If there were an
aesthetics of overkill, The Matrix directed by Andy and
Larry Wachowski (Warner Bros.) might well rate as a masterpiece.
If it were only a straightforward action picture, it would be
possible to see The Matrix as nothing more than a
reasonably exciting movie--although a picture like John
McTiernan's Die Hard (1988) generates as much heat without
having to resort to such a complicated plot line. But the film
lays claim to being science fiction--and it does so by way of a
highly pretentious script which recounts the adventures of young
Neo (Keanu Reeves), to whom it is revealed by Morpheus (Laurence
Fishburne) and his band of followers that the human race has been
enslaved by artificial intelligences of its own creation and is
being kept by these ai's in a state of permanent unconsciousness
while being exploited as a source of energy. The Matrix only deserves attention for two
reasons: Because 1) it illustrates the uncertain status of the
science fiction film genre; and 2) it represents the latest in an
ongoing series of films with paranoid scenarios. Last summer, during the high tide of end-of-
the-world movies, I put down some jottings about paranoia in
recent movies which I am posting on a separate page (The
Paranoid Genre), with the addition of a post-matricial
parenthesis.
Kurt Vonnegut once lamented that "I
have been a sorehead occupant of a file drawer labeled 'science
fiction' ever since [my first novel], and I would like out,
particularly since so many critics regularly mistake the drawer
for a urinal." Judging
from the praise that has been lavished upon The Matrix, it would seem that this time the critics have
mistaken a gilded urinal for a serious example of science fiction
on the screen. In an article
entitled "It's Time for a Reality Check" that appeared
in the Los Angeles Times Calendar on 4/6/99, Eric
Harrison, comparing The Matrix and "other cyberpunk
movies of recent years" with Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A
Space Odyssey, declares that "We no longer only fret
that machines will get out from under our control and threaten
our existence; now we seem to fear that technology threatens our
very conception of what it means to be human and that it may also
take over our dreams." Mr. Harrison writes as if this were
virtually a discovery of these "recent" films, although
he concedes at the beginning of the following paragraph that
"Such concerns have long been at the heart of some of the
more interesting science-fiction literature." I would say
so, since such a concern supplies the major theme in Mary
Woolstonecroft Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), considered
by most students of the genre to mark the start of modern science
fiction literature. And it crops up in a slightly different
form--the idea that humans resemble machines--in the literature
of the French Enlightenment, in Denis Diderot's The Dream of
d'Alembert (1769) and in La Mettrie's Man, A
Machine (L'Homme-machine [1748]),
which Mrs, Shelley probably knew of through her father, William
Godwin.
If this complex of
themes--the dehumanization of humans by machines, the loss of
personal identity, etc.--does not have as long a history in the
science fiction film genre, it is hardly of recent date. Writing of alien invaders from outer space in her
memorable essay "The Imagination of Disaster" (1965),
Susan Sontag pointed out that "If [the planetary invaders]
are human in form…then they obey the most rigid military
discipline, and display no personal characteristics whatsoever.
And it is this regime of emotionlessness, of impersonality, of
regimentation, which they will impose on earth if they are
successful….They are the wave of the future, man in his next
stage of development." Written over thirty years ago, these
lines could be applied without qualification to the scenario of The
Matrix, in which the agents of the ai's are black-suited
robots identical with one another. Even before the films of the
1950's--about which Sontag was mainly writing--this same thematic
complex lay at the core of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, whose
robot Maria has an antecedent in Homunculus (1916),
directed by Otto Rippert. Nor is the other idea on which The
Matrix harps endlessly, the idea that "reality"
only exists in the mind, any stranger to science fiction
literature, whose origins coincide with those of romanticism, in
which the conflict between consciousness and "reality"
is a recurrent motif. Moreover, this idea--which is implicit in a
medium that seems able to mirror "reality"--has haunted
the cinema since Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
(1919), one of the masterpieces of the early silent cinema--and
it has not ceased to perplex aestheticians of the movies since
then.
Once The Matrix's shabby claims to originality are set aside,
all that remains are the effects--its true subject--and the movie
is nothing if not an orgy of high-tech effects. Unfortunately, as readers of de Sade know, an orgy
carried to its logical conclusion culminates in death, and this
orgy is no exception. The Matrix lays on its effects so
heavily and so relentlessly that it stifles any residual breath
of life in the picture. In effect, the movie perpetrates upon the
audience the same acts of violence with its effects that the ai's
are carrying out on the human race with more conventional
weapons. Moreover, The Matrix pays a price for its
extravagance, since the viewer quickly becomes desensitized to
effects where there is no coherent strategy in employing them.
The shot in The X-Files movie where the saucer rises
through the ice is, as far as I am concerned, far more
breathtaking than anything in The Matrix, since it comes
at the conclusion of a well-constructed and calculated motion
picture--which The Matrix is not.
The intended function of the effects
here--like the effects in action pictures for some time now--is
to give a greater air of "realism" to such patently
improbable events as characters diving off the tops of
skyscrapers and surviving. Nevertheless, the more The Matrix
tries to be physically literal--for example, when Neo and his
girlfriend fight off a horde of armed troops amid a hail of
bullets in the lobby of the highrise in which Morpheus is being
held prisoner--are far less "real" and more abstract
than any shot out of one of D.W. Griffith's Biograph productions.
