Rarely has any film been studied and analysed, its meaning and subtext debated as much as the Wachowski Brothers’ two Matrix movies (the third, Matrix Revolutions, will hit the cinemas in December). With their many-layered meanings, their treasury of slippery allusions to everything from Zen to Alice in Wonderland, they have displaced 2001 and Blade Runner as the ultimate cult films for sci-fi fans, wannabe philosophers and, of course, computer geeks. They have been subjected to every sort of analysis possible: Christian, Marxist, nihilist, postmodern, and, of course, fashion: like, those black leather outfits and sunglasses are the height of cool, right?
Start with a simple question—what are the films about?—and the possible answers would include: free will and destiny, the nature of reality, the purpose of life, the meaning of all creation, faith and salvation, Microsoft and open source computing.... Well, maybe not Microsoft and open source computing, but you get the drift.
For the unmatrixified, here’s the basic storyline. Towards the end of the 21st century, man created intelligent machines, which obviously then decided to be the dominant species on earth. The machines won the war against humankind, but the war also "scorched the sky", so they could not draw solar energy to survive. But they found a new power source in the human body, which "generates more bio-electricity than a 120-volt battery and over 25,000 btus of body heat". Except for one secret human settlement, Zion, the machines enslaved all mankind, put each human in a womb-like vat, and sucked power from their bodies. To keep humans from revolting, they created the Matrix, a computer-generated virtual world (which looks just like ours), jacked each sleeping human’s brain into this enormous collective dream, and went about their business. Everyone is happy since everyone thinks they’re going to office and digging their noses and having sex, while they are all actually dreaming in chemical-filled vats.
But a small bunch of rebels escape from their vats and make it their mission to destroy the matrix, defeat the machines and return humanity to real life. They believe a prophecy that a man, The One, will come and liberate humankind. So, they find Neo (Latin for New, anagram of One) and open his eyes to the actual state of affairs. At the end of the first film, Neo achieves enlightenment, that is, he understands the structure of the matrix (the nature of reality), and as a result develops certain superhuman skills inside the dream world, like the ability to fly.
The second film takes Neo deeper into the purpose of the matrix and ends with Zion and the machines poised for a final war that could wipe out all human life, even irreparably tear apart the fabric of all realities, both the dream and flesh-and-blood varieties.
One principal theme should be obvious even from this bare-bones plot outline. If we are all inside a computer program, free will is clearly the biggest scam of all time. But by cracking the Creation Code, man can exert free will, as Neo seems increasingly capable of. But the Wachowskis don’t play that simple. They make it also clear that Neo is destined to be the messiah, he has no choice about that. And as the conversation between Neo and the Architect (the human projection of the software that built the matrix) at the end of Reloaded makes clear, this destiny was written into the matrix’s computer code.
"Your life is the sum of a remainder of an unbalanced equation inherent to the programming of the matrix," the Architect tells Neo. He is a bug in the system, but a bug that the Architect deliberately put in.
The first matrix the Architect built was, as Agent Smith tells Morpheus in the first film, a perfect world "where none suffered". But "the perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrums kept trying to wake up from", because "human beings define their reality through suffering and misery". So, the matrix was redesigned to reflect this. There seems to be a Garden of Eden allusion lurking here, waiting to be captured. Which makes life even more difficult for the analyst. Is Neo then Lucifer, since his mission is to bring "knowledge" to mankind and subvert the Architect, the God figure? But the films abound with allusions that link Neo to Christ. Plus the Wachowskis have admitted their Buddhist influence, so with his monk-like look and expertise in Oriental martial arts, Neo could also be Bodhisattva.
The films revel in these riddles and paradoxes. Morpheus is named after the Greek god of dreams, but is the man who wakes Neo from his dream. The traitor Cypher’s real name is Reagan. The evil Merovingian is named after a French dynasty which claimed to be descended from Christ.
The Architect finally figured out that 99.9 per cent of all humans became satisfied with their lot if they were given an illusion of "choice, even if they were only aware of the choice at a near-unconscious level". Once he built that into the matrix, it worked. But this illusion of choice was also the bug, the "systemic anomaly, that if left unchecked might threaten the system itself". So, the matrix is a fundamentally unstable system, which has to be periodically rebooted and upgraded when a Neo rises and human rebellion reaches an inflexion point and the software looks set to crash. The current Neo is in fact the sixth Neo, the current Zion is Zion 6.0! Reincarnation, avatars, cycles of creation...endlessly debatable allusions....
But the metaphors hardly end at the religious-mythical-philosophical area.In the first film, Neo has a copy of Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, which theorises that postmodern culture is all about creating images that have no basis in reality. But the book itself is a simulacrum: Neo has hollowed it out to store contraband software. The final choice that Neo has to make in Reloaded is a clear reference to the ‘Grand Inquisitor’ chapter in The Brothers Karamazov. In Reloaded, Agent Smith, who was killed by Neo (that is, his code garbled) in The Matrix, appears as a virus program, replicating himself endlessly. And remember, Smith, who lives (if that is the word) to destroy Neo, is played by Hugo Weaving, who was the maniacally focused Douglas Jardine in the TV series Bodyline. But the Wachowskis’ allusions cannot possibly extend to cricket, can they? I sincerely hope so.
"Hope," The Architect tells Neo, "is the quintessential human delusion, simultaneously the source of your greatest strength and your greatest weakness." Lakhs of people around the globe today live in the hope that they will some day figure out what the hell the Matrix trilogy is all about, that they will be able to hack the Wachowskis’ brains. Come to think of it, that could just be as big an achievement as Neo’s.
