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::: a special four-part series
"I can visualize a time in the future when
we will be to robots as dogs are to humans."
—Claude Shannon, The Mathematical Theory of Communication,
1949
What is the Matrix? Your senses of
sight and sound will be placed on continuous red alert as they experience
information overload on a scale almost unimaginable. The Matrix
is Marshall McLuhan on accelerated FeedForward. Scene cuts are visual
hyperlinks. Fight scenes are Playstation incarnated. What is The
Matrix? It’s the Technological Society come to its full
fruition. It’s Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times
and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis for the 21st Century, in
which we don’t simply work for the machine (rather than the
machine working for us), but we are created, given life, and used
by the machine exclusively for the machine’s purposes. It’s
a modern pastiche of Hollywood’s latest special effects combined
with John Woo kung-fu and more bullets, explosions, and gothic horror
than Batman meets Bruce Lee under the aural assault of a cranked
up electronica. But don’t let the packaging fool you. Because
far more than the eye-popping special effects and ear-shredding
soundtrack, it is the ideas and the dialogue that dazzle in The
Matrix.
In other words, the Wachowskis seem to have posed themselves this
question: How do you speak seriously to a culture reduced to the
format of comic books and video games? Answer: You tell them a story
from the only oracle they’ll listen to, a movie, and you tell
the story in the comic-book and video-game format that the culture
has become so addicted to. In other words, The Matrix is
a graduate thesis on consciousness in the sheep’s clothing
of an action-adventure flick. Whether you’re illiterate or
have a PhD, there’s something in the movie for you.
What the word "matrix" actually means, according to the dictionary,
is 1. The womb. 2. Hence, that which gives form, origin, or foundation
to something enclosed or embedded in it. 3. The intercellular substance
of a tissue, 4. The earthy or stony substance in which an ore or
other mineral is bedded, 5. The hollow in a slab to receive a monumental
brass, and 6. Math, The square array of symbols which, developed,
yields a determinant. In the film The Matrix, we see
that the filmmakers intend almost every one of these meanings, and
then some. Put another way, to understand The Matrix, it
helps to know a bit about the history and theories of communication.
In the above quote by Claude Shannon, we see the main premise upon
which The Matrix hinges. The Matrix is the robot, and we
are the dogs acting as servants to our technological masters.
But technology and theology aren’t far apart in this world
where the Cartesian split between mind and body is made manifest,
tangible, and interchangeable. Like 2001, Terminator,
and Robocop, The Matrix envisions a world where artificial
intelligence is not only more appealing than flesh and bone reality,
but more intelligent than the species that created it. In Morpheus’s
analogy, the purpose of the Matrix is to turn humans into batteries
(i.e., energy sources) for the machines to do their work. What is
their work? To keep us humans enslaved by our own illusions, chief
of which is that technology is not enslaving us, but actually liberating
us.
Keanu Reeves plays Thomas Anderson by day and "Neo" the computer
hacker by night. In his analog existence, Anderson works as a top-notch
programmer at the MetaCortex software corporation, in the most despairing
of Dilbert-like cubicles, until he is freed by a FedEx delivery
of the latest Nokia cell phone. Product placement in this film works
so well you actually want to own what they own, especially Fishburne’s
ultra-cool wrapless sunglasses, the most talked-about item on the
film’s website.
Morpheus tells him that the secret he is on to is one that won’t
go away, like a splinter in the mind. It is this: he’s a slave.
Reeves’s character is a slave to technology, and to free his
mind he must choose between a red or a blue pill. By the film’s
end, his identity is made clear when he tells arch-enemy agent Smith,
"My name is Neo" just before "killing" him in the subway. By choosing
his digital identity, he rejects a lifetime of programming and shows
that he now knows that "The Matrix cannot tell you who you are."
Now he can rapidly learn to override the physical limitations of
five senses, the laws of physics, and other unpleasantries of analog
existence while he is in the Matrix. The intimation is that we can
all be The One simply by choosing to see.
The almost universal understanding of the battle scenes at the
end, where the most sensory overload takes place, is that they are
simply what audiences demand in a movie these days. Initially, they
appear to avoid answering the questions raised by the plot with
any "deeper meaning." The big shoot-out at the end seems more like
a cop-out. But in fact it serves to open the audience’s mind
to the deeper meaning in a profound way. The best way to question
whether the path you are on is correct is to see where it leads.
In a culture demanding ever faster, louder, more dazzling everything,
the only way to call this into question is to give them more than
they asked for. The Matrix is technological speed and volume
dialed up to 11, screaming at the top of its lungs, asking if you
want to go any faster.
The telephone serves as the connection point between the two worlds.
Interestingly, it must be an analog line, and not a digital or cellular/wireless
phone, that makes this connection. The telephone, according to Marshall
McLuhan, is an extension of the human voice. Walter Ong points out
that the voice is the only medium that cannot be frozen; words disappear
as soon as they are spoken. No freeze frame is possible, making
the voice the only organic, living medium in the history of the
species. The voice’s isolation from all the other senses,
as we experience it on the telephone, highlights the fact of our
most deprived sense: touch. It was from this principle that McLuhan
created the tagline "Reach Out and Touch Someone" for AT&T in
1979. Thus, the analog phone call, and the human voice it represents,
are the only possible way to retrieve someone who is trapped in
the Matrix. Orality and an oral culture are what’s needed
to escape the Matrix. This is why Trinity’s kiss saves Neo
from death. She speaks and touches with the same organ of orality,
and the content of her speech is love, the power that drives all
true communication. Neo’s final voice-over shows him telephoning
the audience, asking them if they want to become real.
As the credits roll, one of the website’s nine passwords
is revealed, and we can enter it to find out more. Entering your
own e-mail address gets you an e-mail from morpheus@whatisthematrix.com
with the line, "The Matrix has you." If you’re getting e-mail,
it certainly does. Or does it?
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