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The Matrix is one of those movies that has imprinted itself on a whole generation. I remember very vividly seeing it for the first time, and it had a powerful effect on me. The language of The Matrix has come to undergird much of our political discourse, and strangely on both sides of the political aisle. And though, I have to admit, it would be impossible to go through all of the symbolism in the movie, hopefully I can follow a thread that will make its basic structure available. The Matrix is full of small symbolic references, and so many people have written, discussed, and explored all of these references, the names, the play on words, but dwelling too much on these, like the name Trinity, or Morpheus, or the play between Neo and the One, I think can become a distraction. And it’s also obvious that the Wachowskis threw in a large number of references which are not completely coherent, and can confuse us as we attempt to make out the basic structure of the story. Which is really a battle between two clear sides, at least in the first movie. The two sides can be described in many ways. It’s a battle between the mind and the body, artificial intelligence and man. We can say the artificial and the natural in general. It’s a battle between control and freedom, determinism and free will, purity and mixture, conformity and difference, conservatism and change. It’s also reason versus faith, but also reason versus intuition, reason versus love, reason versus desire. And ultimately, it pits the system, no matter how you see it, against the individual. Once one sees the basic opposition, we can follow the thread. The opening of the movie is the key. Trinity, a hacker who’s attempting to find Neo so to set him free from this system, is confronted with police and agents of the Matrix. And in that scene we see both the setup of hierarchy, which is shown as the agents pulling rank on the policemen, and we also see the self-willing of Trinity lying on her back, telling herself to get up, so to get out of the Matrix before she’s killed by the authority structure. The fact that both Trinity and the agents know that the rules which regulate the Matrix are artificial constructs gives them special powers in manipulating how they interact with it. The conflict between the two sides plays itself out at several levels. First off, this happens within Neo’s life. He has two identities. This is particularly made clear by Agent Smith when the agents capture him in the beginning. On one hand, we are told he is Thomas Anderson, a cog in his system, an employee for a software company who contributes to the social fabric, pays his taxes, etc. On the other hand, he’s a hacker who has chosen his own name, Neo, and in that identity, he must hide from this system, works to subvert, infiltrate, and undermine the system of order, working to solve the conspiracy of which he has an intuition and which is the key to his own sense of being out of place, out of sync with reality. As a Thomas, he doubts. It’s important to understand how adherence to conspiracy theory is far more a meta question than one might think. Beyond the specifics of this or that conspiracy, it’s the sign of an extreme duality, the lack of unity between the opposites of control and freedom, system and individual. Conspiracy theory is first and foremost doubt about the system of order itself, an intuition that it has become corrupt and exists only to serve its own nefarious ends which are being hidden by the very authority and power embodied by the system itself. The system, like the totalitarian governments of the 20th century, like in Orwell’s 1984, is only there to self-perpetuate its capacity to control, and in doing so reduces the human being to a tool. When this vision, social order, is seen as crushing the logos of man, the will and freedom which makes them in the image of God, we could say. This is of course represented quite forcefully in the moment where Neo loses his mouth during the interrogation scene. Now in the Matrix, the system of control is invisible. It’s in fact the very shape of phenomenological reality as it presents itself to the person. The system of control only becomes visible and violent when you question it. This can have some frightening consequences for the message of the film. The system of control is represented as our very frame of perception, which is programmed and controlled without us knowing it. When Morpheus is explaining to Neo what the Matrix is, he gives several human activities as examples of places where you are engaging with the Matrix. First he speaks of the Matrix as that frame for reality, watching television or looking through your window. But then he says, You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes. These examples are specifically structured according to the social organization which could be found in the Middle Ages, which is similar to other structures in many cultures. The three orders which correspond to the working-slash-business class, the ruling class, and the priestly spiritual caste. The point is that behind the science fiction façade, the Matrix is not so much about robots putting humans in vats, but is simply order itself, viewed negatively as a system of control. Morpheus gives us a final definition. What is the Matrix? Control. A computer-generated dream world built to keep us under control in order to change us, to change human beings into a battery. The radicality of how encompassing the Matrix is makes any act against it justifiable. Terrorism, of course, but also any individual who stands to defend the system is an agent of the system, even