> No this is wrong. The importance derives from the
importance of the ideas - how they are expressed is
secondary. In fact the *way* they are expressed
probably accounts for some of the widespread critical
disdain - it seems too obvious, slick, and ultimately
superficial.


I would disagree entirely - the way something is expressed is half of what
it means. There is no real divide between form and content. I have an essay
I wrote on the way in which the aesthetics of The Matrix work to take apart
the narrative it constructs in the first half.



Surely the matrix is the ultimate act of representation and there is no way
back to a world without representation/the matrix while humanity is
enslaved. The spectacle of The Matrix works to suppress the fact that it is
uncritically revelling in the very thing it reviled: the boundless
sensuality of the matrix. A scene might be imagined where Morpheus councils
Neo after he admits the seductive power the matrix has over him; such a
scene would be at least a narrative gesture towards exposing the film's
contradiction but of course no such scene exists. William Gibson who coined
the term 'the matrix' in his novel Neuromancer focuses on the contradictions
between body and mind, where representation becomes the absolute and "the
body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh" (1995, 6).
Unlike Gibson's matrix Bullet Time is pure feeling and is devoid of morality
or ontological meaning. It is "what utopia would feel like rather than how
it would be organised" (1977, 3), as Richard Dyer described the basic aim of
entertainment, and it is a utopia inside the matrix.

Dyer emphasises the use of non-representational signs used in the generation
of this utopian feeling, and The Matrix highlights its use of these not only
in Bullet Time but also the contrast between the characters' appearance in
reality and within the matrix. It marshals these signs not to generate
meaning but in a sense to suppress it. According to 'The Culture Industry'
it is "with good reason that the interest of innumerable consumers is
directed towards the technique, and not to the contents - which are
stubbornly repeated, outworn and by now half-discredited" (Adorno and
Horkheimer, 136). The Matrix creates such a spectacle out of its own design
that one cannot stop to consider what meaning is communicated. Adorno and
Horkheimer saw this "relentless rush of facts" (127) as an "the objective
nature of [film]" (126) that meant "sustained thought is out of the
 question" (127) and although I must disavow this claim it is to my mind
most certainly true of The Matrix .

After Neo has taken the red pill Morpheus leads him to an adjoining room. It
is full of technology that is in truth a meaningless bricolage of technology
designed to be looked at. Cipher turns to Neo and informs him that "Kansas -
is going bye-bye", echoing Morpheus assessment that Neo must feel like Alice
falling down the rabbit hole and inviting him to stay in Wonderland. We are
informed the red pill was a 'tracer program' and will disrupt his
'input/output carrier signal'. Neo looks across to a shattered mirror and
sees the cracks disappear allowing his face to be seen clearly. In another
nod to Lewis Carrol he touches the mirror and a metallic film is left on his
hand. What looks like mercury spreads up his arm and someone urgently raises
their voice, 'Its going into replication!' The silver spreads over his body
and into his mouth as the camera dives down Neo's throat. What does all this
mean? That the viewer is left excited, bewildered and most importantly
assaulted by information they understand but cannot interpret. The
references to The Wizard of Oz (Fleming, 1939) and Alice in Wonderland
appear meaningful until one realises that Neo is not entering Wonderland or
Oz but rather leaving it, a vital distinction Morpheus seems oblivious to.
The technical jargon is merely techno-babble. The words themselves are not
meaningless but are there to create an atmosphere. That the programme is
'going into replication' is meaningless except for the tone in which it is
delivered. The entire scene does not have a meaning in the traditional sense
of interpretation. Even the lines spoken fall under a non-representational
mode, they don't mean what the words refer to but instead vague ideas that
trigger links: Judy Garland lying on her bed as a cow floats past her window
or the knowledge of computer geeks whose conversations are incomprehensible.

