Section: Film/Video/DVD Review
Combining science fiction with kung fu, The Matrix was one of the most successful, innovative, and timely Hollywood-made films of 1999. (It is also the biggest-selling DVD ever in that new, mass-market medium.) The film cleverly incorporates recent cultural theory into its plot line and reflects millennial fears and hopes about the role of technology.
In academic circles, The Matrix has captured much attention: At two recent conferences on film and media that I attended, panels were devoted to locating the subversive moments and revolutionary potential of the film. For all its innovation in terms of the use of digital technology (it won four technical Academy Awards this spring) and genre, The Matrix is all too traditional. It insists--as Hollywood films concerned with injustice usually do--that social change is possible only through the heroic action of a hyperkinetic individual. In the film, a sustained social movement does not prevail--a savior triumphs.
Like much of science fiction film and literature, The Matrix is a tale of a young man waking up to a confining reality and fighting for freedom. The dystopia in the film is particularly gruesome and especially technophobic for a film that revels in digital special effects. In the future, the machines have taken over (again, typical for sci-fi). They "farm" human beings to use them as batteries in a world that has been drained of other sources of power due to (yes, you guessed it) human folly, in order to pacify the minds of their dormant prisoners (who lie in vast fields of amniotic fluid encased in artificial wombs, digesting the liquefied remains of the dead), the artificial intelligence creates an elaborate virtual reality. In this coordinated and micro-managed realm, the digital selves of the imprisoned live and work in cities not unlike our own. Except for a few bands of rebels, no one knows that their minds are operating inside a dream that is programmed for them. This realm is known by the artificial intelligence and the resisters alike as The Matrix.
The directors and producers of the film, the Wachowski brothers (who also directed Bound, a lesbian-themed thriller), pay homage to the French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard by having a book called Simulacra and Simulation visible in the home of the hero, Neo (Keanu Reeves). Indeed, the film quotes Baudrillard's earlier text, Simulations, when the leader of the rebels, Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne), instructs his younger convert, Neo, that he is living in the "desert of the real" and not in reality at all.
Baudrillard argues in Simulations, using America as his example and Marshall McLuhan as his inspiration, that reality is in fact a copy of a copy, or a simulation that has pulled the wool over our eyes. For Baudrillard, Disney's danger is not that it produces synthetic and appealing environments in Florida, California, Times Square, and in spectacles of animation or puppetry. The danger of Disney is that it tricks us into thinking that there is a difference between that which is Disney property and that which is not. For Baudrillard, all of the United States is a theme park. In this corporate-sponsored illusion, authentic experience is in fact nostalgia. "Reality" can only appear in quotes and the original is all but replaced by copies.
The Matrix picks up on Baudrillard's insistence and makes manifest the latent paranoia in his vision. In the film, virtually all of the masses are hoodwinked and complicit with a system that is total and invisible. It suggests that we are all somnambulists who mistake the narcotics of routinized sleep as wakefulness where we can exercise our freedom. What fools these mortals be as they drowse in a false consciousness!
Luckily, There's a Resistance
Unlike rebels of the past, who are often depicted as wearing worn berets, torn combat fatigues, and beards, the rebels in The Matrix sport '90s high fashion when they go to battle in the virtual reality. They are clad head to toe in form-fitting black leather or vinyl Prada-wear. Their chicness suggests that commodity fetishism is a defense against the blandness of everyday consumerism. The rebels are a multicultural group, led by the African-American Morpheus (named for the Greek god of sleep) who is a mystical kung-fu master. Morpheus and Trinity (an aerobicized lieutenant who could be Keanu Reeves's female twin) are convinced that Neo is the "one"--a Jesus-like savior who can navigate and disassemble The Matrix using pure will.
The rebels fight the sentient programs inside virtual reality. The appearance of these agents proves the old Hollywood saying that costume is character. The enemy, all Caucasian (and quite pale at that) with receding hairlines, wear the requisite suits of middle management, off-the-rack and by-the-book dull gray-green. They patrol the virtual reality. They, too, know martial arts, but have unnatural speed and superhuman strength. As embodiments of artificial intelligence, they do not die no matter how often they are kicked and punched. (Luckily for special-effects enthusiasts, they can be blown up!)
The Matrix flirts with showing how an organized, multicultural movement can sustain resistance to a system run by "suits." This sets it apart from much recent Hollywood fare. In mainstream cinema, aberrance from the norm is usually punished within the film (see, for example, Boys Don't Cry, where the gender-confused hero/ine is murdered, or American Beauty, where the closeted homosexual neighbor kills himself after shooting dead the nonconforming straight white male hero). Indeed, The Matrix is clever in concept and rich with allusions--not only to Baudrillard, but also to the more popular Alice in Wonderland and the Bible as well as to earlier sci-fi films.
The Matrix is also intelligent, if contradictory, concerning technology. It warns that far from freeing us from the doldrums of ordinary life, new technology may be aligning computer stations as the assembly lines of the recapitalized western world, allowing the masses to be controlled by the "techno-bosses." The film urges its audience to wake up to power dynamics and recognize the illusion of balance and propriety that corporate and governmental forces put forward.
In the end, The Matrix reverts to a time-proven and particularly American device: the individual, acting heroically and alone, prevails and modifies the system. Keanu Reeves' character, finally accepting that he is the "one," destroys a trinity of devilish agents. This signals that The Matrix is vulnerable. Neo catches and darts bullets with the greatest of ease, and starts to fly through the dissolving simulated realm. Due to expert effects, this is exciting to watch as a moment of personal triumph and power, but disappointing politically. Where collective action and resistant Strategies fail, the force of the hero succeeds.
In this way, The Matrix moves to a more conservative position, preserving America's insistence on the individual as the agent of change. This agent of change is goodness itself and can identify the shrouded face of evil. In this hope for a hipper America, every day is casual Friday, and the clothes still make the man. The nonconformist hero-hacker eschews the suit and wears designer garments in order to master the pathways of the Internet and the corridors of corporate capitalism. He is in all ways committed to seeking truth and reality--with a gym-buffed body. In other words, Neo is an emblematic male hero of the late '90s.
Perhaps with Julia Robert's Erin Brockavich, we have the '00s female counterpart. Armed with an always-revealed cleavage, she single-handedly takes on corporate polluters and wins, using her wits--and her fetishized body--to advantage. The message from Hollywood is clear: the many must wait for the heroic and attractive few to bring about social justice. Part of the reason for Hollywood's conservatism is box-office economics. Collective action is just not sexy enough and unsuitable for depiction by stars. Films that are about sustained political movements remain scarce, even as the use of civil disobedience increases and the efforts of unions intensify in the contemporary United States.
~~~~~~~~
By Edward D. Miller
Edward D. Miller teaches media theory and cultural studies at The College of Staten Island, City University of New York. He is a contributing editor for the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture, published by Routledge, and writes on broadcasting history and policy and the cultural politics of music, sound, and technology. He has just completed a manuscript on American radio in the 1930s.