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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
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.
May 21, 2003 | The most curious feature of Warner Bros'
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.
