An Old Review Of Matrix 2

I think the critique on the matrix is harsh--saying that its technical aspects overshadow its philosophical ones, unlike the first one did. It's still a matter of where you focus your attention. You can't say "the story line and idea behind it is thin" and then complain about why the dialogue is too long. The dialogue between architect and Neo is actually mind blowing. If you read between the lines, it encompasses philosophical beliefs of reincarnation, destiny, freewill, existentialism and metaphysical ideas of multiple dimensions, origin of the universe, fractals and the anthropic principle.

The movie also tries to illustrate controversial Eastern issues of consciousness like "prophetic dreaming," "energy" "levitation," as well as "psychic surgery." It is actually distressing to know that another Western film beat us to these curious issues which are actually uniquely Eastern in origin. They have the technology to make it but the ideas really came from us. Psychic surgery, which undoubtedly inspired the scene wherein which Neo "dips" his hand in Trinity's body to get the bullet, is actually found ONLY the Philippines.

Matrix and the New Age

The Matrix such a hit in the Western countries like the “New Age” is because it revitalizes their long-lost view of magic-realism, which most Eastern counties haven’t lost. Magic realism is when you can see something beyond the ordinary in everyday things. This can be seen in the Sanskrit belief that tea drinking has a certain potency which can make your “aura” grow brighter and stronger which the Chinese still hold today. It is the stuff which martial artists desire to manipulate. We see references to that culture as Neo prepares to see the Oracle. We see Neo as a “clairvoyant” able to see energy fields as in the part wherein the Chinese Tea Drinking guy, the one who “protects that which matters most”, met and fought with him. “You never really know someone until you fight with him”, he says, heavily pertaining to Taoists beliefs. Neo sees his aura as ‘bright orange’ which is reputedly what drinking ginseng tea will give you according to Kirlian Photography. The idea of “mind over matter” is also originally Eastern, with Indian gurus able to bear great amounts of pain through meditation.

Altered States and the Primordial Unconscious

The film heavily employs issues of “altered states of consciousness” with the film’s concept of the matrix and everyday reality interchangeable with our reality’s concept of dreaming/ meditation and all forms of altered states as oppose to our waking reality. It challenges the way we view the world because it calls on us to review the things we dismiss as “just psychological” as having greater importance than we think. A nightmare or a good dream for example, happens only in our heads but can change our mood for the whole day or even week, for better or for worse. It correlates the matrix with our real life waking state which we think is “real, objective” and our dreams, meditations, prayers and general intuition of something greater in this life to “ the actual real world” in the film.

So it puts forth the radical idea that ‘we are what we dream or imagine’ and what we actually are in reality is just a mere simulation. It says that “dreams are more whole than we are as waking beings” and the vision of the unconscious is really the more correct perception of reality. It implies that “when we wake up from a dream saying it was only a dream, we therefore kids ourselves of the truth that in our everyday waking reality, we are nothing but a consciousness of this dream!”

The film also presents Zion as the metaphor for the primordial “Collective Unconscious” which probably explains why it is made to closely resemble African culture and its rituals —one of the places suspected to be the cradle of civilization. The collective unconscious is defined by Jung to be the storehouse of all human experiences that all people have deep in their consciousness through history and evolution. It is where we connect to the life-source of our humanity. A writer from the Philippines, for example, can replicate the thoughts and ideas of what one another is saying in West America, without deliberate effort in the “shared consciousness” that goes on between them. Through this we share common values of love, hope, faith in all parts of the world even though manifestations of this differ from one place to another.

We see the future of humanity being debated in Zion, once again attesting to the “power of consciousness” to design and shape the course of all our lives.

People in Zion are also naked, barefoot and sensual giving references to the unconscious’s natural drive to celebrate the body. People in Zion have the comfort that their body sensations are real and they rejoice for it, in contrast to the Matrix’s futile and illusory sensory manipulations induced by machines. Could the matrix’s “fake” sensory impressions be alluding to the false-drives and desires that advertising gives us? There hedonistic wines, steaks, and fancy restaurants disguise the fact that they as batteries, functional tools for machines, eating the processed bodily fluids of those that came and died before in the program. This gives allusion to the Buddhist belief that all sensations are illusory and to be ruled by it is wha causes suffering. Unless we are enlightened enough to know that all that is an illusion, we can never really thoroughly enjoy the body as it is in its real, throbbing, mud stepping, salt sweating pleasures which is what the long dance scene interspersed with Neo and trinity’s love scene is about.[1]

Rebellion in A Programmed World

The Matrix is also a deconstruction of Plato’s “Shadows in a Cave” wherein we are all chained inside a cave where we can only see shadows and rarely, when one of us breaks free from those chains can she only see the splendor of the real world. In Plato’s story, the people who see only shadows in the cave could not accept the larger truth outside and stones to death the one that has come back to free them.

Whereas the first Matrix shows Morpheus, Trinity and Neo as ‘the ultimate rebels, ’ the second shows us how even these rebellions can be part of the program. For “rebels” who identified with the first film, this is difficult to accept. They do not want to admit that rebellion can sometimes be customary, “fashionable” maybe even called for by the system and that even the most radical is still up to a point, following a code, a programming. Even Neo himself is an “expected anomaly.” Morpheus is also degraded to just one “crazy captain” in a room-full of people struggling for liberation. He is not the exalted “guru” anymore, he’s just a loon clinging to his beliefs different from everybody else. Many have commented this as an unfavorable change from the first. But I say--aren’t all wise men and messiah’s considered fools by their contemporaries? If they were popular in their time, then they wouldn’t really be saying anything radical aren’t they? As a theological commentary, the Matrix is still faithful to its creed to expose the truths on the saga of a fallen hero which is the sign of a post-modern literature.

