Thursday, August 07, 2003

The Matrix: Reloaded, Re-Decoded
Propaganda and the Freedom to Believe
Metaphilm’s theologian in virtual residence takes another crack at interpreting Reloaded. Can you free your mind if the Matrix is really your own desire for salvation?
There’s just too much wrong with that last post to even begin.
Socrates lived several hundred years before Christ. No connection.
Only Gnostic or NeoPlantoic forms of Christianity denigrate the body. Paul taught that believers would be given new, resurrected bodies at the return of Christ (1 Cor. 15). Christ’s own physical body was resurrected, and above all that, when God finished creating the material world he declared it “good.”
Neo is seen as a Christ figure because he’s a savior, he died and rose again, he has “miraculous” or “superhuman” power within the Matrix (and now perhaps outside of it), but this doesn’t mean that Christianity in any meaningful sense is the basis of the Matrix films’ ontology. It rather manipulates a generic sequence of signs representing enlightenment, some of which are compatible or derived from Christianity, some of which resonate with a wide variety of traditions—including the Socratic. The question, “ever have a dream so real you couldn’t tell if you were asleep or awake,” from the first film, is addressed in one Plato’s dialogs and referenced in Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass books, to which there were many references in the first film.
Jim