Hacker's paradise
Jan. 10th, 2022 12:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nozomi604“You can be anything, this time around” - Timothy Leary
As its Chinese title, Kingdom of Hackers, implies, The Matrix has always been partly about finding one’s community. It’s a superhero film, but also carries a theme of overcoming alienation, not unlike another 90s speculative-fiction (and latently queer) film, Todd Haynes' Safe.
The Matrix: Resurrections begins with Neo and Trinity re-alienated, plugged into a new version of the Matrix where everyone remembers the last three films' events as a video game. The metafictional aspect is nothing new, especially if you’ve read VALIS or the Illuminatus trilogy; I’m more interested in how it elaborates on and draws out the psychological horror aspect, something that was only touched on in the first film. At one point, there’s a theatre scene where an unraveling Neo watches footage of a younger Neo’s reality unraveling, a recursion that evokes Inland Empire. By then we’ve already watched him try and fail to wake up from his nightmare, and even though we know he has to for the plot to progress, it’s still a tense and scary moment when he finally does.
In the earlier movies, the Matrix looked like a greener version of the real world; here, it’s more subtly off-putting. A little too thin, and a little too fake. Neo’s glitchy, shaky redpill trip may not have the slickness of the first film, but it captures something visceral about the psychedelic experience. And the new Morpheus is a trickster, soft-shoeing out of a toilet stall and nonchalantly reciting dialogue that used to be dramatic. Is he a bad joke, a symptom of mental breakdown, or the light beginning to seep through the cracks?
In some ways, this is a redo of the original movie, and a course-correction for the franchise. I liked that the new Matrix is powered by human brains’ computation, something the Wachowski sisters intended for the first film. And there’s a character, Lexy, who reads as a trans woman; her lines about what Trinity meant to her are some of the most heartfelt in the film. Even so, rewatching the first and second films (and watching the third for the first time), I’m struck by how much this is a pay-off of the ideas promised in the OG trilogy, and a logical follow-up from Revolutions.
Reloaded and Revolutions should’ve been one movie; on their own, they suffer from too much plot getting in the way of the story, as Joe Bob Briggs might say. Still, there are good ideas in them. Revolutions in particular felt like the kind of campy sci-fi flick that I might’ve caught at 1AM on The Movie Channel in the late nineties, and I enjoyed it on that level. I especially liked the rocket launcher-wielding women and their buddies-in-guerrila-warfare relationship, and the glimpse of the world above the black sky. WRT Reloaded, I think it’s interesting that the first film’s body-horror themes recede into the background, making way for free love, ecstatic dancing, and Neo's powers extending into the real world. It’s like the first film was pre-transition and the second was post-transition, or at least transition’s awkward first steps. Now that you’re free, what do you want to do?
The sequels are also a commentary on recuperation, and how the idea of rebelling against control is used to ensure the continued operations of power. Neo's special abilities aren't a bug, they're a bug fix; a way for the Matrix to perpetuate the illusion of freedom by giving humans a cause to rally around and a messiah to follow. Meanwhile Agent Smith, given a taste of freedom by Neo, becomes a sentient virus that feeds off the conflict between humans and machines, ultimately planning to overwrite both worlds. Effectively, he’s the fascist side of the three-way fight between anarchism, the state, and fascism. To me, the masses of identical Smith clones represent something scarier than conformity; they’re populism without ethics, like the Occupy bros who went over to the alt-right.
Neo, however, can’t win this fight. Instead, he has to merge with his opposite force, the machines, which is the one thing Smith fears. More trans subtext, and a case for a politics less based on binary oppositions.
What I loved about Resurrections is that we see the result of this choice. The Synthients are morphologically diverse, from cuddly robots to programs that use nanoswarms to don and doff human guise at will. Just as importantly, their minds are their own. We saw human-machine coexistence once before: in Matriculated, Peter Chung’s contribution to The Animatrix. But the machines there were converts to our side, killers captured and deprogrammed by humans. Here, the machines join on their own terms. Their difference is no longer a source of fear, or a limit that needs to be transcended, but a strength that complements humans. It’s the first sci-fi movie that feels informed by A Cyborg Manifesto and xenofeminism.
Plotwise, the scenes on Io spin their wheels a bit, and Niobe’s character could’ve been handled better. Still, the eco/solarpunk setting is a step forward from the underground bunkers of the second and third films. And can we talk about the politics of Niobe’s speech to Neo? "Zion" failed because it enforced a rigid, ideologically based division? You don’t say.
The later action scenes have been criticized for having low stakes, but I think this was a deliberate choice. Reflecting the film’s feminist consciousness, no one is a sacrifice to anyone else’s mission. There are no redshirts; no character dies. Arguably, no sentient being dies, since the ‘zombies’ are bot swarms created by Smith. In a sense the film gets to have it both ways, but it’s in keeping with the overarcing theme that these conflicts are psychic and emotional, memetic and cultural.
Having said that, I don’t know what to make of the shinkansen scene. I liked its dreamlike visuals (those oversaturated cherry blossoms!), but to depict the only characters observing Covid safety as soulless bots hiding under Asian faces is… not a good look. There was not a mask to be seen in the earlier, San Francisco-set parts. You could argue that those were meant to evoke a 2010s cultural bubble that has now passed, and that the Japanese setting is meant to be a bit closer to our reality. But in a film that stresses interdependence and mutual aid, I found it jarring.
Resurrections isn’t my favorite part of the franchise; that goes to Koji Morimoto’s Beyond, also from The Animatrix. But it’s a more mature and emotionally resonant take on the series, both a return to and improvement on its source.