In fact, the most effective scenes are the most stylized, as when
Morpheus tells Neo about the fate of the human race against a
solid white background. By comparison, the Japanese anime science
fiction picture The Ghost in the Shell (1995), directed by
Mamoru Oshii (available on an excellent DVD produced by Manga)
which makes a highly stylized use of animation throughout, is far
more innovative than The Matrix ever is, which hovers
uncertainly between stylization and suffocating literalism. (The
Ghost in the Shell also has a far more imaginative
screenplay, but that is another question.) Still, these are not the least of
The Matrix's problems.
If I said that the effects are the true
subject of The Matrix, I in no way intended to imply that
the film's shortcomings could be redeemed by appealing to a
simplistic form/content dichotomy. To the contrary, in few recent
movies are form and content so closely bound up as in The
Matrix. But the mediating element is contradiction: what the
film explicitly states at the level of content, it tacitly
disavows at the formal level. The film is in debt up to its
eyeballs to sophisticated digital technology, yet the script
constantly abjures technology as the work of the devil. It is no
small irony that a film in which there is so much talk about
slavery and the need for freedom should be itself so abjectly
dependent upon technology. This contradiction, however, is negligible, in
comparison to that between the visceral aesthetic which The Matrix inflicts upon the spectator and the
mind-over-matter ideology that it expounds through the mouths of
the principal characters--nor does it help that this drivel,
which sounds like the delirious ravings of a freshman student in
a college philosophy class, is delivered by the actors as if it
were the word of God being given to Moses on Sinai. It's not that contradictions are injurious to
science fiction--it thrives on them. But in The Matrix the
contradictions are between what takes place on screen and what
the film itself is. The film never plays out these contradictions
within the action; they simply run in parallel channels and tear The
Matrix to pieces.
Words have their revenge. Long before
William Gibson used the word "matrix" in his novel Neuromancer,
it meant--as my Webster's New World Dictionary informs
me--womb as well as public register, origin. Through IE *matér<
*ma-, it is etymologically related to such words as matter
and materialism on the maternal side, so to speak. This humble linguistic fact might
provide more of a clue for getting into the labyrinth of The Matrix than any provided by the movie, behind whose all
too elaborate cyber-camouflage it is possible to discern the
elements of an infantile scenario properly speaking. What underlies all these fatuous oracular
pronouncements about freedom and mind over matter but a revolt
against physical existence--and in particular the sexual
reproduction it entails? It is certainly no accident that the
most horrifying episode in the movie is the one which shows all
the anaesthetized humans in a grotesque nursery, afloat in
bassinets filled with blood. Yet what is this if not a fantasy of
intrauterine existence, the prison from which Morpheus promises
to free Neo? (And why should he bear this name? Did the
Wachowski's confuse him with Orpheus?) The promise is fulfilled
at the end of the movie when Neo becomes the savior of a reborn
world, thereby realizing another infantile fantasy, that of
omnipotence. This hero, liberated from the enslaving matrix and
raised from the dead, now creates himself anew. (The
other--paranoid--aspect to this fantasy is discussed in The
Paranoid Genre.)
Great literary science
fiction asks questions like "What if…?" But these are not "timeless" questions
like Heidegger's interrogation of Being . The science fictional
mode of asking questions belongs to a specific historical period.
In the words of Robert Scholes and Eric S. Rabkin in Science
Fiction: History.Science.Vision, " science fiction could
begin to exist as a literary form only when a different future
became conceivable by human beings--specifically a future in
which new knowledge, new discoveries, new adventures, new
mutations, would make life radically different from the familiar
patterns of the past and present." While few science fiction
films have ever made it to such an explicit level of
interrogation as that of the best works of science fiction
literature, it would be an understatement to say that The
Matrix--unlike The X-Files--doesn't even take a first
step in this direction. I do not begrudge The Matrix its
success. To the contrary, I am happy that my favorite movie
studio--the one that gave us The Jazz Singer, Jimmy
Cagney, Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart, Bugs Bunny and earned
George Cukor his only Oscar for direction--finally has a hit on
its hands after a long dry year in 1998. Also, cheap talk about
the "death of movies" has become such a cliché in
recent months, that in a certain way I regret having to write
something disagreeable about any movie. Unfortunately, really
outstanding movies have become so uncommon that it is a
temptation to overrate any halfway interesting new production
that comes out. I admired Saving Private Ryan and The
Thin Red Line, but I am far from thinking them among the
greatest of war movies, much less among the greatest movies ever
made. They are in very different ways powerful and affecting
movies--and that is no small achievement. From this point of
view, I can understand the reception that has greeted The
Matrix, but I do not think the interests of the cinema are
well served by this kind of critical inflation. Postscript: The day I saw The Matrix, I saw the trailer
for another Warner picture, Wild, Wild West. Now I read in
an article by Patrick Goldstein in The Los Angeles Times
(4/19) that the movie is the object of considerable gossip in the
industry because of its cost. I know nothing about that, but I
can say that Warners would do well to ditch the trailer which is
nearly guaranteed to drive away anyone except twelve year olds.
They should take a lesson from the new Phantom Menace
trailer, which is a model of what an effective trailer should be.
I saw the earlier one--now withdrawn--and the second is by far
and away an improvement.