A Gnostic Eclipse [TE]

Estimated reading time: 12 minutes, 57 seconds. Contains 2592 words

Welcome back, friends.

Gather around the fire as we share stories of fringe culture. This is the Trenchant Edges and I’m your host Stephen once again.

This is not symbolism! | by Cugerbrant, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Today is a rare treat for everyone: An on time sequel! We had a post earlier this week and now we have the follow up at the same time! Incredible!

You probably will want to read that though as these were written as one larger essay.

Last time we discussed the context of the Matrix and the way the story was told makes it particularly easy to decontextualize for whatever an interpreter wants. This isn’t a problem with The Matrix as much as it’s just a general problem with allegory, but especially Plato’s Cave.

But I digress, we’re about to get to that bit of the essay. Let’s just jump in.

Red Pills and Stigmatized Knowledge

Tying back with our discussion of of Neoreactionaries is the right wing meme of taking the red pill. Unlike The Matrix, the Red Pill is a story that does make nazis.

It’s a story that says They don’t want you to be a nazi because being a nazi is how you become strong and they fear your power.

All that liberal human rights crap is gay and you’re gay if you care about any of it.

In more liberal circles this is often laughed at but the ignorance here isn’t accidental.

The red pill exists to get people to do things that radicalize them the next step. So you say something and the pushback you get for it “proves” that other people are brainwashed.

It’s a method that more or less guarantees you’ll go as far to the right politically as you can, get comfortable there, and go further right.

Now, in reality, the matrix didn’t make the red pill. This could easily have been done to the sunglasses from They Live. Which itself was a movie that personalized the resistance to capitalism in a way that’s next to indistinguishable from antisemitism.

Was that intentional? Not from John Carpenter.

But it’s very easy to read into because of how antisemitism works. Dehumanizing “Them” into a soulless mob of secret scheming through media and finance.

Antisemitism isn’t called the socialism of fools for nothing.

It blames the destruction of capital accumulation on one group, letting most financers, bankers, and media moguls off the hook.

Part of the confusion here is that definitive interpretation doesn’t really exist. This is a structural fact of language: Words have multiple meanings, people often don’t share specific interpretation of those words, and we often come at the same situations with different contexts and experiences.

So even if you understand the story formally in the same way as someone else, if they have a different background than you do they will probably emphasize different parts of it than you.

To understand what I mean, we can visualize things a bit with a solar eclipse.

Note that the size difference in this image between the sun and Earth is reversed: The audience is far, far larger than the author. Not just that they’re many people vs a few or one, but they bring far more things to the text than any author could.

Just so we’re on the same page here: A solar eclipse is when the earth, moon, and sun are lined up so the moon fully blocks out the light of the sun from the Earth.

Because light travels in waves, the area fully blacked out by the sun is a relatively small band called the umbra, with a wider band of significant darkness called the penumbra.

Note: I’m using the term “The text” to refer to any object of interpretation from a wordless meme up to whole bodies of knowledge.

Let’s set aside the light and darkness of this metaphor because that is reversed between a real physical eclipse and interpretation.

The author has something to say, even if it’s just a silly story. They create the text, which an audience can read.

We only know the authorial intent through the text itself, though many authors will build on those concepts over time outside their creative works. We can think of this as a scale with David Lynch refusing to explain shit about why eraserhead is his most spiritual movie on one hand and the queen of TERFs herself, JK Rowling. She’s put out so much extra content about the Harry Potter universe beyond the books or movies that it’s practically an extra book’s worth of information.

The latter is called “Word of God” by nerds who don’t understand the point I’m making here.

Note: Some of what I’m saying here fits into the “Death of the Author” in literary criticism, which I have a specific view of. DotA says the author is completely irrelevant to interpretation and that we should only focus on the text itself. I recognize this as an extreme position opposing a trend of over-psychoanalyzing authors biographies to explain choices they made.

This was always more tenuous than presented. But we do not need to fully dismiss the author to focus on the text. I think the author has a privileged, but not definitive opinion on their work. People misunderstand themselves and their decisions all the time.

