Warning: Contains speculation about the Matrix that may qualify as spoilers — don’t read if you’re one of those people who can’t enjoy a movie unless you’re in a state of ignorance about it
Henry Hanks links to this bit of commentary about Cornel West’s bit part in Matrix Reloaded. Jonathan Last writes,
Whatever their other merits, the Wachowski brothers have an affinity for junk-academics, which doesn’t speak well of them. They hired the omnisexual campus fixture Susie Bright as a consultant for “Bound” and were so taken with her that they gave her a bit part and included her in the commentary track on the DVD. Now they’ve given West eight or nine seconds of screen time as an excuse to hang out with the rapping professor in Sydney during filming.
For starters, their tastes in faculty worship don’t inspire great confidence in the intellectual underpinnings of their work. But on a more general level, while celebrity cameos are fine for “Friends” they can be disastrous in semi-serious movies. Nothing strains an audience’s suspension of disbelief like a slap across the face reminding you that behind the story are a bunch of famous people snapping towels.
I think Salon.Com’s review got it right (I can’t believe I just said that) — by the time all three films are out, The Matrix will turn out to be an entertaining piece of leftist agitprop.
A couple years ago I wrote about two Matrix-like films, inluding The 13th Floor which in many ways was a much better film than The Matrix. The thing that bugged be about the ending of The Matrix is that no one in the film asked the obvious question — if the real world turned out to be an illusion, how do we know that our new real world is not an illusion as well? Once your idea of reality has been that screwed with, how would you ever be sure that anything was real?
Well apparently, as Seth Dillingham pointed out at the time, that was likely to be the setup for the sequels, and apparently Matrix Reloaded drops a ton of clues that what Neo and Morpheus think is the real world is yet another computer construct.
But how do you resolve the inherent problems with this in a movie without going all Cronenberg on the audience? If you put some finality to the project — that this time the characters are in the real world (which is how The 13th Floor unsatisfyingly ends), the audience is always left wondering how the characters can be sure. But, on the other hand, trapping the characters in a constant state of indeterminancy does not a blockbuster make.
But assuming both The Matrix and Zion are computer simulations, it’s interesting how the two films treat the respective fantasies in a way that fits well within what appears to be the Wachowski’s leftist politics.
The obvious point of the first movie was straight out of leftist media criticism — 99 percent of people have the wool pulled over their eyes. Only a handful of people are able to see through the lies and transcend this false consciousness and they, of course, are persecuted to no end.
As Salon.Com’s review points out, it fits nicely with leftist critiques of capitalism that the films contrast the modern, urban, consumerist and hence inauthentic. The “real” world, however, is marked by apparent poverty, ratty clothes, certainly no shopping malls, and hence authentic.
If Zion is just another computer-generated illusion, then the obvious problem is that The Matrix certainly seemed like a much superior simulation than Zion and Cypher was right all along in the first movie.
I suspect the mix of religion and politics the Wachowski’s favor is going to lead in the end to some Matrix version of liberation theology or even a left wing Christian existentialism. Personally I’d take the bourgeois matrix simulation any day of the week over that.