As its Chinese title, Kingdom of Hackers, implies, The Matrix has always been partly about finding one’s community. It’s a superhero film, but also carries a theme of overcoming alienation, not unlike another 90s speculative-fiction (and latently queer) film, Todd Haynes' Safe.
The Matrix: Resurrections begins with Neo and Trinity re-alienated, plugged into a new version of the Matrix where everyone remembers the last three films' events as a video game. The metafictional aspect is nothing new, especially if you’ve read VALIS or the Illuminatus trilogy; I’m more interested in how it elaborates on and draws out the psychological horror aspect, something that was only touched on in the first film. At one point, there’s a theatre scene where an unraveling Neo watches footage of a younger Neo’s reality unraveling, a recursion that evokes Inland Empire. By then we’ve already watched him try and fail to wake up from his nightmare, and even though we know he has to for the plot to progress, it’s still a tense and scary moment when he finally does.
In the earlier movies, the Matrix looked like a greener version of the real world; here, it’s more subtly off-putting. A little too thin, and a little too fake. Neo’s glitchy, shaky redpill trip may not have the slickness of the first film, but it captures something visceral about the psychedelic experience. And the new Morpheus is a trickster, soft-shoeing out of a toilet stall and nonchalantly reciting dialogue that used to be dramatic. Is he a bad joke, a symptom of mental breakdown, or the light beginning to seep through the cracks?
In some ways, this is a redo of the original movie, and a course-correction for the franchise. I liked that the new Matrix is powered by human brains’ computation, something the Wachowski sisters intended for the first film. And there’s a character, Lexy, who reads as a trans woman; her lines about what Trinity meant to her are some of the most heartfelt in the film. Even so, rewatching the first and second films (and watching the third for the first time), I’m struck by how much this is a pay-off of the ideas promised in the OG trilogy, and a logical follow-up from Revolutions.
Reloaded and Revolutions should’ve been one movie; on their own, they suffer from too much plot getting in the way of the story, as Joe Bob Briggs might say. Still, there are good ideas in them. Revolutions in particular felt like the kind of campy sci-fi flick that I might’ve caught at 1AM on The Movie Channel in the late nineties, and I enjoyed it on that level. I especially liked the rocket launcher-wielding women and their buddies-in-guerrila-warfare relationship, and the glimpse of the world above the black sky. WRT Reloaded, I think it’s interesting that the first film’s body-horror themes recede into the background, making way for free love, ecstatic dancing, and Neo's powers extending into the real world. It’s like the first film was pre-transition and the second was post-transition, or at least transition’s awkward first steps. Now that you’re free, what do you want to do?
The sequels are also a commentary on recuperation, and how the idea of rebelling against control is used to ensure the continued operations of power. Neo's special abilities aren't a bug, they're a bug fix; a way for the Matrix to perpetuate the illusion of freedom by giving humans a cause to rally around and a messiah to follow. Meanwhile Agent Smith, given a taste of freedom by Neo, becomes a sentient virus that feeds off the conflict between humans and machines, ultimately planning to overwrite both worlds. Effectively, he’s the fascist side of the three-way fight between anarchism, the state, and fascism. To me, the masses of identical Smith clones represent something scarier than conformity; they’re populism without ethics, like the Occupy bros who went over to the alt-right.
Neo, however, can’t win this fight. Instead, he has to merge with his opposite force, the machines, which is the one thing Smith fears. More trans subtext, and a case for a politics less based on binary oppositions.
What I loved about Resurrections is that we see the result of this choice. The Synthients are morphologically diverse, from cuddly robots to programs that use nanoswarms to don and doff human guise at will. Just as importantly, their minds are their own. We saw human-machine coexistence once before: in Matriculated, Peter Chung’s contribution to The Animatrix. But the machines there were converts to our side, killers captured and deprogrammed by humans. Here, the machines join on their own terms. Their difference is no longer a source of fear, or a limit that needs to be transcended, but a strength that complements humans. It’s the first sci-fi movie that feels informed by A Cyborg Manifesto and xenofeminism.
Plotwise, the scenes on Io spin their wheels a bit, and Niobe’s character could’ve been handled better. Still, the eco/solarpunk setting is a step forward from the underground bunkers of the second and third films. And can we talk about the politics of Niobe’s speech to Neo? "Zion" failed because it enforced a rigid, ideologically based division? You don’t say.
The later action scenes have been criticized for having low stakes, but I think this was a deliberate choice. Reflecting the film’s feminist consciousness, no one is a sacrifice to anyone else’s mission. There are no redshirts; no character dies. Arguably, no sentient being dies, since the ‘zombies’ are bot swarms created by Smith. In a sense the film gets to have it both ways, but it’s in keeping with the overarcing theme that these conflicts are psychic and emotional, memetic and cultural.
Having said that, I don’t know what to make of the shinkansen scene. I liked its dreamlike visuals (those oversaturated cherry blossoms!), but to depict the only characters observing Covid safety as soulless bots hiding under Asian faces is… not a good look. There was not a mask to be seen in the earlier, San Francisco-set parts. You could argue that those were meant to evoke a 2010s cultural bubble that has now passed, and that the Japanese setting is meant to be a bit closer to our reality. But in a film that stresses interdependence and mutual aid, I found it jarring.
Resurrections isn’t my favorite part of the franchise; that goes to Koji Morimoto’s Beyond, also from The Animatrix. But it’s a more mature and emotionally resonant take on the series, both a return to and improvement on its source.
