The Matrix was written and directed the Wachowskis[1], then virtual newcomers to Hollywood who had previously made only one commercial film, the low-budget (but impressive) crime thriller Bound (1996); they had made no science fiction at all. Perhaps this lack of experience accounts for some of the freshness of the film, which may include little in the way of new science fiction concepts but which, in the tradition of the best SF film, genuinely showed viewers things that they had never seen before on the screen. The innovative effects and camera work and extensive use of motifs from Hong Kong martial arts films in a science fiction setting proved both successful and influential, making The Matrix one of the most talked about (and imitated) films of the past few years. The film also inspired two sequels, The Matrix Reloaded (2003) and The Matrix Revolutions (2003), both of which were also box-office successes. The first sequel was an even bigger commercial hit than the original Matrix film, grossing over $700 million worldwide. In the meantime, the Matrix franchise triggered a huge wave of interpretive response, as critics struggled to come to grips with the philosophical implications of what has proved to be much more than a mere pop cultural spectacle.
Plot Summary
The Matrix was the first in a four-film series, the latest of which—Matrix Resurrections (2021)—was directed only by Lana Wachowski. These films are classic expressions of anxiety over the possible enslavement of human beings by intelligent computers, though they are also classic examples of the use of computer special effects to produce effective action sequences. The fast pace of The Matrix is set early on as one Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) is working at a computer terminal (in her trademark skin-tight black latex) when the police burst in. In a high-energy sequence accompanied by the hard-driving music that will characterize such scenes throughout the film, she dispatches the police rather easily, employing an array of gravity-defying martial arts techniques. When a group of “agents” (who, like Trinity, seem able to break the laws of physics) arrives, she has to flee, leading to a spectacular rooftop chase and to a narrow escape as she heads into a phone booth and then mysteriously disappears, just before Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving), the film’s principal villain, crashes a large truck into it.
At this point, audiences have very little idea what is going on, but it is clear that we should be on the lookout for happenings that differ from our everyday expectations of reality. The next scene introduces us to computer programmer Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves), who leads a secret life as Neo, a notorious computer hacker. Trinity (herself a famed hacker who once cracked the IRS database) contacts Anderson with a mysterious message on his computer urging him, like Lewis Carroll’s Alice, to “follow the white rabbit.” Some hipsters, led by one Choi (Marc Gray), then arrive to purchase an illegal computer disk, which Neo extracts from its hiding place inside a hollowed-out copy of Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, the title of which is shown very clearly on the screen as if to alert us to its relevance. Neo then notices that Dujour (Ada Nicodemou), a young woman in the group, bears a tattoo of a white rabbit, so he accepts their invitation to go with them to a club, where Trinity managesto approach and warn him that he is being watched, though he does not really understand her warning. Nor does he quite comprehend what is going on the next day when one Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) calls him (on a special cell phone they have just sent him via FedEx) at work to warn him that “they” are coming after him. Frightened and confused, Anderson is unable to use Morpheus’s instructions to escape from the high-rise building and is instead taken into custody, where he is interrogated by Smith, who, like all of the “agents,” looks a bit like an FBI man, or perhaps even a Man in Black of UFO lore (or of the 1997 film Men in Black), with his conservative business suit and tie, white shirt, and dark sunglasses. In particular, Smith wants Anderson to help him capture Morpheus, whom Smith describes as “the most dangerous man alive.”
When Anderson refuses to cooperate with Smith, his mouth mysteriously disappears from his face, perhaps alluding to Harlan Ellison’s classic story “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” in which intelligent machines also subjugate the human race. Anderson is then thrown onto a table, where a weird mechanical bug is dropped onto his abdomen and begins to tunnel into his navel. Suddenly, Anderson awakes in his own bed, his mouth restored. Audiences (and Anderson) can breathe a sigh of relief: the weird happenings we have been observing can now be explained as a mere nightmare on the part of Anderson.
