The Great Gnostic Caper [TE]
Estimated reading time: 22 minutes, 30 seconds. Contains 4503 words
Welcome back to the Trenchant Edges, a newsletter about fringe culture and the people who make it.
Today we’re hopefully going to conclude discussing The Matrix with an unnecessarily long exploration of the plot of the franchise.
This post is dedicated to the late Gloria Foster and Mary Alice, who brought The Oracle to life.
I was going to do a big introduction but nah. Get onboard! We’re explaining The Matrix Trilogy! Get slightly better informed, idiot!
Read the previous entries in this series here:
A Quick Flyby of The Matrix Trilogy
The Matrix is loaded with little details you can obsess over and most of them are red herrings. They don’t matter.
The matrix is an allegory. It’s not about these strange future people and their strange robo-prison. It’s about you, your life, and the ways society builds itself around you.
Note: I am once again not going to discuss the trans allegory as plenty of trans critics and the directors themselves have done this at length and better than I ever could. Nothing I’m going to say here really conflicts with their reading. Also, I’m basically ignoring all the ancillary comics, video games, the animatrix, and last movie because they don’t really tell this story. I’ve reviewed them and they’re just doing different things.
It’s produced to be about as symbolically packed as possible because most of those symbols are, like the Matrix itself, a distraction.
I’m going to argue later that the fundamental theme of The Matrix is very specific and the trilogy is a tightly written exploration of that theme.
That theme is agency. And that’s agency as distinct from choice. The red pill/blue pill thing is a choice, but as the 4th movie, Matrix Resurrections, literally says: That’s not a real choice. Anyone whose found themselves being offered the pills will “choose” the red pill.
Agency is about the freedom to select the context and structure of your life. Consumerism provides us with many choices of breakfast cereal and ketchup, but very few of us get to control our time or how we make a living.
Those choices are already made by social and macroeconomic forces and we can either move with them or try to fight them and probably lose.
Agency is about those big questions about who and what your life is about. And as we will see, it’s limited by understanding, perception, and imagination.
The Matrix Trilogy as a whole is not only a worthy successor to Plato’s Cave, but a guided tour of many of the bad decisions you could make after seeing the Sun/Light of Truth.
Enough preamble. Let’s amble.
The Matrix
You more or less know this one if you’re this far in so let’s recap quickly: The crew of a hovercraft in the hellish real world led by Morpheus are psyopping and kidnapping a not-Microsoft employee to turn him into a terrorist.
His name is Neo and he’s a badass insomniac hackerman but also a smol bean with anxiety because he feels like the world isn’t real.
And he’s right! The world is fake as shit and he’s introduced to a wider truth where he’s the long prophesied messiah. He learns Kung Fu, meets an Oracle who manipulates the hell out of him, and decides to be a big damn hero.
He’s saved by the power of love, doesn’t need to dodge bullets, can destroy the agents of the system, and can fucking FLY!
Can I get a hell yeah?
The Matrix Reloaded
A good sequel needs to walk a fine line of doing all the stuff people liked from the first one while expanding on the world and its themes and not being too stale.
The Matrix Reloaded is both kind of a bad movie and a great sequel. It makes lots of decisions that serve the larger story but make this one kind of annoying to watch. We’ll get into it.
This one starts out by introducing Morpheus’ peers and sets the stakes of the invasion of Zion, the last human city deep underground. A crisis is at hand, many bothans died to bring us this information, etc etc.
The machines are coming and Agent Smith, who died in the previous movie, is alive and can take over both machines and people. Infecting them like a virus. There’s no explanation to Smith’s resurrection, but I think you'll see there is a very good guess we can make later.
The crew returns to Zion with the bad news and they have a sweet rave.
This is also where we get one of the most important points of the movie: Neo is deeply uncomfortable being a messiah. He’s really kind of here for his girlfriend.
But Neo still can’t sleep.
On my rewatch this was the scene that really got me perked up because while I’d remembered Neo being kind of into being messiah this shows him, well, feeling an awful lot like he did before he escaped the Matrix. He’s the big hero and… still feels reality is bullshit and still can’t sleep.
Hint hint.
All their bluster about escaping machines and they’re still dependent on a vast network of machines most of them don’t understand.
Anyway, we don’t have any time to think about that because the Oracle calls and the gang go visit her. She tells Neo he doesn’t have a fucking clue what he’s doing and sends him to get some guy named the keymaker.
