The Matrix Revealed: It Begins!

Introduction

OK.

The time has come.

I have the 10 DVD Matrix Collection that features documentaries on the technical aspects of the film-making,  the science behind the artificial intelligence ideas  and the multi-layered and seriously academic philosophical themes and  references. It also has an otherwise unavailable commentary track by none other than Ken WIlber in dialog with radical intellectual Dr. Cornel West running through all three movies! A feast for the mind.

When The Matrix came out in 1999 it struck a powerful nerve in the American and perhaps the world psyche. The film consequently grossed more than $460 million worldwide and became the first DVD to sell over 3 million copies in the U.S.

Here was a genre-bending postmodern sci-fi film that featured unbelievably cool state-of-the-art special effects and action sequences, impossible Hong Kong kung-fu moves, subversive counter-culture ideas, world mythology references and a grand narrative that posed the forces of good in the form of Neo (part everyman, part superhero, part postmodern messianic avatar) and his uber-cool band of sexy leather-wearing, mostly black, somewhat androgynous freedom fighters against the "agents"  - who look like identical depersonalized white males - part corporate capitalist Kafka-esque bureaucrats , part fascist secret police in suits, ties and  shiny black sensible shoes. Of course, neither side had a monopoly on dark glasses.....

This first film in the trilogy also really captured the imagination of the spiritual community represented now (in part) by the Zaadz demographic - as there were multiple messages in the film about spiritual awakening, saving the world, finding (or becoming) the savior, and learning to use the mind to overcome tyranny.

The subsequent two films were almost universally not as well received, with the third and final installment actually losing money. As the series unfolds, the philosophical concepts get more complex, the world-savior archetype gets deconstructed, the good vs. evil ideology gets subverted and the films force us to realize (if we are willing/able to) that "taking the red pill," waking up to the inner and outer tyranny and getting engaged in the "good fight" is merely the first of a long series of initiations that will keep unfolding, deepening, expanding - and that always require a letting go of the holy grail of the previous level in order to move forward to the next.

As such, the films can almost be said to represent a complex map of developing intellectual and spiritual inquiry set within a narrative that situates itself within world mythology while playing postmodern philosophical jazz against a throbbing 21st century techno groove.

Let's begin by talking about the first and most beloved/approachable film: The Matrix. My plan is to cover all three movies over the course of the next month. Stick around - it's going to be a fun ride....

I will offer an interpretation and an outrageous assertion that Zaadz is part of the real matrix in my next post...

The Matrix

I am going to focus on the opening 40 minutes or so of the film as it is both dense and definitive.

We open with the now famous screen of green computer code and the important message "trance running" - this is followed by a sequence of images that morphs to take us into the world of the computer code - and we enter a scene that finds Trinity , androgynous, leather-clad, badass in confrontation with classic (and tellingly two-dimensional) urban police who think they have nothing to fear from a "girl" and fed-looking agents who know better. The ensuing left-field remix from noir-esque cop drama to out-of-context exquisitely shot superhero kung-fu action sequence puts us immediately into heretofore unexplored postmodern cinema territory, and before we know it we are watching (with the baffled cops) as both Trinity and the agents leap tall buildings in single bounds and practically fly from rooftop to rooftop. The thing about this opening sequence is that it immediately juxtaposes the familiar representation of an urban crime movie with unbelievable physical (yet viscerally depicted) feats that suggest either superpowers or an alternate reality.

Next we see Trinity in a race with a massive semi truck to the ringing telephone that will magically allow her  to escape just before the phone-booth that houses it  disintegrates into shattered glass and metal under the onslaught of the monstrous machine. As the agents look on we are taken through the telephone, back out via the morphing computer code and onto Neo's computer screen that introduces us simultaneously to Morpheus via an online article Neo has been reading and to Neo himself asleep in front of the machine - Wake up Neo, says the green text on the screen- The Matrix has you...

And we are right in the middle of the central themes: machine vs. human, conformity vs. nonconformity, oppression vs. freedom, guile and excellence vs. lumbering tyranny, leather vs. suits, reality vs. a computer generated world.

We know too that the reality we are witnessing is not what we are used too - everyone is on the edge of their seat. What the fuck is going on here?

