The Gnostic Bomb [TE]

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes, 44 seconds. Contains 1747 words

Welcome back to the Trenchant Edges!

Normally I play Virgil to your Dante in the great fanfiction of explaining fringe culture, but today we’re going to do basically the opposite of that and I’m going to explain the Matrix to you.

No no, I promise, not like that.

Editor’s note: This ended up almost 4000 words so I’m breaking it up into a second post that’ll go out on Friday.

I don’t really mean the content of the film as much as I mean the cultural impact. In an absurd sense, the desire to escape the matrix has itself become a recuperation industrial complex repackaging the matrix from an attempt at radical art into the foundation of a movement to the centerpiece of capitalist shills selling working yourself harder to buy your way out of the human condition.

I’m also not really going to be talking about the trans allegory or the way being closeted trans women informed the series. Other critics and the Wachowski sisters themselves have done a far better job there than I could and nothing I’m going to say contradicts them.

Cypher is my favorite character in the first Matrix movie.

There was a kind of rising wake of pop gnosticism in the late 90s that more or less culminated in the Matrix.

I have a whole list of them but here are some highlights:

• 1997: Abre Los Ojos, Gattaca

• 1998: The Truman Show, Dark City, Pleasantville, What Dreams May Come

• 1999: eXistenZ, The Thirteenth Floor, Fight Club, Being John Malkovich

I’ve removed all the ones I haven’t seen personally.

That’s, like, an awful lot of movies about doubting your own lived reality, right? Now, this didn’t come out of nowhere. I think a decent chunk of them were just kind of downstream of the rash of Philip K Dick adaptations. A culture simply can’t do that much Dick without getting pretty gnostic about it.

And by gnosticism I mean the pop gnosticism I discussed a few years ago.

I’ve been online since like, 1997. But I didn’t *really* get online until mid 2000 when we got cable internet. So I barely remember fringe culture before The Matrix.

Watching it percolate, be one of the biggest things in pop culture, and then bomb twice and kind of taper off into a steady but fragmented influence has been educational. Especially looking back.

For context here, I saw The Matrix on DVD in 2000, The Matrix Reloaded in theaters, and skipped Revolutions for a year or two. At the time had had what I think is a pretty typical experience: Blown away by the original, enjoyed but didn’t really get the sequel, didn’t make it into a theater for the third one.

About half the people who saw Reloaded went to see Revolutions. That feels about right. After 100 days in theaters Revolutions had made about $140m to Reloaded’s $280m

That feels about right.

And I was pretty unimpressed when I did see it.

It wasn’t until a decade later when I heard both Wachowski sisters had transitioned that I made a point to rewatch the trilogy and kind of fell back in love with them.

I figured there were probably some theme’s I’d missed and… whew, yeah. One or two. (laugh track plays)

If you aren’t familiar with the movies this next bit might not make sense, don’t worry about it, we’re not going to spend a lot of time on the plot or with the sequels. Also, lol, spoiler warning. Skip to the next headline if you don’t want to deal with it.

I don’t want to go into it, but broadly the Matrix is a movie about people being distracted with special effects from reality who’s audiences were pretty thoroughly distracted by its special effects from what I’d consider the plain text reading of the film:

The protagonist is The Oracle, everyone else are either her enemies and/or pawns. She is perfectly successful. A *ahem* transition from Masculine power to Feminine power. The Architect ripped off her work, she spent 300ish years beating him at his own game. The trilogy ends with a human victory that sounds suspiciously like what the Architect says in Reloaded: Humans are given a choice to stay in the matrix or not.

Neo, Smith, Zion, the prophecy, all of it were her pawns.

OK, that’s enough about the plot.

How To Fragment A Reality

While I like a lot about The Matrix, especially as a trilogy there are some…. let’s say unforeseen consequences of it being a mix of philosophy 101 or a graduate seminar in philosophy told via action movie with the sensibility of looney tunes.

(Resurrections is it’s own thing, and I don’t have any motivation to revisit the tie in shit like the games),

Personally, I find that a very charming combination.

The Matrix was my big introduction to Plato’s Cave.

But since it’s only a couple hours, while it gets people asking a lot of good questions it’s considerably less helpful in giving answers.

