The Contagion of the Real

On the other hand there are certain things which are a bit more troublesome and less easy to dismiss. Why, in all of the talking that goes on at the beginning of the film, is there such a stiff formality? This is especially apparent in Morpheus, but to a lesser degree is present in Captain Niobe, in Commander Lock, and Councillor Hamann as well. To consider it as merely bad acting seems insufficient, especially when compared to other incidents of unusual utterances. Such an overly formal delivery usually suggests some sort of artifice. Is that what is going on here? The character Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation was an android, an artificial being. He was written so that he was unable to utter contractions such as "can't," "don't," "won't." This gave him an overly formal demeanor which denoted artifice, in this case a literal, and not just social, artifice. Is there something similar going on with Morpheus, who also does not employ contractions? With so little to go on, we have only a nagging suspicion. Moreover, there are two other incidents later on in The Matrix Reloaded that fuel these suspicions. It makes a good deal of sense to represent the inhumanity of the Twins by having them speak in a monotone unaffected by any inflection (rather like Agent Smith), but why is the Merovingian such a bad Frenchman? Though he says he has sampled all of the world's languages, like all of its wines, and he has elected French as his very favorite, why does he perform it so badly, in a caricature of a Frenchman? The caricature is, in fact, doubled, since Lambert Wilson, the actor who plays the Merovingian, is perfectly fluent in this language, yet parodies a terrible Americanized "French accent." We are aware, of course, that the Merovingian is a construct. Must we presume that all such constructs are marked by some form of artificial speech? What are we to think of Morpheus, then? Especially after that strange incident in the hallway of the "programmer's back door" to the Matrix where at one moment we see Morpheus struggling against the penetration of two Agent Smiths, who have him pinned against the wall, as his surface is corrupted by a black, oily, sheen, and in the next, as Neo calls his name, he is whole again? Has something happened here? One learns to be a bit wary when the camera lingers a little too long or passes over something a little too quickly. Well, for all that, it may just be a bit of distraction, an easy way to instigate a little more tension. We will see.

Repetition and the Repressed Algorithm

. . . choice no longer concerns a particular term, but the mode of existence of the one who chooses. . . ." - Gilles Deleuze

Deleuze is alluding to Pascal's wager: the problem is not that of choosing between the existence or the nonexistence of God, but between the mode of existence of one who believes in God and the mode of existence of one who does not. Between these, a great number of modes of existence come into play, such that choice covered as great an area as thought itself, since it went from nonchoice to choice, and was itself formed, as Deleuze says, between choosing and not choosing. This is, in its outward shape, an appropriate conundrum for Neo:

"So. . . the problem is choice?"

In The Matrix Neo was presented with a fairly simple choice: between illusion and the real, symbolized by blue and red pills; like Alice, he wanted both, chose one, and got to look behind the mirror. But now things have gotten a bit more complicated, and the quaint illogical logics of the looking-glass world have given way to more complex chaotic conditions. Neo, who is both human and construct, is "overwritten," contaminated with code, defined as a recursive algorithm which, regardless that it rests on a (still) human substrate, is programmed to crash and reboot the Matrix. He is informed that this is not the first time - more like the fifth or sixth - that this has happened, and that the process becomes more refined with every iteration (it is still a problem of technical reproducibility in a sense). There have been clues all along; Neo asks the Oracle why she would invite him to (choose to) sit when she already knew what he would do. The Merovingian had been expecting him. So had the Keymaker. So had the Architect. Is the possibility of choice a real choice? For all of the choices that he thinks he has made, Neo finds himself a pawn who in previous iterations has always fulfilled his role as "just another control system." Is there another choice?

Gen-Lock: Picture Control ad infinitum

Memory is the real name of the relation to oneself, or the affect of self on self. . . not that brief memory that comes afterwards and is the opposite of forgetting, but the "absolute memory" which doubles the present and the outside and is one with forgetting, since it is itself endlessly forgotten and reconstituted. - Gilles Deleuze

In the central chamber of the Source Neo confronts the Architect of the Matrix. He is surrounded by tesselated walls of monitors, a sort of inverse Panopticon, and as their conversation goes on images ripple across the surface of multiple screens. They are images of Neo, in a classical mise-en-abyme; not mere copies of a single image but a virtual cacophony of different iterations, images within images within images, all speaking at once, so that it is impossible to choose, to sort out which are identical and which are different. Though there seem to be an infinite number of variants, nonetheless the camera selects one isomorphic counterpart, and zooms in. As the frame of the monitor becomes coextensive with the frame of the screen, there is a digital blip, a residual glitch on the surface of one screen as it momentarily occupies the space of another, and slips into the "present" frame. This glitch on the (conjoined) surface of the screens is like a momentary interference pattern, and it marks the passage from one generation of iteration to another. This occurs three times, punctuating the conversation between Neo and the Architect. It is impossible to determine whether we have witnessed a succession of iterations of this event (which would put us at around the ninth or tenth reboot) or a record of past events.

At a certain point the screens are inhabited by scenes from at least one immediate past (a complex database configuration of scenes from The Matrix) which serve as liminal memory traces or mnemonic markers (flashbacks). At other points there are apparently random images, the evidentiary noise of the world, displayed on the monitors, and, near the end of the conversation (which is intercut with the events leading up to Trinity's fall) there is a contemporaneous monitoring of Trinity as she fights with the Agent (real-time surveillance), which slips proleptically into the future, both a foreshadowing of what is to come and a recollection of the various memory traces which have prefigured this event. (It is possible that there are some proleptic foreshadowings of The Matrix: Revolution, though we have no way of knowing at this time.)