though they might not even know what they’re doing or know about the Matrix. If you are not one of us, you are one of them. And those agents or those people in the Matrix can be eliminated as needed without moral consequence. This type of discourse is truly that of the revolutionary. The recent research of notions like systemic oppression or group guilt, that is the fact that you’re guilty of all the crimes of a group simply for being a member of that group, is an example of the type of thinking which animates the Matrix movie. That means that anyone we haven’t unplugged is potentially an agent. In a normal vision of the world, our relationship with the system of order is seen as an exchange. People do act as batteries for organizations, whether it be the state, the church, but it’s also true of your local sports club or your aunt’s knitting group. Individual participation acts as fuel by which the higher order identity and order itself can continue to exist. But in a normal vision, that system of order also offers identity, structure, purpose, and cohesion to the group which feeds it, while also leaving room for the idiosyncrasies and our private world. On the side of the human resistance, we see lined up a series of qualities which bolster the basic opposition against the system. So if the Matrix is conformity, when the Nebuchadnezzar crew enters the Matrix, they’re shown as idiosyncratic in their appearance. If the Matrix is filled with white people, in fact the agents are all white men, the resistance appears as multicultural and diverse. We find a form of spirituality in the resistance, but this faith is seen as individual faith, as short-circuiting reason and predictability. And each person’s belief does not have to coincide with what others believe in order for those beliefs to have value. What was said was for you and for you alone. And in the end, the ultimate faith is the faith in oneself, for it is finally by believing that he is the one that Neo is able to explode the structure of control. This understanding of opposition to the system also shows us the meaning of the Oracle, who demonstrates that there are limits to coherent linear thinking and human causality is not always linear. And don’t worry about the vase. What vase? That vase. I’m sorry. I said don’t worry about it. But often runs backwards and forwards in all directions. Intuition often trumps reason, and there is great power to be found in that space where even freedom and determinism break down. And when Morpheus presents Neo with the two pills, it is choosing between these two sides, the question of deciding which is more real. The blue side of the simple, the straightforward, and the side where your experience of the world matches your theory of the world? Or else the complicated, unbelievable vision where absolutely nothing is what it seems? First off, it’s important to say that we make this decision every time someone makes a statement to us. Do we trust or distrust? Is this truth or a lie? Is the pronouncement there to show us or to mask from us reality? In this image of the pills, the Wachowskis use a very deep intuitive structure which goes beyond the confines of the movie, of course. It is what many have called the right and the left hand, water and fire, the blue side of mercy and the red side of rigor, the side of reason and the side of the passions, the straight and the crooked. One could say that it is the two sides of the brain, but it is the reflection of a greater pattern which is that we vacillate between coherence and completeness. Are things simple, moving towards unity, or are they complicated, moving towards flux? What is important to understand is that at least in the first movie, the opposites are portrayed within a liberation frame of modern politics. The narrative is one of revolution, we can’t avoid that, and the breaking of systems of order. And in this case, the structures, the frames, are seen as impeding the real, which is identified mostly with the body, with instinct, the individual, and the possibility of self-determination, of being whatever you want to be, no matter what the social fabric seems to impose. In many instances, Neo says that he will not accept to be subject to the rules, that he is in control of his own fate. Do you believe in fate, Neo? No. Why not? Because I don’t like the idea that I’m not in control of my life. Several people have seen the resemblance between The Matrix and Platonism in relation to the allegory of the cave, and this is an obvious comparison. But The Matrix presents us with a form of reverse-Platonism, we could say, where what is most real is not the reality of stable forms which are beyond even the mental realm, but it is a fight between the controlling mind and the flux of the body. By understanding how rules, structures, and frames of reference, as mental tyrannies, are artificial and malleable, one acquires special powers in shaping and twisting reality for revolutionary ends. In this sense, The Matrix and how it works is very akin to magic, which attempts to master the structures of conscience and manifestation in order to manipulate them. So we follow the story of Neo. As we do that, we do have a descent into the underworld of sorts. Neo leaves the comfort of The Matrix and is dumped into the real world, and this takes on the imagery of baptism, as Neo is reborn into the real world outside The Matrix. As he does that, he then ascends to learn to control the very thing that imprisoned him. He accepts to risk his life to go into The Matrix to save his new father figure, Morpheus, and in doing so becomes the One, the individual, which can stand against the system and