This was published in the PANY Bulletin, Spring, 2002. Obviously it was influenced by 9/11. It also refers to a spate of films at that time spurred by virtual reality, a theme that has been taken up again with the release of Avatar. It links with last month’s “Christmas post” in the reference to Anna Freud’s The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense.
“The suspicion and asceticism of the ego are primarily directed against the subject’s fixation to all the love objects of his childhood. The result of this is … that the young person tends to isolate himself; from this time on, he will live with the members of his family as though with strangers.” (A. Freud, 1936 p. 166)
“… you look around, what do you see—businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters, the very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy.” (The Matrix)
Since September 11, there has been much speculation about how young people can become ruthless terrorists, propelled by powerful rage and willing to sacrifice their own lives and the lives of others for a greater cause. Alan Eisnitz gave us a pursuasive model for such a terrorist in the last issue of the PANY Bulletin (Fall, 2001). For another, perhaps we need go no further than our local video store. The vehicle is a film that allows us to have the experience of being God-like, the center of the universe, while seeing large numbers of people as dehumanized enemies.
In 1998 and 1999, a spate of films challenged our belief in the world of our senses. The Matrix, Dark City , The Thirteenth Floor and, to a lesser extent, The Truman Show thrust us into the possibility that the world as we know it is illusory. (In a fifth movie, Being John Malkovitch, characters are able to enter the consciousness of one another.) These films, born of the new technology in “virtual reality” place us in a world which turns out to be an illusion, a perfectly crafted image of a world which is made to seem real to our brains. I cannot say what zeitgeist spawned films from different countries and different perspectives that nevertheless converged on the same point, a distrust of perceptual reality. In these films, the hero is a single man with few or no friends or family, seeking a woman’s love and, at some point gifted with God-like powers to create or change his world.
The most popular and best known of these films is The Matrix. It is unlike the others in that it is most pointedly directed at an adolescent audience. It elaborates a fantasy that addresses a particular adolescent issue, the need to remove oneself enough from the objects and values of childhood to be able to develop an independent identity. The Matrix creates a world that justifies complete distrust and alienation from the world of the older generation.
In The Matrix, human beings have been defeated by the machines they created and converted into batteries to supply energy for the machines. The humans live as virtual fetuses, attached to devices that drain their energy and kept alive through an illusory existence in a virtual reality world of 1999—a computer net called “the Matrix”—maintained and guarded by their captors. The film’s metaphorical message is quite obvious. Like the characters caught in the illusory Matrix, we, too are merely existing in our safe lives of conformity to a society which drains our creative energies. The fear and wish of being infantilized, drained and robbed of identity can occur in any phase of life. For adolescents it is central to their developmental challenge of leaving the comfort of family and childhood to prepare to enter the adult world.
The Matrix begins and ends with a telephone conversation. (Anyone who has been around a teenager recently will find the emphasis on telephones ironically fitting.) We hear the conversation, but see numbers on the screen aligned in a matrix, the film’s symbol for impersonal control. The conversation is about the film’s hero, who is under observation. It prepares us to see him as special, the center of attention, even before we know his identity.
Man’s voice: “You like him, don’t you. You like watching him.”
Woman’s voice: “Morpheus believes that he is the one.” The conversation ends as she realizes the call has been traced.
In fact, as the first scene opens, the police are descending on a young woman in an abandoned hotel at night. The police are notably middle aged. One or two look too old for the job. A car pulls up to the site and three agents step out. They suggest FBI or CIA, with a sinister aura. They are clone-like, almost identical in appearance and identical in dress, with black suits, sunglasses and coiled wires behind one ear. The agents are well dressed middle aged men, seemingly representatives of conservative Republican corporate America. They chastise the graying police lieutenant for sending his men in, telling him the orders to surround her and stay out were for the police’s protection, to which he answers, “I think we can handle one little girl.” This is an intergenerational battle.
The “little girl,” Trinity, displays superhuman agility and speed as she wipes out several of the policemen, at one point outrunning their bullets, then escapes the pursuing agents, making a huge dive from a roof through a small window of another building. (The chase across the rooftops looks very much like the rooftop chase in the opening scene of Virtigo.) She eventually reaches a pay phone and disappears just before the agents can crush her and the phone with a truck. She gets away, but we learn that the agents have an informant who has told them that the rebel group’s next target is someone named “Neo.”
“Neo” is a screen name. At work, and to the adult world, he is Thomas Anderson. To the shared world of computer hackers, he is Neo. We sense that he is a loner, with no hint of ties to family or friends. Like his fellow protagonists in the other virtual reality films, Neo seems to have no one to mourn when he leaves his illusory world. He is introduced to us in a familiar adolescent pose, with earphones over his head, asleep in front of his computer.
