Erik Davis' Figments] The Matrix RESEND

[anna balint]

1. From: Erik Davis <erik at techgnosis.com>

Hey folks

Just wanted to let you know that the fellow that Adam Gopnik refers
to as a "Dick scholar" (as in Philip K.) waxes philosophic on the
Matrix Reloaded in Salon:

http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2003/05/21/davis/index_np.htm

"Me, me, me."
--Agent Smith

2. From: Erik Davis <erik at techgnosis.com>



  Sorry folks

  I guess Salon's  "watch ads as you go" system didnt work with the link I
  just sent out. So here is the Matrix Reloaded piece in the  flesh.





  The Matrix way of knowledge

  From the Gnostic gospels to the visions of Descartes to the shamanic quests
  of Eastern mystics, the Wachowski brothers' pop opus weaves a dense web of
  philosophical and metaphysical allusions.

  - - - - - - - - - - - -
  By Erik Davis


  May 21, 2003  | The most curious feature of Warner Bros' official Matrix Web
  site is not the handful of jaw-dropping "Animatrix" clips, but the
  collection of high-quality philosophical essays by heavy hitters like Hubert
  Dreyfus, Colin McGinn and the cognitive science superstar David Chalmers.

  These essays, which hash out Descartes, Mahayana Buddhism and the proverbial
  "brain in the vat" problem, are all the evidence you need that the Wachowski
  brothers' original 1999 film has vaulted into that curious category of Big
  Think mainstream sci-fi films -- and that they want the "kickass" sequel to

  extend the beard-pulling.

  No one is surprised when filmmakers like Andrei Tarkovsky or Chris Marker or
  Stanley Kubrick use future shtick for metaphysical purposes, but it's
  another thing for Hollywood action fare -- designed to reap big bucks from

  the popcorn crowd -- to create a space of inquiry into philosophical,
  political and spiritual questions, however "comic book" the frame. Movies
  like "Blade Runner," "Robocop," "They Live," "Minority Report" and the
  "Alien" and "Terminator" flicks have managed, sometimes through no fault of

  their own, to edge toward the profound. But the Wachowski brothers made it
  to the top of this heap with the most lucrative sci-fi action empire to feed
  the questioning, and questing, mind.

  Now, with demiurgic ambitions matched only by "Lord of the Rings" director

  Peter Jackson, the brothers have unveiled the next chapter of their live-
  action post-apocalyptic anime franchise. As a movie, "The Matrix Reloaded"
  has some serious flaws: Many sequences drag, the pacing is jangled and there
  are far too many dreadlocks. But I have no problems with the pretentious,

  concept-heavy dialogue. Some reviewers imply that this metaphysical kitsch
  detracts from the fun; for some of us, it is the fun. At one point in the
  new film Neo returns to the Matrix and wanders through a street market full
  of religious junk: chintzy Mother Maries, head-shop Shiva posters, and

  blinking Jesus plaques. This is the pop carnival of souls where the Matrix
  films rightly take their place -- the flea market of genre movies and rumors
  of God that, for many these days, is the only portal left into the meaning
  of it all. In the words of Philip K. Dick, whose spirit (but not tone) hangs

  over the Matrix, "The symbols of the divine initially show up at the trash
  stratum."

  The Wachowski brothers may be too self-conscious about their divine trash,
  but in the end that's what feels true, or at least contemporary, about the

  Matrix films: their excessive self-consciousness about selves and
  consciousness. The original "Matrix" hit home by digitally remastering a
  time-honored (because always timely) conundrum: How do I know that reality
  is not a total illusion? Though this question gives off a cheesy adolescent

  fizz, it's more than a stoned gedanken experiment, like Pinto's speculation
  in "Animal House" that our entire universe might be an atom in some all-
  being's fingernail. The question lies at the heart, at least, of Western
  epistemology, with Descartes.



