eXistenZ 's near-future vision is set in a countryside littered with old buildings now being used for something other than their original function. This move away from the city comes out of a decision made by Cronenberg with regular collaborators Carol Spier (production designer) and Peter Suschitsky (director of photography) to remove from this world everything people would expect from a sci-fi movie about game playing. There are no computers, computer screens, televisions, sneakers, watches, clocks, jewellery or suits. The result of this multiplication of minor subtractions is perfectly subliminal: you can feel the operation of a 'look', but its exact nature is elusive.
"I removed Blade Runner, basically," admits Cronenberg. "The production design of that movie has a weird life of its own. It's almost as if that world exists. It's a very interesting phenomenon. Instead, we were replicating some of the style of some video games. If you want a character to wear a plaid shirt, it takes up a lot of memory, so it's much easier if he has a solid beige shirt. So I was trying to replicate the blandness or blockiness of the polygon structure of some games."
Game Boy: On Cronenberg's eXistenZ - https://web.archive.org/web/20180916045339/http://old.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/149
This is something I keep coming back to. Blade Runner is everywhere at this point and more an adjective and aesthetic than anything, but it's also a very specific vision of the future rooted in things like 1980s Japan and one which has somehow asserted itself as THE vision of the future. It's gotten to the point where it feels as though plenty of people are willing it into reality, they want to live in it and are taking their cues from it.
I don't think eXistenZ is a particularly brilliant film and I do love the whole BR thing, but I appreciate Cronenberg's attempt to completely bin "Blade Runner" as an aesthetic, if only as an act of defiance. It fits in with this odd subset of films which feel as though they're simultaneously set in both the past and the future, stuff like Burton's Batman films, Barton Fink, Dark City and the Naked Lunch adaptation, this strange juxtaposition of the 1920s to 1950s with science fiction and fantastical technology.
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