In this film, however, the distinction between reality and dream is not so simple. Called to meet Morpheus, Anderson, generally known as Neo from this point forward in the film, is picked up by Trinity, who uses an electromechanical device to remove the bug from his abdomen—it was “real” after all, though the film will go on to question the definition of reality in fundamental ways. Morpheus greets Neo at the rebel hideout within the Matrix, the interior of which looks a bit like a Gothic haunted house. Continuing the Alice in Wonderland motif, Morpheus tells Neo, “I imagine that you are feeling a bit like Alice, tumbling down the rabbit hole.” Later, continuing this motif, he offers Neo a blue pill and a red pill. The blue pill will return him to his former life. The red pill will allow him to stay in Wonderland and to discover “how deep the rabbit hole goes.”
Neo chooses the red pill, and the rebels take him on a bizarre road of discovery in which he learns that it is apparently approximately 200 years later in history than he had thought and that his real physical body—like that of most other humans—is entrapped in a small placenta-like compartment where it is tapped for energy (essentially used as a battery in a power plant) by the machines that actually dominate the real world. This situation arose after the development of artificial intelligence in the early twenty-first century, leading to all-out war between humans and machines. When humans employed the tactic of “scorching the skies” to block out the sun and deny the machines the solar energy on which they depended, the machines retaliated by developing the human batteries as a power source. Nightmarishly, human beings are grown in fields to be harvested for use as such batteries, while the dead are liquefied to be fed intravenously to the living. The world of 1999 that Neo had thought to be real and the person he had thought himself to be are simply computer-produced simulations, manufactured by the machines to keep the humans unaware of their real plight. However, if one is killed in the Matrix, he apparently dies in the real world as well, lending extra importance to activities within the simulation.
The only humans living outside this system reside in the underground city of Zion, sending out rebels like Morpheus and his group to conduct a guerrilla campaign against the machines in both the real world and the Matrix. The rebels rescue Neo’s body from the power plant so that he can join them in the real world, taking him aboard their ship, the Nebuchadnezzar, a large, industrial-looking hovercraft, apparently (according to a nameplate aboard the ship) manufactured in 2069. Morpheus, meanwhile, reveals his belief that Neo is the reincarnation of “the One,” the legendary founder of the resistance movement, a man supposedly born within the Matrix and gifted with almost unlimited powers to change and manipulate it. (Note that “Neo” is an anagram of “One.”) Morpheus believes with a religious passion that Neo is the One, though many in the resistance doubt that the story of the One and his Christlike second coming is more than a myth. When Neo begins his training to work as an agent of the resistance in the Matrix, it soon becomes clear that he is an especially gifted student, lending credence to the notion that he may be the One. This training (and his subsequent activity in the Matrix) consists largely of martial arts, which may make little sense as a technique for fighting the massive power of the machines, but certainly makes for numerous scenes of effective cinema.
In the midst of Neo’s training, the Nebuchadnezzar is attacked by a “sentinel,” a tentacled, search-and-destroy killing machine, but they manage to disable it by firing off an EMP (electromagnetic pulse), which disables any and all electrical systems within the blast radius. (As a result, they must shut down all of their own systems before firing the device.) Eventually, Morpheus takes Neo to visit the enigmatic “Oracle” (Gloria Foster), an entity within the Matrix who had originally prophesied the second coming of the One. The Oracle, appearing in the guise of a kindly grandmother baking cookies, hints (but does not unequivocally state) that Neo is not the One. In addition, she warns him that there will soon come a time when either he or Morpheus must die and that Neo will have to choose which of them survives. Meanwhile, one of the rebels, Cypher (Joe Pantoliano), tired of the rigors of life as a real-world guerrilla, has sold out to the machines, informing against his fellow rebels so that he can return to the power plant and to the illusion of a comfortable life within the Matrix, living a simulated life as someone rich and important, “like an actor.” This treachery leads to a Smith-led ambush of Morpheus, Neo, and those who accompany them on the way back from seeing the Oracle. Neo and Trinity escape, but only because Morpheus stays behind to battle Smith, knowing he cannot win. Morpheus is then taken captive. Meanwhile, Cypher returns to the Nebuchadnezzar and seemingly kills two “operators” who are monitoring the group in the Matrix. He then starts unplugging the bodies of the group that is still in the Matrix, killing two of them before he comes to Neo. Then he gloatingly announces that, if Neo were the One, some miracle would occur to save him from being unplugged. At that moment, Tank (Marcus Chong), one of the seemingly dead operators, arises and blasts Cypher, saving Neo and Trinity, whom he then helps to exit the Matrix safely.