  In order to escape medieval authority and embrace the proud autonomy of the
  rational "I," Descartes battled a "demon of doubt" that undermined
  everything it could, including the reality of the world before the
  philosopher's eyes. Descartes' skepticism, with its sci-fi scenarios of

  false worlds and automatons disguised as human beings, initiated a
  revolution in thinking that, in some sense, ultimately leads to the
  universal machines that sit on our particular desks. The Matrix, with its
  mathematicized objects and Cartesian coordinates, is really Descartes'

  storyboard.

  Descartes dreamed great dreams as well -- like the angel who appeared to him
  one September night, proclaiming, "The conquest of nature is to be achieved
  through measure and number." Most of us have such veridical dreams on

  occasion, when visionary Technicolor truths burst through the usual REM
  murk. At the very least, the power of these dreams reminds us that the
  "false reality" problem strikes a far deeper note than skepticism alone can
  sound. Millenniums ago, human beings had to face the fact that our minds

  regularly pass through realms very different from the seemingly solid world,
  however we choose to interpret them. In other words, the Matrix problem
  arises from our wetware's capacity, through dreams, drugs or trance, to boot
  up radically different worlds of consciousness. That's why Descartes'

  skepticism still resonates with cultural narratives as different as Hindu
  folklore or Gnostic myth or the Taoist Zhuangzi's famous quip (intended with
  more comedy than I think we now hear): "How do I know I am a man dreaming he
  was a butterfly, and not a butterfly dreaming he is a man?"


  The Matrix problem becomes particularly unavoidable in the age of virtual
  technologies, which constantly narrate their own totalizing dreams of
  "world-building" and "experience design." Of course, media have long sought
  to create immersive spaces of fictional reality: Baroque cathedrals, 19th

  century panoramas, even, perhaps, the Paleolithic caves of Lascaux or
  Altamira. Today, the accelerating perceptual technologies of media are on a
  collision course with cognitive science and its understanding of how the
  human nervous system produces the real-time matrix we take for ordinary

  space-time. So we should not be surprised at the massive popularity of a
  Hollywood slug-fest where dream and reality and virtual technology enfold
  one another. Not only does the film mythologize the game-world aspirations
  of so much popular media, it stimulates the corresponding desire to crack

  through -- and remake -- the construct.


  What was particularly savvy about the Wachowskis' comic-book movie was that
  its mirror-shade cool reflected any number of readings -- Marxist, Lacanian,
  utterly stoned. Perhaps most surprising, and influential, was its use of

  religious symbols and viewpoints. Most viewers picked up on the Christian
  elements of the first film, which center on Neo's role as a savior figure,
  but the deep frame of both movies is a more esoteric pop stew of Gnostic and
  Buddhist ideas. The Gnostics of antiquity transformed the analogy of Plato's

  cave into a full-blown and harrowing cosmology: We are strangers trapped in
  a strange land, they argued, immortal sparks slumbering in a material cosmos
  fashioned by an evil or ignorant demiurge and his nefarious archons. The
  Buddhist analysis is less personalistic: We are stuck on the delusive merry-

  go-round of samsara, an almost mechanical system of causes and conditions
  that fools us into believing the self and the world are substantially real.
  In both cases, we step toward the light not through grace or the remission
  of sins, but through the direct awakening of insight into our condition. Neo

  must swallow his pill and take the ride himself.

  Opening in theaters on Buddha's birthday, "The Matrix Reloaded" clearly
  places itself in a crypto-religious landscape. There's a ship called the
  Logos, characters like Seraph and Persephone and Neo's hushed worship by the

  multiculti masses of Zion. Neo's mystic powers are growing as well: His
  "second sight," which allows him to see into the underlying code inside the
  Matrix, lets him read energy bodies and, in a remarkable fusion of Christ
  myth and shamanism, resurrect Trinity by removing a bullet embedded in her

  body. But "The Matrix Reloaded" would have been lame if it had simply
  followed its Gnostic bodhisattva superhero around as he kicked ass in Jesuit
  robes. Instead, to keep the cognitive sparkle, the Wachowskis altered the
  conceptual maps of the two worlds that Neo moves through: Zion and the

  Matrix.

