Film Notes: The Matrix

Stop for a moment. Stop and look at your phone. Resist the urge to reflexively open Instagram or check a message— simply rest the phone in your hand and raise it up before you. In your hand is a machine composed of elements. Lithium, cobalt, copper, silver, gold. You almost certainly know that you have come to hold these elements in your hand through a process of mining, of human and ecological exploitation, but your phone does not remind you of this. In fact, it severs you from this knowledge by dint of its actual purpose: distraction and instant gratification. Attempts to wrest its tyranny from your carpal tunneled hands prove futile, for in doing so one excommunicates oneself from the public square and the modes of commerce and daily life that are now de rigeur. Face it, you need it. It’s harder to attempt to live without it than to just give in, to bathe in the convenience and open the conduit of stimuli that become the architecture of your consciousness, politically, socially, aesthetically, epistemologically.

This is how Morpheus might scold us were The Matrix made today. But the phone is also a perfect illustration of the thesis of Jean Beaudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, in which the philosopher posits that modern capitalist society has replaced reality with media-produced cultural signifiers—like our phones and all the information they transmit—and thus our experience of reality is a constructed simulation. He also coined the term “Hyperreality'' (wink, wink), the state in which collective consciousness is unable to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality. Many have extrapolated literal simulation theories from this. In the ‘90s the vehicle for this speculation was the internet itself– newly accessible to the masses– and the potential for its iterative development to lead to a cyborgian future. Perhaps we are all in a computer program. Perhaps the machines will gain sentience. Enter the Wachowskis. 

Beaudrillard’s work provided the backbone to the screenplay for The Matrix; in fact it was assigned reading for the cast and a reference text during production (and the ever-pontificating character of Morpheus seems a stand-in for Baudrillard himself). Keanu Reeves frequently cited the book on the press tour. The film’s source material, however, is manifold—Alice in Wonderland, Ghost in the Shell, Hong Kong martial arts films— and it is hyper-tailored to its cultural moment. Released in 1999, it capped an anxious decade, a world rising from the dust of the Cold War— the “End of History''— in capitalist fervor and explosive technological innovation, teetering on the unknown of a new millennium.  While it is widely considered the apogee of the cyberpunk genre, The Matrix also belongs to a wider cinema of cynicism, films like American Beauty, Fight Club, and even Office Space (all released in 1999) which interrogated consumerism, the suburbs, the heteronormative nuclear family, and the American Dream. A micro-moment of “take the wool off your eyes'' films. Your stuff will not be your savior, there is no glory for corporate cogs, your idols are vacuous. 

Discursively, The Matrix feels both quaint and prescient. The greater thesis that adherence to normative society does not breed freedom or happiness no longer feels revolutionary, but the AI robot war backstory has a different tenor now that the debate over the nefarious possibilities for generative AI has become more concrete.

As a piece of filmmaking, The Matrix also has an interesting analog-digital tension, in retrospect an unintentional meta-reference. The sets feel constructed, the stunts are real, and there are just as many practical effects as there are digital. But The Matrix will always remain revolutionary for the innovative digital filmmaking techniques Lana and Lilly Wachowski helped pioneer.

The iconic “bullet time” shot, in which time grinds to a near halt and the camera appears to make a 360 rotation, was envisioned by the Wachowskis and hesitation about its feasibility scared off some initial investors and actors (including Will Smith, the first choice for Neo). The result was accomplished by a setup of tens of still cameras, arranged in a circle, triggered to shoot like dominoes a fraction of a second after each other, resulting in motion captured at 12,000 frames per second (normal film speed is 24). This method was also employed to capture photo realistic backgrounds that could then be used to animate these sequences, and the idea of using photos for texture in 3D animation was spawned from there. Thus despite its age, the digital effects in The Matrix hold up very well. 

The Matrix takes itself deathly seriously, but therein lies the campy fun. Keanu Reeves delivers the apex of self-referential performances, and Laurence Fishburne somehow imbues a role that is entirely expository dialogue and teeny tiny glasses with immense gravitas. While not ostensibly of the genre, the film adheres to many tropes that make it feel like a conventional ‘90s action movie, complete with a pyrotechnic grand finale and a declaration of love while the world crumbles to ruin and literal sparks fly. It wouldn’t work if it were done with a wink.

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