The Wall Street Demonstration Feeds Into What It Opposes - Vija Kinski

http://cosmopolisfilm2.blogspot.com/2011/08/understanding-simulacra-and-simulation.html?zx=d0db2160906347e5

Cronenberg's eXistenZ is serious filmic social theory of the nature of our postmodern landscape. Cronenberg, like Baudrillard, would like to oppose the reality he describes, but points out that terrorist resistance to it is merely absorbed into the system and cannot defeat it. Ironically, terrorism and resistance are "game-themes" in eXistenZ, suggesting that they broach no threat, but are actually required by the system in order to provide a pretext to continue information emission. Baudrillard, too, would like to be a terrorist- to lash out violently against those who are in control, but such a role is no longer possible in a world where death and violence have no impact and are met by glassy eyed apathy as the result of data-glut. It seems that the only hope is awareness of the effect that media have on communication and human relationships. Cronenberg, like Baudrillard , McLuhan, and Shenk, urge us to be aware of what constant exposure to information and simulacra do to the human psyche and to culture. The content of the media is irrelevant. It is the quantity of data and simulacra to which we are exposed and the methods by which we are subjected to that information that result in data smog, mental disorders, and violence. The most effective strategy to resist the system is to behave like an irreverent child, declining to constitute ourselves as subjects, refusing to process the data and abstaining from responding to it. By passively ignoring the data input thrown at us by the parental system, it will cease to exist as it does now. We can turn off the tv, shut down the computer, and stop playing the game.



DeLillo has Vija Kinski elucidate Baudrillardian theory to Eric Packer in Cosmopolis:

A specter is haunting the world, they cried.

He was enjoying this. Teenagers on skateboards sprayed graffiti at advertising displays on the sides of buses. The styrofoam rat was toppled now and there were police in tight formation advancing behind riot shields, helmeted men who moved with a totalistic grimness that made Kinski seem to sigh.

Protesters were rocking the car. He looked at her and smiled. There were close-ups on TV of faces scorched by pepper gas. The zoom lens caught a man in a parachute dropping from the top of a tower nearby. Chute and man were striped in anarchist red-and-black and his penis was exposed, likewise logotyped. They were knocking the car back and forth. Projectiles came popping from tear-gas launchers and cops free-lanced in the crowd, wearing masks with twin filtration chambers out of some lethal cartoon.

"You know what capitalism produces. According to Marx and Engels."

"Its own grave-diggers," he said.

"But these are not the grave-diggers. This is the free market itself. These people are a fantasy generated by the market. They don't exist outside the market. There is nowhere they can go to be on the outside. There is no outside."

The camera tracked a cop chasing a young man through the crowd, an image that seemed to exist at some drifting distance from the moment.

"The market culture is total. It breeds these men and women. They are necessary to the system they despise. They give it energy and definition. They are marketdriven. They are traded on the markets of the world. This is why they exist, to invigorate and perpetuate the system."

He watched the vodka slosh in her glass as the car bounced back and forth. There were people banging on the windows and hood. He saw Torval and the bodyguards sweep them off the chassis. He thought briefly about the partition behind the driver. It had a cedar frame with an inlaid fragment of ornamental Kufic script on parchment, late tenth century, Baghdad, priceless.

She tightened her seat belt.

"You have to understand."

He said, "What?"

"The more visionary the idea, the more people it leaves behind. This is what the protest is all about. Visions of technology and wealth. The force of cyber-capital that will send people into the gutter to retch and die. What is the flaw of human rationality?"

He said, "What?"

"It pretends not to see the horror and death at the end of the schemes it builds. This is a protest against the future. They want to hold off the future. They want to normalize it, keep it from overwhelming the present."

There were cars burning in the street, metal hissing and spitting, and stunned figures in slow motion, in tides of smoke, wandering through the mass of vehicles and bodies, and others everywhere running, and a cop down, genuflected, outside a fast food shop.

"The future is always a wholeness, a sameness. We're all tall and happy there," she said. "This is why the future fails. It always fails. It can never be the cruel happy place we want to make it."