  In the first film, these two worlds had the virtue of simplicity: We slipped
  neatly between the world of the Matrix, with its single nefarious agenda,
  and the revolutionary messianic world of Morpheus' ship, the Nebuchadnezzar.

  But "The Matrix Reloaded" complicates these two worlds. Before the
  Nebuchadnezzar even arrives at Zion, we realize that Morpheus -- previously
  the hierophantic voice of truth -- may simply be crazy, an irrational
  demagogue, a renegade believer. Meanwhile, the Matrix grows far more

  complex. In the first film we sensed a unity of purpose and design behind
  the agents and their urban landscape, but now we confront a Babel of
  programs: rogue self-replicating agents, the power-mad Merovingian, the
  intuitive Oracle, all competing in an open-ended nest of potentially

  infinite regress. As the Oracle admits to Neo, it's a pickle: There's no way
  for him to know what's going on or whom to believe.

  The Matrix comes to resemble the multifarious world of shamanism rather than
  the black-and-white world of the Christian afterlife. Neo, the otherworldly

  voyager, encounters a wide variety of beings, each with his or her own
  contradictory raps and agendas, and none entirely trustworthy. The
  architecture of the Matrix has also become pickled, an Escheresque Swiss
  cheese of transdimensional hallways and quantum portals. If "The Matrix" was

  all about screens and mirror shades, "The Matrix Reloaded" is all about keys
  and doors. The keys are codes of course, the language of encryption, but
  they are also the keys of magicians navigating through angel-space. And the
  portals we keep passing through remind us that the action liesbetween the

  worlds, as the conventional cartography of the Matrix melts into the
  metamorphic palaces of dream.

  After all, however much you resonate with the cabalistic or Marxist
  metaphors, the Matrix most resembles the shifting virtual worlds that our

  brain conjures nightly. The first glimpse that "The Matrix Reloaded" gives
  us of the Matrix -- when Trinity falls to her apparent demise beneath a rain
  of bullets -- turns out to be a recurrent dream in Neo's head. What makes
  this dream a nightmare is not just Trinity's death, but Neo's own inability

  to intervene in the scenario. We've all gotten caught in these hypnagogic
  snares, where you face some horror but cannot move -- encased, as it were,
  in the amber of dream time. What we want in these moments is the secret wish
  whose fulfillment animates these films: the desire to awaken inside the

  phantom world and wrest control from the dream machine.

  On this level of psychic control, both Matrix films can be read as
  instruction manuals for lucid dreamers. As the first film suggests, the
  simple knowledge that one is dreaming is not usually enough to exert control

  on the illusory world; instead, one achieves full creative action only after
  a lot of training in the dreaming dojo. The first thing that a lot of
  dreamers do when they first go lucid is also one of the first visual
  pleasures "The Matrix Reloaded" gives us: flight. Neo's bat-winged cruise

  through the moonstruck heavens is not just a Superman reference, but also a
  specific invocation of our own dream experience. This is what people don't
  understand about the Wachowskis' special effects, many of which revolve
  around virtual camera moves impossible to generate in the real world.

  Remember the subconscious equation of film: I am the camera. When the
  Wachowskis propel their camera faster than a speeding bullet, when it swoops
  and dives with angelic grace or whips through a frozen moment of space-time
  -- these novel perceptions strike us at first as virtual experiences,

  familiar only through dream time or trance.


  Of course, the novelty of these effects wears off fast, and we soon
  assimilate the technique as mere technological rhetoric. "Bullet Time" sells
  beer now; we are not impressed. Our rapidly jaded eyes drive the arms race

  of special effects, a race that suggests that we will not be satisfied until
  we somehow break through and manipulate space itself -- a pleasure now
  increasingly available through computer games, like the Wachowskis' own
  "Enter the Matrix." As in lucid dreams, the question is all about control, a

  control that necessarily implies a certain technical disenchantment. We can
  control our dreams when we recognize they are merely dreams, just as we can
  create the "magic" of FX only with the total mathematicization of space-time
  and the images of human bodies.


