Inside The Matrix

This week's blog post is merely in response to our class viewing of the 1999 sci-fi thriller The Matrix last Thursday as well as this Booker article on the film.

I believe this is the third time I've seen The Matrix. I remember my dad renting it from Blockbuster when it first came out (remember those?) and the second time was when we were learning about "the hero's journey" in my ninth grade English class. It's been so long since I've seen the film that I there were some parts from Thursday's screening that I didn't even remember that well.

Still, it is quite a captivating and dynamic effort from the Wachowksi brothers that still seems to hold up better than both it's released-within-six-months-of-each-other 2003 sequels The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions. The Booker reading didn't quite add to my takeaway from the film, but it did raise an interesting point on pages 258-59 about how the film industry is seemingly hell bent on exploiting the creativity of filmmakers and distorting our reality only for their personal gain and profits. Otherwise, the only real purpose it served was to point out what elements of other works The Matrix had "borrowed" from.

In class these past two weeks, we have already discussed The Matrix and its relationship to Plato's Cave, Baurilliard and the Simulacrum adnauseum. Rather than retread along those points, I'd like to reiterate what my real "takeaway" from The Matrix was as I had previously mentioned. I took it was a chilling warning of things to come in regards to our own technological advancements.

In class, we mentioned how the The Wachowski brothers had obviously meant the film to be some kind of rant against modern technology and how the filmmakers chose to include shots of phones from the 20s and 30s as well as 50s TV sets (and what looked to me like 80s era computers) in a 90s movie. I thought that choice was deliberately made to supplement the film's message and illustrate how far we have come technologically to that point in time. The Wachowski brothers wanted to show us the then current state of technology so they could bring it to it's logical conclusion by showing scenes of people addressed as "coppertops" wired into an alternate technological reality while the real physical world around them has turned into a wasteland.
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All this time, characters are talking about how this is the "real world" and what we previously experienced as real was just an illusion meant to hide all of this from us. The message of The Matrix may carry more relevance in 2013 than it truly did in 1999. With the rise of both the smartphone industry and social networking platforms as ever advancing billion dollar commodities, people are now carrying around a technology that is consuming them every where they go and easily allowing them to enter into new worlds where their real or true identity carries substantially less meaning. It hasn't quite gotten to the point where we are so wired into this technology that we've adopted it as our one true reality, making us unaware that we are really just living in a vast wasteland (at least not in the most literal sense yet) but I have a feeling that this could be the not too distant future.

I think I'll stop here as I intended to make this blog post shorter and the fact that I have a film paper to write for media ethics right now. See you next week!