There’s a big looney tunes ass fight with an army of Smiths (oh, did I mention he can now overwrite other people and turn them into copies?) and Neo eventually escapes.
This leads into a visit to my favorite guy, the Merovingian who tells the gang they’re fucking clueless pawns and goes to cheat on his incredibly hot wife Persephone.
Pissed at the sheer disrespect, Persephone helps them find the keymaker, briefly mentions werewolves exist before killing them, and leaves the movie a queen.
Honestly, in a just world we’ve get a whole trilogy that’s just The Merovingian and Persephone having the most toxic relationship.
There’s an extended action sequence that’s still very good and they end up getting the keymaker and the crew of two ships into position for The Big Heist.
Morpheus is set up for his big failure with a “this is the moment of prophecy” speech and Neo asks Trinity to stay out of the matrix because of his dreams.
The heist goes bad, Trinity immediately breaks her promise, and there’s another Smith fight. Neo narrowly helps Smith and the keymaker escape, but the keymaker is killed because his only reason to exist is done.
This is textually true and cinematically true. He existed to maneuver Neo into this moment and the door beyond it.
Ergo, I’m not going to discuss the Architect at this point because this is the most heavyhanded and overanalyzed scene in the franchise and a lot of people missed it so… we’ll be coming back.
TLDR: Everything Neo knows is a lie (again), Zion itself is part of the matrix (figuratively?) and this whole thing is set up to get the one human who gets administrator privileges in the matrix to restart the war against the machines after the machines kill off all the free humans. This will prevent the systemic destruction of the matrix while keeping humanity and the technical possibility of freedom alive.
But Neo is in love and Trinity is fighting an agent. So, he rejects saving humanity the way his predecessors did.
Neo saves Trinity, they escape the matrix, and their ship the Nebuchadnezzar is destroyed. Fleeing from the machines, Neo is somehow able to destroy them but passes into a coma.
The film ends on another ship with news of disaster and one of the people Smith overwrote in the real world.
OK, that was fun. A bit jank, but fun.
As a friend reminded me: The matrix 2 and 3 are functionally one movie. I consider this a flaw, tbh. A feature film should be a complete unit of story and using one movie to entirely set up another one is weak storytelling. This is a common failing with trilogies. But that’s what they did here so we’re running with it.
The Matrix Revolutions
Before we talk about the plot, I’m going to say something nice about the sequel titles. I love how loaded they are. Is the matrix reloading a gun or software reloaded? Both, obviously. Likewise, the Revolutions in the third movie are both a political revolution and a completion of a cycle. And you could go much further with those.
In Fight Club, Brad Pitt asks Ed Norton, “How’s that working for you, being clever?”, a question perhaps nobody has needed to answer so much as the Wachowski sisters while writing this movie.
If the first Matrix was successful in part because it pointed to lots of little experiences people have with deja vu, hating their job, and being awkward at the club and the second movie tried to play the same card by saying cryptids and UFOs are malfunctioning programs, which for some reason didn’t have the universal impact.
This one isn’t about you. It’s not even about Neo or Zion. The Matrix took a familiar hero’s journey structure and filled it with telling details about how this was really about you, the viewer. But to continue the story they needed it to be more about their own worldbuilding than the viewer, which fuels a lot of the disconnect people feel between the first movie and its sequels.
We’re so far down the rabbit hole even the cast of the film are lost. Like them we’re going to start with the B-plot because it takes up the vast majority of the 2 hour 9 minute runtime of the film. The A-plot will wait.
And that’s where we start: Neo is trapped in the matrix after using his The One powers in the “real world”. His friends have to invade hell [a fetish club, thanks sis] to force the Merovingian to release Neo from the subway program he’s trapped in. Merv says the most important line in the film and Neo has an A-plot conversation with The Oracle.
We’re not going to worry about that because we’ve got two hours of worrying about the fate of Zion and the big climatic war with it.
We learn almost all the deployed hovercrafts were destroyed by Bane who’s name isn’t symbolic and definitely hasn’t been possessed by Agent Smith. The remaining ship now carrying most of the cast finds Niobe’s ship and eventually captains split up into two teams: Team Deadweight will return to Zion and help defend it and Team Messiah will commit a more aggressive suicide by invading the machine city.