He lives in what looks like a single room apartment, surrounded by books and electronic equipment with the computer at the center. Something wakens him, and as he wakens he sees letters forming on the computer screen, “Wake up, Neo. The Matrix has you … “. The computer puts him to sleep and the computer wakes him up. Computers are the vehicle to wake up, to find the truth, and the vehicle to sleep, to hide the truth. This is fitting in that the computers that absorb adolescents in isolated activity also connect them to a world of knowledge as well as to their friends. Technology is the enemy of individuality and creativity, the enemy of man; but, it is also the vehicle of creativity and individuality, the tool that defines man.
As Thomas Anderson, Neo works in a cubicle and is harangued by his boss for coming late to work:
“You have a problem with authority, Mr. Anderson. You believe that you are special, that somehow the rules do not apply to you. Obviously, you are mistaken. This company is one of the top software companies in the world because every single employee understands that they are part of a whole.” (my italics)
We could as easily imagine these words coming from a hard-headed assistant principal or college dean speaking to a rebellious student. It is the gauntlet over which the film will be fought. The rebellious young man will overcome authority, prove that he is special and that the rules do not apply to him. He will establish his unique identity. He will not be part of a whole. But he will seek membership and a special place in a counterculture group.
This is close to a family romance fantasy. Neo will find a new father who loves him as a special son. He has been searching for a mysterious rebel known as Morpheus, a terrorist to the control freak guardians of the Matrix. When they speak to one another, Morpheus tells him, “You are the one, Neo. You see, you may have spent the last two years looking for me, but I’ve spent my entire life looking for you.”
Morpheus is an older man, with a deep resonant voice, who nevertheless has the style and swagger to serve as a modern day guru for the younger generation. Neo meets him in a gothic mansion. Morpheus has a large, square shaped shaved head, reflecting sunglasses and a long leather coat. He speaks slowly with careful articulation. He appeals to Neo’s discomfort, drawing him in:
“Let me tell you why you’re here. You’re here because you know something. What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You felt it your entire life, that 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.”
He tells Neo about the Matrix, now directly appealing to all of us as well, emphasizing aspects of our society that control us and limit our thinking, for the adolescent, vehicles of control from the adult world.
“You can see it when you look out your window, or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth. … That 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.”
He offers Neo a pill to help him escape from the Matrix, using drug culture imagery of Alice, Through the Looking Glass and the white rabbit, then entering into epistemological questions that might arise late at night in college dorms.
“Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world?”
In “the real world”, we see a naked, hairless Neo escaping from a mechanical cocoon, one of many, disattached from cables and brought to Morpheus, Trinity and their small rebel band. He is told that it is about two hundred years forward in time, that the world of 1999 in which he believed was an illusion created by his machine/computer captors.
In keeping with this adolescent rebellion into romance fantasy, all the rebels are known by single word “screen names”—Morpheus, Trinity, Cypher, Tank, Apoc, Mouse, Switch, Dozer. They have removed themselves from family names that are associated with the repressive Matrix. They are mostly young men and women led by the somewhat older, but stylized Morpheus. These rebels have found a way out of the hypnotic spell of the Matrix. They live in a real world which is dark, lonely and dangerous, traveling in some sort of ship that is continually being sought after by destructive machines. We are told that there are a small number of free human beings living in hiding in a city which is their last refuge from the machines.
But they have not abandoned the virtual reality world of their captivity. Paradoxically, they seem to revel in it, having learned that through their minds they can manipulate it to perform superhuman feats, much as young people learn to master the virtual reality world of the computerized games they play. We can vicariously enjoy the power of controlling the parameters of a virtual reality world. They create their own weapons, develop martial arts skills that carry into the realm of dodging bullets and, ultimately, changing the fabric of the world. They do battle with the enemy, the clone-like agents, guardians of the Matrix.
They are all special, but Neo has been chosen as most special of all, not merely a chosen son for Morpheus, but a Christ-like figure who alone can save humanity from its shackles, and a reincarnation of a hero from the past. In another indirect reference to the division between generations, Morpheus explains to Neo why he had to remove him out of the Matrix despite the fact that Neo was too old not to be shocked by it. Morpheus tells Neo,
“When the Matrix was first built, there was a man born inside who had the ability to change whatever he wanted, to remake the Matrix as he saw fit. It was he who freed the first of us, taught us the truth. As long as the Matrix exists the human race will never be free. After he died, the Oracle prophesized his return, that his coming would hail the destruction of the Matrix, end the war, bring freedom to our people. There are those of us who have spent our entire lives searching the Matrix looking for him. I did what I did because I believe that search is over.”
Morpheus and his crew teach Neo to control the Matrix, to develop fantastic martial arts skills, much like children learn to master such moves in their complicated computer games. The revolutionary rhetoric quoted earlier was part of that training, designed to alienate Neo from his past attachments. Morpheus walks with Neo down a crowded city street, telling him,
“The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you’re inside, you look around, what do you see—businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters, the very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged, and many of them are so inured, so dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it.”
This indoctrination prepares us as well as Neo for later scenes in which he and Trinity kill scores of people, security guards, policemen and soldiers, with no more feeling than if they were shooting figures in an arcade game.
