©2006 William Ahearn

In the Matrix, no one knows you're a battery . . .

It’s a dark future just over the horizon where the artificial intelligence machines have taken over the world. During the struggle for dominance, the humans apparently created an eternally cloudy day to thwart the solar-powered computers and, in turn, the machines forced humans into pods where they would serve as batteries in some unexplained fusion system. As the old batteries die they are tossed into the Cuisinart and recycled as food to the newborns thus creating a perpetual energy source for the machines to create a cyber simulation to stream into the brains of the trapped humans in the pods. Mad pod disease hasn’t developed yet, so during the lifetime of the flesh “coppertops” they exist in the virtual reality of modern life known as the Matrix.

Or something like that. Morpheus – the leader of the resistance to the Matrix – is a tad vague on specifics when he explains it all to Neo, who is the presumed man-child savior of human consciousness.

What comes to mind is, if the machines can perform surgery – sticking tubes in people's heads and numerous other procedures – why not just ice pick the brains of humanity and leave them in a vegetative state? That way, the artificial intelligence machines could sell the servers that run the Matrix on eBay or settle into a millennium-long game of Unreal Tournament or, as Joshua, the computer from “WarGames” would put it, “a nice game of chess.”

As the film unfolds, cultural images scatter and fly. The first is all the kung fu fighting. To paraphrase that old Hollywood gag: “Nobody is fighting, everybody is doing choreography.” Any cultural reference that suggests any content at all gets dropped into the script: Alice in Wonderland, Jesus, Trinity, The Wizard of Oz, Zion, Nebuchadnezzar, Oracle, Morpheus and others get mentioned as the film thunders along. Strewn is perhaps the best description since Nebuchadnezzar was the Babylonian king who conquered Zion and now it seems they’re on the same side.

There might be madness to this method and it could be contained in the work of the French post-modern philosopher Jean Baudrillard whose Simulacra and Simulation inspired or influenced the script of “The Matrix.” It is the book that Neo has vandalized to hide the illegal software he is selling at the beginning of the film. Or, as Baudrillard has stated, “The Matrix” is based on “misunderstandings” of his work. What are the odds of a French post-modern philosopher being misunderstood? Let’s just say that I’d take that bet on any given day and if you read Baudrillard and then watch “The Matrix” a tenuous relationship might be found on some abstract plane. According to scuttlebutt, the Wachowskis, who wrote and directed “The Matrix,” approached Baudillard to work on the sequel and he declined.

Check here for an essay about “The Matrix” and Baudrillard.

It could owe just as much to John von Neumann’s concept of self-replicating machines. Neumann was a Hungarian-born prodigy who excelled in numerous disciplines including quantum physics, set theory, and computer science. One could argue that along with Alan Turing and a few others, he was computer science. Neumann created the architecture of computers and technically just about every computer is a von Neumann machine. Neumann worked on the Manhattan Project developing the atomic bomb and was completely unapologetic about his development of the hydrogen bomb with Edward Teller.

It was Neumann who developed the idea that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs should be detonated before they hit the ground to maximize the destruction. When told that J. Robert Oppenheimer had said he had felt like “a destroyer of worlds” when Oppenheimer witnessed the Trinity atomic bomb test, Neumann replied, “sometimes one confesses a sin in order to take credit for it.”

Another notion that Neumann toyed with was the concept of self-replicating machines. (Neumann predicted computer viruses before the advent of software.) The concept was to create a perpetual workforce for mining moons and asteroids. The machines would continue to build themselves as they mined for minerals. If Alan Turing’s dream of artificial intelligence is applied and a dash of Hal’s self-preservation is added, the basis for “The Terminator” isn’t far off.

It’s only a short hop from there to “The Matrix.”

Which, in the long run, is neither here or there. Films are what they are no matter what they are based on. Finding a film that is true to its source is as hard as finding a decent remake. Where it becomes problematic is in the viewing when the exposition is so incoherently articulated. Which is interesting in that “The Matrix” became the first geek film since “2001: A Space Odyssey” to succeed at the box office and to be taken seriously by critics. But it isn’t “2001” that the Matrix draws from under the religious patina and pseudo-Eastern philosophies (“there is no spoon”) that glut the narrative. “2001” didn’t use narrative sense – as “Alphaville” didn’t – and that is one of its strong points while “The Matrix” insists on a narrative logic that ultimately doesn’t add up.

