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Harry Potter with Guns
kauff writes "Slate has recently released a somewhat-inspired article
about what the Matrix was. You have to read it for yourself. Good way to
hype yourself up before Reloaded on May 15th."
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The Matrix
It's Harry Potter with guns.
By Chris Suellentrop
Posted Thursday, May 1, 2003, at 2:23 PM PT
Illustration by Charlie Powell
Why is The Matrix? The "what" has already been answered: It's an R-rated Star Wars, a sci-fi movie with philosophical pretensions that did shockingly gangbuster business at the box office. The Matrix raked in more than $170 million in the United States, became the first DVD to sell more than 1 million copies, and set the stage for the two most-anticipated sequels of 2003 (at least until The Return of the King comes out). But while The Matrix's commercial success is impressive, it's not mind-boggling. In 1999, four movies--Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, The Sixth Sense, Toy Story 2, and Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me--did better business than The Matrix, and Disney's Tarzan finished only a fistful of dollars behind. What makes The Matrix stand out from that pack is the way it combines mass appeal with a smaller, more intense cult following. No recent movie (other than films with a built-in fan base, like the Star Wars or Lord of the Rings movies) inspires the same kind of slavish, fan-boy devotion. Type the name of a contemporary movie with a similar box-office gross, like Ocean's Eleven, into Google, and you're confronted with a list of official sites and e-commerce pages hawking the movie. Type "the matrix," and you get those sites but also a flood of fan pages--Matrix as Messiah Movie, Knowthematrix.com, the requisite LEGO site, and the sine qua non of movie-geek cult status: the fan-created role-playing game.
What explains the phenomenon? We know it's not the dialogue. Part of the explanation is simple: The mixing of the genres of science fiction and kung fu meant that the Wachowski brothers combined two great cult tastes that go great together. (On one of the featurettes on the Matrix DVD, Andy Wachowski sums up the movie by saying, "It's about robots vs. kung fu.") The movie's startling premise, atmospheric John Woo-style action, and "bullet time" effects go a long way toward explaining the movie's appeal, too. As does the fact that the movie is laden with references and allusions that reward repeated viewings, making fans who recognize them feel as if they and the filmmakers are part of an exclusive, in-the-know club. A by-no-means-complete list includes everything from Baudrillard to Christianity to Descartes to Buddhism to spaghetti westerns to Lewis Carroll to William Gibson's Neuromancer to Jackie Chan's Drunken Master.
But none of these explanations is sufficient. The real source of the fascination with The Matrix is that, despite all appearances, the movie is not a dystopia. Rather, it's a utopia, a geek paradise. The Matrix is a sci-fi John Hughes movie, in which a misfit learns that he's actually cool. (Think Harry Potter with guns.) At the software company where Keanu Reeves works, his boss might as well be the principal castigating Judd Nelson in The Breakfast Club when he says: "You have a problem with authority, Mr. Anderson. You believe that you are special. That somehow the rules do not apply to you. Obviously, you are mistaken." Of course, we learn that the oppressive Figure of Authority is the one who is mistaken. But instead of going to the prom, Keanu gets to pack heat, learn kung fu, wear a black trench coat and sunglasses, and, to top it off, he gets a hot, ass-kicking girlfriend who sports fetish wear. What kind of dystopia is this? No one wants to be Winston Smith in 1984, but everyone wants to be Neo (or Trinity, or Morpheus) in The Matrix.
As Alan Dean Foster puts it in Exploring the Matrix, an anthology of essays by science-fiction writers, Neo is "Everynerd": "His perceived world is a sham, a mistake, a carefully crafted fake, and you know, deep down, that yours is, too." But the movie has a special appeal to that subset of misfit, the computer geek. When we first see Neo, he's living alone in his cramped apartment, staying up all night on his computer. He's a programmer by day and a computer hac
Excerpt from Aint-It-Cool-news:
"MATRIX: KINGDOM OF ASS-KICKING is like if all of Anthrax's albums formed into a hot chick who had to fuck you ten times a day or she gets pee-cancer."
The clever explanation I heard for the 'human battteries' was this. Morpheus is wrong. Of course the ower generated by a human isn't meaningful compared to what they consume. But they mention the use of Fusion. The explanation is that fusion power is a very tricky process to regulate, to the humans are used as a massive parallel computer to control the real power plant. Any energy they produce is just icing.
Now, if the robots have enough computer power to simulate reality for millions of humans, you might think they have enough computing power to control the power plant, but oh well, I thought it was a clever excuse for a pretty glaring hole in the movie.
Spencer Ogden
For those of you who didn't read the article, Read this! it is all of Neo's dialogue, all 3 pages of it. I never realized it before, but most of his lines are questions. and the only really long line is his ending narration.
YOU SUCK BALLS!
The matrix is a great movie beacuse it is the first and only movie to really focus on the use of illusion as a tool of social control. From Plato and the allegory of the cave to Nietzsche and is exploration of slave morality, this has been a dominant theme amongst the greatest philosophers
That's not what the cave allegory means. I speak as someone who has read the Politeia in the original. The cave allegory is about what the Hindus and Buddhists call the "veil of maya," the UNIVERSE catching us in its illusions, not society. For Plato one must use the intellect to reach beyond the shadows on the wall of the cave and see the real universe beyond, the universe of the forms.
The Matrix's approach to this is more gnostic than Platonic. Read the Nag Hammadi Codices. The AIs and the master control of the Matrix (there's gotta be a master control somewhere, otherwise there would be nothing preventing Smith from getting what he wants - out) are Yaldaboath, and Zion's core computer is Sophia. There's a lot of gnostic symbolism in Dick's later work, so it wouldn't surprise me terribly if the W brothers had read some late Dick.
There are intersections, of course: in the Nag Hammadi codices you'll find a translation from Plato. But I wouldn't call the Matrix genuinely Platonic.
Nietzschean, though, there you're onto something.
Ender's Game is going to be a movie, but OSC's writing the script, so it shouldn't suck too badly.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.