Finally, Morpheus takes Neo back into the Matrix to meet the Oracle. On the way, Neo points to the street at a place he used to eat. “They had good noodles. … I have these memories from my life. They never happened. [Neo remembers the world in which he grew up in terms of food, nurturing, but not in terms of people.] What does that mean?”
Trinity answers, “That the Matrix cannot tell you who you are,” confirming the need to give up these childish things and his childhood identity.
Another visitor to the Oracle adds a touch of Eastern philosophy—”Do not try and bend the spoon. That’s impossible. Instead, only try to recognize the truth … There is no spoon. Then you’ll see it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.” The Oracle, a down to Earth woman baking cookies, tells Neo he is not the one, but leaves some wiggle room, “Your next life, maybe.” She also tells him that he will have to choose between Morpheus’s life and his own.
The stakes were spelled out in the tongue lashing Neo received at the beginning of the film. The film confirms the adolescent grandiose fantasy of specialness, unique identity, differentiation from the whole and freedom from authority. Just as “Morpheus” stands for mutability, “Neo” is a new kind of human being who will be a savior. In the quasi-religious mythology of the film, Neo is a special son to Morpheus, a son who will save his father. He is a Christ-like figure, his existence predicted by an oracle. Like Jesus, he is betrayed by one of the group’s members, not for pieces of silver, but for the sensual pleasures of the virtual reality world. Interestingly, this Judas is a somewhat older member of the group, substantiating the idea that you can’t trust anyone over thirty.
Morpheus is captured protecting Neo from the agents. Neo goes back into the Matrix with Trinity to save him in a Mission Impossible type rescue. Using various types of automatic weapons and explosives they kill hundreds of people and create massive destruction as they rescue Morpheus from the agents. Neo displays extraordinary power, dodging bullets and holding up a helicopter while standing on a roof ledge. Finally, with Morpheus and Trinity safely out of the Matrix, Neo is forced to face the agents alone.
He seemingly fights them to a standstill, at one point proclaiming his new identity as the agent holds him in the path of an oncoming subway train and says, “Goodbye, Mr. Anderson.” Neo appears to get strength from this, answering, “My name is Neo” and vaulting himself and the agent up against the roof of the train tunnel.
But after a furious chase, Neo enters a room, looking for a phone to achieve his escape, and is confronted by an agent with a gun. He is shot several times, sinking to the floor in the Matrix world while his body goes into arrest in the rebel ship outside the Matrix. It appears that they have killed him. In the ship, Morpheus looks aghast, saying “It can’t be.” In the world of the Matrix, the agents check his pulse and declare, “He’s gone.” Once again, the agent says, “Goodbye, Mr. Anderson!”
But Trinity does not give up hope. Holding his limp body in the rebel ship, she tells him, “Neo, I’m not afraid any more. The Oracle told me that I’d fall in love and that that man, the man that I loved would be the one. So you see, you can’t be dead. You can’t be because I love you. You hear me? I love you.” She kisses him and he reawakens (Sleeping Beauty in reverse) with newfound power. Now, he is the one who can see through the Matrix, transform reality and defeat the agents with ease. He awakens from the Matrix and kisses Trinity.
Ironically, Neo can achieve his specialness only in the false, corrupted virtual reality world of the Matrix. After he has defeated the agents, sent them running, we hear him addressing them through a phone.
“I know you’re out there. I can feel you now. I know that you’re afraid. You’re afraid of us. You’re afraid of change. I don’t know the future. I didn’t come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it’s going to begin. I’m going to hang up this phone, and then I’m going to show these people what you don’t want them to see. I’m going to show them a world without you. A world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible. Where we go from there, is a choice I leave to you.”
Neo leaves the phone booth from which he has made the call, looks at the unknowing people in the street around him, and flies high into the sky. As the credits begin, we hear the opening words of a song, “Rage against the machine!” As the song goes on, the singer screams out “Wake up, wake up!”
But this breaking of the rules is possible only in the world of virtual reality, the world of the Matrix. True freedom in the terms of this film is to be outside the Matrix, living in a real world in which the laws of physics must be accepted and obeyed. If true freedom is disillusionment, then it should also include giving up our narcissistic fantasies engendered by the world of virtual reality. This contradiction is consistent with the ambivalence of adolescent narcissism, embodying the desire to see through the illusions of the adult world while holding onto grandiose narcissistic fantasies. The real world of The Matrix is barren and cold. Neo is one of a small, desperate band of humans living in a very hostile world. They eat bland food and are surrounded by cold metallic walls, not to mention the frightening machines that pursue them. It reflects the loneliness of an adolescent who is forced to disown the world he has known in order to free himself from his childhood attachments, a process that in the film allows him to ignore the humanity of his fellow humans, to become a terrorist. Ironically, the film’s happy ending with a God-like hero amongst strangers is a further reflection of that loneliness.
Freud, A. (1966 [1936]) The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense. New York: International Universities Press