When Adorno and Horkheimer use the phrase "relentless rush of facts" they
are not simply be referring to 'facts' as recognised by positivism but
instead the relentless rush of the image. We see how more recent types of
cinema - more specifically action/spectacle - concern themselves with
creating a coherence of time and space whilst impressing on an audience the
feeling of speed, movement and excitement . This is not strictly a rush of
facts but one fact repeated ad infinitum, the fact of motion. In Bullet Time
complex human movement is distorted and stretched in time. It is both a
stunning technical achievement and an effect that allows the spectator to
focus on the formal elegance of the human form in movement. It does at times
suggest sculpture or still photography but perhaps the closest parallel can
be found in the comic book, which relies heavily on the creation of feelings
of movement and dynamism using a static medium. This is no surprise
considering the Wachowski brothers honed their skills at Marvel Comics. The
fact that film is a medium of movement is perhaps what makes Bullet Time's
dynamic stillness so impressive, it does not efface movement but examines it
minutely. It is my belief that this minute examination does not prompt a
critical engagement but instead a feeling of the Kant's analysis of the
sublime, which "is sometimes accompanied with a certain dread." (quoted in
Marshall) The sublime is an aesthetic experience, not a judgement and an
experience that threatens to overwhelm the spectator. According to Lyotard
it is the "mixture of fear and exaltation that constitutes sublime feeling
is insoluble, irreducible to moral feeling" (1994, 127).
The Lobby Scene presents the viewer with excitement generated narratively by
the threat the soldiers pose to Neo and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) and
formally by the loud, pounding soundtrack that cues the fight's beginning
and creates the structure for the editing, which cuts rhythmically as the
action changes pace from slow motion to normal and what feels like fast
speed. The opening creates tension. Neo and Trinity appear unarmed as the
enter the lobby in slow-motion and set off a metal detector. A guard
approaches and Neo opens his jacket to reveal his torso is covered in guns.
Human and technology are blurred once again but this time the human uses the
technology. Soldiers rush into the lobby and there is a standoff filled with
silence and stillness that serves to make the music, movement and editing
that will follow more dramatic by contrast. The spectator is then assaulted
by images as fragments of the marble fly towards (perceptibly bounce off)
the camera lens as it tracks Neo running in slow-motion, the guns blazing in
bright flashes of light, bullets flying and coat flapping behind him. The
scene is so full of movement that its kinetic quality absorbs the effort to
follow where the movement is headed and simply focuses on the fact of
movement itself. We are exalted by the movement as much as we are
intimidated by the violence inflicted on the mise-en-scene, the soldiers and
our own vision. Not only do we have to look unless we turn away but why look
elsewhere when you can watch something impossible? Digital technology allows
the creation of images that have never existed or no longer do. Bazin
claimed that photography satisifed "once and for all and in its very
essence, our obsession with realism" (1974, 12). Perhaps CGI satisfies,
'once and for all', our obsession with fantasy, for CGI has no unified
pro-filmic reality. CGI and perhaps special effects more generally exist as
pure image, a simulacrum within the film world utterly alienated from
objective physical, social, psychological reality.

Perhaps this is why Bullet Time works so well as entertainment and to
resolve contradictions. It possesses nearly all of Dyer's criteria: energy,
abundance, intensity and arguably transparency. The only aspect lacking is
tellingly that of community, hardly surprising considering that the film is
set both everywhere and nowhere and filled with a community of both everyone
and no-one, that four of the revolutionaries die within the course of the
film and that Morpheus impresses on Neo that anyone within the matrix can
become a vehicle for the agents. It is this one plot point, cleverly
emphasised but minor nonetheless, that allows The Matrix to cling on to the
moral foundations it laid whilst constructing an action movie above them. We
can see the change take place in the body of Neo as he moves from a tortured
Messiah whose body is so graphically violated to a superhero whose fatal
bullet wounds are no more than dark, wet patches on his black clothes. This
minor plot point is less a way of moving villains into the action swiftly
and more a way of avoiding the contradiction that, most obviously in the
Lobby scene, Neo and Trinity slaughter innocent men, a contradiction that
the spectacle of the action scenes and the expectations of the genre resolve
anyway.
The coolness of the film, its sense of exaggerated poise and artifice,
replaces its moral structure. The distraction that takes place even as
Morpheus tries to reveal the truth of the matrix is the start of the way in
which the movie interrupts actual thought and replaces it with continually
renewed sensation, what I have called non-cognitive sensuality or as Jose
Arroyo identifies in passing in Mission: Impossible (Brian de Palma, 1996)
the 'erotics' (2000, 25). The action set pieces perform a similar role to
the song and dance numbers of musicals where "their function as spectacle
exceeds their function as narrative" (Arroyo, 24) and in the Lobby Scene
actually runs counter to parts of it. The scene is not narratively
illogical; we know Neo and Trinity must rescue Morpheus. But we are given no
information as to why they affect a frontal assault on a heavily guarded
building fully aware that the people they will kill are in fact real people.
Despite their ambivalent role in the revolution these are the people they
are supposedly saving. Once the scene begins, however, it cannot stop. It
cannot stop even though it is perhaps the most pointless scene in the film
(surely there was a back door?), the most gratuitous and the most psychotic.
Dowling implies that seeing an individual as a thing and inflicting violence
upon them as if they were a thing is psychotic, and goes on that "it was
Marx's point that there is already this element of the psychotic in any
relation of domination". Humans are reified as commodities to be exploited
under capitalism, just as humans are reified by the artificial intelligence
in The Matrix, defined shorthand by Morpheus comparing a human to a Duracell
battery. And the spectacle of the Lobby Scene implicity convinces the
audience of the same thing. More attention is giving to the ripping of a
security guards newspaper, to empty shell cases cascading in slow motion and
to the smashing of the marble-panelled pillars than the sanitised deaths of
several dozen men. The film achieves a complete moral turn around and
instead of criticising the matrix for its lack of reality, fetishises the
very materiality that it denied existed in order to proved the thrill. For
of course, where else can it look? Into the bullet wounds and lifeless faces
of the dead soldiers? Hardly, for that gives no aesthetic pleasure and would
reveal the contradiction that Bullet Time is narratively  more about bullets
than time.

