The Matrix way of knowledge
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.

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By Erik Davis

May 21, 2003  |  The most curious feature of Warner Bros' official Matrix
Web site is not the handful of jaw-dropping "Animatrix" clips, but the
collection of high-quality philosophical essays by heavy hitters like Hubert
Dreyfus, Colin McGinn and the cognitive science superstar David Chalmers.
These essays, which hash out Descartes, Mahayana Buddhism and the proverbial
"brain in the vat" problem, are all the evidence you need that the Wachowski
brothers' original 1999 film has vaulted into that curious category of Big
Think mainstream sci-fi films -- and that they want the "kickass" sequel to
extend the beard-pulling.

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.

What was particularly savvy about the Wachowskis' comic-book movie was that
its mirror-shade cool reflected any number of readings -- Marxist, Lacanian,
utterly stoned. Perhaps most surprising, and influential, was its use of
religious symbols and viewpoints. Most viewers picked up on the Christian
elements of the first film, which center on Neo's role as a savior figure,
but the deep frame of both movies is a more esoteric pop stew of Gnostic and
Buddhist ideas. The Gnostics of antiquity transformed the analogy of Plato's
cave into a full-blown and harrowing cosmology: We are strangers trapped in
a strange land, they argued, immortal sparks slumbering in a material cosmos
fashioned by an evil or ignorant demiurge and his nefarious archons. The
Buddhist analysis is less personalistic: We are stuck on the delusive
merry-go-round of samsara, an almost mechanical system of causes and
conditions that fools us into believing the self and the world are
substantially real. In both cases, we step toward the light not through
grace or the remission of sins, but through the direct awakening of insight
into our condition. Neo must swallow his pill and take the ride himself.

Opening in theaters on Buddha's birthday, "The Matrix Reloaded" clearly
places itself in a crypto-religious landscape. There's a ship called the
Logos, characters like Seraph and Persephone and Neo's hushed worship by the
multiculti masses of Zion. Neo's mystic powers are growing as well: His
"second sight," which allows him to see into the underlying code inside the
Matrix, lets him read energy bodies and, in a remarkable fusion of Christ
myth and shamanism, resurrect Trinity by removing a bullet embedded in her
body. But "The Matrix Reloaded" would have been lame if it had simply
followed its Gnostic bodhisattva superhero around as he kicked ass in Jesuit
robes. Instead, to keep the cognitive sparkle, the Wachowskis altered the
conceptual maps of the two worlds that Neo moves through: Zion and the
Matrix.

In the first film, these two worlds had the virtue of simplicity: We slipped
neatly between the world of the Matrix, with its single nefarious agenda,
and the revolutionary messianic world of Morpheus' ship, the Nebuchadnezzar.
But "The Matrix Reloaded" complicates these two worlds. Before the
Nebuchadnezzar even arrives at Zion, we realize that Morpheus -- previously
the hierophantic voice of truth -- may simply be crazy, an irrational
demagogue, a renegade believer. Meanwhile, the Matrix grows far more
complex. In the first film we sensed a unity of purpose and design behind
the agents and their urban landscape, but now we confront a Babel of
programs: rogue self-replicating agents, the power-mad Merovingian, the
intuitive Oracle, all competing in an open-ended nest of potentially
infinite regress. As the Oracle admits to Neo, it's a pickle: There's no way
for him to know what's going on or whom to believe.

The Matrix comes to resemble the multifarious world of shamanism rather than
the black-and-white world of the Christian afterlife. Neo, the otherworldly
voyager, encounters a wide variety of beings, each with his or her own
contradictory raps and agendas, and none entirely trustworthy. The
architecture of the Matrix has also become pickled, an Escheresque Swiss
cheese of transdimensional hallways and quantum portals. If "The Matrix" was
all about screens and mirror shades, "The Matrix Reloaded" is all about keys
and doors. The keys are codes of course, the language of encryption, but
they are also the keys of magicians navigating through angel-space. And the
portals we keep passing through remind us that the action lies between the
worlds, as the conventional cartography of the Matrix melts into the
metamorphic palaces of dream.

After all, however much you resonate with the cabalistic or Marxist
metaphors, the Matrix most resembles the shifting virtual worlds that our
brain conjures nightly. The first glimpse that "The Matrix Reloaded" gives
us of the Matrix -- when Trinity falls to her apparent demise beneath a rain
of bullets -- turns out to be a recurrent dream in Neo's head. What makes
this dream a nightmare is not just Trinity's death, but Neo's own inability
to intervene in the scenario. We've all gotten caught in these hypnagogic
snares, where you face some horror but cannot move -- encased, as it were,
in the amber of dream time. What we want in these moments is the secret wish
whose fulfillment animates these films: the desire to awaken inside the
phantom world and wrest control from the dream machine.