With two people.
And Bane!
Ok, I’m going to level with you here my memory of the fine details of this plot has faded quite a bit. Luckily, the Matrix Wiki has listed out every scene so I can just look at summaries to refresh myself.
Fuck it, the B plot doesn’t matter. Speedrun time:
A bunch of people with collectively two minutes of screen time before movie 3 are introduced and get to work together to defend Zion. They’re uh badly outnumbered and lose with style: Each proving themselves by working together to open the doors that the crew of Team Deadweight can get into so they can blow their EMP and hold off the machine invasion.
They succeed buying time for Team Messiah.
OK I’m being a little cheeky here but this is all actually really important: Just like Reloaded’s Cave Rave demonstrates the power of Eros to unify people against existential terror, the resistance to certain death shows the collective effort needed to fight back a giant machine turning the environment and you into paste.
Just in case, you know, you happen to be on a planet where that’s relevant.
I’m getting ahead of myself a bit. I did find a real scene list and I skipped over Agent Smith absorbing The Oracle, which is A-plot stuff. And over with Team Messiah he does jump them as Bane. Neo gets blinded and eventually kills Bane because now he can see matrix stuff in the real world.
I’m sure that’s not important.
Anyway, Neo and Trinity make it to the machine city. She’s written out of the movie here and Neo goes to face the demonlord roboswarm baby head literally called Deus ex Machina in the script.
Neo makes an offer: He handles their Smith problem in exchange for peace with humanity. Neat.
He goes into the matrix, he and smith fight in one of the worst action scenes of the decade. They have a little argue, smith is confused for a bit, and Neo lets himself get turned into Smith.
Then for apparently no reason every smith explodes and it turns out Neo won somehow.
The Oracle and Architect have a nice little talk around Dawn and everyone in Zion is shocked to find out they’re not being killed.
Yay! Roll credits.
Well that’s a little unsatisfying hey wait wow this email is so much longer and why did I list all this as B-plot.
The A-Plot
The fundamental problem the Matrix has is it’s A-plot is hidden pretty well. Most people miss it. When I noticed it in 2016, I couldn’t find anyone else who’d noticed. I wasn’t the first and it’s become more clear to people over time.
This is, to be clear, bad writing and directing.
The Matrix Trilogy is about the transition between the masculine power of the Architect and the feminine power of The Oracle. Two competing demiurges who wish to define reality for humanity.
So, if you were wondering on hearing the writer/directors of the Matrix Trilogy were transwomen, if there was some uh gender stuff going on in these movies… let me assure you there is.
I’m not going to focus on it here because my interest is gnostic more than gender, but honestly transness and Gnosticism have a lot of overlap.
The A-plot of this movie starts with the Architect scene of the last one: The Oracle is a subordinate peer of his. She designed the modern matrix, the one that works, where his design failed.
From there we have the Hel club in Revolutions where the Merovingian says, “The Oracle’s eyes cannot be taken, only given.” Merv’s business is knowing things, and he’s gloating so we can probably take him at his word.
I believe this is the most important line in the franchise. We’ll get to why.
After his rescue, Neo goes to meet the Oracle who lays on another mess of bullshit. She’s ambiguous as usual but says the second most important line in the franchise: Everything that has a beginning has an ending.
Our next relevant scene is Agent Smith accusing the Oracle of manipulating him before absorbing her. She basically blows him off, he calls her mom, and she gets absorbed.
This scene establishes that every Smith still contains part of the person they absorbed when the Smith that used to be Sati quotes the oracle’s line about cookies back at her.
The scene ends with The Oracle’s Smith scaring the other Smiths with manic laughter. Now here’s the interesting thing: She’s the main Smith for the rest of the movie.
You know, because the Oracle’s eyes cannot be taken. Smith absorbs her, thinking he’s taking back control, but he’s being set up. Smith believes he’s won and then sees a vision of himself winning.
Thus the laughter.
Now let’s skip to the climax because it’s time for us to unpack why this rules actually.
Smith and Neo have fought. Neo refuses to go down. Smith rambles nihilistically at him for a bit and accuses Neo of not even knowing what he fights for.
Neo gets up and says he chooses to fight because that’s his choice. He gets beat up again.
Now things get interesting: Smith recognizes the moment from his vision and and says he’s supposed to say something then says, “Everything that has a beginning has an ending, Neo.”