  The Matrix films are not neo-Luddite propaganda; the Wachowski brothers
  recognize that technology accompanies all our dreams. Early in the film, an
  insomniac Neo wanders through the depths of Zion as Councilor Hamann draws
  his attention to an irony only implicit in the first film: The good guys

  also depend utterly on machines. In their stilted chat, Neo differentiates
  between the Matrix and Zion's technological infrastructure, a steam-punk
  space of Tesla-coil arc lights and corroded "Modern Times" gears that looks
  back to the organic textures of the last century. Neo implies that Zion is

  free because humans have control. But this 19th century romance only raises
  the question Hamann asks him: "What is control?"

  This question is not just the nut of the movie. It is the central koan of
  our cybernetic civilization and its ever more intricate symbiosis with

  algorithms, control systems and the kind of self-replicating bots suggested
  by Agent Smith. All the representatives of the Matrix, even the Oracle,
  continually suggest that conscious human agency is not what it's cracked up
  to be. During his first balletic bash with Neo, Smith, though now apparently

  a "free agent" like Neo, insists that everything is determined by its
  purpose. He does not use the term as Morpheus later does, to suggest destiny
  or a higher calling. Instead, he means a techno-Darwinian logic, a
  programmed calculus of success. His is the voice of the evolutionary

  psychologist, who delights in deconstructing our most spirited social
  actions in terms of the base advantage they confer. This is also the
  perspective of the Merovingian, who comes off as a curious hybrid between
  "Jesus Christ Superstar's" Herod and Pilate. With the aphrodisiac piece of

  pie he feeds a future fuck-bunny, the Merovingian raises the distinct
  glandular possibility that "decision" is simply the story the brain tells
  itself about the neural cascades of electrochemical reactions that underlie
  behavior. Code rules: Despite appearances, we are out of control.

  As mythographers, the Wachowski brothers realize that the cybernetic problem
  of control reboots the hoary old struggle between freedom and fate.
  Morpheus, for example, is convinced that everything is proceeding according
  to cosmic plan, but his increasingly tedious speechifying about destiny and

  prophecy weirdly mirrors Agent Smith's grim talk of mechanical purpose.
  What, then, is the proper rejoinder to determinism? The Oracle tells Neo
  that "You are here to understand why you made the choice, not to make the
  choice." I take this to mean that, to an awakened one, events and decisions

  have always already occurred, but that understanding and compassion can
  still dissolve their karmic hold.

  OK, enough already. It's silly to squeeze too many meanings from a cyber-
  chopsocky flick; as in the anime tradition the Wachowskis draw from,

  metaphysical puzzles are more for atmosphere than answers. I won't even get
  into Neo's final chat with the Architect, although I suspect that all the
  talk of anomalies and contingent affirmations won't really add up in the
  end. But adding up is not really the point (unless you are talking about

  adding up the merchandise sold to fans who want to spend as much time as
  possible in the Wachowskis' endlessly nested construct). Like the overly
  complex plots of film noir, which ultimately serve only to increase the vibe
  of claustrophobic paranoia, "The Matrix Reloaded's" fractured chatter is in

  service of an old Gnostic hunch: There is a crack in the cosmic machine, and
  we are the crack.

  As I left the theater after watching the new film, I was handed a slick
  little flier. "Take the Red Pill," it said. "Join the Resistance." At first

  I thought it was a Christian tract, but it was Not in Our Name's clever
  attempt at a wake-up call for a very sleepy nation. Here are the truths the
  tract's authors offered: slaughtered Iraqis, Orwellian homeland security,
  deportations and military tribunals, endless war and repression. But they

  also saw a light at the end of the rabbit hole. "Another world is possible
  and we pledge to make it real," they said. "Join us." They listed some
  numbers, and I impulsively looked around for the nearest public phone, as if
  I were Clark Kent, or Neo trying to slip back out of the Matrix. I didn't

  see one. They're not easy to find these days.

  salon.com