Insight 4

The most remarkable thing of all about The Matrix is that it creates almost impossible expectations and then does not disappoint. It is everything it sets out to be; it has no real pretensions, being an action-effects extravaganza, yet is has heroic aspirations, and it lives up to them almost effortlessly. It presents the end of the world, the final battle between light and darkness, as the ultimate video game in which the stakes are real, and only the means artificial. Of course, the fact that in The Matrix the apocalypse—technologically not psychologically speaking—has already happened (though no one has noticed it!) adds an extra twist to the proceedings. Above all it allows the movie to avoid getting bogged down in the tired and tiring mechanics of victory-defeat, good vs. evil, etc, that characterize the action movie, and also guarantee that it is invariably a let-down in the end. It is understood intuitively here that what is at stake, in this arena, and despite all the hardware inside the software, is not the world (it’s already been lost), but the soul of the world. And as in The Terminator, though more explicitly here, the machine-intelligence that oppresses and opposes the individual spirit can be seen in actual fact to be serving it, to be allowing it to evolve and to come into its full potential, using the obstacles and challenges which the machine provides for it. The Matrix—which is Latin for “womb”—is actually (to the Illuminati at least) less of a prison and more of a training ground, a school, in which they are able to discover their true nature in the process of survival. It’s natural selection at a soul level. It is within this “black iron prison” of mind that the soul is allowed to incubate and come to fruition, with the option—but by no means the guarantee—of gathering its power in time t break out of the chrysalis, and emerge fully formed into reality, more or less exactly as the butterfly spreads its wings to fly, in the very same moment it destroys its previous—and temporary—abode. What was once built for its protection has now become merely its bondage. The agent Smith’s desire to escape the matrix by locating the secret human colony Zion[4] (and so completing its work and being released from illusory existence), is ample indication of the secret will or agenda of the machine. It wants to be born, it wants to experience the flesh, not just simulate it. The closest it gets, however—so far at least—is when Neo enters inside the AI energy field and so causes it to disrupt, to explode, presumably (I’m guessing again) from an overload of input, of information, or perhaps even of emotion. The primary trouble with The Matrix is that it is back-to-back action from start to finish. There is hardly a single scene that doesn’t serve to advance or expostulate its plot or to set up some character, and as a result the movie has a choppy, forced feel to it, like endless Kung Fu kicks. It lacks perhaps the most elusive pleasure of all works of art: the superfluous moment, details, random felicities. At the same time, as a result of this lack, none of the realities seem quite real to us, because we are never given the time to get accustomed to them, to inhabit them. The film never sets its scenes, it simply hurls headfirst into them. This weakness is most especially regrettable with the real world sequences, which never take the time to give us an idea of this post-apocalyptic world and what it looks like (beyond the images of the endless “fields” in which the inorganic entities are leeching the humans, the single most chilling and inspired image in the movie). We are left with little more than the inside of Morpheus’s hovercraft, the Nebuchadnezzar, in which the rebels operate, with no sense of its movements (in relation to Zion for example, which is located near the center of the Earth) or of just why this rebel force is so limited in number, whether there are other groups working to the same end, etc etc. Since they are merely human vehicles for the themes and the plot of the movie none of the characters is allowed to develop. The rather shabby acting throughout hardly compensates for this weakness, either (the major exceptions are Fishburne, Foster as the Oracle, and Hugo Weaving as the demon-agent Smith). This is the level at which the film is weakest, and ironically enough it’s the human level.

