Exploring the Matrix: Visions of the Cyber Present - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312313586 ISBN 13: 9780312313586

Publisher: St. Martin's Press, 2003

Synopsis

It is the beginning of the twenty-first century, and we are living on the cusp of change. Reality has already spawned one alternate state, and for many people virtual reality is now where they are most at home. But what happens when virtual worlds become indistinguishable from what we consider to be the real world? When you wake up from a dream, how do you know that you are not still dreaming? And if the reality we're in is virtual, who is doing the programming?

These questions, and many more like them, spin effortlessly out of the box-office mega-hit The Matrix. More than just a computer-aided shoot-'em-up, more than just the latest cinematic expression of cyberpunk angst, The Matrix presented layer upon layer of challenging explorations of what the true nature of reality might be, and why this should (or should not) be important to us.

Exploring the Matrix presents eighteen thoughtful and though-provoking essays on what the film had to say and exactly how it was said. Here you will discover the long and fascinating history of some of the themes set forth in the Wachowski Brothers' landmark film, why they are important, how they have been explored n the past, and their implications for the immediate future of human society. The true nature of reality in our current cyber-age is not a rhetorical question, but rather one that needs to be answered as we move closer to seamless virtual scenarios, accessible online, in video games... and perhaps ultimately as the result of uploading software to an implanted chip in the brain.

You can take the blue pill and stay in the dream, unaware of your status, or take the red pill and see just how deep the rabbit hole goes.

About this title

About the Author

Karen Haber is the author of eight novels, including Star Trek: Voyager - Bless the Beasts; coauthor of Science of the X-Men; and editor of the Hugo-nominated essay anthology celebrating J.R.R. Tolkien, Mediations on Middle-earth. Her short fiction has appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and many anthologies. She reviews art books for Locus magazine and profiles artists for various publications, including Realms of Fantasy. Haber lives in Oakland, California, with her husband, Robert Silverberg.

Robert Zohrab is an Australian digital artist and designer whose work appears on book covers and in corporate brochures. His clients include the Manta recording company, for which he has designed album covers and promotional material, and ibooks, inc., for which he has supplied cover image for new trade editions of Brian Aldiss's landmark Helliconia triology, among others.

Darrel Anderson, a digital-art pioneer, emerged from the underground comix scene to create one of the earliest and longest-running art Web sites, braid.com. With members of the BRAID collective and PCA Graphics, he created the animated CGI climax of the 1995 film Johnny Mnemonic. The Science Fiction Channel Web site features forty-eight of his images, and he is profiled in Fantasy Art of the New Millennium II by Dick Jude. His artwork has received top honors in numerous international awards, including Pixar's call for images and MacWorld's Macintosh Masters competition. Anderson actually works either side of the screen, as both programmer and artist. One of his latest developments, GroBoto, is an interactive art tool intended to allow children to explore their creativity, and artists to further theirs. Anderson's work can be seen and sampled at braid.com

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One
To make The Matrix cost over sixty million dollars. I don't know if you've ever hung out much with people commanding dozens of millions of dollars. Once I attended the World Economic Forum, where the planet's ultra-rich people flock in large crowds. This event took place in New York, in the jittery, heavily armed post-9/11 period, and the vibe there was very, very Matrix indeed.

There were swarms of armed bodyguards, marbled halls with swishing bronze elevators, glum, impassive federal agents, expensive eyewear, Forum groupies in sexy tailored costumes, the Secret Service in black bulletproof SWAT gear.... Very intense, very out-there, very designery, very Wachowski Brothers.

The World Economic Forum is not supposed to be scary. It's a philanthropic event. The Forum is all for the public good, and the worldwide betterment of the human condition. That is the public rationale, at least. That is the Blue Pill version, as it were.

However, you don't have to be a Seattle rioter or Naomi Klein to get it about the World Economic Forum's extreme disconnection from the man-in-the-street. The attendees there ... they were uniformly courteous and scarily intelligent people, but they bear just the same relationship to a middle-class American that a middle-class American bears to an illiterate Venezuelan campesino. They are from a different level of reality. They dwell in a seamless world of private jets to the Waldorf-Astoria, where public space is the eight feet between the doorman and the limo.

Much the same goes for the galactic gulf that separates The Matrix from its street-level inspirations in underground comix and sci-fi paperbacks. I doubt that anyone understands this better than Larry and Andy Wachowski. Somehow, and I give them every credit, they were able to metabolize the Hollywood red pill and leap to the dizziest levels of the military-entertainment complex. I've never met the Wachowski Brothers, but I have every confidence that they get it. Otherwise, two guys with their exquisite design sense would never choose to wear Converse sneakers and backwards baseball caps.

Luc Besson directed the science-fiction film The Fifth Element, a film that eats at the same cafeteria with The Matrix, feasting at a global gumbo of counterculture sources. Luc Besson was at the World Economic Forum sitting at a table behind me, and he was the worst-dressed guy in the Waldorf-Astoria. Luc was so bad-boy, so confrontational, so in-your-face, that it was indescribable in any language other than French. And Luc really belonged there, that was the good part. When those Swiss captains of industry saw Luc in his four-day beard and bulging monocolor T-shirt, it cheered them all up. They sort of glanced at him sidelong and whispered. They were honored, really.

The Matrix may have budgeted for sixty-eight million, but for an ailing Warner Bros. it brought in way over two hundred million, and that was before the sequels. That was before the plastic action figures, the animé cartoons, comic books, and the thriving online Matrix cult groups. I enjoyed the hell out of that movie, and five years later I was still thinking about it fondly, and finally getting around to making this arch critical assessment. Man, a record like that speaks for itself.

