FILM COMMENT HOME
TABLE OF CONTENTS
BUY THE NEW ISSUE!
ART & INDUSTRY BY AMY TAUBIN:
NEW: FATIH AKIN'S HEAD-ON AND DANIEL BURMAN'S LOST EMBRACE
ONLINE EXCLUSIVES
SIGN UP FOR
E-NEWS
READ MARCH E-NEWS
FORUM
ARCHIVE
NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL
WALTER READE THEATER
FILMLINC.COM HOME
COMING IN March/April 2005:
Dustin Hoffman
Bulle Ogier by Gary Indiana
Hirokazu Kore-eda by Chuck Stephens
Amitabh Bachchan by David Chute
Lucrecia Martel's The Holy Girl by Kent Jones
And much more
SURFACE TO SURFACE: THE MATRIX REVOLUTIONS
Reviewed by Thomas Zummer
a Film Comment online exclusive
"How would you know the difference . . .?"
-Morpheus,The Matrix, 1999
If The Matrix was about simulation, and The Matrix Reloaded about dissimulation (and there are good arguments for both cases) what isThe Matrix: Revolutions about? This is an interesting question given the complex patterns of intertextuality between the three films. Thomas Anderson, better known by his hacker name Neo, was presented in The Matrix 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. He saw that the world as he knew it was false, a simulation, a copy of everyday life which masked a grim and dystopian reality, that contemporary human beings were little more than batteries, material manufactured and consumed by artificial intelligences, the near victors in an ongoing war between men and machines. Illusion has secured complacency for the greater part of the human race, modeled as the most efficient steady-state production/consumption of power. This requires The Matrix, a virtual-reality simulacrum of the world. From this moment on any and all proleptic suspicions of irreality (of there being, as Neo says, "something wrong with the world") circulate around a complex interplay between simulation and dissimulation. It is an economy of revelation and deferral, where simulation (indistinguishable from reality) is only revealed as having been a simulation when it ceases to simulate, thereby becoming a dissimulation (which is in this moment, ironically, indistinguishable from reality). One only knows a simulation through the "puncturing" of its illusion, that is, in its demise into a dissimulation. It is impossible to know a simulation as a simulation, since it is only re-cognized as such a posteriori. Before that it was real. Neo discovers too, that once one knows that, the only choice to participate in the simulacrum again is through pretense. Pretending (dissimulating, as Baudrillard remarks) leaves the principle of reality intact, whereas simulation threatens the difference between the "true" and the "false," the "real" and the "imaginary." Moreover, the copy predicates its existence, qua copy, upon whatever it submissively imitates. But what is the copy, and what is imitated in The Matrix? This differential ambiguity even more closely shapes the complicities, tensions and resistances between The Matrix and The Matrix Reloaded. Within The Matrix, to pretend is paradoxically to know what is real, and not to pretend is to subject oneself once again to the illusory. Curious. And Curiouser.
To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have
what one doesn't have. One implies a presence, the other an absence. But it is more
complicated than that. . .
-Jean Baudrillard(1)
"Ceci n'est pas un cuiller"(2)
The simulacrum is never what hides the truth - it is truth that hides the fact that there is none;
the simulacrum is true. -Ecclesiastes
"There is no spoon."
-Anonymous, The Matrix, 1999
The shock, both visceral and intellectual, in seeing The Matrix for the first time has to do with our own propensity towards mediations, our presumptions of the ordinariness of the represented cinematic "world" of Neo/Thomas Anderson. In other words, the simulation is already at work on us, and its displacement (by another, or even a succession of subsequent simulations) is both familiar and decidedly unnerving, that is, uncanny. Of course, we get over it quickly ("it's only a movie") and it all becomes another dis/simulation, another pleasurable consumption. And from time to time we are diegetically reminded which is which: torn, dirty sweaters are for the real world, while latex, spandex, shiny leather, and sunglasses demarcate the territories of the simulated. We seem to need these reminders, lest we, like Neo forget the pretense, and find ourselves at the mercy of shadows once again.
