The Laser Age: 'eXistenZ' with Scott Tobias

Throughout the 1990s, film after film explored the possibilities of the then-new concept of virtual reality. The trend reached a seeming peak in 1999, with the release of the semi-forgotten The Thirteenth Floor, the anything-but-forgotten The Matrix, and, like a shadow cousin to those big-budget studio efforts, eXistenZ. With his first film based on a wholly original idea since Videodrome, David Cronenberg put his own spin on the notion, one informed by Philip K. Dick, existential philosophy, and his own abiding obsessions with sex and the slippery nature of reality. Film critic Scott Tobias, a name doubtlessly familiar to readers of The Reveal, joins this episode to discuss the film.