Well, we could spend hundreds of pages decoding the many, many symbols and references that ensue. Perhaps the most telling of which is that Neo lives in apartment number 101. In other words this will just be his freshman year in the school of mind expansion...

In true dorm room style, Neo answers the door to find a group of cutting-edge hipsters in search of the contraband he can provide - in this case a forbidden computer disc which he keeps hidden in a hollowed out copy of Simulacra and Simulation. The green text has predicted the knock and also told Neo Lewis Carrol style to "follow the white rabbit", which turns out to be a tattoo on a sexy girl's shoulder.... This is thrilling to the adolescent in us that wants to believe that looking cool, being sexy and partying in forbidden ways is the path to being liberated from "the system" - but as we shall see later the Wachowski's are just beginning their Chinese box puzzle of illusions within illusions...

From trusty wiki:

        "Simulacra and Simulation (Simulacres et Simulation in French) is a philosophical         treatise by Jean Baudrillard.

Simulacra and Simulation is most known for its discussion of images, signs, and how they relate to the present day. Baudrillard claims that our society has replaced all reality and meaning with symbols and signs, and that in fact all that we know as real is actually a simulation of reality. The simulacra that Baudrillard refers to are signs of culture and media that create the reality that we perceive.

A specific analogy that Baudrillard uses is a fable derived from On Exactitude in Science by Jorge Luis Borges. In it, a great Empire created a map that was so detailed it was as large as the Empire itself. The actual map grew and decayed as the Empire itself conquered or lost territory. When the Empire crumbled, all that was left was the map. In Baudrillard's rendition, it is the map that we are living in, the simulation of reality, and it is reality that is crumbling away from disuse."

Needless to say, Neo follows the white rabbit to a pulsing dark nightclub where Trinity awaits.  Her whispered invitation and unspoken seduction will eventuallly take him to meet the person whom we gather is a legendary underground resistance figure, Morpheus. We find out that Trinity is a legendary hacker who Neo mistakenly had assumed was "a guy" and that she has come to tell Neo that he is in danger, that he is being watched and that she knows he is driven by a single question - what is the Matrix?

Let's just pause and look at these three names: Neo = new, contemporary, it's also an anagram of "one." Trinity has religious overtones - especially with regard to integration and wholeness. Morpheus, Neo and Trinity could be seen as themselves a trinity - father, son and holy spirit. Morpheus is a god from Greek mythology that has ambiguous overtones.




 Again from wiki:

"Morpheus ("he who forms, shapes, moulds", from the Greek morphe) is the Greek god of dreams.

Morpheus has the ability to take any human's form and appear in dreams. His father is the god Hypnos, of sleep. Nyx (the goddess of night) is his mother/grandmother. The sons of Hypnos — the Oneiroi — are rulers of dreams, and also include Phobetor (also known as Icelus), and Phantasos.

Morpheus is spoken of in the Metamorphoses of Ovid. He sleeps on an ebony bed in a dimly lit cave, surrounded by poppy flowers. Ovid suggests that Morpheus has a special talent for mimicking human form in dreams. According to Ovid, Morpheus concentrated on the human elements of dreams, his brothers Phobetor and Phantasos being responsible for animals and inanimate objects, respectively.

Morpheus sends images of humans in dreams or visions, and is responsible for shaping dreams, or giving shape to the beings which inhabit dreams. Phobetor made fearsome dreams (etymologically related to "phobia" from the Greek φόβος "fear"). Phantasos produced tricky and unreal dreams (hence "fantasy", "phantasmagoria", etc.). Together these sons of Hypnos rule the realm of dreams. Morpheus also had special responsibility for the dreams of kings and heroes. For these reasons Morpheus is often referred to as "Morpheus the Greek god of dreams" in superiority to his brothers.

The drug morphine (once "morphium") derives its name from Morpheus based on its dream-inducing power."

After his night out, Neo awakens to his ordinary room and goes to work in the little cubicle at  the software company where he is under the thumb of his pedantic boss. A Fedex courier brings Neo a cellphone and Morpheus tries to help him escape the building as the agents come to take him away. We still don't know why, neither it seems does Neo. Having failed in his bid to escape, Neo is taken away in cuffs.