But wait, Smith only ever deadnames Neo. And that’s a quote from the Oracle earlier. And he’s immediately confused. He doesn’t even remember what he said. Everything goes to shit.
And poor Neo, our beloved messiah, realizes at last how ratfucked he’s been. He stands up again and tells Smith that he was right actually and all this has been inevitable. And Smith absorbs him.
Now here we have to dip into speculation. At this moment what I believe happened is The Oracle and the machines collective intelligence had a nice little chat where she held all the cards: The ability to wipe out the matrix on a whim.
Neo had asked for peace and she set the terms of it: Humans given a choice to leave the matrix and a ceasefire that may be expanded on.
All the Smiths explode, and The Oracle is left alone in the crater of the climatic fight and the Matrix begins to reload to an older state.
The Oracle sits in a park and the Architect tries to act like he didn’t just get outplayed. He did. He explains that she’ll get her way and The Oracle meets Sati who created a pretty sunrise for Neo, who maybe we’ll meet again in the future.
Total, perfect, flawless victory.
The Matrix isn’t a hackneyed messiah story. The Matrix is the story of the woman who created the messiah and aimed him at her enemies.
I took a bunch of screenshots for this but honestly just watch the scene.
Neo, to his credit, never really was comfortable in that role. But he committed a grave sin: He followed orders. He acted like a tool so he was used and disposed of as one.
The problem wasn’t choice. It was agency. Neo craved it in his dead end office job, and becoming a hacker-terrorist-messiah was only more free in contrast. Ironically enough, Mr Smith was right about which life had a future.
Smith himself followed a similar arc. He and Neo shared dissatisfaction with their assigned roles in The Matrix, but being dangled freedom and power distracted him from any kind of meaningful improvement in his situation. He was only ever a tool.
But things aren’t so grim everywhere: Morpheus, his faith destroyed after the revelations of the last two movies, ends by asking the first real question he’s asked since he was coopted: “Is this real?”
He wanted the end of the war so bad that getting it made him suspicious. And it should. Councilor Hamann is just as unsure of reality.
These are good signs. Agency is a difficult quality to attain. You can’t be given it. You can’t take it. You have to live it creatively. It must be built within you.
Gnostic Surprise
When I first wrote this a decade ago, I treated The Oracle as a villain. Like she was oppressing the humans she “helped.”
That was silly.
She’s just another person trying to make her way in a context not of her making.
She is the protagonist of the trilogy. Using the tools available to her to make a better world.
The original version of this essay argued that the “real world” was another layer to the matrix in a literal sense as well as in the way described in Reloaded. I still think much of that holds weight: The “real world” shown is great bait for anyone who imaginings themselves a rebel.
Here’s a whole world to rebel about. Never mind that none of it makes sense, it’s evocative! The superintelligence machines couldn’t figure out how to unfuck the atmosphere with hundreds of years? Sure.
But that’s irrelevant.
As Terence Mckenna used to say: You’ve got to have a plan or you become part of someone else’s plan.
And that’s what The Matrix Trilogy is about. Some of the ancillary material (comics, games, sequels) expand on bits and pieces in interesting ways, but this is what the movies were *about*.
Self Determination is a right inherent to all beings, but one that’s easily coopted. You can easily determine yourself out of life if you aren’t careful.
Gnosticism is an old genre of beliefs trying to contend with horrible facts: The brutal Roman persecution of Jews and Christians and the fact their messiahs seemed not to be showing up as promised.
It says the reason things are fucked is because our communities are radically deluded about the basic facts of reality and only by embracing a new set of truths can we bring the universe back on our side.
Historically it’s hard to see much of a sign of this working. But any time you have dualistic morality rooted in good and evil you’ll have the possibility for moral inversion. And as long as you have people doing awful things while claiming to do good, you’ll have plenty of reason for people to go that way.
This is why it’s actually vitally important we get as many people away from that as possible. But that’s another story.
Gnosticism has provoked some of the most violent suppression of any ideology in history. Qanon is as much a gnostic faith as it is apocalyptic and Christian. And it’s now just the mainstream republicans.
So where does that leave us?
The Matrix Trilogy was created with the intention of getting people onboard with the anti-capitalism its writer/directors seem to favor.
