Epistemographer

Saw The Matrix:Revolutions last Wednesday with Dave, Nina and Randy (check out Dave’s thoughts here, though you might need to scroll a bit). The theater was packed – there was a line to get up the escalator, so you could give your ticket to an usher and wait in another line, to get up to the theater and finally find seats. Thankfully, we’d bought tickets on Fandango beforehand, because there was no line at all for tickets – they’d sold out well before we got to the theater.

My short take on the movie: liked it quite a bit. I had also really liked the second one (even more than I’d liked the first), so you should probably take my thoughts on the film with a grain of salt.

[spoilers below – if you keep reading, consider yourself warned]

The interesting thing about the film for me is that while it’s not the way I wanted to see the story go, it worked on its own merits, and the brothers W deserve credit for a wholly involving conclusion to their trilogy that treats both the characters and the world they inhabited with respect bordering on reverence.

If you’d asked me after the first Matrix movie what I thought the theme of the film was, I’d have said it was about reality and whether we can trust our senses – the good ol’ Cartesian line. After having seen the entire trilogy, however, I realize that the theme of all three was choice, not reality vs. virtuality. Turns out that the Zion/Matrix schema was a framework laid out in the first movie which was going to allow the thematic exploration of questions about the nature of reality, the importance of faith, and the tension between the natural and the mechanical, but in the end, the question of real vs. virtual was irrelevant.

I hadn’t quite seen this coming. Going in to the third movie, the biggest question for me was how they were going to resolve the fact that Neo seemed able to collapse the boundary between the two worlds of Zion and the Matrix (I’ll refrain from calling one the ‚Äúreal‚Äù world, and more on that later). As I would up arguing in a late-night diner conversation after the movie, Zion and the Matrix had been set up as ontologically distinct spaces, which one could move between through a technological interface. Movements could be in both directions – humans could enter the Matrix, while a copy of Smith could enter the Zion world. However, such movements were always through a specific gateway, a junction of man and machine located right around the pineal gland (where Descartes believed the soul to reside).

This distinction was gradually eroded throughout Revolutions, which opened with Neo having entered the Matrix (or at least some state of limbo associated with it) entirely on his own, without the benefit of the traditional gateway. While his mind returned to the Zion world through the use of a cable plugged into his skull (Trinity uncouples him when he finally wakes up on the ship), it’s clear that the relationship between Zion and the Matrix isn’t quite what we’d thought.

At this point, I was expecting to find out that Zion was another virtual world, which would mean that Neo et al were still in pods somewhere, leaving the story two places to end – either they are revived and end up in the really Real World, or it’s turtles all the way down and they’re forced to come to terms with the fact that they’re ultimately stuck in a world of someone else’s making. That’s where I thought the filmmakers were going, because I was stuck on the reality vs. virtuality angle.

Turns out that the brothers W were agnostic on this point. At the end of Revolutions, we don’t honestly know that the world of Zion isn’t virtually generated, and that there aren’t countless other layers of reality in which they’re nested. It doesn’t matter one bit. That’s not what the trilogy is about, so the question doesn’t need to be resolved.

As I read the film, the ending represents the inability of any one group to entirely dictate the choices of another, be it humans, machines, or Smith. As we learned in the oft-maligned Architect speech (which I totally dug, leaving me massively in the minority, but then again I also laughed at the Baudrillard reference in the first movie), pure determinism is a fallacy – the computer simply couldn’t predict every action of every entity in the Matrix, presumably because both humans and the system more broadly were so massively complex. This isn’t too unlike Stephen Wolfram’s argument in A New Kind of Science that determinism doesn’t necessarily equal predictibility.

In the end, what separates humans from machines is choice – at least, that’s what we’re told. Neo faces down Smith with the final words “Because I choose to‚Äù (keep fighting, that is). The Oracle and the Architect, the avatars for predictability, don’t know what’s coming next, but there’s an interesting slant to their final conversation – the truce between machines and humans will last for at least a while, then it won’t. There isn’t the implication that humans (clearly the agents of disorder in this system) will necessarily be the ones to disrupt things. Maybe the machines are just as likely to act against the humans, even though they’re not the ones with “choice”?

Just as the worlds of Zion and the Matrix are symmetrical if you take away the presumption that one is “real” and the other isn’t, maybe “choice” isn’t necessarily an inherent property of humans, but rather it’s simply an action taken by one party that the other doesn’t seem to understand or have a rational reason for. To programs, the actions of humans seem like choices, and vice versa for humans (think of the father in the station at the beginning who “chose” to send away his daughter for her survival). Maybe Harry Knowles isn’t too far off when he talks about the inhabitants of Zion and the Matrix as different cultures not unlike today’s various regionalisms – you can read these movies in various ways depending on your perspective and prejudices, not unlike contemporary geopolitics.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 9th, 2003 at 11:04 pm and is filed under Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.