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September 06, 2005
The Matrix - A Retrospective
by max314
The Matrix - A Retrospective
"Oh, man - you've just gotta see it."
Fuck that, I thought. I've got exams coming up and there's no way I can afford to take time out to watch some lo-jack Keanu flick.
"Sure thing, dude. I'll make it down to the cinema this Friday."
Uh-huh...
And so it goes that I missed what could have been one of the most innovative cinema-going moments of my life. When it came out on VHS and DVD, that same friend who couldn't stop talking about this blasted movie kept bugging me to borrow his video. I took it, and it lay on my window ledge for over a month.
He then asked me if I'd seen the film. I replied that I hadn't got around to it. He said he wanted it back and so I gladly lifted the buren off my shoulders. That day I gave it back to him, and he asked my teacher during art-class if he could play it in class - my teacher was cool like that. Draw him a pic of Spidey and he'd orgasm and give you an 'A'. And he loved to keep movies running whilst we compiled our critical studies. Being the busy bee that I was, my attention was utterly focussed on my work, and the ambient noise of the classroom drowned out the sound from the movie.
"Dude, look! Look!"
He hadn't put on the film until about thirty minutes into the half-hour lesson, and the lesson was damn-near over. So I figure "what the heck - I'll just pretend to be interested for a few minutes and I'll pack my shit and leave."
The next thing I see is some dude covered in slime, looking out of a pink pod at billions of other people encased inside similar pink pods. As far as the eye could see, there were pink pods down the sides of vast, Giger-esque towers (I was especially aware of this influence because I was researching Giger at the time...needless to say, my critical studies were about to take a whole new form...) with huge bolts of electrical lightning roaring between them and within them, human beings lying dormant.
As the amaceated skin-head gets 'flushed' out of his pod, the teacher starts dismissing us and I'm like "whoa, wait...wait..."
I turn around to see my friend standing there, grinning.
With a sheepish-looking face, I ask "hey...uh...?"
"yeah, go for it."
And so I took the video home and watched it from start to finish.
I was kicking myself.
Taking the Red Pill:
Whilst my fandom of The Matrix wouldn't start for another four years upon the release of the simply stunning second installment of what the Wachowskis maintain was envisaged as a trilogy-worth of metaphysical mayhem, the first movie was still in a league of its own when compared to its Hollywood contemporaries and predecessors.
Having been a huge fan of animé since the age of 12 and having been introduced to my first cyberpunk work at the age of 14, I was very aware of where this new neo-noir was coming from. What's more, this was the kind of movie that I'd already seen in my head long before I'd seen it on screen. It was a rush to see my mind be put so well on my TV screen that I certainly wasn't in any hurry to hand my friend's copy of the film back to him. It was smart, fun, furious and disorienting - all the things I felt defined me as a teenager.
In this way, as with the protagonist of the movie, The Matrix was a wonderfully liberating experience.
However, what I began noticing after my second or third viewing of the movie were some of the potential flaws and set-backs. For example, minimal time had been spent on expressing any convincing connection outside of superficiality between Neo and the main love interest, Trinity. There were some painfully childish lines of dialogue where they literally tell you what's going to happen next ("we can't use [the EMP] until [Neo] is out").
Gee. Thanks, Trin.
And then there were the plot holes. How in the world can the system not locate a cookie-baking granny stationed in a shitty ghetto apartment? And why the Hell is she not unplugged? And if she is unplugged, how come she's able to stay in that one location in both the Matrix and on whichever ship she's from?
And it wasn't just oddities about the Oracle, either.
There was a lot of stuff about Morpheus, too.
"No need to hope, Trinity. I know it!"
If I didn't know better, I'd say this guy was near-desperate. Underneath that sleek apprearance and behind those armless round shades is a man who seems more like a Jehovah's Witness with subsequently dangerous, fanatical tendancies. Surely this guy can't be as 'good' as we think he is.
There were also personal pet-niggles that developled rather quickly - I hated how the machines had been demonised. I mean, shit, we'd already seen this in the Terminator movies (among countless others) and it might have been neat to see something a bit more fresh. And one thing that always got to me...the ending. I mean, the whole story was not even a story. It was 90 minutes of "is he or isn't he", albeit, very well executed in terms of technique. But it was all kind of cliché with a bit of a one-dimensional "happy ever after" ending with the good guy flying off. I couldn't harbour a seething hatred for it, because it was so stylishly done. But for a film that come out of the minds of some obviously capable directors, I couldn't help but feel that the movie was a little bit too much of...dare I say it...emptiness in a cool outfit. A hollow shell, at least compared to what it could have been. Ironically, the movie became an emboddiment of its central Baudrillardian conceit - a lack of meaning and definition beyond the surface appearance.
