Keanu Reeves, as Thomas/Neo, is an attractive enough personality, but he’s also a disappointingly bland center for such an intense drama to revolve around. He plays the archetypal reluctant hero, yesterday’s man, a burnt out shell with barely the energy to smile. As such, he makes the ideal candidate for world savior—mythologically speaking—because there is nothing remotely heroic about him. The film is about his own spiritual rebirth—his coming to consciousness—and this is its main strength, what gives it its resonance, beyond all the tricks and twists and the karate kicks. It is also its failing, however, because Neo, as played by Reeves, is never really real to us, either as a zombie or as a superman. Neo, the messiah, is “the One” by virtue of some unspecified capacity of the mind.

It may be a genetic thing, but if so the film doesn’t dally with it, keeps it vague but specifically mental. Neo is a natural born sorcerer, one might say. He has the ability to suspend disbelief, along with those twin bugaboos, fear and doubt, and hurl himself into the unknown, trusting his wings to sprout in time to carry him across the Abyss, and into the fourth dimension. The film makes dramatic use of an actual, physical leap—Neo tries to jump from one building to the next—to represent the proverbial leap of faith. This is Blake’s liberation of perception into the Imagination, and it is perfectly a propos here. Like the Force of Star Wars it comes straight out of the works of Carlos Castaneda, and is tailor-made for fantasy. Of course, Neo fails to make the leap; his “faith” deserts him (like Peter walking water) and he plummets, just as (we are told) everyone does the first time. It is inconceivable for Neo not to be confronted with mortal doubts and paralyzing fears at the mere idea of being the man who is going to save the world. When he visits the Oracle (Gloria Foster), in probably the film’s best single scene (a little Surrealist gem unto itself), she starts off, like a good seer, by playing with his mind and confounding all his expectations. She lets him believe that he is not the One, adding (at Neo’s own insistence) that Morpheus will never accept this, however, and will probably die defending his belief in Neo. Hence, the reluctant hero is presented with his challenge. He is given the imaginary option of backing out of an untenable situation, but presented with such circumstances that he cannot possibly, in all conscience, do so; he simply has to fight for Morpheus and for what he believes in, even though he now believes it to be false himself. This recalls Don Juan Matus’s tricking of Castaneda, in the second of the books (A Separate Reality), to ensure that he keep up the apprenticeship. Don Juan led Castaneda to believe that his, Don Juan’s, life was in danger and that only Castaneda could help him; at the same time, he let Castaneda off the hook by giving him the option to abandon his apprenticeship (the path of the shaman) and to return to his old world (take the blue pill). Castaneda, in the tale, has a brief period of doubt before realizing that he simply cannot sit back and let a man like Don Juan die, no matter how useless he may feel himself to be to save him. Hence he is liberated of self-doubt and is set free to act, in full consciousness of his inadequacy, with abandon. Neo is effectively “set up” in the same fashion by the Oracle. Since she appears to see time laid out before her like a map, however, she presumably knows that Morpheus won’t die, and that Neo is the one, but that both facts—both possibilities—depend upon Neo’s believing the opposite (just as his breaking the vase depended on her telling him not to worry about it). In order to become “the One”—to be worthy of his calling—he must first be freed of the intolerable burden that this calling entails, making it worse than useless to him, until he himself knows it to be true. Hence he has to prove it, not to anyone else but to himself.

As Don Juan teaches Castaneda, at the very start of their association: only knowledge that is actively seized can be claimed as power. This is the most rousing, existential fodder imaginable for an action melodrama, and it gives The Matrix the kind of emotional power that one generally only gets from works of art. In which case, that’s what it is; as such, it may well be the cheekiest, most audacious, and most exhilarating work of art since Citizen Kane. Of course Neo must die to be reborn. As the film’s sole moment of real human interaction has it, the world is saved by a kiss. Neo gets caught within the Matrix and has to fight for his life, but is overcome by enemy agents and shot at point blank range. For a moment he seems to forget the lie that he is in a body, that all this is real, and he shrugs off the bullet. But the onslaught continues and he is overwhelmed, succumbs to doubt, and dies.