Neo and Trinity plan a daring operation to rescue Morpheus, despite the fact that he is being held in a heavily guarded facility. What follows is a spectacular combat and rescue sequence (a sort of stepped-up version of the attack on the police station in The Terminator), leading to the successful exit from the Matrix of both Morpheus and Trinity. This time, however, Neo is left behind to battle Smith, who eventually pumps him full of bullets at point-blank range, seemingly leaving him dead. Back on the Nebuchadnezzar, Trinity speaks to Neo’s physical body and tells him that the Oracle prophesied that she would fall in love with the One and that, since she now loves Neo, he must be the One and cannot therefore be dead. He suddenly revives, finding himself now gifted with greatly enhanced powers. When Smith and a group of agents open fire on him, he simply stops their bullets in mid-air and causes them to drop harmlessly to the floor. He then easily defeats and seemingly destroys Smith in hand-to-hand combat and exits the Matrix just in time to allow the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar to use their EMP to shut down a group of sentinels that is assaulting the ship. As the film ends, Neo returns to the Matrix to exercise his new super powers, presumably in the fight to free humanity from subjugation by the machines.
Discussion
Originally released to relatively little fanfare, The Matrix went on to become one of the sensations of 1990s film. It won Saturn Awards (from the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Film) for best director and best science fiction film, beating out Star Wars: Episode One—The Phantom Menace, which won the award for best special effects of 1999. However, The Matrix trounced its Star Wars rival in the effects categories of the Oscars; it was nominated for four Oscars and won all four, in the categories of best editing, best sound effects editing, best visual effects, and best sound. It is indeed a technically impressive film, and its look and sound and influenced numerous subsequent films. Its combination of a thoughtful science fiction premise with high action sequences (including the martial arts sequences for which the film is perhaps best known) was a landmark in science fiction film.
Despite the effectiveness of these action sequences and the tremendous success of the film as a work of visual art, it is ultimately the thought-provoking ideas (however superficially they may be pursued) behind the action for which The Matrix is most important. These ideas have triggered a staggering amount of serious critical commentary, most of it focusing on the philosophical and religious dimensions of the film. Book-length works on the film include such titles as Taking the Red Pill: Science, Philosophy, and Religion in The Matrix; The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real; Like a Splinter in Your Mind: The Philosophy Behind the Matrix Trilogy; Jacking in to the Matrix: Cultural Reception and Interpretation; The Gospel Reloaded: Exploring Spirituality and Faith in The Matrix; and The Matrix Cultural Revolution: How Deep Does the Rabbit Hole Go?
Many commentators have been particularly impressed by the spiritual dimension of The Matrix. The Christian aspect of Neo as a savior returning from the dead are rather obvious, but one can also find Buddhist, Hindu, and other religious resonances in the film and its sequels. Indeed, rather than endorse any particular system of religious belief, The Matrix seems to endorse the principal of belief in general, drawing upon a number of different sources to create a pluralistic combination that can be viewed as either a powerful spiritual hybrid or a meaningless pop cultural hodge podge. Still, the overt religious references in the film are primarily Judeo-Christian. For example, in a retelling of the story of the fall from the Garden of Eden, we are told that the machines originally created a utopian Matrix in which all human desires were fulfilled and in which pain and sorrow were unknown, but that humans rejected this “programming,” preferring to live instead in a reality that was defined by misery and suffering. Zion, meanwhile, is the name of the heavenly city promised to the Israelites by their God in the Old Testament. Trinity’s name also has strong Christian ramifications, though her role is roughly that of a somewhat androgynous Mary Magdalene. Cypher does not have a religious name (though his name may suggest Lucifer), but he clearly plays the role of betrayer that is played in the New Testament by Judas. Finally, while Morpheus is named for the god of dreams in Ovid’s Metamorphosis (and his name also suggests the morphing technology that is used aplenty in The Matrix), he clearly plays the role of precursor to the savior, relating to Neo as John the Baptist relates to Christ.