In what will turn out to be a reference to a scene much later in the trilogy, we find Neo in the interrogation room via a bank of surveillance screens that all bear the same image - that of him sittting at a table in an otherwise empty room....We close in on one of the images and see three agents filing in ominously - an evil trinity.

Agent Smith educates us:

Mr. Thomas A. Anderson has been living two lives, one as a program writer for a respectable software conmpany with a social security number, pays his taxes etc who helps his landlady take out the garbage,  the other life is lived in computers with the alias Neo in which he is guilty of almost every computer crime we have a name for... They also know that he has been contacted by Morpheus - considered by many authorities to be the most dangeous man alive.

The scene thus far feels like a cross between a police interrogation and a visit to the principle's office - all of which makes it very satisfying when Neo gives Smith the finger and demands his phone call.

Smith: But Mr. Anderson, what good is a phonecall if you can't speak?

We are again confronted by the unreality of the world we find ourselves in as Smith first makes the silently protesting Neo's mouth somehow disappear and then inserts an terrifying electronic bug like creature into his belly button while the other two agents hold him down.

Neo writhes into wakefulness in his bed. Was that a dream?

Meetings Morpheus

The phone rings and Morpheus ups the ante - "You are the One Neo . You may have spent the last two years looking for me, but I have spent my entire life looking for you...."

Neo waits in the meeting place under the bridge. The rain cascades from the bridge onto the street below. The bridge as a symbol of the passageway between two worlds, the rain as a symbol of baptism, rebirth.

As a foreshadowing to the revelation Neo is about to have laid on him, Switch calls him "coppertop" as she holds a gun on him and he decides wether or not to go along with her, Trinity and Apok. Then the bug installed into his belly button is removed by a very scary mechanical contraption and dropped out of the window onto the gleaming wet road.

Neo: Jesus Christ that thing's real?!

This is another Jesus reference - when he gives the contraband computer disc to the hipsters at the door one of them says, "you're my savior Neo, my own personal Jesus..."


So now, on to meet Morpheus. The lightning strikes, the thunder cracks, the rain glimmers in the half-light - we are still in noir territory and there is a kind of high-def unreality or hyper-reality to everything. It's lush and satisfying and also oddly predictable and cliched. I think that's intentional.

Now come the most important moments of the first film. Novice meets Master, Luke meets Obi Wan, Grasshopper meets Sensei. However in this version, we and Neo are about to learn the answer to the question - what is The Matrix?

Fisrt let's look at the word:

    Meaning of matrix (noun)
forms: matrices, matrixes
point of origin; array of numbers or algebraic symbols; mold or die

Example of matrix
Some historians claim the Nile Valley was the matrix of the Western civilization.

Matrix also refers to the mother, the uterus/womb - the birth matrix, and Stan Grof uses the word to describe each of four stages (or perinatal birth matrixes) of the birthing process that can be accessed and processed for traumatic content during deep experiential therapy like Holotropic Breathing or LSD psychotherapy. (Take the red pill Neo... and find out the truth as you go down the rabbit hole.)

The sequence that follows is mind-blowing in it's narrative force, breathtakingly executed and layered with meaning.

In the broken down 19th century looking room,  Morpheus again makes reference to Alice in Wonderland - saying that he imagines that Neo feels like Alice and asking how far down the rabbit hoie he wants to go.....He refers to the philosophical question of wether or not we know we are awake or dreaming, and asks Neo if he believes in fate. Then:

Morpheus: Do you want to know what it is? The Matrix is everywhere; it is all around us, even now in this room. You can see it when you look out your window or turn on the television. You can feel it when you go to work, go to church, when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you to the truth.
Neo: What Truth?
Morpheus: That you are a slave Neo, like everyone else you where born into bondage. Born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch. A prison for your mind. Unfortunately no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself…This is your last chance. After this there is no turning back. You take the blue pill, the story ends; you wake up in your own bed and believe whatever you want. You take the red pill, you stay in wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes…Remember all I'm offering is the truth, nothing more. Follow Me…

Neo takes the red pill. The layers of philosophical and mythological references are piling up and now we have added a gesture toward psychoactive sacraments. Ravers, trippers and counter-culture truth seekers everywhere cheer! Cypher tells Neo to "Buckle up Dorothy- cause Kansas is going bye-bye."