The rebels of the program are those who do not wait to be defined by machines and ideologies to know what they are. Marginalized people of society, say homosexuals for example, are revolting against the machines programming of them, refusing to let it tell them what they can or cannot become or who they can or cannot be with according to the system. Perhaps transvestites in the 20^th century world of the Matrix are those who are born women in the “real world” but are given a male identity in the matrix, a role which they refuse: a role untrue to their real identities.

Feminist film?

The Matrix is a surprisingly a subtly feminist film in certain aspects-- giving importance to the Oracle’s female intuition and nurturing understanding over the Architect’s brute Newtonian logic and authoritarian determinism. As the two ruling programs of the matrix or its god and godesses so to speak (The Father and The Mother) —the film gives preference to the soft-free will, intuitive logic of the oracle, the woman who knows that not everything is 100% determined by math and computer programs and that people respond better to their responsibility if you give them a sense of choice, however illusory.

Although Trinity is also not as powerful as Morpheus or Neo, she is the person who “The Messiah” gains his strength from. She is his equal and there’s no amount of telling her “Promise me, don’t go back in the matrix” even from her lover-messiah himself that’s gonna stop her from fulfilling what she set out to do. Though He saves her from dying in the end, Neo affirms how she saved him first by saying “Now, we’re even.”

Theory of Everything

As a theory of everything, Matrix, Reloaded also tries to explain the existence of ghosts and werewolves and vampires. It aims to break the mold of sci-fi films. It not only concerns itself with the future but is a metaphor of the nature of reality as it is, NOW. Those who did not get that doesn’t understand how big a project of the movie is. Its implications are similarly immense because the movie tells us more of what we are at present as oppose to what we will be.

The Matrix movie is an ambitious project, which is of course, even in the versatile meduim of film, very difficult to express. We must at least give it credit for aspiring to tackle such profound issues in such a pop-advertised movie. It deals with the whole lot of the nature of existence from magic to creation. Its a movie that certainly does not under estimate its viewers and we must forgive it if it over-estimates some.

As was said, it subtly encompasses metaphysical issues of multiple-dimensions, fractals and creation.

The theory behind the “big-bang-big-crunch” hypothesis is that as the whole universe was created by a big massive explosion that generated enough energy to power stars and galaxies for billions of years. This life-giving cycle however, is predicted to end in a “big-crunch” –meaning someday, the universe will stop expanding and begin contracting. This will eventually end in another big explosion, similar to the big bang that will again, theoretically start the cycle of the universe—possibly leading to a “new reality” with new laws of nature (i.e gravity, form of being, space-time limitations or non-limitations.) From the Matrix, the Architect is telling us that this has happened six times already, each incarnation more efficient than the one before. Another interpretation is that in each creation of the universe, in each “big bang,” our soul is once again reborn in that cycle, fulfilling or ‘improving’ on the purpose which we have served before in the previous cycle. Hence, Neo the 6^th being more efficient than his predecessors of the previous Matrixes.

We do not necessarily remember previous incarnations, realities in a previous universe, but we may “sense” it as we get a greater perspective in the world. A sense of unease or mission may also prevail in us to remember what this “core” purpose of ours is. These dimensions can also converge or communicate within ourselves so we may also sense other dimensions, other realities in this respect—hence prophetic dreams or déjà vu’s. A possible “glitch” in the Matrix of the universe, temporarily shutting of the veil that keeps us blind, allowing us to see other realities as existing or our present reality “repeating.”

This may give a sense of shock or disappointment as that in Neo as he found out that “The One” wasn’t the only one. The Oracle is a bridge to all these realities giving us options to which reality we want to pursue. The discovery of this, often traumatic and life-changing. She however also knows that the pattern is always fluid and changeable.

Fractals found in nature –in trees, in mountains, in shorelines, in the flow of the water, in our thumb print would also remind us that no two pattern ever repeats in the same way. Each piece of nature is completely irregular and because of this, completely unique and unrepeatable.

This irregularity, this never-ending chaos, this organized mess is what governs the nature of our existence. There is a pattern to it, however irregular and this is what enables us to predict patterns in nature. As being become more complex however their patterns become more and more irregular and unpredictable like that in human’s. If human brains were structured simply so as for us to understand it, we would then be too dumb to do so. Complexity in our thinking and in our brains is what allows us to be smart. That is why genius is always marked a certain craziness, a certain derangement apart from “arranged” people. Contradiction and multitudes in humans is its weakest and strongest side---like hoping for the impossible or giving up your life for another—a kind of thinking that only complex beings manifest.

Love is one of the most complicated, supra-rational, undefinable human response of all which constitutes of many, overriding our natural survival and self-absorbed instincts, i.e. “giving our life for another” as in what the Architect shirks in Neo.

The conditions for our existence: evolving from nothingness, The whole universe contained in a particle no bigger than a nucleus enough to power it for a billion years exploding in rate which had it been .0001 seconds faster would lead to an expansion that would result in the drifting off and dying of the universe, “the big freeze” and had it been .00001 slower would result in a massive crunch that would again lead to a “big crunch”, the sun and the earth being in the right position in our solar system, the earth having an atmosphere to sustain life, the primordial stew leading to bacteria’s that would then evolve to complex organisms that would then evolve to us, our mother and father meeting each other and having us –the whole improbabilities necessary for our existence is just so immense that it is really a miracle that we are here at all. This leads to the Anthropic principle that the matrix talks about “the world is the way we see it because if it were different, we would not be here to see it otherwise.”

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[1] The Love scene also reminded me of Matrix’s Catholic allusions-- Magdalene as the temple prostitute and Jesus who was rumored to be sleeping with her.