Contemporary movie people, especially supremely rich and powerful ones like Steven Spielberg, they really get it about the homely authenticity of Levi's jeans and white tube-socks. Because they know all about how to dress very attractive people very attractively. They've got it down to a literal science, they can measure the colored glint off polyvinyl with digital light meters. Why would movie pros ever dress like their actors? If you're a director and you dress up like a star, it's like confessing to your colleagues that you swallowed the baited hook.

Therefore, in The Matrix's "real world," that world where giant Geof Darrow drawings writhe their tentacles and harvest babies like cantaloupes, all the Matrix heroes, slinky Trinity, delphic Morpheus, they have to wear collarless, ragged, functional clothes. They eat oatmeal and work overtime. Just like the Wachowskis do.

Whenever they leap through a telephone into the Matrix, however, they instantly become rich glamour people. They've got limos, couture clothes, and fully booked agendas. They've got bodyguards-actually, they are their own bodyguards, because they're also comic-book superheroes.

Their furniture shows up out of nothingness, as if they'd Web-clicked it off Design Within Reach. They have an infinite number of guns ... an elite education comes in a plug-in cartridge ... they are regal, kinky aristocrats.

What little we learn about these people in the early part of the film suggests that they are fanatical terrorists. Morpheus is an international fugitive. Trinity is a crooked hacker who broke an IRS code. But they're not outlaws, not really.

Because they never have to rob, swindle, corrupt, bribe or steal. They don't take drugs, have psychotic episodes, or do jail time, the homely, everyday things that most actual criminals do routinely.

They're not criminals, hackers or terrorists. They're masters of illusion. So if the Matrix people have a functional equivalent in contemporary society, it's not the Cosa Nostra or the Baader-Meinhof gang. It's Hollywood producers. Because they possess enormous resources, all out proportion to the flimsy nature of their enterprise. They can create and deflate vast fantasies at will. And yet, their lives and careers are in constant danger. Just like Warner Bros. executives!

As Howard Waldrop once said, all science fiction is really about science fiction. Movies tend to be really about movies. Movies are what movie people find most interesting in life. For real movie people, even bad movies are magic. Any act of cinema is magic for movie people, just like movies were magic when Méliès, the French stage magician, was inventing them.

Let's consider the justly famous dojo sequence in The Matrix. A dojo is not a place where people really fight. A dojo is a stage; it's a place to train and mimic fighting. In this scene, Morpheus is teaching Neo how to fight. But what he is really teaching Neo is how to think about the art of violence. And the real freight being hauled here is two young, breakout American filmmakers teaching Hollywood how to film action sequences.
You see, you don't need Hollywood stunt doubles! Not at all! That's just habit! Instead, you hire top-flight kung-fu action people from distant, global-economy Hong Kong, to fully train the actors so that they can act while they're fighting!

And now, check out this "bullet time" part where we freeze stuff just like a Marvel Comics two-page center spread! Watch and learn: now we wheel around it with this elaborate circle of synchronized cameras. See what we just did there? You think that was air we were breathing? Stop trying to make action films and make one!

The Wachowski Brothers are too young to be real cyberpunks. Besides, they work in the 0wrong industry. They do however have one great commonality with cyberpunk science fiction. They can't resist opening up the fabric of their artwork to stuff in every single idea they have ever had in their entire lives. In cyberpunk critical diction, this practice is known as "eyeball kicks." This term was first coined for the graphically overloaded comics pages of MAD magazine, so it is a cultural contribution of comics to science fiction. Blade Runner had it. The Matrix has it in spades.

H. G. Wells declared there should be only one weird element in every scientific romance. Wells was an author in a solemn Edwardian world that would allow itself only one or two really weird elements. Any more than that, and you weren't entertaining anymore; instead, you were raving and blaspheming.

The Wachowskis are native sons of the 1990s. It is impossible for them to think in such a limited way. If they ever found a world with just one freaky thing going on, they would assume they were in a cemetery.

In The Matrix, everything is going on. It's been blenderized and synthesized. It's tossed like brain salad.

First and most importantly, the film's got pop appeal elements. All kinds of elements: suicidal attacks by elite special forces, crashing helicopters, oodles of martial arts, a chaste yet passionate story of predestined love, bug-eyed monsters of the absolute first water, fetish clothes, captivity and torture and daring rescue, plus really weird, cool submarines.
Some of my favorite films are made entirely of clichés: Casablanca, Every Which Way but Loose, The Prisoner of Zenda. They're clichés, yes, but they have broken free of that problem, because the clichés slide through the narrative at refreshing orthogonal angles. In Casablanca the clichés are always tipping their hats at each other, "Hello war movie trope; pleased to meet you, women's weepy riff; how do you do, police procedural." They backflip from cliché to archetype. They generate tremendous narrative power. The clichés no longer tire us in these movies; they exhilarate.

The Matrix is a postmodern philosophical movie in which fragments of philosophy do this Casablanca cliché dance. There's Christian exegesis, a Redeemer myth, a death and rebirth, a hero in self-discovery, the Odyssey, Jean Baudrillard (lots of Baudrillard, the best parts of the film), science-fiction ontological riffs of the Philip K. Dick school, Nebuchadnezzar, the Buddha, Taoism, martial-arts mysticism, oracular prophecy, spoon-bending telekinesis, Houdini stage-show magic, Joseph Campbell, and Godelian mathematical metaphysics.

This is a real mess. It would seem like a farrago if not for the film's premiere genius move, which is to reveal th...

Edition details

• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0312313586
• ISBN 13: 9780312313586
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272
• Editor: Haber Karen