Meanwhile, in the real world, Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) comes to the rescue., Firmly persuaded at last (that he is the One) by her own feelings for him (the Oracle told her that she would fall in love some day and that it would be with the One), she whispers in his ear, “You must be the one, because I love you.” The truth, represented here in perhaps the most simple and stirring poetic image there is—the lovers’ kiss—resurrects Neo to his new life. It sets him free. He is raised up, reborn. The agents (them thar pesky demons) resume their attack, but Neo simply shrugs and shakes his head, with perhaps the faintest of smiles. His gesture speaks volumes: preterhuman confidence, the confidence of a hologram inside the holographic universe, one who is everything—the spoon, the bullets, the universe—because he is nothing at all. Hence his death is not symbolic, or figurative, it is literal. Shamanically, he crosses the rainbow bridge to the upperworld and there his body is replaced by the spirits; he returns, with a perfect image in place of the flesh. Like Jesus and his twin. By the end of the movie—which is indeed but the beginning of the story—Neo has attained his true “Bodhisattva” status as an enlightened soul amongst the damned, a Psychopomp navigating Hades, a magical healer with a dead world on his hands (or shoulders). He is “the One,” not in the sense of the only, but rather as the first: the first to realize his true nature and so become adept, a reality-molder, a Toltec dreamer. He has arrived at the totality of himself, he is whole (holographic); the fact that his moment of death-rebirth also entails union with his soul mate or anima (Trinity, no less) makes perfect alchemical sense. The divine androgyne emerges. To this extent at least, Keanu Reeves is well-cast, having a naturally androgynous quality, such as also presumably what got him the part of Bertolucci’s Little Buddha. Following his resurrection Neo stops the bullets and dives inside the demon (Smith) and so explodes it from within. This is the moment in which he is fully recognized as the One (i.e., the One-ness of male and female, mind and body, simulated and actual, left- and right-brain, reason and imagination), and the pop-culture realization of the opus magnus, par excellence. It is every bit the soaring climax that the film has promised us from the start.

The Matrix is myth without the psychodrama, however; it lacks any theological depth, beyond its smattering of Zen and Sorcery, and it fails to create any arresting religious imagery or iconography to match its apocalyptic resolution. In place of such imagery, it falls back on standard Hollywood Revenge Fantasy fare: black clothes, cool sunglasses, heavy artillery, impossible violence. The way in which it transcends this potentially crippling limitation, however, is integral to the appeal of the movie as a whole. Since the characters are interacting largely in a computer-simulated reality, the violence can be impossible without stretching our patience or belief; the circumstances require it to be off-the-wall (the only time it really oversteps its bounds is when Neo shoots up a room of agents in which Morpheus is also captive, without getting a scratch on Mopheus in the process). The absurdity of the violence here moves freely into the surreal, where it belongs. And since the surrealness of it is leading inevitably on to its own obsolescence—where true power is, force is no longer necessary—there is, for perhaps the first time ever, a purpose, a point, an object, to all the excess. The Matrix is a reality map for potential artists and dreamers and would-be shamans to mull over for hours. The possibility that everything in it is exactly and precisely true—if metaphorically stated—and that the film itself is a breakthrough work in the propaganda-illumination program of the hidden rebel forces of “the future” (i.e., the real world), is a possibility that should not be left as a throwaway line at the end of a movie book about violence. It is a possibility that invites our most serious consideration, if only for the sheer hell of it. Morpheus is not wrong when he assures Neo that “reality”—if understood as what is apprehended by the senses—as smell, sight, etc—is but electrical impulses in the brain, and that as such it may indeed be simulated by artificial means. Science and technology has certainly established this, if they have not actually proved it to us, as yet. Perhaps we are holding back, out of a lurking fear that, should we realize what is possible, we may also realize that it is equally inevitable—that it has in fact already happened. We will perceive the matrix of our mind as the death trap it has become. At which point we will have but one of two options: the blue pill, or the red one.