Understanding Simulacra and Simulation in David Cronenberg's eXistenZ By Heidi Nelson Hochenedel

This is an awesome review of Cronenberg's eXistenZ. I am so jealous.

http://home.comcast.net/~crapsonline/Library/cronex.html

INTRODUCTION

eXistenZ, written and directed by David Cronenberg, is cyberpunk on the big screen. It addresses the problems of a culture so plugged into technology that it can no longer distinguish between fantasy and reality or between the organic and the mechanical. In Cronenberg's world, the most ubiquitous form of entertainment is computerized vr games which physically plug into the human body and replace other forms of recreation, such as sex, drugs, and sports. They are entertaining and mind-expanding, but so realistic that it is impossible to distinguish between games and reality. After playing, the "real" world feels like a game and, as a result, human behavior is apt to express violent "game-urges" even when the game is over. Sound familiar? Like all cyberpunk, eXistenZwarns against a techno-future that is already here. We shall see that many of the ideas addressed by Cronenberg in this film are also examined by theorists Marshall McLuhan and Jean Baudrillard, who study the effect of technology on modern culture. Cronenberg, like McLuhan, argues that technology is an extension of the human body and psyche⁽¹⁾. In eXistenZ, technology has evolved from machinery to biological organisms that plug directly into the human nervous system; an idea that echoes McLuhan's belief that computers are extensions of human consciousness. In eXistenZ, technology is biological and is thus more "human" than it is in our world. But as technology becomes organic, humans become more mechanical and therefore less free, unable to resist their "game-urges." As human consciousness is extended, human freedom of will (or its illusion) is amputated.
One of Baudrillard's most important ideas is that simulation and representation have changed over time. For Baudrillard, simulations or "simulacra," have become "hyperreal," more than real. Our hyperreality, like Cronenberg's world of computer simulation, now feels, and, for all intents and purposes is, more real than what we call the "real world." Baudrillard discusses four stages of simulacra in his essay "The Precession of Simulacra:" (continue to original here).........
....................................................................................................................................................................

CONCLUSION
Cronenberg's eXistenZ is serious filmic social theory of the nature of our postmodern landscape. Cronenberg, like Baudrillard, would like to oppose the reality he describes, but points out that terrorist resistance to it is merely absorbed into the system and cannot defeat it. Ironically, terrorism and resistance are "game-themes" in eXistenZ, suggesting that they broach no threat, but are actually required by the system in order to provide a pretext to continue information emission. Baudrillard, too, would like to be a terrorist- to lash out violently against those who are in control, but such a role is no longer possible in a world where death and violence have no impact and are met by glassy eyed apathy as the result of data-glut. It seems that the only hope is awareness of the effect that media have on communication and human relationships. Cronenberg, like Baudrillard , McLuhan, and Shenk, urge us to be aware of what constant exposure to information and simulacra do to the human psyche and to culture. The content of the media is irrelevant. It is the quantity of data and simulacra to which we are exposed and the methods by which we are subjected to that information that result in data smog, mental disorders, and violence. The most effective strategy to resist the system is to behave like an irreverent child, declining to constitute ourselves as subjects, refusing to process the data and abstaining from responding to it. By passively ignoring the data input thrown at us by the parental system, it will cease to exist as it does now. We can turn off the tv, shut down the computer, and stop playing the game.

What counts are the rhymes- designed to fill your mind...
It's a start a work of art...
What we need is awareness, we can't get careless...
Right on, come on
What we got to say
Power to the people without delay
To make everybody see
In order to fight 
Fight the powers that be.

Chuck D., lyrical terrorist Public Enemy
"Fight the Power" on Fear of a Black Planet


LINK



It is excellent. It is funny. It is thorough and Cronenberg emerges as one of the great post modern thinkers of our time who also happens to express himself in film.

But since 9-11 Baudrillard has changed his theory on opposing the system. True it cannot be opposed within the dialetic as Vija Kinski so carefully tells Eric Packer. Demonstrations, civil disobedience, terrorism and riots are welcomed and absorbed by the system. Notice the arrests going on from the UK riots and all the lame explanations, just more info circulating globally. However, Baudrillard after 9-11 opposes our rush into Virtual Reality by an act of implosion. He saw clearly that the bombers of 9-11 created an excess of reality so hyperreal that people watching thought it was TV until they turned channels and saw it everywhere. Orson Welles did the same with his radio broadcast of the alien invasion that had people running in the streets in the late 30's (my details are fuzzy). The 9-11 excess of reality was coupled with suicide and so Symbolic Exchange and Death was merged as the GIFT to the USA global capitalistic system, a gift to which it must respond with the counter-gift - OR commit suicide. We have not responded with the counter-gift. And we are committing suicide. It is playing out.

Watch and learn.

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.

Reading Eric Packer Through eXistenZ

Cronenber's Graphic Novel

Cronenberg's Film  eXistenZ

Eric Packer can be read through eXistenZ when he pops his head out of the roof of his limo and feels excited by the out of control demonstration. Each scene from then on begins to place him abruptly in another world in which he seems predestined to be in, in which he spontaneously responds or reacts, in which he has lost control. He feels exhilarated and free for the first time in his life. He is alive. He is playing the game!