But what Thomas undergoes as a result of the red pill is like every psychedelic seeker’s worst trip. As the betrayer Cypher puts it: why-oh-why did I take that damn pill??!! Thomas is torn from not-so-blissful oblivion, and there given the hideous,, literally mind-shattering Truth: that he is a slave to an order of inorganic beings that until this moment, he did not even know existed. Morpheus explains that the year is not really 1999, that it is in fact closer to two centuries later, and that civilization has in the meantime already been destroyed. That, as a result of the discovery of Artificial Intelligence (AI), somewhere around the start of the twenty-first century, there was a stand-off between man and machine—between the creation and the creator (exactly as in The Terminator)—and the machine won. AI discovered a means not merely to destroy civilization and inherit the Earth (a limited prospect at best), but to develop for itself cybernetic, semi-organic bodies, using human beings as its primary energy source. (The machines were solar-powered, but the human-engineered holocaust blocked out the sun.) To this end, human beings were enslaved en masse. They were put into a deep sleep, and a collective dream was engendered to keep them tractable and docile, like babies in their cribs, while their vital life force was sucked from them.

Humans are bred and raised directly into these incubators, and fed intravenously with the liquefied remains of the dead. This is pure occultism, and goes way beyond even the best sci-fi cinema, into the murky realms and veiled nightmares of Lovecraft, Heinlein, Kenneth Grant, Carlos Castaneda, et al, with their accounts of “the labyrinth of the penumbra,” the inorganic entities that have enslaved humanity and turned it into a food source. Of course modern UFO lore of “the grays” adapts and develops the same atavistic beliefs, complete with technological additions such as “implants” and clones, etc. All of which puts The Matrix at the very front-line of modern myth-making; or is that psycho-history? The collective dream that is engendered to keep humanity docile is life on Earth, circa 1999, and this is “the Matrix.” Within the Matrix, however, there exist certain possibilities for escape, and this is where Morpheus and his crew (the “crew that never rests”) come in. They are the “awakened” ones—Illuminati , if you will—who have made it out of the computer-simulated fantasy grid and liberated their bodies from the energy farms in “the real world” (it’s hard to taken even this world as real, since we have spent far more time in the other worlds, and since it also happens to be the most bizarre and surreal world of them all). As a result of liberating their bodies, these Illuminati able to enter the Matrix—the dream world—at will, and function therein with superhuman potential. For example, any knowledge, information or training required can simply be downloaded, on the spot, directly into their consciousness by computer. On top of this, they have a contact line to their associates up in the real world, like gods or guardian angels, who can monitor and direct the agents’ operations within the Matrix, providing them with a god-like omniscience. Despite such apparently superhuman capacities to navigate the Matrix, however, the “resistance”(3) fighters are at a profound disadvantage when it comes to facing off the sinister men in black, who are “in fact” (!) concentrated AI projections—energy fields, if you will—sent by the Matrix into the Matrix to maintain a hold over its reality-program. To this end, these agents hunt down and eradicate all potential “dissidents,” those Illuminati counter-agents hell-bent on disrupting the Matrix’s spell, and on breaking down reality as we know it.

While Morpheus’s crew can leap improbable distances, sustain an inhuman amount of damage, take out SWAT teams single-handed, and so forth, they are not actually (officially) superhuman. They can bend, and even break, some of the rules of the Matrix, but not all of them. They cannot simply override its tyranny and assume their godlike status as holograms within a hologram, because only “the One” can do this. At present they are all still restricted by the confines of their minds, still working to eradicate the old program imposed upon them by AI. Hence Morpheus's training of Thomas—now Neo, the One, or Eon—is centered around “freeing his mind,” on making him realize that he is not in fact restricted by the laws of the body at all, but only by his belief in such. As a rather hokey but touching child-buddha cum Geller-esque spoon-bender explains to Neo: “Do not try and bend the spoon. That’s impossible. Instead . . . only try to realize the truth. There is no spoon. Then you’ll see that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.” This is pure Zen, and goes beyond Yoda and his Force, into quantum physics. The AI “agents,” though still subject to the laws of the Matrix, are not restricted by the same beliefs that dog the humans. They are able to shape-shift, and perform other miraculous feats, yet even these are within certain apparent limits. Obviously, the Matrix must sustain, keep constant, its reality-mirage, otherwise the sleepers will start to awaken. So these agents must move subtly, within restraints, and at least appear to be human. Although the Matrix can change anything it wants within the game, it still has to deal with the living, individual consciousnesses that it has enslaved there. Hence it is limited by its own devices: if it wants to maintain its hold it cannot perform too many overly impossible stunts, because this will only serve in the long run to empower the rebel fighters, by freeing their minds from the “tyranny of continuity” (Time), upon which the whole program depends. None of this is explained in the movie, but it seems fair to deduce that the Matrix is limited, despite being the creator of reality; and also that there is presumably some reason for this limitation. The above is the only one that seems to hold up.

Neo—as the One—is expected to turn the tide in favor of the human uprising, the “awakening,” by shifting the balance, by making the leap, both literally and metaphorically, from game player to game master, from ordinary man to shaman, and to demi-god. And this of course he accomplishes. What’s so satisfying about the movie is that in the end—despite the its reliance on violence and destruction—it is the power of the imagination that wins the day. Once Neo reaches a certain realization he is able to simply stop the bullets with his mind—since they don’t exist in the first place—and to project himself into the (holographic) body of the Enemy (so fulfilling its own secret will to become real), and explode it from within. Inside the Hollywood action fantasy, there is a far stranger bird, just waiting to break out. It doesn’t quite make it with this movie, but the potential is there for the sequels, should they come, and should they prove half worthy of this early promise (a possibility I am forced to doubt, obviously). But in this and other moments, The Matrix achieves perfect symmetry, and offers something akin to shamanic ecstasy. It’s not just a movie; it’s an experience.