It was just like any other movie, only with substantially more style over an above-average but ultimately inconclusive substance.
Walking through the door...
The Morpheus of the shooting script was slightly different from the Morpheus of the final cut of the movie.
Fishburne's dogmatic freedom fighter seemed more "dogmatic" and less "freedom" oriented in the Wachowskis script. Neo being but one in a string of potentials who - like himself - had been made to believe in their false messianism, and were left dead after confrontations with Agents bearing striking similarity to that which Neo faced in the movie's climax. They, however, weren't so lucky as to be resurrected as a 'Master of the Matrix' à la Neo, and were but forgotten.
However, with Morpheus effectively being 'the exposition guy' throughout the movie, the Brothers probably decided that it would taint his credibility if Morpheus were seen to be that..well...utterly insane.
There were hints of that left, both in the passage I quoted in the previous section and in the Oracle revealing how even she could not pierce through Morpheus' powerful obtuseness; but now it could simply be alternative as Morpheus being the 'good Christian', the 'steadfast believer'.
In effect, he retains his now-popular dubbing as the John The Baptist figure of the piece.
This is one of many place in which The Matrix Reloaded exceeded, my expectations.
No longer viewing the Wachowskis world as filtered through the eyes of Morpheus and his ship, we are brought into the greater context. We are brought into Zion. Here, we see that Morpheus' opinion - whilst popular with many - is never to far away from the Cypher-like scepticism that seemed like such a gross perspective to have in the first film.
He is met with hostility for his views by superiors and peers alike. BUt it is that same unwavering, charasmatic power and belief that jerked Neo out of his slumber that works its magic throughout the people of Zion. In the Enter The Matrix game footage, co-scpetic lovers Locke and Niobe talk of Morpheus power over Zion, and the fact that .25 million sentinals inching their way towards the gates of Zion rendered everyone petrified.
Everyone but Morpheus.
As Niobe says, "you need him".
But, the Wachowskis being indifferent to the concept of religious subscription, wouldn't have Morpheus' faith be unshakeable. Morpheus personal extrapolation of and absolute resolution with the prophecy becomes his downfall.
Rewatching The Matrix after Reloaded and Revolutions (as I did today, which is what inspired this article) Morpheus comes across as an almost tragic figure. Seeing that child-like glee flash over his eyes in the first installment every time Neo does something out of the ordinary or when he responds to Neo's enquiry of the Oracle's revelation to him by saying "
Morpheus is disillusioned, trapped within his own 'Matrix'.
Unlike Neo, however, Morpheus doesn't just throw up and get over it...throughout Revolutions he is a broken man who seems to have abandoned his gift for inspired speech, but never stops trying to find some light in the darkness that has so suddenly and violently destroyed his entire sense of life. When Morpheus is asked why he wants to search the Matrix for Neo without a head-jack into the system, he can but implore Captain Roland of the Mjolnir with an uncharacteristically timid-yet-sincere "please...for me".
In many ways, this is what makes Morpheus last declarative speech of the trilogy one of the greatest. Whilst the pre-Architect summoning Morpheus gives in his "we are soldiers" speech of Reloaded tingles the spine and spurs the heart, it is the soul-shattering bleakness of his proclamation that keeps you hanging on to the end of Revolutions after an exhausting Zion seige.
For the first time in the trilogy, the lexical compostion of his speech is full of "don't know"s...which makes the final "I know" all the more powerful.
"Neo is doing what he believes he must do.
I don't know if what he's doing is right, and I don't know if he'll reach the machine city...and if he does, I don't know what he can do to save us.
But I do know that as long as there is a single breath in his body...he will not give up.
And neither can we."
~Morpheus~
Morpheus is coming to terms with Neo's potential to save both man and machine-kind as being a real sacrifice, and not just some sleek, airy-fairy surgical procedure. This is also where the stylitic departure of Revolutions from Reloaded takes its cue. Neo's journey is no longer one of super-coolness, arrogance and blind brute (pun not intended). It has instead become a journey through "the desert of the real" wrought with pain, death, suffering and clasping onto the smallest strain of hope ("the quintessential human delusion", as the Architect would have it) in order to acheive a state of enlightenment that Buddha would be proud of.
Built of light...
Throughout human history we have been dependent on machines to survive.
Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.
~Morpheus~
Morpheus gives us a highly summarised outline of transpired events that reshaped the face of the planet. It was pretty obvious that the one-dimensionality of the first movie that was predicated upon the basis that a relatively unreliable Morpheus was our guide through this world would extend to every facet of said story.
One such facet was the viewers opinion of the machines as dictated by Morpheus.
Despite Morpheus' confession that the Earth's sky was destroyed by men and not machines, the movie seems to propagate this sense of 'good' versus 'bad' throughout the entire thing. There is no compromise.
