The Matrix
contributed by Veit M. Etzold, 2006
by Veit M. Etzold, based on the movie by Andy and Larry Wachowski, Warner Brothers, 1999
Introduction
The topic of The Matrix is as old as the hills: Reality, as we know it, is a product of our imagination, we cannot really judge what is true or false. While the whole topic goes back as far as Plato's Allegory of the Cave, The Matrix managed to sell this philosophical debate as a new and shocking revelation. In Matrix, all human beings are enslaved by machines and their bodily warmth is used as a source of energy supply. To prevent mankind from uprising, people's brains are logged inside a big computer that gives them the impression that they live in the real world—however, this real world is nothing but a gigantic, interactive simulation of reality—the Matrix! Whereas other movies with a similar topic flopped at the box office—like Ridley Scott's Blade Runner from 1982—The Matrix hit big with the right topic at the right time. The technology of the '90s, that delivered high-level interactive computer games made the ambivalence of perception something that mattered to everyone—and made Matrix a box office hit netting nearly one billion dollars in revenues!
The Matrix
"But all be that he was a philosophre, Yet hadde he but litel gold in cofre," writes Geoffrey Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales, referring to the often less than satisfactory financial situation of philosophers and humanists in general. But Andy and Larry Wachowski's The Matrix, one of the most successful and hotly discussed movies of the '90s, proved that it is possible to make a lot of money with the story and marketing of Western philosophy's insights. Breath-taking special effects, thrilling action scenes, an intelligent plot, new dimensions of style and fashion, and quotations from the entire history of film and ideas made The Matrix a doubly coded work of art par excellence. With its allusions to Film Noir, Western, and Science Fiction films, Gothic and paranoia, hackers and detectives, epistemology and media sciences, comics and computer games—plus the question and quest for a fixed position within the apparent ambivalence of perception—The Matrix was a movie that almost every theatergoer, independent of his or her educational and personal background, was able to identify with in one way or another.
The computer specialist Thomas A. Anderson, who hacks into business and government computer networks under the alias Neo, is contacted by a mysterious organization. The boss of the organization, a certain Morpheus, informs Neo that the reality surrounding him is just an illusion. The real world is a wasteland destroyed by war. Humans, Morpheus claims, created highly intelligent machines, and eventually war broke out between the two. Ultimately, the machines won. Ever since, humans have been enslaved by machines and used as batteries for their body warmth. To prevent uprisings, every human is connected to a gigantic computer and fed with an illusory reality in which he or she is free. This reality looks exactly like the world on the threshold of the 21st century. But in truth, that which humans call reality is nothing but a huge, neurally interactive simulation—the Matrix. In the course of the movie, Neo disrupts his neural connection to the Matrix and becomes the savior of humanity, strong enough to fight against the tyranny of the machines.
The Secret of the Matrix
Man against machine, illusions, the redeemer—none of this is new. So what is the secret of The Matrix’s success? Alluding to Kant in his book The World as Will and Representation of 1818, Arthur Schopenhauer defined reality as an imagined construct of the observer. Modern brain science, in medical analyses of cognition, affirms this theory by postulating that everything humans perceive is subjectively composed by our brains. The Matrix exploits not only the fear of not being real, but also the desire to be able to be someone else in another world. From one day to the next, Neo becomes a superhero—without even really trying: he is the Chosen One and possesses superhuman abilities, adopting kung fu and arms training by e-learning. This allows the average, ordinary viewer to identify more easily with Neo than with superheroes who were always superheroes or who had to work hard to become them. The Matrix therefore capitalizes on both fears and desires. The subject matter fascinates audiences who think of themselves as educated as well as audiences who have never heard about the subject before. This is because the subject—the ambivalence of human reality—fascinates people per se. The story told in The Matrix is perceived by most viewers as fascinating, and in particular, as new. But as described above, epistemological philosophies are anything but new. The questions they grapple with kept the scholarly elite busy for thousands of years, but were seldom applied to everyday life. Day to day, it is not practicable for ordinary people to weigh the question of whether everything around them is an illusion or not. 1999, the year The Matrix opened, and 2003, when the second and third sequels came out, were times when audiences were particularly receptive to this question. The reason for this can be found in progress of technology. With the ever more perfect simulation of reality in theaters, by computers (such as PlayStation, Xbox, etc.) and Dolby Surround Sound—which enables anyone to enjoy the sound of a full symphony orchestra in his living room—the viewer (or listener) begins to wonder how much of reality is still real. The teenagers in front of their Xboxes see that reality can be convincingly recreated by a virtual system—interactivity included. With its plot on hackers and computers, The Matrix grabs the generation that grew up with computer games right there and pushes the question further: if the virtual world is a perfect copy of the real one, could the real world be a perfect copy of something else? For most viewers, the Wachowski brothers discovered a discourse that has been around since Plato's Allegory of the Cave. By contextualizing the fascinating discourse on relativity and perception, the Matrix burst onto the scene just when the average moviegoer was starting to notice that reality was not so easy to define. The hypothesis that the movie was in the right place at the right time is reinforced by the fact that movies like Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), with a plot that is just as fascinating, were flops at the box office. Technological progress was what enabled the Wachowski brothers, with their boiled-down compendium of cognitive theory, to preach to a (long) converted audience. But Matrix was successful not just for its disillusive tale of perceptive ambivalence, but also for its combination with a culturally pessimistic desire expressed in ostensibly objective, spiritual constants such as love, the redeemer figure, and an apparently fixed point within a perceptive construct. The Matrix is a crash course in Western epistemology and cultural history—the media-savvy version of Jostein Gardner's Sophie's World, as it were and above all, it is an example of a perfectly timed market entry. --- This article is copyright protected. All rights reserved. This article is for personal use only. Other use, especially reproduction, storage in data bases, publication and transmission to third parties – also in parts or in edited form – without BCG´s prior written permission is not permitted. ---
The central idea of the Matrix is that the world that surrounds us does not have to be as we perceive it. In his famous Allegory of the Cave, Plato (approx. 370 BC) pointed out the ambivalence of human perception. In the 17th century, Descartes surmised that humans are deceived by an evil spirit. Immanuel Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason of 1781, finally concluded that human reason and senses are not capable of perceiving the core of reality.
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Keywords:
Ambivalence, See, Seeing, False, True, Redeemer, Jesus, Christ, God, Religion, Computer, Digital, Illusion