I prefer Lynch’s view of refusing to explain. If you wanted to explain I generally think you should do so within the text. Ironically, The Matrix is a reasonable exception to this because 1. An open trans story was literally not possible in 1999 and 2. It’s been so often misinterpreted, to the point I’m writing this 26 years after its release.

OK, so getting back into it: There’s roughly 3 zones of interpretation.

We’ve got the umbra where interpretations of the text that most fit it lay. Some details may be a stretch, but the overall structure is sound and hard to dispute.

Within the Matrix itself, we can easily put the trans allegory, Plato’s cave, and the hero’s journey here. It’s pretty textbook stuff, tbh.

One stage out, we’ve got things that are kind of supported by the text. Fun fan theories that don’t fully work but are usually a good time to think about.

So, like, Agent Smith was The One is a fairly well known one in the Matrix. Or They Never Left The Matrix, though I think that’s probably just in the umbra if I’m honest.

Here’s one I don’t think I’ve heard elsewhere: The machines are unambiguously trying to save humanity from our own self destructive impulses by providing a playground where we can’t hurt anything more than we did during the war.

It doesn’t fully fit all the details of the series, but (especially if you watch the animatrix) it’s not really contradicted. The apparently malicious programs simply weren’t told the overall plan or didn’t particularly care.

Which brings us to outside the penumbra: Shit just not supported by the text at all.

Just off the top of my head: The Matrix is a metaphor for how much better Pepsi is over Coke and the process you have to go through to learn that Coke is actually not a very good drink.

So, within this view we can go back and look at the right wing interpretation of The Matrix and, well, I hate giving good people bad news but it’s probably just in the umbra.

Yes, even if it directly contradicts the Writer/Directors.

Allegory unfortunately works through comparison and if you just change the variables a bit, you can come up with totally different conclusions. It’s not really anti-capitalist because it doesn’t name capitalism and is itself a product of capitalism. You can take the digs it makes at corporate America and point them towards the imposition of political correctness through HR compliance.

The Matrix is a diversity training trying to make you stop saying the n word at work.

Is that a good interpretation? No.

But it’s not one contradicted by the text itself.

This is a point a friend of mine brings up all the time against my fondness for Plato’s cave: It’s so general you can make the cave-dwellers literally anyone or anything you like.

So if you’re, say, a nazi it’s easy to point to liberals as cave dwellers who haven’t seen the light of skull measuring.

It’s a problem.

Second Person Problems

I want to wind down by looking at another thing I haven’t heard much discussed.

You ever notice how many second person statements there are in the matrix?

Mix that with the way Hollywood movies train people to empathize with the protagonist and it’s less of a mystery why so many people act like this movie was literally speaking to them.

I did a couple of hacky searches for the word you in various forms within the scripts for The Matrix, Dark City, Gattaca and a few others. Initially I thought it was promising as an explanation: The Matrix has almost twice as many “you” and “you “s as Dark city, but it gets messier when you look at other scripts.

Guess I’m going to have to add some semiotics analysis of these movies to my to do list.

So, let’s limit things to a comparison between dark city and the matrix even though that probably overstates my point.

Dark City is the story of an apparent murderer who’s name isn’t John with amnesia as he tried to understand the insane world of endless night he’s in. And his problems are all because of that insane world. He eventually overcomes it with superhuman powers.

The Matrix is the story of a guy who’s accumulated frustrations with the banality of life push him to join a terrorist who tells him that what he’s really frustrated with is that the world is fake. He then overcomes it with superhuman powers.

The former is very much not about you. You don’t live in a world of endless night, your memories (probably) aren’t being shuffled around by psychic parasites, and you probably can leave your city.

But you are probably frustrated and spiritually impoverished by your shit job and fucking around to try and find a way out without success. And you’ve probably been tempted by someone who promises to tell you the REAL reason all this is happening.

Dark City is a surrealist neo-noir fable with impeccable art direction. Tim Burton’s Batman in a k-hole.

