Matrix, The

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Matrix (1999), a science fiction action movie written and directed by Larry and Andy Wachowski, has been called the masterpiece of “cyperpunk” cinema for the twenty-first century. Cyberpunk, a science fiction subgenre, deals with the adventures of rebellious hackers in the computerized realm of “virtual reality.” The subgenre was founded in the early 1980s by a group of American science fiction writers, foremost among them the novelist William Gibson in his novel Neuromancer (1984). Gibson coined the terms “cyberspace” and “the matrix” to refer to virtual reality. The Matrix is a central film dealing with the philosophical issues concerning virtual reality: What is happening to the nature of the human within the new electronic universe humans have created? How can people tell the difference between the real world and a computerized reality? Which is preferable?

The Matrix is the first film of a trilogy about a hacker superhero called Neo who is prophesied to be the savior who will defeat the computers that have enslaved humanity. The film blends the old mythology of the coming of a messiah with the new mythology of virtual reality to create a new kind of religious hero. The first film is the origin story of Neo, who discovers he is living in a computer-constructed world, escapes to the real world, and begins to exercise his extraordinary powers against the agents of the machine. The first third of the film takes the form of a mystery: Both Neo and the audience are at first bewildered by fantastic events. As Neo slowly learns the truth about his world and the nature of his powers, so too does the audience. Gradually the audience realizes that it is 2199 and the surface of the earth has been destroyed in a war with artificially intelligent machines. Deep underground, human beings are bred as a source of energy for the machines and kept lifelong in an embryonic state, dreaming that they are living in an American city in 1999. The dream world of the Matrix is a computer simulation to keep the populace docile.

A few humans remain in Zion, the last human city. Morpheus, the rebel leader, and his crew rescue from the Matrix Thomas Anderson, by day an obscure computer programmer working for a large corporation, by night an outlaw hacker called “Neo.” Morpheus believes Anderson is “the One” who it is foretold can defeat the agents of the machine. But first Neo must be extracted from the Matrix, reborn in the real world, reeducated, and trained.

Today, because of formidable technological obstacles, a program sufficiently complex to simulate real life, including all five senses, well enough to fool people does not exist. The Matrix assumes that in the future these obstacles have been overcome. Many commentators imagine virtual reality as a transcendent space better than ordinary reality, promising a utopian existence. And, in fact, in The Matrix the character Cypher knowingly chooses the Matrix over meager existence in the real world; however, Cypher is a villain who betrays and murders his comrades. Other contemporary critics argue that virtual reality, if it ever exists, would not be transcendent but merely a secondhand existence in a world of shadows, like life in Plato’s cave.

Science fiction and other contemporary cultural concerns about virtual reality project fears and hopes about life inside the machine or life augmented by the machine in the cybernetic age. Humans live now in a new electronic age, not simply the postmodern but “the posthuman.” As the boundary lines break down, people fear that the human may be taken over by the machine, or, at the opposite extreme, hope that the human may be made transcendent by the machine. As critic David Porush (1996) says, virtual reality is “a new mythology” in which the new frontier is not outer space but the “inner space” of the computer and of the human mind and the interface between the two (p. 109).

In Gibson’s novel Neuromancer, cyberspace is a transcendent realm that, for hardcore hackers, is better than drugs or sex. The Matrix taps into this new mythology but inverts Gibson’s notion of cyberspace, creating not a New Jerusalem but a virtual prison, a cyber-hell. Instead, the film openly borrows the ideas of French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, one of the theoreticians of the new order of simulation or virtual reality.

Baudrillard’s central idea is that, in the postmodern world, the real has been almost totally displaced by the simulated, or what he calls the “hyperreal” (1994, p. 1). The real, he believes, has been irretrievably lost, replaced by the electronic and other forms of simulation. Even if people wanted to, they could not distinguish anymore between the simulation and the real. America is in the vanguard of the hyperreal, and the future promises only more and more simulation, he claims.

According to philosopher Slavoj žižek, The Matrix is not about the future but about the unreality of present-day America in the oppressive, all-enveloping world of virtual capitalism: “The material reality we all experience and see around us is a virtual one, generated and coordinated by a gigantic computer to which we are all attached” (2001, p. 25).

SEE ALSO Cyberspace; Film Industry; Reality; Totalitarianism; Utopianism

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baudrillard, Jean. 1994. Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Gibson, William. 1984. Neuromancer. New York: Ace.

Hayles, N. Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Matrix, The. 1999. Written and directed by the Wachowski Brothers. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video.

Porush, David. 1996. Hacking the Brainstem: Postmodern Metaphysics and Stephenson’s Snow Crash. In Virtual Realities and Their Discontents, ed. Robert Markley, 107–141. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Yeffeth, Glenn, ed. 2003. Taking the Red Pill: Science, Philosophy and Religion in The Matrix. Dallas, TX: BenBella Books.

žižek, Slavoj. 2001. The Desert of the Real. In These Times, October 29: 25–27.

Andrew Gordon