In the closing scene of the film Neo strolls through a crowd, Rage Against
The Machine on the soundtrack, before swooping up past the camera in a flash
of his black trenchcoat, evoking Superman and Batman (Batman looked cool but
couldn't fly - the only cool thing about Superman was that he could fly).
The desire to spend time for no real reason in an environment where you can
fly is of course comprehensible but made in no way contemptible. So what is
the difference between Cipher's choice and Neo's choice? Narratively the
difference is obviously huge; Cipher's betrayal threatens to end the
revolution once and for all, Neo striding through the matrix has no
narrative significance at all and only reasserts his mastery over the
matrix. It is hardly a wild interpretation that supposes Neo's desire to fly
around the matrix and Cipher's desire to be reinserted into the matrix
spring from the same feeling: that the matrix is far more preferable than
reality. It is hard to see the benefits of reality beyond a metaphysical
preference for an authenticity of experience and an escape from an enforced
stasis of society.
If The Matrix was to fit into the culture industry it had no choice except
to resolve the contradictions within the film. It is an incoherent text, to
use Robin Wood's term (1980, 24-42) not due to any stupidity or
thoughtlessness (the references in the film range from baking to
Baudrillard) but because of an internal logic that as part of the culture
industry the film must conform to. It needed action scenes in order to make
it exciting and that meant people have to die. It also needed an
philosophical element that would differentiate it from every other
action/spectacle movie on the market  - especially considering its release
in the same summer as The Phantom Menace (George Lucas, 1999), demonstrating
the enthusiasm for a combination of mysticism and technology. The Matrix is
not art. The action scenes and they way they are shot effaces any prospect
the film may have had for social critique. The philosophy is as much part of
the spectacle as Bullet Time, as commodified as the Nokia phone that flies
out of Neo's hand. This is not a new occurrence, Mike Davis quotes a
magazine article from 1989 reporting "that 'intellectualism' had arrived [in
LA] as the latest fad" (1990, 17). What is so eminently satisfying about The
Matrix is the range of pleasures that it offers and goes on to supply in
abundance. What is so dissatisfying is that coherence is not a pleasure the
culture industry values.
The Matrix gives us the impression that what we watched "was worthwhile"
(Rosenbaum, 97) without letting us judge for ourselves. "It provides the
regular movie goer with the scraps of culture he must have for prestige"
(Adorno and Horkheimer, 151). 'The Culture Industry' concludes powerfully:
"The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel
compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them"
(167). In the same way Neo and the spectator of The Matrix, and indeed any
mass culture film, are invited to share the emotional and physical
stimulation that they know is not real but which is delivered with utmost
skill for consumption that is pleasurable and unproblematic. It is "the
magic of the unintelligible [that creates] the thrill of a more exalted
 life" (166). The Matrix is certainly not intelligible: it simply pretends
to be. What it is is incoherent and using spectacular effects and filmic
devices is the most significant way in which it pretends not to be.


"Inwardness, the subjectively restricted form of truth, was always more at
the mercy of the outwardly powerful than they imagine."
Adorno and Horkheimer, 'The Culture Industry', p144