Then again, Neo is a rather problematic savior. For one thing, there is a certain amount of self-conscious irony to his depiction as a Christ figure, which is, after all, by this time a sort of science fiction cliché that recalls predecessors from Klaatu of The Day the Earth Stood Still to E.T. Indeed, The Matrix shows an awareness of the glib and superficial way in which our culture often appeals to Christ metaphors. Thus, when Neo hands Choi the illicit computer disk, the latter responds with mock-religious joy: “Hallelujah! You’re my savior, man. My own personal Jesus Christ.” From this point of view, the link between Neo and Christ might be seen more as a postmodern pastiche of Christ imagery than as a genuine parallel, meant to be taken seriously. Meanwhile, as opposed to the peaceful Christ, Neo is a virtual killing machine, blasting his way through the Matrix and leaving a trail of bodies in his wake—most of them law enforcement officers. Many critics, in fact, have criticized The Matrix for using its spiritual and religious references in a mere attempt to make its graphic violence seem more acceptable.
Numerous technical aspects of the film seem designed for a similar purpose. It is certainly the case that the violence of the film is made more palatable by the fact that it is so unrealistic, its “bullet-time” super slow motion and other effects making the battle scenes seem almost ballet-like. The violence is cartoonish, rather than realistic; more accurately, the violence is reminiscent of a video game, which no doubt adds to its appeal for viewers who are video gamers—but which is also appropriate, given that it occurs within a computer simulation. However, the film suggests that the simulated people in the Matrix are the avatars of real people in the machine power plants, and that the deaths of those avatars bring about the deaths of the real people. Thus, as Neo kills cops and others in the Matrix, he is also killing people in the real world, an implication that many viewers seem to miss entirely.
However problematic its presentation of Neo as a figure of Christ, it is clear that The Matrix exemplifies the notion of filmmaking as mythmaking, creating an elaborate mythic structure to underlie its basic plot and scenario. And, if the actual implications of that mythic structure are a bit unclear, The Matrix does deliver a fairly clear overall message, perhaps best summed up in Neo’s final speech at the end of the film, when he returns to the Matrix with his newfound powers, addressing those who control the system:
“I know you’re out there. I can feel you now. I know that you’re afraid … afraid of us. You’re afraid of change. I don’t know the future. I didn’t come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell how it’s going to begin. I’m going to hang up this phone, and then show these people what you don’t want them to see. I’m going to show them a world without you. A world without rules or controls, borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible. Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you.”
Human beings, in short, are enslaved largely because they do not know and understand the nature of their enslavement. Knowing the truth, the film suggests, will set them free. Unfortunately, this message is little more than a cliché, though one that is central to the ideology of modern capitalist society, in which the “truth” is constantly valorized (sometimes to disguise an absence of truth). Thus, much of the popular success of the film can be attributed to the fact that it projects a message to which its audiences have been conditioned throughout their lives to respond positively. On the other hand, The Matrix does not advocate this message quite as unequivocally as a quick and superficial viewing of the film might suggest. Neo’s empowerment is a fantasy of individual liberty that is undermined by the fact that the freedom from controls and boundaries that he cites here exists only within the simulated environment of the Matrix. It is only within the Matrix that Neo can fly about like Superman, while the people to whom he plans to demonstrate his power to break the rules are themselves still trapped in their battery cases in the power plants of the machines. Moreover, the film has suggested that, once the people in these power plants have reached a certain age, they generally cannot be removed because the psychological shock would be too great, so that the liberation of the bulk of humanity from their slavery is not a practical possibility. Meanwhile, even within the Matrix it is only Neo who seems to have unlimited freedom from boundaries and restraints. He cannot serve as a model of liberation for others because, as the One, he is literally one of a kind whose example cannot be duplicated.
