The Secret of the Matrix

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.

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