Neo makes his choice, and moves toward the door that will take him to Trinity. Is it the same choice that he has made previously, or is it different? Or is it both?

Choice is a perennial theme in the world of the Matrix. So too is the notion of interpretation, that a sign or event may be interpreted in a variety of ways, dependingupon local conditions, and that those conditions in turn may change. On two occasions a very specific phrasing of this problematic has occurred, first between Morpheus and Niobe, and then between Niobe and Lock: "Some things never change . . . and some things do."

...and so...

In the end The Matrix Reloaded is irresolute and problematic, if at times quite pleasurably so. It is open-ended and impressionable, and a bit like rolling a ball of wax around in your fingers until it warms and softens, and then rolling it across the floor: all manner of things are caught up on the surface. It is too early to determine whether it will successfully mediate and integrate The Matrix and The Matrix: Revolution into a coherent whole, and so in a sense it is too early to make any serious attempt at an aesthetic or critical evaluation. For now, at least for me, it remains fragmentary and incomplete, and full of promise, and therefore impossible to tell. But I like that; I like that it admits a variety of readings, more than it can ever consummate or account for; I like the details, and that they remain suggestive, open and implicative. With some provisions (noted above) I like the look of it, and the overall sense. I like that characters are sometimes just hollow textual markers, taking up time and space until they turn into something else, or have something more interesting to do. I like that it is loose enough that one can still think though it, tamper a bit, and tease out some unexpected and novel configurations. There are some moments of startling clarity and brilliance, and I like those. I like that it is, for a commercial film, not so easy to consume, in spite of all of the hype and spectacle. I like that it absorbs so many interpretations, and yields what it does by demanding a certain index of labor. And I like that it can go on for a bit longer . . .

In the sequels to The Matrix, we shall undoubtedly learn that the very "desert of the real" is generated by another matrix. - Slavoj Zizek

---------------

Notes

(1) Though we have no way of knowing it in this moment, everything in the scene-- lighting, color schema, architecture-- is introduced here as a proleptic foreshadowing not only of the site of the culminating "real" event, but also in order to position subsequent flashback events, variants of the same scene, as analeptic memories: ours as well as Neo's. Between the prolepsis of the initial sensory impression - cognition, or foresight - and the culminating analepsis of recognition, seeing organizes and creates perception. Much of The Matrix Reloaded depends upon this. Unconscious proleptic elements pass by in filmic perception until they are caught in an analeptic moment of recognition, where all of their latent force of signification is sutured to the present via memory. These are subtle, but quite common elements of cinema/media artifacts, or foreshadowings, and there are many examples (e.g., The Terminator; Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Ghostbusters I & II, Blade Runner, Alien I-IV, and in films by Hitchcock, De Palma, Roeg, etc.) Of course one of the major indexical signs employed in the Matrix to indicate where one is, is costume: if people sport the coolest, most intense fashions, they are within the communal fantasy of the Matrix.

(2) It would be quite interesting to address other related media artifacts such as The Matrix Revisited, Animatrix, or the new Matrix game in this respect, as variant foreshadowings of the 'possible worlds' of the Matrix.

(3) In its use of a static, almost fixed image to indicate extreme acceleration, The Matrix Trilogy is indebted to an odd set of forebears: somewhere between Samuel Edgerton's high-speed photonics and Steve Austin, the Six-Million Dollar Man played by actor Lee Majors on the Seventies science fiction TV show, we naturalized the representation of temporal attenuation and dilation by the appearance of their opposites. The Six-Million Dollar Man introduced a recognizeable phonic trace in the soundtrack as an index of temporal or physical anomaly, and Edgerton's photographs gave access to an invisible and minute world by the capture of its imperceptible passage. Certainly there is debt to Marey, and Muybridge and other early chronophotographers as well, and just as surely to the domestication of the "instant replay" in organized commercial sports coverage.

(4) In this instance the flashback is also a memory-trace for the spectator, as we are inscribed into Neo's point of view, swiftly dislocated from our voyeuristic disposition into a premonitory anxiety. This flashback is a fragment or variant of the very first flashback, and so functions as a recognition (analepsis) of an earlier, but undefined, cognition (prolepsis). The structure of prolepsis/analepsis is a very important organizational device throughout The Matrix and The Matrix Reloaded.

(5) See: Evelyn Fox Keller, "Situating the Organism between Telegraphs and Computers," in The Point of Theory: Practices of Cultural Analysis, ed. Mieke Bal and Inge E. Boer, [Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press] 1994. Keller cites the Progress Report of the Air Defense Systems Engineering Committee, dated May 1, 1950 as introducing the first definition of "system' in modern technical usage, which serves as well as an equally valid prototypical definition of a cyborg: " . . . What then are organisms? They are of three kinds: animate organisms which comprise animals and groups of animals, including men; partly animate organisms which involve animals together with inanimate devices such as is the [Air Defense System]; and inanimate organisms such as vending-machines. All these organisms possess in common: sensory components, communication facilities, data analyzing devices, centers of judgement, directors of action, and effectors, or executing agencies. Organisms also have the power of development or growth....moreover, they require to be supplied with material....nearly all organisms can sense not only the outside world, but also their own activities....it is the function of an organism to interact with and alter the activities of other organisms, generally to achieve some defined purpose...." This description might easily serve as a blueprint for the worlds of The Matrix.

© 2003 by Thomas Zummer

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