The red pill is actually a tracing device that helps Morpheus' team locate Neo in The Matrix. Neo starts to hallucinate that the cracked mirror he is sitting in front of is becoming whole - that the fractured reflection of himself is crystalizing into one image. He reaches out and finds, like Alice, that the looking glass is permeable.

Morpheus: Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference between that dream world and the real world?

Neo: (As the mercury-like substance from the mirror starts to creep up his arm) This can't....

Morpheus: Can't  what? Be real, be real?

Morpheus' team struggle to "locate" Neo via their computer screens - we don't know what this means yet. As they "lock in" the silver substance starts to stream (with us) down his throat to the harsh sound of a dial-up modem.

The Big Reveal

We arrive in a pink womb-like pool with a naked body plugged into multiple black cables, like machine umbilical cords. This is Neo waking up. Naked, hairless, emerging from slime and fluid like a newborn - grotesque, struggling - it's something straight out of Stan Grof and John Lilly's  research with psychedelics, isolation tanks and breath induced altered states.

While discovering the cable jacked into the base of his skull, neo becomes aware of the other womb-like pods all around him and the camera pulls back to show the massive scope of the nation of human beings held in this bizarre mechanical nightmare. But it's not a nightmare - this is reality - as Morpheus will assure us again and again.

Next we see the Nebuchadnezzar for the first time. Is it a space ship? it flies up to Neo and extends a mechanical arm to hold his face and had steady while removing the cable from the back of his head. The ship flies away and the cables all start popping out of Neo's body, the water starts to drain rapidly from the pod and Neo drops through a canal into the water below  where he is met once more by the Nebuchadnezzar and lifted on board.

Wow.

Weak, wet, and out of it, Neo can barely focus on Morpheus as he says: Welcome to the real world.

Morpheus: We've done it Trinity. We've found him.
Trinity: I hope you're right.
Morpheus: I don't have to hope, I know it.
Neo: (looking up from the medical-type table) Am I dead?
Morpheus: Far from it...

Neo's atrophied muscles are rebuilt with acupuncture-looking computer stimulation type machinery.

Neo: Why do my eyes hurt.
Morpheus: You've never used them before.

Time passes. Neo's body gets stronger.

Now we will find out more. Neo thinks it is 1999, but really it is more like 200 years later.

Now we are in the real world: No-one is wearing leather, no-one is wearing dark glasses, everything is austere, humble, spartan.

Next Neo gets jacked into "the contruct" Morpheus' loading program. Now he and Neo are represented by "residual self-image" a mental projection. Nice clothes, no more sockets where the cables used to plug in, Neo has stylish hair.

Morpheus explains that Neo has been living in a dream world - that the world (shown now on a TV screen) he has taken as reality is in fact a computer simulation of 200 years ago. Then he shows him the world as it is today - a post-apocalyptic wasteland. We come full circle now to Baudrillard as Morpheus intones, "Welcome to the desert of the real."

We don't know the whole story, Morpheus tells us, but somewhere at the peak of human ingenuity and hubris a war broke out between the A.I. imbued machines and the human beings. In an attempt to cut off the machines' supply of solar energy humans "scorched the sky" - which ironically led to their demise because the machines figured out that they could grow humans and keep them in farms like the one Neo has been rescued from - to run themselves on the energy generated by the human body. And the comment from Switch pays off here as he holds up a coppertop battery to cement the metaphor:

"The Matrix is a computer generated dreamworld, built to keep us under control in order to change a human being into this."

Neo: no it's not possible....

Morpheus: I didn't say it would be easy Neo - I just said it would be the truth.

Returning to the drab real world of the Nebuchadnezzar, Neo is flipping out, vomits and collapses. On waking up Morpehus explains the prophecy and his belief that Neo is The One who will end the war, destroy the Matrix and bring freedom to human kind.

And the game is on.

Now come the amazing training sequences that will prepare Neo to do battle inThe Matrix.

That's as far as I want to go for now, because the grand reveal of the central conceptual framework of the film is in place - and there's a lot to work with there!

Seeing as this post has gotten rather long I will begin work on the interpretation in a second post.  It's up here now!