That Trinity falls in love with Neo, for example, is simply the obligatory romantic development that we are assured of from the start. There is nothing whatsoever to suggest what it is about him that she falls for, besides his cute eyebrows and the possibility that he is “the One”—because there is nothing about Reeves’s Neo to suggest anything. And the same goes for the rest of the characters: they are about as full-bodied as the holograms they may or may not be (we don’t tend to distinguish much between the three different “modalities” or realities which the film gives us, either). This is obviously no minor criticism when it comes to a supposed work of art, yet at the same time the film never really suffers much from its weakness. It has so much character itself that it gets by on this and this alone. And The Matrix must be the only film of its kind to get by without a standard villain, as well. Although Weaving’s Smith serves this basic function, since he is ostensibly but a single “government” pawn, he lacks the grandiosity of your standard mastermind, nor is he especially loathsome ( though Weaving plays him with marvelous flair and menace, giving us the best performance in the movie). In The Matrix, the enemy is everywhere and nowhere. Since AI is itself a creation of mankind, obviously the enemy is ourselves. Yet at the same time, the inorganic machine entities have evolved into a species unto themselves, hence they can be seen as living embodiments of this “evil,” albeit our own. Certainly, they live up admirably to such a definition (they leave the Daleks in the dust), and the scenes of the hellish, sulfur-reeking wasteland of Earth, circa 2199, are by far the most disturbing in the film. Within the “human” realm—within the Matrix—the enemy is diffused, decentralized, elusive, and effectively extends to humanity itself. Those who are not ready to be awakened, these mass-produced automatons have become one with the machine. As Morpheus puts it, “If you’re not one of us you’re one of them.”(5)

The Matrix is more than simply a movie, however, and this is why I have been so unabashed in praising it, above and beyond its actual qualities as a work of art. Such qualities, though prodigious enough, are also (I freely admit) quite debatable. It is as a social phenomenon, on a par with and also intimately related to “The X-Files,” that The Matrix deserves attention and respect, beyond any other movie in recent memory. Coming as it did on the very eve of the Aeon (it was released on the last Easter weekend of the millennium), it effectively sums up a whole body of fears, beliefs, fantasies, hopes, and paranoias that is gaining an ever firmer hold upon the collective imagination (at least that of the Western world). It ties together a vast array of millennial strands into a slick, phenomenally entertaining package, and seems designed to spark off its own cult following, somewhere along the lines of a Star Wars for grown-ups.

The Matrix is simply the latest in a timeless series of myth-making in which humanity is shown to be ensconced in a truly diabolic situation, the nature of which entails our complete ignorance of the fact. Since the most essential factor here is ignorance, by the same token, the first and most difficult, most crucial, step is simply becoming aware of the true nature of our predicament. Considering all this, The Matrix is serving the oldest and most respectable, most revered, cause of art: that of enlightening the populace, by means both profound and ridiculous, to the Truth. Perhaps one in a thousand of those who see the movie will recognize or even notice its Gnostic tenets; but regardless of this, everyone who sees the film has effectively been exposed to them. Of course by the logic of the kids in The Faculty, it might equally be argued that The Matrix is serving the precise opposite function, that by rendering the truth as sci-fi it is stripping it of its credibility. This argument only holds up however if the work in question is actually ridiculous, in itself. In the case of The Matrix, the work is simply too inspired and effective (and affecting) to be anything but a work of revelation.

Where exactly the immensely talented Wachowski brothers came up with the ingredients to their sorcerers’ brew of a movie I cannot say, without looking further into it; obviously they have done their share of research. The Matrix has an internal drive and logic beyond the mechanics of its paranoia-based plot, and its mythical base compares to (and finally outdoes) the very best of science fiction cinema, from Metropolis to Invasion of the Body Snatchers to Alien and The Terminator, all movies that have sprung—with varying degrees of integrity and poetry—from the collective unconscious of humanity. Since sci-fi by definition involves our future as much as our present, since it attempts to project the collective imagination forward, and so perceive better what is happening now (by seeing where it is leading), great sci-fi is intrinsically more revealing—more progressive—than the other genres. (Possible exceptions are horror and fantasy, which are equally obliged to plunder the unconscious.) The Matrix is the most fully realized and impassioned projection of our collective fears and aspirations in a sci-fi movie since Fritz Lang’s Metropolis; and since it has been timed, with alarming precision, to come at the very end of the present millennium, it has not merely earned but actively seized its place in cinema history. It’s a veritable bookend for an age.

Time is always against us. Morpheus, The Matrix

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