Ultimately, of course, the phenomenon to which The Matrix advises resistance is not the use of human beings as batteries by far-future intelligent machines but the use of human beings as cogs in the vast capitalist machine of our own contemporary world. While many have argued that simulated life in the Matrix actually seems far preferable to life in the dystopian real world of the film, this simulated life is certainly far from ideal. Indeed, the film (or at least Smith) tells us that the machines have intentionally programmed pain and suffering into the Matrix because that is the only sort of life that human beings will accept. This notion may echo the Christian vision of humanity as a species fallen from grace and thus doomed to suffer, but Smith’s explanation for the presence of pain in a simulated world also echoes the tendency of capitalism to attempt to justify its injustices and inequities as nothing more than the consequences of the natural human condition.
Importantly, the programmed pain of life in the Matrix corresponds quite closely to the negative consequences of capitalism in the real world. Thomas Anderson works at what is presumably a moderately well paying middle-class professional job, but his life as a computer programmer for a large corporation, slaving away in a tiny cubicle in a high-rise office building, seems mind-numbingly boring and routine. When we first see him on the job, he is receiving a lecture from his boss, Mr. Rhineheart (David Aston), for his lack of conformity to corporate expectations. Rhineheart himself is an embodiment of corporate conformism, a reincarnation of the gray-flanneled “organization man” of the notoriously conformist 1950s. Further, it is no accident that Rhineheart both looks and sounds like Agent Smith, the principal enforcer of rules, regulations, and conformity in the Matrix—a man who himself looks and sounds like all the other agents. Rhineheart’s name may also suggest that he has a German heart, linking his strict insistence on obedience to corporate policy to Nazism, a link reinforced soon afterward when Neo refers to Smith’s questioning of him as “Gestapo crap.”
The Wachowskis reinforce this notion that life in the Matrix is driven by conformity to routine by muting the colors of this simulated world, tinting everything with a grayish-green that suggests both a lack of creativity and computer generation, recalling the green screens of early computer terminals. (Life in the Matrix is also explicitly compared to the sepia-tinted, black-and-white world of Kansas in The Wizard of Oz.)Meanwhile, Neo reacts to the routinization of life in the Matrix with the feeling that, as Morpheus puts it, “there’s something wrong with the world,” tormenting him “like a splinter in the mind.” Unable fully to understand or articulate just what is wrong with the world, Neo merely has a vague sense that the world isn’t right and he doesn’t fit in. What he experiences, in fact, are the classic symptoms of alienation, long identified by critics of capitalism as one of the crucial consequences of life in a capitalist system. Marxist critics in particular have argued that the capitalist system is nevertheless able to ensure the necessary cooperation with this economic system through a complex system of ideological illusions designed to convince individuals that the system serves them rather than the other way around. As Morpheus continues to introduce Neo to the Matrix, he does so in terms that strikingly echo Marxist descriptions of the workings of capitalist ideology through the creation of “false consciousness.” The Matrix, he explains, “is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you to the truth that you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage, born into a prison that you cannot smell, or taste, or touch. A prison for your mind.”
The Matrix, meanwhile, argues that this bondage through false consciousness can be broken through the revelation of the true workings of the system, just as Marxist critics believe that the best weapons against capitalism are knowledge and understanding of its true nature, which is generally heavily disguised. However, far from touting socialism as an alternative to capitalism, The Matrix advocates individualism, failing to see that it thereby endorses one of the principal tenets of capitalist ideology, thus reinforcing the very system it seems to want to criticize. Morpheus and his band are not Marxist theorists but individualist activists. They are, in essence, terrorists who find the power that rules the world so despicable in its suppression of individualism that they are willing to use any and all means at their disposal (including mass killings) to try to disrupt that power.
When we first meet Neo he has fallen asleep while scanning on-line newspapers for information about Morpheus, one of which describes him as a “renown [sic] terrorist.” As with the rebels of the Star Wars saga or the alien fighters of Independence Day, the guerrillas of The Matrix tap into deeply ingrained American myths, enacting a vision of individual resistance to systemic oppression that dates back to the American Revolution but that picked up particular rhetorical power during the years of the Cold War. The fact is, however, that these rebels have far more in common with Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaida terrorists than they do with American heroes like George Washington or Abraham Lincoln. (Interestingly, after the screen identifying Morpheus as a terrorist, Neo’s computer next scrolls to an article from An-Nahar, an Arabic-language newspaper from Beirut, possibly linking Morpheus with Arab terrorism.)
