The Matrix Reloaded. When I saw the first Matrix, I thought, "Gee, nice effects, but it's kinda slow and dopey during all the mystical/philosophical bullshit." I mean,
No one can be told what the Matrix is.
Brain in a jar, you pompous windbag.
What if the robots didn't know what chicken tastes like, and that's why everything tastes like chicken!
Suck my oil.
Of course it didn't help that the world suddenly fell in love with this deep and complex movie. Now, however, I suddenly see the films from the other side, as I think The Matrix Revolutions is a deep and complex film, and everybody else seems to think it a bunch of special effects action scenes with some bullshit philosophy.
Some thoughts on The Matrix Revolutions.
I had previously thought that Neo's powers at the end of the movie were the result of a "nested Matrix," or the argument that those who thought they left the Matrix never really did. Instead, they entered a different portion of the simulation which allowed them to act out the fantasy of being terrorists...er...freedom fighters against oppression. (That the terrorists strike from Zion is a nice touch.) My evidence for this had been the scene in which TMR's Annoying Kid (as opposed to TM's Annoying Chicken Head) gives Neo a spoon. In the first film, a spoon was memorably manipulated inside the matrix with the explanation that the trick to bending it was to realize "there is no spoon." Since Neo got a spoon in the "real world" in TMR, perhaps this indicates that he is in fact still in the matrix, or a "nested matrix," if you will. But what does the spoon really represent?
One of the several things that annoyed me about The Matrix was the way that the film portrayed computer control of reality. I thought that the robots should be able to just up and delete anyone that they found. Why would they have to sic agents on Zion's terrorists? Shouldn't they be able to delete these guys with a couple of keystrokes? What's more, that main agent dude, Smith, seems to be totally unrobotlike. He seems to seethe with hatred. Furthermore, he makes decisions which fall outside the dictates of the matrix‘ “rulers.“ Interrogating Morpheus, he asks the other agents to leave the room so that he can compare human beings to a virus, something that multiplies and multiplies, destroying everything it touches. When the other agents return, they ask him what he was doing. A real computer program would not be motivated in such a personal way, would not be so emotionally driven. It also could not act independently of its programming directives. Winamp would never refuse to play Linkin Park on the grounds that it’s shitty music.
One of the several reasons I love The Matrix Revolutions is that it redefines, clarifies, and develops the first movie. In a scene between Neo and the Oracle, she explains to him that although programs are written to control all aspects of the matrix, they have the capacity to misbehave. So while there are programs which act in perfectly regular way, controlling the behavior of, say, the birds in an invisible manner, there are also misbehaving programs which act in peculiarly human ways. The Merovingian has a love life, enjoys wine, and has a decidedly bitchy personal manner.
In this sort of world programs appear driven by own artificial intelligence, an intelligence which is more independent and humanlike and artificial in that they are mechanical and not biological. They are more like programs in the movie Tron, little digital people, than they are limited instruction sets that can never act capriciously, like Winamp.
Soon after this conversation, agent Smith returns to the action. No longer an agent of the matrix, he is one of the rogue programs, acting in a manner that does not support the general consistency and well-functioning of the matrix. Able now to reproduce in an unlimited manner, devouring the lives of his victims in order to turn them into a perfect replica of himself, agent Smith has become the virus he always despised, focused on a personal mission of vengeance. That he becomes what he despises is a wonderfully human story arc.
One of the people he infects is a Zion terrorist who is attempting to leave the matrix via a telephone. As Smith approaches, the terrorist exclaims, “Oh my god!“, which the once agent takes as a vocative and replies, “Smith will suffice.“ Smith is not the first person in the series to be explicitly mistaken for god, as a douchebag in The Matrix called Neo his “own personal Jesus Christ.“ The poor fellow who cried out is then overwritten by Smith, who in turn leaves the computer simulated world and occupies the independent, living and breathing body the infected fellow once had.
And yet this is not the first example of a human being living with a piece of machine intelligence living inside his brain. The Architect explains that Neo has code in his body which is necessary for rebooting of the Matrix. Neo is a sort of bugfix for the Matrix. He is a human being but has programming in his brain. Neo and Smith are closely related, and both are figures which bridge the digital/human divide. This division and its transgression are explicitly mentioned by the Oracle in the scene I mentioned earlier. There, she tells Neo that the present problem can only be survived by an alliance of humans and technology. I believe, for this and other reasons, that Neo can stop the sentinels at the end of TMR because he has code inside of him and is not strictly human. By the end of the film, he is visually paired with the other transgressive character, the newly-human agent Smith.