The Matrix is a slickly polished techno-thriller with a cyberpunk twist, but it’s emotional core is purely relatable. You don’t need to be special to feel what Neo does.

You just need to hate your job and think things are kind of vaguely fucked.

So, some quotes:

The Matrix has You

“I can see it in your eyes. You have the look of a man who accepts what he sees because he is expecting to wake up.”

“Let me tell you why you are here. You have come because you know something. What you know you can't explain but you feel it. You've felt it your whole life, felt that something is wrong with the world. You don't know what, but it's there like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that brought you to me. Do you know what I'm talking about?”

“That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else, you were born into bondage, kept inside a prison that you cannot smell, taste, or touch. A prison for your mind.”

“Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real?”

“What if you were unable to wake from that dream, Neo? How would you know the difference between the dreamworld and the real world?”

“Do you believe that's air you are breathing now?”

“I'm trying to free your mind, Neo, but all I can do is show you the door. You're the one that has to step through. Tank, load the jump program.”

“Your mind makes it real.”

“You have to understand that most of these people are not ready to be unplugged and many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it.”

“No, it's another training program designed to teach you one thing; if you are not one of us, you're one of them.”

“That the Matrix cannot tell you who you are.”

“Then you will see that it is not the spoon that bends. It is only yourself.”

I could have easily doubled or maybe even tripled that list of quotes if I wanted. There are lots of examples.

This isn’t brainwashing. It’s a bunch of questions you can and maybe should ask yourself. A pile of splinters for your mind.

Decontextualized from the story they provide a framework to sell anyone just about anything. You don’t need to be convincing, just sow enough doubt and point to resistance as proof.

And it works without a fake guru even. You can just as easily sell yourself on some awful shit.

The harsh truth is that there’s no red pill you can take to get the truth. You just have to be aware of how many ways you could misunderstand the world while seeking out the best information available.

Hoping that you eventually arrive at stable, robust, and accurate conclusions about the world.

It’s a high bar.

Or, I suppose, you can go the Donald Trump route and try and believe the world you want into existence. Hard to look at him and say it doesn’t work on at least some level, if you at least have enough privilege backing you up.

Empiricism vs magic.

Know Thyself

This is probably where I should start scolding away magic, but my rationalist brain knows to keep the fuck on it’s side of the corpus callosum.

(Yes, the left brain/right brain thing is an exaggeration to the point of myth but it’s fun to imagine them as roommates)

But let’s not give into vulgar rationalism or naive philosophical idealism. Or commit the foolish move of assuming that disagreement means we’re on the right track.

We don’t live in a deterministic track, but a messy environment with chaotic information asymmetries, which makes being unreasonable it’s own kind of advantage. If you can’t calculate the world accurately without all the information, you might as well make some big fun bets and play as long as you can right?

Heh.

I don’t know if that’s good advice, but I think it’s the practical reality for most of us most of the time.

Ambiguity, paradox, contradiction, and confusion reign as often as not.

Like almost any other part of culture The Matrix becomes a kind of funhouse mirror that lets you distort yourself.

Which brings us back to our dear friend Cypher, the most honest character in The Matrix. He’s wrong and a greasy little shit, but at least didn’t stop questioning.

But his end illustrates a wide misunderstanding: Ignorance is not bliss at all. Usually ignorance is pain.

Knowledge is difficult but it’s not impossible and it’s the only way to change things for the better.

A better life, a better world is possible but not if you lie to yourself.

Wrapping Up

I have a weird mix of feelings here. On one hand I've basically signed up to do at least another 1-2 posts about the matrix and I’ll probably have to rewrite the whole essay I wrote back in 2017 about the gnostic themes of the franchise.

On the other, other hand, that’s more fun than going through the mountain of “released” Epstein docs or UFO shit, which are both next on the queue. Plus The Weird Index.

Gonna be a fun March.

Hopefully April will let us get back into some more original research.

Feeling pretty good overall despite the world.

We’ll see how long this productive streak on TE lasts. Hope y’all enjoy the ride.

See you soon.

-SF