thing one can do is to destabilize and provoke the world around us. 

We shouldn't presume to produce positive outcomes. In my opinion this isn't the intellectual's or the thinker's task. ... I've the impression that if energy still exists, it is reactive, reactionary, repulsive. It needs to be provoked into action. One should not inaugurate positive solutions, because they will immediately be condemned _ so they're virtually a waste of energy. In other words, one needs to make a kind of detour through the strategy of the worse scenario, through the paths of subversion. It's a slightly perverse calculation, perhaps. But in my opinion it's the only effective option _ it's the only way that a philosopher or thinker can, as it were, become a terrorist. Of course today, the real terrorists are not so much us, as the events around us. Situationist modes of radicalism have passed into things and into situations. Indeed, there is no need now for Situationism, Debord, and so on. In a sense all that is out of date. The hyper critical, radical, individual sensibility no longer exists. Events are the most radical things today. Everything which happens today is radical. 

Reading Eric Packer As Dangerous: A Dangerous Seer;Visionary;Prophet

Elise Shifrin and Eric Packer in the Taxi

Elise: You know things. I think this is what you do. I think you're dedicated to knowing. I think you acquire information and turn it into something stupendous and awful. You're a dangerous person. Do you agree? A visionary. (C 19)

Jesus was a visionary. Jesus was and still is dangerous.

Foucault: Knowledge is not for knowing. Knowledge is for cutting.

From Burroughs Live, 1960-19997 p. 104

New York Interview 1968

Burroughs: ... Graham Greene wrote The Quiet American a great book. I hadn't read it before, but when I got to the point of the milk bar...   

Jeff Shero: The what bar?

Burroughs: The milk bar. You know the explosion in the milk bar. He's looking around in this milk bar, and I said wait a minute, time to hit the floor. I knew when the explosion was going to take place. I hadn't read it yet. And that was about two years before the same explosion happened in the milk bar in Algiers. I had been in Algiers eating in this milk bar. Two months after I had left there, about two years after Graham Greene had written this scene with people, their legs all splattered with Maraschino cherries and ice cream and blood and brains, passion fruit, pieces of mirrors __ in this very milk bar where I would eat __ a friend of mine got to the milk bar just at this time and saw this scene. Wow! Graham Greene had written that.

Writers don't want to take responsibility for these things; they have to. A long time ago I said, "The Soccer scores come in from the capital." You remember the Soccer riot in Peru __300 people. That's what it referred to.

Jeff Shero: Why do you think Genet is the only one who has taken responsibility for his characters? What about Kesey? You know Kesey's book, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest ?

Burroughs: Sure. It was simply that Genet was one of the first ones to state this.

Jeff Shero: So more than that, it was Genet who recognized it?

Burroughs: Genet recognized it, yes, probably before I did. But if the soccer scores are coming into the capital one must pretend an interest. That was 10 years before this soccer riot happened. I realized what writers write happens. Therefore writers have responsibility to be there and to do something about it. In Chicago Genet said to me, "writers now must support the youth movement, not only with their words, but with their presence." I agree with that one hundred percent.

DeLillo has been noted for having predicted a number of catastrophic events. Cosmopolis  has been written about as predicting the dot.com meltdown in Bush II's reign. I don't think so. I think it predicted the 2008 derivative meltdown which was a much more catastrophic event. Now was Eric Packer the model for it? We will never know, will we?


Eric: "How will we know when the global era officially ends?”
Vija: “When stretch limousines begin to disappear from the streets of Manhattan.”


Eric: He knew they would figure it out eventually how he'd made it happen, one man, bereaved and tired now. (C 140)

Reading Cosmopolis Through Joyce's Ulysses, Freud, Hamlet,Proust, Moby Dick etc

Don DeLillo reading in NYC

Cosmopolis has been interpreted as a modern day James Joyce Ulysses by reviewers. It seems that any novel that takes place in one day gets covered by the Ulysses template. The last one I remember was Ian McEwan's Saturday, a marvelous novel taking place in London during one day with some back story in the thoughts of the main character. Or maybe it was just plain backstory, I can't remember now. So it seems that the Dominating Literary Discourse for a novel that occurs in 24 hours is a self-referencing footnote to Ulysses. And yes it can
certainly be interpreted this way.

