Topic 7 - Cronenberg: Cinema & Technology

Lecture

We watched the film eXistenZ. The movie was about a woman, Allegra, who had created a virtual reality game called eXistenZ. She is about to release her game to a focus group when she is attacked and her game is damaged. In order to inspect the damage she convinces her friend Ted, to accept a "game port" in his own body, so they can play the game together and find out what's damaged. After that the 2 are on a journey, unable to differentiate between what is virtual and what is reality, which is certainly the message that the director David Cronenberg is portraying. The movie really makes you think. What is reality? How do we know? And how to virtual gamers know the difference? It has now become that these days that virtual reality is so real, it is becoming impossible to tell the difference between that and actual reality. The danger of this is that there are no consequences in a virtual reality - it is just a game. You can kill, steal, perform any criminal act and nothing will come of it, you go on your way. For those who cannot differentiate between actual and virtual reality means there can be no consideration for the consequences.

Readings

A paper called The Military-Entertainment Complex: A New Facet of Information Warfare was our reading for this week. This paper gives evidence about how military and entertainment have always been interlinked. (For example, the military have always used songs and chants in their marching for entertainment value, and it works in reverse with organisations like the USO (United Services Organisation) providing entertainment for troops in war torn countries and Hollywood taking it on and using them as storylines in movies.) Currently, we are seeing the effects of this so called Information War, in relation to the Iraq war. The media are trying to develop an "us against them" attitude towards the war. They have set up the story like its a plot in a movie, amping us up to believe that we are winning, like it's a good-natured competition.

The article makes reference to the Dixie Chicks making a negative comment about the war in Iraq and consequently having their record sales drop. This demonstrated to critics of the war, that people are enjoying the "show" performed for them by the media and caused a massive silence of negative opinions in relation to the Iraq War. The danger of this is that if we don't hear different opinions and only pay attention to the song and dance the military/Hollywood combination are trying to spin us, then we lose our objectivity of these current events and are all but brainwashed into believing that war is the only way.

Tutorial

There was no tutorial class this week.