On this level of psychic control, both Matrix films can be read as
instruction manuals for lucid dreamers. As the first film suggests, the
simple knowledge that one is dreaming is not usually enough to exert control
on the illusory world; instead, one achieves full creative action only after
a lot of training in the dreaming dojo. The first thing that a lot of
dreamers do when they first go lucid is also one of the first visual
pleasures "The Matrix Reloaded" gives us: flight. Neo's bat-winged cruise
through the moonstruck heavens is not just a Superman reference, but also a
specific invocation of our own dream experience. This is what people don't
understand about the Wachowskis' special effects, many of which revolve
around virtual camera moves impossible to generate in the real world.
Remember the subconscious equation of film: I am the camera. When the
Wachowskis propel their camera faster than a speeding bullet, when it swoops
and dives with angelic grace or whips through a frozen moment of
space-time -- these novel perceptions strike us at first as virtual
experiences, familiar only through dream time or trance.

Of course, the novelty of these effects wears off fast, and we soon
assimilate the technique as mere technological rhetoric. "Bullet Time" sells
beer now; we are not impressed. Our rapidly jaded eyes drive the arms race
of special effects, a race that suggests that we will not be satisfied until
we somehow break through and manipulate space itself -- a pleasure now
increasingly available through computer games, like the Wachowskis' own
"Enter the Matrix." As in lucid dreams, the question is all about control, a
control that necessarily implies a certain technical disenchantment. We can
control our dreams when we recognize they are merely dreams, just as we can
create the "magic" of FX only with the total mathematicization of space-time
and the images of human bodies.

The Matrix films are not neo-Luddite propaganda; the Wachowski brothers
recognize that technology accompanies all our dreams. Early in the film, an
insomniac Neo wanders through the depths of Zion as Councilor Hamann draws
his attention to an irony only implicit in the first film: The good guys
also depend utterly on machines. In their stilted chat, Neo differentiates
between the Matrix and Zion's technological infrastructure, a steam-punk
space of Tesla-coil arc lights and corroded "Modern Times" gears that looks
back to the organic textures of the last century. Neo implies that Zion is
free because humans have control. But this 19th century romance only raises
the question Hamann asks him: "What is control?"

This question is not just the nut of the movie. It is the central koan of
our cybernetic civilization and its ever more intricate symbiosis with
algorithms, control systems and the kind of self-replicating bots suggested
by Agent Smith. All the representatives of the Matrix, even the Oracle,
continually suggest that conscious human agency is not what it's cracked up
to be. During his first balletic bash with Neo, Smith, though now apparently
a "free agent" like Neo, insists that everything is determined by its
purpose. He does not use the term as Morpheus later does, to suggest destiny
or a higher calling. Instead, he means a techno-Darwinian logic, a
programmed calculus of success. His is the voice of the evolutionary
psychologist, who delights in deconstructing our most spirited social
actions in terms of the base advantage they confer. This is also the
perspective of the Merovingian, who comes off as a curious hybrid between
"Jesus Christ Superstar's" Herod and Pilate. With the aphrodisiac piece of
pie he feeds a future fuck-bunny, the Merovingian raises the distinct
glandular possibility that "decision" is simply the story the brain tells
itself about the neural cascades of electrochemical reactions that underlie
behavior. Code rules: Despite appearances, we are out of control.

As mythographers, the Wachowski brothers realize that the cybernetic problem
of control reboots the hoary old struggle between freedom and fate.
Morpheus, for example, is convinced that everything is proceeding according
to cosmic plan, but his increasingly tedious speechifying about destiny and
prophecy weirdly mirrors Agent Smith's grim talk of mechanical purpose.
What, then, is the proper rejoinder to determinism? The Oracle tells Neo
that "You are here to understand why you made the choice, not to make the
choice." I take this to mean that, to an awakened one, events and decisions
have always already occurred, but that understanding and compassion can
still dissolve their karmic hold.

OK, enough already. It's silly to squeeze too many meanings from a
cyber-chopsocky flick; as in the anime tradition the Wachowskis draw from,
metaphysical puzzles are more for atmosphere than answers. I won't even get
into Neo's final chat with the Architect, although I suspect that all the
talk of anomalies and contingent affirmations won't really add up in the
end. But adding up is not really the point (unless you are talking about
adding up the merchandise sold to fans who want to spend as much time as
possible in the Wachowskis' endlessly nested construct). Like the overly
complex plots of film noir, which ultimately serve only to increase the vibe
of claustrophobic paranoia, "The Matrix Reloaded's" fractured chatter is in
service of an old Gnostic hunch: There is a crack in the cosmic machine, and
we are the crack.

As I left the theater after watching the new film, I was handed a slick
little flier. "Take the Red Pill," it said. "Join the Resistance." At first
I thought it was a Christian tract, but it was Not in Our Name's clever
attempt at a wake-up call for a very sleepy nation. Here are the truths the
tract's authors offered: slaughtered Iraqis, Orwellian homeland security,
deportations and military tribunals, endless war and repression. But they
also saw a light at the end of the rabbit hole. "Another world is possible
and we pledge to make it real," they said. "Join us." They listed some
numbers, and I impulsively looked around for the nearest public phone, as if
I were Clark Kent, or Neo trying to slip back out of the Matrix. I didn't
see one. They're not easy to find these days.

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