There are many intertextual moments that retroactively (as re-cognition) help to ground the narrative present into the established diegetic "world" of The Matrix. At one point in The Matrix Reloaded, just as Neo, with Trinity, Link and Morpheus, is about to board the Nebuchadnezzar to rendezvous with the Oracle once again, he is given a parting gift, "from one of the children" of Zion. It is a crudely beaten and fashioned silver spoon, an analeptic reference to Neo's earliest and most important lesson: that to mistake an image for a reality is a great danger. Other things are happening in this moment. Bane, who has been "possessed" by Agent Smith, is interrupted in his stalking of Neo. We had seen Bane slicing his hand with a blade (a foreshadowing), just before his advance on Neo; Neo receives the spoon, and asks Bane what he wants. Just to wish him luck, he says. Bane's last words in The Matrix Reloaded, are "We'll be seeing you," a lightly disguised promise, a proleptic foreshadow of the coming confrontation with Agent Smith(s). Neo's presence within The Matrix is both pretense and affect, and the interface between these two modes of being is the binding tension between recognition and reflex. He must constantly and vigilantly choose between pretense and illusion. Gravity, velocity, inertia, orientation, force-all of these are a matter of memory: whether fictional or real, manipulable or inviolate, it's the same for us as spectators, for we, too, are left alone in the dark, to engage, believe, or disbelieve, in a world where we are not really there. What we have is our own interface-the cinematic screen-which acquires and displays the same taxonomies of signs, portents, and symptoms as occur within The Matrix.
Echo and Reflection
There are a number of reflections, intricate mimetic symmetries, which occur within and between The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions. The Architect's phrasing of "please" in reference to the Oracle-ironic and dismissive in The Matrix Reloaded - is echoed by the Oracle's repetition of "please" in the same disparaging tone concerning the Architect in The Matrix Revolutions. In both films Agent Smith always appears feet first, a small but constant thing. Bane's voice, his intonation and phraseology, mimics that of Agent Smith who "inhabits" the real world through having parasitized Bane. At one point during the fight scene at the entry to the Merovingian's place, Trinity, calling attention to the mnemonic trace with a glance, repeats the same sort of slow, time-attenuated, pause and kick event as had occurred in The Matrix. The scene that immediately follows, set inside the Merovingian's nightclub, mimics the camera movement and mise-en-scne of the pre-apocalypse dance in Zion, seen in The Matrix Reloaded. Neo, blinded, "sees" Smith as Bane, a reflection of Bane as Smith. The figure of the Oracle, for various reasons, is occupied by two similar, but different, bodies. Is there a complicated symmetry between Neo's blindness and the Merovingian's desire for the eyes of the Oracle? Trinity and Neo are haunted by premonitions; forethought (prometheus) and afterthought (epimetheus) are indistinguishable, time stops, then repeats. The grammar of temporal attenuation and dilation reflect and modify certain moments, making technical and structural patterns salient, reflective and reflexive, between all three films.
"Speed has no privilege over slowness: both fray the nerves, or rather, train them and give them mastery."
-Gilles Deleuze
Images, Figures, Idols: A Reproducible Theogony
". . . .programs hacking programs . . ."