Like Star Wars and Independence Day, The Matrix was made before the 9/11 bombings and surely does not refer to them directly. However, the sequels were made after those bombings and seem to continue very much the same message as the original film. Granted, they depict the struggle of the humans against the machines as primarily defensive attempts to defend Zion from invasion by a foreign force, but then the only major offensive assaults in the war on terror in our own world have involved attacks by technologically superior American forces on strongholds of resistance to American power, not attacks by terrorists against the U.S. As with the aliens of Independence Day, it is the machines of The Matrix and its sequels, not the embattled human rebels, who correspond to the role played by the United States in the global politics of our own world.
This is not to say that the Wachowskis are somehow attempting to drum up support for anti-American terrorist activities in their Matrix films. In fact, while the rebel culture of Zion does have much more of a Third World feel to it than do the oppositional cultures of Star Wars or Independence Day, it has very little of the flavor of the Islamic cultures that provided the primary opposition to the U.S. in our world. If anything, the political model for Zion, seems to be pre-capitalist, vaguely reminiscent of the democratic city-states of ancient Greece. On the other hand, the politics of Zion do not figure in the original Matrix film at all, and they are not necessarily presented as an ideal model even in the sequels. If anything, the politics of The Matrix are strongly antidemocratic, containing a messianic (or Nietzschean) strain that suggests a crucial need for strong, charismatic leaders on the order of Neo and Morpheus—or Hitler and Mussolini. The people of Zion are unable to save themselves from destruction, but they are able to survive their war with the machines thanks to the intervention of their superhuman leader, Neo.
One might argue that the prevailing political attitude of The Matrix is nostalgia. However hip and cool it might appear, there is a definite yearning for older simpler times that runs throughout the film, whether it be in the largely anti-technological tone of the films or in this political yearning for pre-democratic times of strong, paternalistic leaders, divinely endowed with the authority to rule. Similarly, the reality vs. illusion conflict of the film suggests that in our own contemporary world, we have lost touch with the kind of authenticity of experience that was presumably once available to us. From this point of view, The Matrix is a highly conservative film that is very much in line with the nostalgic attempts of right-wing proponents of “traditional values” to look to the past for solutions to our contemporary malaise. The structural opposition of the real world versus the simulated world of the Matrix is very much an opposition between past authenticity and present fakery, based on the assumption that a legitimate and genuine reality does exist, even if that reality may be difficult to access through the web of representations that now cloak it.
Granted, it is possible to see the “reality” of The Matrix as simply another simulation, perhaps one of an infinite series of such simulations, each of which is presented as a “real” alternative to the simulation before it. This possibility is explicitly suggested in “Matriculation,” one of the short films included in The Animatrix.However, there is very little suggestion in The Matrix itself that this is the case. Morpheus and his crew certainly believe that their reality is “real,” and most viewers of the film seem to accept that premise as well—even while believing that their own reality is truly “real” and understanding that the “real” world in The Matrix is a Hollywood fiction.
Then again, the real world of the viewers of the film might be seen as a Hollywood fiction as well. The film suggests in a number of ways that our own reality is a media-produced illusion, to which the film industry itself makes crucial contributions. For example, the green tint of the opening Warner Brothers logo suggests that media conglomerates like Time-Warner make crucial contributions to the distortion of reality in our own world, even as it also allows the Wachowskis to lay claim to the “WB” logo for their own use. In his commentary to the DVD version of the film, special effects supervisor John Gaeta explains that “We wanted to alter the logos of the studios, mostly because we felt that they were an evil empire bent on breaking the creative juices of the average director or writer.” By so doing, Gaeta goes on, the filmmakers wanted to send audiences the message that they “reject the system.” He means the Hollywood system, rather than the capitalist system, but the two are not entirely separable, and this comment certainly makes it seem as if critique of the capitalist media was a major goal of the film. However, this “subversive” remark is also something of a cliché—and perhaps disingenuous, given that the Matrix franchise became such a large element of the “evil” Time-Warner empire for several years.