(Another film that deals with a constructed reality is “Dark City,” that was released around the same time as “The Matrix.” It’s a lot of fun and far more direct in unfolding the narrative.)

It’s interesting in US pop culture films that pit a resistance movement against an oppressive, overwhelming enemy is that a political or cultural basis is never needed or stated by the rebels. In “The Matrix” and “The Terminator” the validity and rightness of the resistance is obvious since they are fighting against machines and machines are always the bad guys in this genre. But what really separates the resistance in “The Matrix” from the Matrix itself when all they are is the sum of computer learning programs injected into their heads? Isn’t the secret of the wisdom of martial arts in the learning of the skills more than the possession of the skills? Baudrillard often writes of false choices and the choice of the red pill versus the blue pill is an unintentional but illustrative example. If you take the blue pill you live in a pod and the Matrix controls your reality. If you take the red pill, you live in a cramped ship and Morpheus fills your head with his reality and whatever knowledge is available on disk. Isn’t freedom the ability to create – at least in some fashion that isn’t delusional – ones’ own reality?

In “The Matrix,” the resistance’s validation comes in the form of the domestic, maternal and mysterious black woman known as the Oracle. The gentle, sensitive, paranormal person shows up in numerous films and in this case she is used to show that the resistance is in touch with the life force, the future, god, the spiritual or some vague power that is beyond man or machine. That mojo to the higher power can only validate the human essence since the machines only believe in rebooting and the occasional virus scan.

Why would anyone choose a theology – even a mis- or disarticulated one – to oppose the Matrix? Aren’t they essentially the same? If “The Matrix” truly was informed (as the post modernists like to say) by Baudrillard, it would be far more political given Baudrillard’s Marxist background and far more astute given his current assessment of popular culture. There is no question that the allusions of the film toy with belief and reality but in a haphazard and sometimes hysterically funny way.

Take Neo’s resurrection: it’s just a couple of handclaps away from the Tinkerbell near-death scene in “Peter Pan.” If the revival of Neo, believed to be “the One,” teeters between Tinkerbell and Jesus, then something is seriously wrong. Or maybe the Jesus part of Trinity is raising Lazarus? The same confusion is evident in the speech Agent Smith gives to the captured and shackled Morpheus about humans that ends with the conclusion that “humans are a virus.” It’s nonsense. Neither viruses nor humans behave in that way. (The aliens in “Virus” that was also released that year make the same speech.)

Which is unfortunate because for all its silly posturing, and slapdash religious and Eastern philosophical kung fu references, “The Matrix” is a stylishly exciting film with good performances and great visuals.

As a computer film, “The Matrix” is the sum of all fears. The computer hasn’t taken your job or your house or the secrets of all codes or the means to wage nuclear war. It has literally taken your mind and body. And if the script had found a bolder or at least a coherent way of presenting itself instead of using all that pretentious religious babble, I would’ve been a much bigger fan. As it is it’s a fun film if you don’t get caught up in the silliness of its mixed metaphoric massages.

What “The Matrix” has accomplished is the end of a genre. There is no place left to go for films using the computer as a central element and the sequels to “The Matrix” are the best proof of that. Once desktop computers became commonplace and then began to be morphed into media centers, the threat mined by moviemakers for half a century disappeared into the ashbin of history along with the vacuum tube, floppy disks, and the personification of operating systems. We have moved into a new era that will relegate the computer to the appliance that the early developers intended – with the possible unplanned ability to steal music and download porn.

As Hal in “2001” proved a difficult act to follow and technophobia now a dead dramatic end, filmmakers will have to discover a new slant to mine the tapped out field of computers in movies. It’ll be interesting to see what they come up with. With quantum computing on the way to reality, can some new fear be far behind?