-Neo, The Matrix Reloaded, 2003
With The Matrix Reloaded "something's different" with the world, and a number of symptoms (in the form of glitches) mark the spatio-temporal borders of the "real" as suspect or problematic. It happens now and then; Trinity's mnemonic premonitions are marked by a momentary surface disturbance; Agent Smith's contaminations have an epidemiological origin, a diagnostic semiotics poised between the technical and the biological; the amber-hued fractal anomaly that is Seraph, is clearly perceived by Neo, who subsequently "vanishes" through a "back door" into a "programmer's corridor," emerging to meet the Oracle, who delivers a tacit, intra-cinematic, theory of glitches as any programming artifact which is not doing what is should be doing (and therefore remaining "invisible"). In other words, certain such creatures as now populate The Matrix are failed simulations. By the time we have reached this point there is some dissembling: things are not necessarily as they now seem, either. Strange things have occurred, and will occur, that render the boundaries between the "real world" and The Matrix simulation permeable. Bane has been hacked, and a technical reproduction of Agent Smith is loose in Zion. Neo will "hack" the "real world" to translate his intra-Matrix powers into the world of Zion and machines. Representation is divorced from reference; distinctions between originals and copies are rendered moot; what one had once recognized as a representation no longer represents anything at all, and the space of The Matrix is found to be populated by all sorts of gods and titans, monsters, and men.
Permeability , Repetition, and the "Real"
". . . .what is simulated? Simulation."
-Severo Sarduy
Phantasms, dreams, glimpses of strange things, whether they arise within us, between us, or among the cognitive architectures of the machine-world, are embodied in a recognizable register of supernatural events and paranormal figures. "Ghosts, angels, vampires, werewolves, aliens" (also dreams and delusions, déja vu, prophecy and premonition) all reflect and simulate themselves within and in contradistinction to normal everyday sense-perceptions and experience. But of course the real-world upon which such distinctions between normal and paranormal are modeled is gone, destroyed in the first stages of the war between men and machines. All that remains is a memory-trace, represented within the confines of The Matrix, but common to both exterior and interior worlds (and to that of the audience). There is an elegant economy of signs articulated in the worlds of The Matrix to indicate the presence or impending appearance of the paranormal. Glitches (visible puncturings or destabilizations of the technological index of photographic verisimilitude, inscribed on the surface of the screen), serve to indicate the uncanny, although in these worlds the uncanny is of a decidedly artifactual nature. Such signs and portents are a wonderfully appropriate deus ex machina, since the very machine (cinema, and its subsequent medial forms) is right there before us. Any shimmer or glitch, such as the doubled iteration of the cat, in The Matrix (and again at the end of The Matrix Revolutions), or the blurs and aftershocks of explosions, or various species of technological traces flashing across the screen, all serve to both mark the eruption of the uncanny within the (simulated) worlds, and to ground such effects as being coextensive with, in many instances, multiple diegetic fields.
Whether such territorial markers are supplemented by spoken cues, involuntary memory, or the foregrounded "evidence" of strange goings on as a technical trace in the space of the narrative, it is an effective strategy. It is also the case that this "doubled simulation" has an extradiegetic effect as well, one which is folded seamlessly back into the narrative: any/every lapse in continuity, or lacunae in the mise-en-scène, can be read as a species of glitch, marking something happening within a diegetic space. Such cues readily translate themselves across the cinematic representation of a technically simulated world, producing a kind of "irreality effect," a strange "action at a distance," which operates by placing us, as spectators occupying a present tense and location, into a (possible) sequence of iterations. By giving ourselves over to the conceit of these simulations we are given "evidence" of our investments on our own screens. Any event of this sort occurring on a surface within the narrative is, but for the indexical matter of framing, indistinguishable from any which happens on the surface of the screen that you are watching. Such visible effects are predefined as a transition-cue between one (simulated) world and another so that if the register of the "real" is never "punctured," but always deferred, the simulation of narrative tacitly proposes its exteriority as just another simulation. Resemblance transports across difference. It is within this sort of formation that much of the interest in The Matrix trilogy as an "intellectual action movie," having some relevence for contemporary philosophical discourse comes about. It is here too that, as Slavoj Zizek comments, it becomes a Rorschach test for any and every current "ism," a palimpsest or collage of allusions, any of which may be attached in a variety of ways to a critical/philosophical commentary. This, in turn, has a curious effect on how one reads The Matrix Revolutions, especially in consideration of some of its more egregious lapses in logic and sense.
GO TO PART TWO