In the Enter the Matrix videogame, a non-Gloria Foster and rather sedate Oracle gives further hints regarding the future of the conflict and, presumably, The Matrix Revolutions. She explains to Ghost that her body has been changed and her mind altered by an angry Merovingian. The code to hurt the Oracle was sold to him by a couple in order to save their child, a child who, the Oracle explains, is very important to the future of the conflict. I believe that this child will be another individual who combines machine intelligence and human intelligence, perhaps the child of a human being and a program. Combined with the apocalyptic-looking Neo/Smith fight, I feel an appropriate title for the final film is The Matrix: The Final Battle, and I wholeheartedly expect to see a tender birth scene turning into terror as the midwife looks down at the child and sees she has a dongle jutting out of her mouth. Well, perhaps that won’t happen, but I did want to write the phrase “she has a dongle jutting out of her mouth.”
Which brings me to something that I actually liked about The Matrix. In that film, in the scenes of a bug being placed in Neo, in Neo’s real world “birthing,” there is a strong element of horror. A nasty little mechanical spider pushes its way into Neo’s navel to infect his body. He wakes from this violation as if from a nightmare. Trinity then kidnaps Neo and penetrates him with a giant translucent dildo device which removes the bug. Very scary, and it also means that Trinity sticks into Neo before he sticks it into her in TMR‘s rave scene. The closest TMR comes to TM’s scenes of “rape” is the Merovingian’s orgasm cake, which is more humorous than horrifying.
But what about that damn spoon? It could represent that the simulation is ongoing, that even in Zion the people live in the Matrix. What does the movie tell us about this possibility? The Architect tells Neo explicitly that human beings can only live in the matrix if they choose to accept living in a simulation. He does not say that people will only accept a simulation that is particularly flattering to their personality or that feeds their fantasies of rebellion. In fact, when a pleasing, Skinner-box-styled matrix was attempted, it was a failure, as reality needed to be more complex and varied, with awfulness and violence in addition to happiness and supermodel rimjobs.
And so the spoon. In fact, it does not have to mean that the Zion world is a simulation. It could, just as plausibly, mean that Neo must somehow transcend reality, that he must move beyond the normal physical world. Making this realization, he would be able to access his new machine/human nature and exhibit his new powers. Now the question is, would this result suck?
The Matrix Revolutions was such a treat for me largely because I hated the mysticism of the first film. Being pretty much a realist, I don’t believe that there are such things as fate and prophecy, that these are illusions which people invent to make their lives easier and more understandable. And so to have Morpheus spitting out religious bullshit about Neo really stuck in my craw. I was therefore delighted to see Morpheus punctured by TMR, which explains the prophecies not as divine truths but rather as rational processes. They are stories which are used to control people. I enjoy this because it much closer to the truth of human experience. In reality, there is no Providence. Rather, religion is a mundane thing, stories used by people to control one another. And this is the function of religion in TMR, except that the machines are telling the stories which Morpheus accepts. As surely as there is “no other world out there where everything’s going to be OK, there’s just this rock,” the prophecy of the One is a tool used to fine tune the matrix and ensure its viability.
In TMR, there is a scene just before the Oracle meeting which depicts a market street. The camera hovers over a stall displaying religious iconography. The portraits and sculptures are not derived from any single religion, but form a hodgepodge of figures from various religion. It is a window display in Baltimore’s Brewers Hill depicted in Blade Runner. The art seems to glow and the too-short scene is the most beautiful in the two movies. If, in Revolutions, it turns out that Neo can bring about the end of the conflict, it will be not because there was a divine plan to do so, that divine plan having been revealed in TMR as a machine’s story. Rather, it seems that the solution to the problem will be in understanding the conflict and coming to a conclusion that will allow peaceful coexistence of artificial and biological intelligence. It is a process that will involve Smith and Neo and a third party only mentioned offhandedly in Enter the Matrix. I am anxious about this ending simply because I have trouble accepting the logistics of a human being controlling machines through will in the real world. These seem superpowers to me. TMR, however, has successfully reversed the greatest drawback to the first film by portraying the previous religious overtones in a manner lacking in reverence. Religion’s salvation is a false hope used to frustrate those same hopes. In this context, the religious iconography portrayed in the street scene becomes sad and enigmatic and beautiful.
We can hope that The Matrix Revolutions will be as beautiful and intriguing as the street vendor’s portraits of the Holy Virgin, but even if it fails, The Matrix Reloaded is itself a fine film, and the increasing quality of films tantalizes with the possibilities for the third film.
Posted by mattb at June 19, 2003 11:41 PM