The best way to wreck the art of movie-making is to think that movie-making is an art. Especially a high art, a deep art, a weighty allegory who skewed camera angles symbolize the crooked timber of humanity and whose fractured story lines illustrate the incapacity of human reason to grasp the moral of the universe.

There are two movies playing in theaters this week — the Wachowski brothers’ The Matrix and David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ — w
ith the same basic device at their center: the paranoid notion that what appears to be real life is actually a computer simulation, a virtual reality into which we’ve all been plugged by some malevolent metaphysical force determined, like Descarte’s evil genie, to deceive us.