But capitalist recuperation is more powerful then metaphor. And it’s instead become the lure in a million decentralized cons to bring people into even more alignment with the “desires” of capital.
Atomized, sure that anything collective action is another ploy to control them, raging against any kind of inconvenience like it’s the Holocaust.
That’s not The Matrix’s fault, but it is one of its consequences.
Art can do incredible things for individuals. At scale it’s… less impressive.
Plato’s Fetish Night
Plato’s cave is one of the foundational myths of “western civilization”. It’s a bit from The Republic and it should sound a little familiar.
A guy’s living in a cave with his society, but he thinks society consists of shadows projected on the cave wall. One day he finds out he’s shackled and realizes everyone is. This alarms him because anyone he points the chains out to think he’s crazy.
Then things get really freaky: His chains aren’t locked. He can just get up and go.
One thing leads to another and he gets out of the cave only to be blinded by the light of the sun, representing Truth and maybe also goodness and beauty. Maybe.
Then he goes back to the cave and tries to get his still-deluded community to know about how fucking bright the sun is.
It doesn’t go well.
It’s about a lot of things: conformity, the nature of second hand knowledge, the need to go and learn for yourself. I don’t want to comment too much more because as Atlantis taught me, there’s always a bunch of extra wrinkles with Plato and I haven’t read this since 2019.
Anyway, if you slap on a pile of special effects, latex, and sunglasses that’s the plot of The Matrix. Also arguably The Hero’s Journey.
And the sequels do something I’m not sure I’ve seen really done elsewhere like this: It imagines an entire society of people who have seen the sun. Then it imagines all of them in their own cave bubble. And another bubble on top of that.
Inside you have the matrix dwellers, clueless and confined. Then you have the machines also trapped in the matrix for some reason including the agents. Outside them you have the redpills and free people of Zion and machines who aren’t trapped in either world. They’re all entrapped within the Architect’s plan for the matrix, which is itself entrapped within The Oracle’s.
Presumably the machines have their own civilization going on pretty much unrelated to all this but we never see it and the only machine intelligence we actually see is Deus ex Machina, the big swarm baby Neo talks to.
So let’s talk about where people end up in this maze. The easiest to place are the Oracle and Architect who both act within the matrix but whose plans act beyond it.
They’re demiurges: Creating a false reality that imprisons humanity.
Next, we’ll take Morpheus’ crew. chilling out in the middle layer sure they’re working to end the war. Except Cypher who realized that was bullshit but only had enough creativity to be a traitor. Sad.
Maybe the most interesting thing about the franchise is that Agents are sentient prisoners in the matrix. Like, why would you do that? It’s so odd. Almost like they were trying to make rogues. And yet none do on their own.
Smith only degrades over the films. In the first movie he just wants to get away from humans, but by the end after absorbing what may be the knowledge of the entire human race (it’s unclear) he’s just going on baby-nihilist rants about how bedtime sucks and everyone’s really selfish, maaan.
Zion is interesting because it’s just another human culture. They’re fully accepting of the reality presented to them even though it doesn’t make a ton of sense. Like, where did they get all those giant machines keeping them alive? They have no ability to produce anything like that. Obviously the machine civilization built them at some point.
Only Councilor Hamann even bothers to notice their dependence. He knows something is fucked but sees no way to move around it so he plays the long game and hopes something changes. One assumes, at least.
Basically everyone else we meet in Zion is a utilitarian character, sadly. Most just as convinced of their own freedom as they were in the matrix.
And this is where walking the path of Neo gets you: Not the everlasting land of milk and honey, but more fashionable seats among the differently deluded.
Neo’s refusal to accept his new role, while admirable, didn’t save himself or Trinity. He only figured out the game in time to win it for The Oracle.
The Merovingian and Persephone are a fun pair, bored out of their minds, and as powerless as they are powerful. Cause and effect, you see. In the end they lacked ambition to get outside the petty role as the rulers of digital hell.
We could go on. It’s definitely fun to look at the cast from this PoV, but you get the point.
You need to know yourself and then to have a plan or you’ll get sucked into someone else’s bullshit.
And there’s no shortage of bullshit to go around.
Alright, I think that’s all I’ve got on this.
Wrapping Up
Feels good getting this out.
We’ll be back to The Dawn of Everything probably on Friday. Then we’ve got some Columbus shit and UFO shit to handle in November.
See you soon.
-S