Eric Packer begins his journey to get a haircut, to get shorn, just after sunrise. His triplex faces the water on the east side by 1st Ave and 47th Street. He will go West through Hell's Kitchen all the way to the west side, sunset and then darkness and night, where he will meet Death waiting there for him. It is April - Easter.

Eric Packer has been married 22 days. The moon is in the 22nd day of its phase. Eric wants a haircut. To be shorn. Lorn. Delilah betrays Samson who loses his strength when his hair is cut. When it grows out he tears down the pillars of the temple. Eric gets an asymmetrical haircut.

Appointment In Samarkand

"The disciple of a Sufi of Baghdad was sitting in the corner of an inn
one day when he heard two figures talking. From what they said he
realized that one of them was the Angel of Death.
"I have several calls to make in this city during the next three
weeks," the Angel was saying to his companion.
Terrified, the disciple concealed himself until the two had left. Then
applying his intelligence to the problem of how to cheat a possible
call from death, he decided that if he kept away from Baghdad he
should not be touched. From this reasoning it was but a short step to
hiring the fastest horse available and spurring it night and day
towards the distant town of Samarkand.
Meanwhile Death met the Sufi teacher and they talked about various
people. "And where is your disciple so-and-so?" asked Death.
"He should be somewhere in this city, spending his time in
contemplation, perhaps in a caravanserai," said the teacher.
"surprising," said the Angel; "because he is on my list. Yes, here it
is: I have to collect him in four weeks' time at Samarkand, of all
places."

from: 'Tales of the Dervishes' by Idries Shah 
http://www.maths.qmw.ac.uk/~ade/sld/sld10.html

Spencer Tunick Installation Montreal

Again following Ulysses:


We have Hades with all the naked bodies, and Orpheus leading Eurydice back out to the world, only he can't look at her for her to return safely. Samson married only 22 days to his Delilah, his hair growing back, and Eric is shorn, but only half of his head, but he does pull the pillars of the temple down. On top of him. The bicyclist at the end with his arms spread wide, balanced, riding no handed, the winged messenger Mercury/Hermes signaling to him his message.

Mercury/Hermes

 

 The made up words spinctered, prousted. All Joycean signs, dissimulating. Enchanted cookie crumbs _ madeleine cookies? -  leading to the enchanted cottage in the forest where indentured servitude awaits or being roasted in the oven and eaten by the witch.

Remembrance of Things Past

It can be interpreted through Proust. Eric says his limo is prousted. He tells Elise that it is cork-lined. He is journeying all day to return to his childhood, the past. Elise smells sex on him. But it doesn't smell like a madeleine, that famous cookie whose smell brought back all Proust's memories  - involuntary memory  -  and started him on A La Recherche du Temps Perdu. So anyone in the know about Proust will pick up this reference of the quiet limo, and the return to an earlier time that moved very slowly, where there was time for intimacy and contemplation.

Proust’s Madeleine

By Kenneth Rexroth 1905–1982 Kenneth Rexroth

Somebody has given my

Baby daughter a box of

Old poker chips to play with.   

Today she hands me one while   

I am sitting with my tired   

Brain at my desk. It is red.   

On it is a picture of

An elk’s head and the letters   

B.P.O.E.—a chip from

A small town Elks’ Club. I flip   

It idly in the air and

Catch it and do a coin trick   

To amuse my little girl.

Suddenly everything slips aside.   

I see my father

Doing the very same thing,   

Whistling “Beautiful Dreamer,”   

His breath smelling richly

Of whiskey and cigars. I can   

Hear him coming home drunk   

From the Elks’ Club in Elkhart   

Indiana, bumping the

Chairs in the dark. I can see   

Him dying of cirrhosis

Of the liver and stomach

Ulcers and pneumonia,

Or, as he said on his deathbed, of   

Crooked cards and straight whiskey,   

Slow horses and fast women.