As long as the Matrix exists, the human race will never be free.
~Morpheus~
Like I said; no compromise.
What's interesting is that Neo seems more open to change than the guy who believes beyond any doubt that he will kick the machines' collective ass. Neo levels with Morpheus about what he's found out about the systematic manufacturing of the prophecy and the One with a straight-but-solemn face. He's bummed, sure. But it's Morpheus whose life-long illusion would be shatered.
In the kind of symmetry whose opportunity on which only the Wachowskis could capitalise, Neo echoes the words of his ex-mentor right back at him from way back when he first introduced Neo to the nightmare of his CG dream: "I didn't say it would be easy - I just said it would be the truth".
But Neo's relative open-mindedness compared to Morpheus was something that was evident ever since the end of the first movie. That final speech (in the script version) is actually much more moderate in tone, wording and central ideal than what Morpheus has been yelling at us for the last 90 minutes. But - with confused and underwhelmed test-audiences damanding something more along the lines of a George Bush declaration of war, the Brothers made Neo's final speech more overtly empowering to humans, Morpheus' cause and himself.
In other words, Neo's final words in the first film are coming from a place of egocentric power.
Isn't it wonderful, then, that after six months of "show
Seeking out the Oracle:
It never ceases to amaze me how - as more and more of the deceptions are stripped away - just how differently we view the Oracle in each film.
In the first movie, we know only what we're told: she's old, she's wise, and "she can help you to find the path".
There are no questions. There are no 'if's or 'but's. Morpheus insists that one not view the Oracle's words as correct or incorrect. Which is effectively asking one to make that same leap of dogmatic faith as Morpheus because it overlooks one of the core practices of all philosophy: critical reason.
It is this critical reason that the second film borders on. She challenges Neo with two choices "acceptance" or "rejection".
In other words, you either trust her or you don't.
In Reloaded, we find out a number of facts that suddenly fill up the gaping holes left in the first film. Facts that suddenly shift your perspective of all that has transpired so far in Reloaded and the 90 minutes of the first film that preceded that.
The Oracle is not 'human'. She is a computer program. In other words, she's from the same place as the relentless Smith program that we so fear throughout the trilogy. This suddenly puts the Oracle of the first film into a different light. Furthermore, it challenges our view on those oh-so-evil machines. I still remember how my face went from a confused crumple into a childish grin as I heard Neo utter the words "you're not human, are you" in response to the Oracle's intent to "get the obvious stuff out of the way". What was even more great was the reply, "it's tough to get any more obvious than that".
Totally. Friggin'. Human.
The fact that it makes perfect sense is what makes it even more disturbing to the viewers who took Morpheus' words in the first movie as law. For me, I just couldn't stop smiling. The toughest part was trying to quieten all the thoughts now racing through my head as I listened to the rest of what the Oracle had to say.
Finally, almost half-way through the second film of the trilogy, the Wachowskis had begun the journey of breaking out of the Matrix...
Quintessentially human...
Pompous, arrogant, logical and menacing...the Architect emboddies the concept of mathematical malevolence.
Whilst the Architect differs in his approach to the idea, he seems to concur with his 'bastard son', Smith, that life is relatively purposeless. At the end of the movie, Smith lists all the "vagaries of human perception" he could imagine that might be motivating Neo to continue to defy his logic. Interestingly, one of those "delusions" is love - and Smith specifically states how "only a human mind could invent something as insipid as love".
And yet, Rama-Kandra, Kamala, Sati...even the Oracle seem to deem love as an important and essential factor. And they're not even 'human'.
But what is this term, 'human'? We use it to describe our species, yes. But we also use terms like "inhuman" and "humanitarian", both derivatives of the word "human". The semantic implication of the word "human" is one of morals, decency and love - things that we human beings take for granted as being our sole domain of function. And yet, here we stand, confronted with computer programs who are expressing those same "temporary constructs". As with Project #2501 in Ghost In The Shell, sentient life that has been allowed to evolve is expressing traits that we previously considered to be applicable only to us.
This is why Sati really is so important.
As Smith says, they are all "as artificial as the Matrix itself". Our own, self-created Matrices; like Morpheus being trapped within his construct of the prophecy, or Neo trying desperately to figure out what the next step in his journey must be, or even Trinity who is willing to go wherever Neo goes without ever looking back to ask "why". Are they are all "trying desperately to justify an existence that is without meaning or purpose"?
Perhaps.
But this seems to be what we're all after from birth till death.
We live our lives punctuated by the constant attempt to define it, to label it.
And that's what Neo learns at the end of the film. That to break free of that simulacrum of obsession with the 'surface of self' and to truly break free, he must realise the one universal concept that fuels all sources of liberation:
There is no spoon.
Posted by icine.org at September 6, 2005 02:18 PM