The Matrix Trilogy Deep Analysis

 

"The Matrix" has become known as the ground-breaking action film for philosophical thinkers, and certainly deserves its fair share of kudos for what it achieved. While the original film is certainly the best received in the trilogy, even it has its drawbacks and can easily confuse audience members who are not as deeply into its genres. While I generally like and approve of this film, and believe I "get" most of what is philosophically layered into it, I think the philosophy has a few whacking great flaws itself. If there's one thing to keep in mind as we go through the saga, it is this: We all know that the map is not the territory. But do we get so wrapped up in various philosophical maps that we sometimes fail to see the obvious in the basic territory of the film?

World of the Mind

The enigmatic trailers for the film drew audience interest with the famous lines: "No one can truly tell you what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself." Of course, long-time Doctor Who fans like myself could take a very good guess at what this Matrix might be, and not be too far off, since something with the same name existed on the home planet of the main character of that show, and featured prominently in many of its mythological episodes, beginning about 23 years before the Wachowski Brothers made their film. For those who found "The Matrix" hard to follow, I suggest they try "The Deadly Assassin" (Doctor Who story no. 88) as a more easily understood primer, and then come back to another viewing of this film.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of this film for me, which set it above Doctor Who's "The Deadly Assassin", is the way that the virtual reality of "The Matrix" was set up as a metaphor for discovering the nature of our own reality, specifically on levels of spiritual and philosophical truth. Nice. BUT, this metaphor works chiefly for what is explored in the first film only. Once we get to the sequels, other territory is explored, and quite rightly too, but we're still stuck in a world defined by the old metaphor, while new metaphors to demonstrate the new philosophical territory are sorely lacking. And the biggest spiritual/philosophical test for me is always what the characters actually do, all metaphors aside, something that gets wildly overlooked by people looking for too many hidden layers.

I think it should be noted that a lot of the necessary exposition for this film and its concepts and metaphors is given to Morpheus, and while there is a lot of good material there, Morpheus puts his own spin on it. Watch out for the danger that this brings, as it becomes a very enemy-centered paradigm, all defined within the context of a heroic battle against an evil system of enslavement, and one in which our resistance gang winds up putting more emphasis on saving themselves than helping any helpless third parties, by virtue of the actions that get the most screen time.

I was also quite surprised on my most recent viewing to hear how often the concept of "breaking the rules" was repeated in so many different contexts throughout the film. You'd think the protagonists might want to align themselves with the universal laws of nature as opposed to those of man and/or machine, but they seem to want to just break ANY rule they encounter instead, almost as a knee-jerk reaction, whether the rule opposes something they want to do or not. Again, they really would impress more greatly as thinkers if they started thinking outside of the enemy-centered paradigm.

When The Action Hits the Fan....

While I like my sci-fi, whether obscure or blockbuster, and I regularly root for rebellious underdogs taking a stand against insidious conspiratorial systems, I'm not particularly an "action" fan, nor a martial-arts fan, nor a fan of gothic-punk stylizations, shiny leather and sunglasses and all. "The Matrix" understood and excelled in these stylizations without particularly impressing me, and that was all cool. But excessive fighting often signals a lack of understanding of spiritual philosophies. In itself, that won't hurt the first film too much, since it's partly a story point, and our main characters are all on something of a learning curve, attempting to achieve things they have never achieved before. Unlike the main character of "Doctor Who" under similar circumstances in "The Deadly Assassin", Neo seemed pretty slow in coming to figure out that he should use his mind in the first film, instead of buying into the constraints of the virtual imagery in the Matrix. And for Neo, that comes at a cost that I think is quite high.

The heavily stylized lobby shootout, although heavily praised by so many on the DVD extras, remains one of the philosophical low points of the trilogy for me. I have little interest in rooting for Neo or Trinity during this sequence. The noblest of aims for Morpheus's gang of rebels, generally speaking, is to free the human inhabitants of the Matrix from the battery fields where they are plugged in. Instead, Neo and Trinity go on a spree shooting up many of these very same poor souls who clearly have no idea what it is they are supporting by acting as policemen and guards for their government. Ken Wilber is keen to say on the commentary that the trilogy is more complex than saying that being inside the Matrix is bad and getting out is good. Fine, it should be. But getting out is better than getting knocked off by a supposed "hero". Superman II offers a good contrast during its climactic confrontation between hero and villains with incredible powers, where Superman goes out of his way to make sure that third parties come to no harm, and the villains take advantage of this by threatening them. This is a very natural way of letting the audience know who is the hero and who the villain, and helps get the audience rooting for the right characters. In "The Matrix", this is pretty much reversed, requiring the audience to accept an overly paranoid view of the world in order to continue to root for Neo and Trinity during their violent spree. This sequence revels in the by-standing casualties of the slowness of Neo's learning curve, and is anything but a spiritual triumph. And when content is this far off the mark, I care little for its style, which this scene was obviously more focused on. The first time I saw this scene, I thought it was getting so derailed that I might end up really hating the whole movie.