Freud

Many girlfans go for the Freudian. His relationship with his mother, watching films after his father had died so they could learn how to be together. The gangster ones where doors got kicked in and victims/victimees  got killed. Carry this thought to  Didi, the older woman perhaps a mother figure,  who gets out of bed when he talks about wanting the entire Rothko Chapel. Or the fact his wife doesn't have sex with him, and so on. Eric feels insecure etc etc etc in the psychological swamp of never ending interpretation.

Following Lacan and Monty Python how about Moby Dick and Ahab's search for the great White Whale Moby Dick. Eric rides in a huge white whale of a  limo and gets tail _ not whale _ all day. What a fluke!

Moby Dick

These are all fun games. Interpretation is accepted literary discourse, in fact it is the Dominating Discourse for lit crit. And it really makes you feel so with it and smart that you know how to decode it. And you can use all of them if you want in a glorious mishmash of erudition. And don't forget Deleuzian flux as Torval lies inert (no flux and flow anymore) and Eric's dead body inert and smelling foul. There's smelling again.

So DeLillo throws out all these signs that distract and send your well conditioned mind to its well traveled rut. These signs dissimulate, they act as masks, to both reveal and conceal DeLillo's secret.

Or we can read Cosmopolis  through Hamlet  by way of doubt. Hamlet's doubts and search for "truth" bring about disaster after disaster.  Didi tells him that he is doubting, an interpretation that Eric denies, (there is no such thing as doubt anymore)and then Vija denies Doubt to him (using the same rationalization) when talking about the yen going up but that it has to come down. With doubt comes ambivalence, and ambivalence is how Marc Schuster organizes his reading of Cosmopolis through Baudrilard.

Marc Schuster

Again that quote from The Foucault Reader: Knowledge is not for knowing;knowledge is for cutting.

Reading Eric Packer and Elise Shifrin Through Destiny

On The Continental Divide Trail

Against this assumption into generalized exchange, this movement of convergence towards the Single and the Universal: the duel form, irrevocable divergence. Against all that is striving to reconcile the antagonistic terms: maintain impossible exchange, lay on the very impossibility of that exchange, lay on that tension and that duel form, which nothing escapes, but everything opposes.

At all events, this duality governs us. Each individual life unfolds on two levels, in two dimensions - history and destiny - which coincide only exceptionally. Each life has its history, the history of its successive events, its twists and turns - but elsewhere, in another dimension, there is only one form, that of the absolute becoming of the same situation, which occurs for everyone in the form of the Eternal Return. The form of destiny, which Nietzsche also calls 'character, to distinguish it from any psychology of the ego and its successive changes. (79 IE)
Somewhere in Colorado there is a demarcation line where the waters part - the so-called Continental Divide - some running off to the Atlantic, the rest to the Pacific. It is a line almost as imaginary as the one separating the past from the future - that line we call the present. And the two dimensions of time themselves run off and vanish into oceanic depths of their own. The instant, that dividing line, is a line of destiny, past and future part there, never to meet again. And existence is merely this ever-greater divergence of past and future, until death reunites the two in an absolute present.

The line where the waters divide - the line where thoughts divide. No planispheric extension.  Waters and destinies always divide. (1 Cool Memories IV)

In man, it is thoughts which divide - the 'mental divide'. Like the continental waters, they run off unpredictably in opposite directions, and often those which were closest together will end up furthest apart.

