The matrix is a computer generated dream world.
Built to keep us under control.
In order to change a human being, into this. The point
of the Matrix, is probably to raise questions
about our world, it's to make us think about
our own world in slightly different ways and
maybe to make us ask questions about what
the real limits and bounds on our own behaviors
are. You see the scene at the end of the first
film when everyone is moving around in a sort
of trance-like way and Neo seems to be the
only one that in that sense is awake. That
notion of awakeness is to me more like a social
and political notion. I don't look at the
story of the Matrix as being literally a story
of man versus technology. It's much more about,
the robots and the machines represent rigid
thinking, institutionalized control, which
people generally allow themselves to be subjected
to.
You have a social critique of the outside, dialectical materialism sort of Marx filtered
through Cornel West but the irony is is that
in the Matrix people are the means of production,
eventually. This great symbol, of people being
batteries while they sleep their bodies are
actually batteries that power the city of
the robots and this whole mechanical society
it's a very powerful symbol. This people in
their completely asleep to what's going on
around them are exploited to that extent.
They are giving up their very life force to
run the society in a lot of ways. When we
become passive consumerists we are surrendering
our life force.
You are a slave Neo, like everyone else you were born into bondage.
Born into a prison that you cannot smell or
taste or touch. A prison for your mind...
The only thing that we know for certain is
that nothing is certain. And that idea goes
back in some form to Socrates. Socrates was
famous for saying that he didn't know in particular
what virtue was and he wasn't sure that anybody
did, and in one place he says perhaps only God knows this.
Socratic wisdom famously is
knowing that you do not know and knowing the limits of things.
This recognition of the
limits of our knowledge seems to be foundational for beginning to remedy that condition.
There's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is but it's there.
Like a splinter
in your mind. Driving you mad. It is this
feeling that has brought you to me.
The Matrix
succeeds in in sucking in the viewer precisely in the same way that the Allegory of the Cave
sucks in the reader. The allegory of the cave
appears in the central books of Plato's Republic.
We discover that there are prisoners who have
been bound from infancy to a single place
in a dark underground cavern. What they see
is the interior of a cave wall. And on it
are projected shadowy images from a fire behind
them. These prisoners don't know they're prisoners
don't think they're prisoners. This is the
only reality that they've ever known. This
level of reality Plato and his mentor Socrates
equate to the level of reality at bottom.
The life you've led is not in fact the totality of what is possible for you and if you could
release yourself from bonds you don't even
see you would then be able to see the world
as it truly is.
Now similarly, we have Neo's situation in the Matrix. We have Trinity and
Morpheus reaching out to Neo bringing him
through his own choice into being unchained
or in this case, unplugged.
"What does that mean?"
"It means buckle your seatbelt Dorothy,
because Kansas is going bye-bye."