In addition, when Cypher negotiates with Smith for his betrayal of Morpheus and Neo, he says that, in his new simulated life, he wants to be someone “important, like an actor.” This request already indicates the prominence of the film industry in the Matrix (and, by extension, our own world). Further, when we consider that the name of Cypher in the Matrix is “Mr. Reagan,” the link to President Ronald Reagan, himself a former actor, is inescapable. The fact that Reagan (like Arnold Schwarzenegger after him) could parlay his film career into a successful political career serves as an additional reminder of the power of the film industry. Finally, the fact that Reagan was often accused of having difficulty distinguishing the world of reality from the world of film (as in his frequent use of film allusions to in his political speeches) reinforces the central theme of constructed reality in The Matrix.
The Matrix also includes television in its media critique. Morpheus, for example, specifically mentions television in his description of institutions that contribute to the illusions of the Matrix, along with work, church, and taxes. Televisions and video screens are prominently displayed at several points in the film, and one of the favorite devices employed by the Wachowskis involves a seamless transition from viewing a scene on a video screen to being inside the scene itself—suggesting the way in which, in our own world, television plays a major role in the postmodern blurring of the boundary between reality and fiction.
Such blurring between different levels of existence is, according to critics such as Brian McHale, in his book Postmodernist Fiction (Methuen, 1987), a central element of postmodernist culture—and of the postmodernist worldview as a whole. To an extent, the key referent here is Baudrillard and his notion that the contemporary world of late capitalism has reached a state of hyperreality, a condition in which individuals encounter nothing but “simulacra,” representations that do not refer to reality, copies of originals that do not exist. Numerous commentators have acknowledged the relevance of Baudrillard to The Matrix, especially given the overt allusions to Baudrillard’s Simulation and Simulacra that appear in the film, which include not only Neo’s (appropriately) fake copy of the book, but also Morpheus’s quotation from it when he welcomes Neo to “the desert of the real.” There has, however, been considerable disagreement about whether the film demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of Baudrillard and his work or whether the use of Baudrillard is entirely superficial. (After all, Morpheus’s quotation is from the first page of the book and could have been picked out without even reading it.) In his essay in the volume Taking the Red Pill (BenBella Books, 2003), Dino Felluga sees The Matrix as an effective filmic presentation of Baudrillard’s critique of postmodernism, ultimately reminding us that we are all metaphorical batteries powering the capitalist system and serving as a “commentary on the way each member of the audience is itself a coppertop, whose own fantasies are being manipulated by and thus feed capital” (83). On the other hand, Andrew Gordon argues in his essay in the same volume that the film discourages political action by encouraging viewers to wait for salvation by a messiah figure. Further, he concludes that the film waters down and distorts Baudrillard’s ideas because it posits the continuing existence of a genuine reality to which one can return from the simulated world of illusions, something that for Baudrillard can no longer be done.
The simulated reality of the Matrix may seem to correspond quite closely to the hyperreality described by Baudrillard, but the depiction of a stable alternative real world is a much more old-fashioned (and less postmodern) gesture. Nevertheless, if The Matrix is ultimately far less subversive than many of its proponents would like to believe, it is also the case that the film, compared to most other works of contemporary popular culture, at least raises an unusually large number of issues and explores and extraordinary range of ideas. Even a detractor like Gordon admits that works of science fiction that deal with virtual reality are particularly relevant today because they are “metaphors and fantasies, projections of our fears and hopes about life inside the machine or life augmented by the machine in the cybernetic age” (87). And, of course, recent concerns over artificial intelligence give the film a newfound relevance. If The Matrix fails to strike any genuinely telling blows against the cultural, political, and economic system that surrounds it, this failure may be less a commentary on the weakness of the film and more a commentary on the strength of the system.
Note
[1]At the time they made the film, the Wachowskis were known as brothers Larry and Andy. They have since undergone sex transfer procedures and are now trans women known as Lana and Lilly. They are most commonly referred to simply as “The Wachowskis.”