Map of Eric Packer's Journey Through the Grid of NYC Traffic

There are always at least two occasions when two persons, unwittingly, almost meet. Each time destiny seems to have prepared this meeting with the greatest care, attending first to one possibility, then another, ordering the tiniest detail and leaving nothing to chance. But each time some tiny, unattended eventuality intervenes to prevent the coming together, and the two lines diverge once again at a greater rate... But destiny iis much too persistent to allow itself to be put off by a failure. It arrives at its ends, by such subtle machinations that not even a click is heard when at last the two persons are brought together. (Nabokov)(IE 81)

Agnes Martin Print

We can recall moments in the past when we had equal chances of living or dying - in a car crash, for example.... Every time someone finds himself at a crossroads of this kind, he has two worlds before him... It is the same with each decisive moment, both with birth and with death. Just as the virtual dead man that I am continues on his way on the other side, carries on with his existence which runs just beneath the surface of mine, birth is that dividing line where on the one side I exist as myself, but on the other I begin, at the same moment to exist as other Such is the form of alterity...(Impossible Exchange 82)

Continental Divide - Mark Tansey

That which has separated definitely  - for example, the I from the non-I at birth - continues none the less to run along another line. These lines, or these parallel lives, meet only in death. But at certain moments, you can jump from one to the other, cross one of these other lives. Destiny dooms us to a personal death, but something of this multiple predestination remains. Alterity  is a trace of these crossings, which provide one of the grids of becoming...(IE 82)

Thus each existence is the product of a double declension. It is in this sense that it is a dual, not an individual form.  We are not free to exist just on the side of our ego,, or just on that of the so-called real world. We are wholly the products of this relation of adversity, this twin complicity. Destiny is divided, like thought, which comes to us from the other. Each is the destiny of the other. There is no individual destiny. (IE 82-3)

Destiny has been arranging the day for Elise Shifrin and Eric Packer. Elise - The Symbolic Order of Seduction/destiny/surprise/challenge/duel -  is ahead of Eric all day, moving West into the sunset and the night. Eric has been following her. Each time they meet, their selves diverge and divide like the waters at the Continental Divide. They split and then split again. Until they end pure and lorn, naked under blinding light.

The Siberian Tiger And The Death of Nikolai Kaganovich

Siberian Tiger in the Snow

The Tiger
William Blake

Tiger, Tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye.
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

Eric and Nikolai had tracked wild boar in Siberia. ... They'd seen a tiger in the distance, a glimpse, a sting of pure transcendence, outside all previous experience.  He described the moment to her, the precious sense of last life, a species in peril, and the vastness of the silence around them. They remained motionless, the two men, long after the animal had vanished. The sight of the tiger aflame in high snow made them feel bound to an unspoken code, a brotherhood of beauty and loss. (C 81)

He sat on the banquette this time, facing the visual displays and learned that the context was the death of Nikolai Kaganovich, a man of swaggering wealth and shady reputation, owner of Russia's largest media conglomerate, ....Eric takes out a bottle of blood orange vodka and pours two short glasses, neat, and they watch coverage of the event on several screens. The man lay facedown in the mud in front of his dacha outside Moscow, shot numerous times.......(C *!)

The reporter kept using the word dacha. ... Then she talked about the dacha. ... found dead  facedown outside his dacha. . They searched for security in the word, self-confidence. It was all they knew about the man and the crime, something Russian, that he was dead outside his dacha outside Moscow. (C 82)

Dacha, dead outside his dacha. Gotcha outside your dacha. Gotcha gotcha.

Reading Cronenberg and eXistenZ Through Baudrillard

"I suppose I'm still a bit of a modernist and not a post-modernist." (eXistenZ p. 103) Is that really what you think David Cronenberg? Of course he said this around 1999.

" I'd rather be seductive (magic Baudrillardian term) than confrontational with an audience. In that sense it's kind of a

many at amazon for under 50 cents

collaboration with 

the audience to bring this world into being and to believe in it, because you're required, of course, to believe in what's going on without wanting to spend a lot of time with the usual sci-fi explanations about everything."(e p. 103)

"One of the excitements of course about getting into the game in the movie is to find yourself questioning what reality is: to what extent are we all characters in our own game and all do play certain roles and can alter them and shift them to a certain extent, and as you get older you begin to realize __ it becomes a very strong and palpable thing that people define their own characters almost as if they have written them. Game playing __ when you are an actor in your own game in particular __ would put your nose up against that, having to deal with what you are as an actor and someone who has written his own role." ( e  p. 95)

                                                 

David Cronenberg

"Certainly, I've seen the effect of the movie__when people come out of it they are not sure where they are basically, they are not sure what they touch is real or who they are is really who they are, or who is playing a game or who is not." (e p. 95)                 

beautiful

".... I think people are fairly overwhelmed by the Hollywood mode which is fairly straightforward in terms of characterization. It's very narrative driven __as they say__and the approach to character, I think, is fairly simplistic.... We're not getting their backstory, we're not finding out about their childhood, because we don't know them that well." (e p.96)

So what he is saying is that he avoids interpretation and hermeneutics. He stays with the surface.  This is Foucauldian and Baudrillardian. Not modernist.

