Sometimes I pitch things successfully, only to realise I don’t have time to write something quality for publication. I recently had this happen with a piece designed to reflect on the recently release The Matrix Resurrections (2021) film.
Since I don’t have time to do it justice, here are some unstructured thoughts I had in my notes.
The Myth Of “The Red Pill”
As many have noted, the postmodern social theorist Jean Baudrillard was a cited influence on the original Matrix films, something Baudrillard himself scoffed at.
A copy of Simulacra and Simulation, is shown in The Matrix (1999), being Bauldrillard’s seminal treatise arguing that our engagement with the world is now pure simulacrum - that we have lost any pretext of “reality” and instead engage in “hyperreal” terms.
The Wachowskis very clearly misunderstood Baudrillard’s work, as they seem to be arguing in The Matrix films that the “hyperreal” is in some way a false reality, which we are able to escape. Their narrative is one of “authenticity” - an existentialist tale of finding “the truth”.
However, this narrative of authenticity is pure hyperreality - there is no greater manufactured simulation, than that of somebody finding their “true self”.
The narrative of the red pill (a decision to escape the simulation) and the blue pill (a decision to remain in ignorance) is a wonderful Rorschach test: it feeds the narratives of everyone from right wing incels to trans liberation activists (let’s not forget the Wachowski brothers are now the Wachowski sisters).
No wonder Baudrillard had this to say when saw the film:
The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce
Existentialist fables, rather than shining a light on the invisible hands that form our subjectivity, are precisely the tools through which technology and the productivist ethos underpinning Western capitalism establishes control.
You cannot simply unplug from the digital simulation, the simulation of a liberated “escape” is all part of the code.
Dystopia As Wish Fulfilment
One of the biggest myths about The Matrix, and the “cyberpunk” genre it falls within, is that this kind of media exists as a warning of things to come.
To the extent that The Matrix is a technological dystopia, it’s one with a tech utopia built in.
The exciting parts of the film aren’t in the de-saturated “real world” - where survivors subsist off stale porridge. The fantastical components are within the matrix itself, where people can be whomever they want (a martial arts expert, a helicopter pilot etc) without the struggle of learning or the constraints of our flabby bodies.
No wonder today’s tech moguls wish to make The Matrix and other dystopian films of the 80s and 90s a reality (from the Metaverse to whatever Elon Musk is doing this week).
The Tech Rebel
The Matrix films exist alongside a number of films which could accurately be called “pro tech propaganda”. As I’ve written about before, I grew up in the age of the fictional revolutionary hacker - the tech savvy rebel who fought against stuffy, authoritarian institutions.
Neo, our protagonist, is an outsider - keen to disrupt the status quo and free us from the robotic “men in suits”. As with most libertarian and anarchist narratives, the emphasis is on individuality and challenging existing norms. Neo is our hero because he refuses to conform.
The political consequences of this tech rebel narrative are decentralisation, putting the tech back into the hands of “the people” and not “the State” (in this case the machines). In this sense cyberpunk resistance is nihilistic rebellion. Not so much anti-capitalist as it is anti-hierarchy and tradition, changes which earn a lot of money for a small band of “tech rebels”.
In the 21st century, this narrative works quite well with the “disruptive” trend of global capital and the decline of institutions.
Ultimately, The Matrix falls flat in saying anything about culture or politics. It exists merely to reflect mainstream fantasies back upon itself under the guise of technological critique.