explode it from within. In this sense, Neo follows the Joseph Campbell hero’s path. Though there is quite a bit of confusion, and the confusion is due to the basic inversion of the Neoplatonic vision. On the one hand, The Matrix is viewed as the world of shadow, like the underworld, but The Matrix is ordered and regular, and reality is represented as a devastated world of death. The Matrix is presented as the dream world, but leaving The Matrix is done with Alice in Wonderland imagery, such as entering the looking glass and tumbling down the rabbit hole, which in Lewis Carroll are seen as equivalent to the dream world. There’s even a scene where as Neo is about to exit The Matrix, he’s told by Cipher, Buckle your seatbelt, Dorothy, because Kansas is going bye-bye. Which is strange because in The Wizard of Oz movie, Dorothy’s trip is seen as a dream. To me, the ultimate example is in the reference to the Nebuchadnezzar in the movie. In the biblical book of Daniel, Nebuchadnezzar is the king who dreams of an order that is toppled, a giant statue which is knocked down by an uncut stone, a tree that is also cut down. And so we can understand why Morpheus’ ship is named that. But in the biblical story, Nebuchadnezzar takes the red pill, we could say. He descends into the body, he exits the control of the city and lives like a beast in the field. This descent is seen as punishment for hubris. This forgetting of order, this more primordial animal existence is actually far more akin to a dream. The life outside the city and civilization is exactly a world where borders are gone and where anything is possible. And this is exactly what Neel calls for at the very end of the movie. Such a reality is equivalent to the dream, where structures of order no longer function, and the Matrix, the systems of order and coherence would be equivalent to the waking world. But of course, if you follow this line far enough, you’ll see that it will also lead you into contradiction. It seems in fact that many of the tropes in the Matrix collapse under their own internal contradiction. Also people have attempted to make references to Christianity. And I can understand why. Neel obviously is made to be an image of Christ. This is mentioned explicitly in the movie. He is the Savior. And there are interesting parallels to make. He even dies and resurrects before fully attaining his highest form. Yet one must be cautious of it, because the structure of the movie is truly a revolutionary one. So if it is Christian, it is in line with liberation theology and things of the sort. We see this as Neel resurrects and becomes the One. He’s in the Matrix, but he also stands outside it. He can fully see the Matrix as the construct that it is. And in that place, the only word he utters is no. And this no is the shape of the movie. For the highest form of the individual is seen as he or she who resists the control, the oppressive system of order. Christ has come to reunite heaven and earth, show us a place where all things can come together. Although Christ did come in part as the uncut stone which topples the statue in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, this is a traditional interpretation, he did not oppose Rome in a revolutionary sense. By accepting to die, he transformed Rome from within until the corrupt system of order, Rome itself, which had conspired in his murder and then persecuted his disciples for centuries, was finally conquered from within and transformed, not exploded. As for the Matrix, the very last scene in the movie clinches the whole story. Neo declares the system is afraid of change. We see the words system failure as Neo says he does not know the future causality of his actions, does not know what effects they will have. His side is one for now. A world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible. That is of course the final message, which is that the truly real is a world without order, without system and without limits, where there is no relationship between the categories of the world and our own possible engagement with it. That is what Larry and Lana Wachowski, that’s what they’re aiming for. The final statement was already framed in sexual imagery as a promise of the freedom we’re talking about right at the very outset of the movie, the first time Neo encounters Trinity at some S&M rave. And now at the very end, Neo’s declaration is cast in political discourse as Rage Against the Machine comes on, wailing its criticism of the American government and the abuses, murders, and systems of control it tried to instigate and preserve during the 20th century. All of this is of course only one side of the equation. For it is true that the systems of order can be corrupt, tyrannical, and controlling. It is true that sometimes the individual must stand and oppose this corruption. We see this in the biblical prophets culminating in St. John the Baptist. But it is also true that there cannot be a world without limits, without borders. Such a world would not be a world, but would be chaos itself. The balance is difficult, but without it we find ourselves in the strange place we stand today. Whereas, the revolutionary narrative exemplified in The Matrix has now taken over institutions in our universities and governments through social justice initiatives. We find that it is more conservative types who are using Matrix analogies like the red pill or tumbling down the rabbit hole. It is the more conservative types that are questioning the narrative that is presented to us by the system of control. So maybe all I can tell you is, wake up, The Matrix has you. 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