... at one point it (eXistenZ) was at MGM and it was being developed there. They decided not to make the movie at MGM and the reason was it wasn't linear enough. That's exactly what was said, it wasn't linear enough, which is very interesting. I took that as a compliment, actually, because to just go from A to B to C and end is linear, and eXistenZ is much more complex than that. (e p. 97)

beautiful man, eh

You have no idea how beautiful you are going to be when you get older.

Again non-linear is post modern as the world is no longer in linear time, so why should books, films, etc continue to be in linear time. History is in linear time and we are no longer in historical time. This is more Foucault and Baudrillard as well as numerous others.

Stick it to them!

On plugging the pod into the bioport which has been inserted into your body:

"... because, for me, the primary fact  of human experience is the human body. That's the first fact and the basic fact in order to make one feel physically, bodily real. It seemed natural to me and obvious to me and I'm surprised no one else has quite done it this way __that you would plug the game into your body."(e 99)

.".. the outside world is invading our bodies in many ways. I think, in fact, that's part of human existence, but we are now controlling and modulating that with our own technology..." (e 100)

"I don't see why someone wouldn't undergo that for a really extraordinary mind-altering , life altering experience, and so I think it's quite conceivable__psychologically." (e 100)

"I think one of the basic yearnings of game players today __the whole virtual reality world__is to get closer and closer to reality and to get closer and closer to an experience that is indistinguishable from your day to day reality.... But the feeling is that you want it to be realer than real. (hyperreal as Baudrillard would say-my insertion)You want to be right in the game." (e 101)

Q: "... but I'm wondering where in your mind did this world come from?"


"This world and the other interconnected one seems to be very innate for me. It didn't take a lot of effort for me to expand to it.... It just seemed to be there when I looked for it and that always seems to be the way it is. Why that should be or what the psychology of it is, I don't know, but it seems very natural for me."(e 102)

He is speaking about the interface between eXistenZ and his mind. Like the interface between the screens and Eric Packer's mind.

...__it's a present future, it's a future that's implicit in the present and of course that's what I write out of because I'm in a certain present and anything that I'm inventing is somehow implicit in the present....and have their be a floating version of time because I felt it was important to bring the audience into that, to detach them from the place they were before they walked into the theatre. It's really to dislodge the audience from their clinging to reality and to take them out of that ...." (e104)


"... but there is something of the computer approach to thought that is dealt with in the movie and certainly to computer gaming but not in a very obvious way. It's very subtle, subliminal, I think."(e104)

Q: Now, the actors__Jennifer Jason Leigh__what made you think she was right for the role? 

DVD at amazon 2.00 and under

And now he discusses the world thinking him:

"I thought of Jennifer Jason Leigh for the lead role of Allegra Geller almost the instant I knew I was writing a woman for the main character. I mean, that surprised me (writing a woman for  the lead character). But it just happened. ... and she was ecstatic and desperate to do it. She had just recently, at that time, been converted to computerdom__herself becoming involved with Apple and becoming an Apple Master, and of course it dealt with role playing and acting really.

Jude was a surprise because I didn't know about him... and of course it's always exciting to feel that you are sort of either discovering a new face or involved in the beginning of a wonderful career and I certainly felt both with Jude."(e105) 


Anyone who has been reading my blogs will not need me to explain anything here. It is obvious we are listening to a director who is Other. You can read Eric Packer through eXistenz here.

A seriously amazing essay on Cronenberg and eXistenz and Baudrillard here.