The questions the matrix asks about knowledge, identity, the value of truth, and the potential for liberation are important and powerful.

But like, a lot of those have very real and specific answers.

“Is the sun going to rise tomorrow?” is a great introduction to the problem of induction. But you don’t really solve that narrow problem by reasoning from first principles.

The answer to the question, “Is the sun going to rise tomorrow?” is very specific: We’re on a big rotating, oblate spheroid in a stable long term orbit around the sun. The sun’s rising and travel through the day is due to our rotation and it’s stability depends on our orbit.

That doesn’t really do shit for the problem of induction, though. Which is really more like, “how should we expect the future to go based on past observations?”

From a purely philosophical point of view, the answer is again pretty specific: You technically don’t know it will, but there’s nothing you can do about that so guess as best you can and try not to spend too much time on useless questions.”

In the Matrix, though, the solution to the same problem is: This charismatic person will explain the Real World to you and you should do what they say.

A less charitable interpretation might end with, “And you should do violence to enforce that charismatic person’s vision”. I don’t think the matrix causes violence like that. But it does demonstrate it.

And this is the core problem we’ve been walking up to.

If you reduce The Matrix to a series of tropes and one liners, that is, if you turn it into the mush that survives in living human memory, it hands a lot of people a bunch of power tools and gives them a safety lecture that amounts to, “Find a cult to join.”

Now, the movies themselves are very critical of this mindset. But most of that criticism is understated and not even really discussed by the fandom.

If you want to know why Morpheus and Hamann end up doubting The Matrix’s own ending, ask in the comments.

Lots of critics have accused The Matrix franchise itself of being a vehicle of recuperation of it’s many influences into a corporate brand that allows shareholders to extract profit and there’s some merit in that view.

From the view of it as a corporate product I think that’s basically true. But it’s not true in a simple way because the intention of its creators was if not genuinely radical, as radical as they thought they could get away with in 1999.

The special effects were a spoon full of sugar to get the subversive medicine down.

But that relies on people reading the movie as intended.

And when you’ve been in a pod filled with capitalist goo and someone tells you that your sense that something is wrong, well, you might not first think of the pod.

You might look at the goo levels slowly dropping year by year and find someone to restore you the goo you *deserve*.

What I want to speculate here isn’t that people misunderstand the matrix as much as the matrix itself just doesn’t really explain itself enough. And when it tried to, people hated that.

And part of that hatred, IMO, is that the message of the Matrix Reloaded is, “You think you’re free but you don’t know any fucking thing about why or how you were trapped and you’re still looking for people to tell you what to do. You must learn for yourself what freedom is, damn the alleged consequences.”

That is a painful and adult message wholly at odds with the looney tunes ass action scenes.

And because it’s an allegory it’s still vague enough that it’s an easily missed message.

It can seem incongruous! Neo did the Hero’s journey! Why is he being told that was a prison built out of his desire to be free?

I didn’t see it. It was only when I’d come to the conclusion myself that my quest for more freedom had constrained me itself and retuned to the films that I did.

So the Matrix has been processed as a choose your own Hero’s Journey kind of story. Not unlike Plato’s Cave itself, you can map the growth and limitations of it to almost any emotional journey.

“I thought the nazis were bad, but then I discovered that they were the heroes actually and antifascists are the real villains.”

Now, my point isn’t that this movie makes people nazis. It’s messier than that.

Fractalized epistemology.

Wrapping Up

We’re only about a third into our exploration, but the other two thirds are kind of a unit and I assume that nobody wants to read 4,000 words from a substack in a single go.

I do want to be very clear: None of what’s happened since is the Matrix’s fault exactly. It’s just not an accident that the Matrix has become a kind of lingua franca of fringe culture.

And unlike nearly every other time I’ve done this… I have already finished writing the rest of the essay. lol.

My overall point here is that the Matrix is one of those bonkers chemistry sets from the 1950s without any thought put in for safety. You can make anything with the right mix of dangerous chemicals.

By asking a lot of philosophy 101-style questions and answering mostly in the form of expensive and complex action scenes, The Matrix left abundant room for interpretation.

And that’s what part 2 is going to be about.

See y’all in a couple days.

-SF