New Agism and the Matrix Notes:
QUOTED FROM: http://pages.cthome.net/morrison/mighty/film/bound/matrix/whatis.html:
from Alicia
First of all I want to say I loved the movie. I sat through it with my jaw on the floor,
but not just b/c of the effects, the depth of the
movie shocked the hell out of me and was a welcome surprise.
Ok, so here's my opinion and what I noted.
First you got the mythical references:
Morpheus= god of dreams
Nebuchadnezzar= a prophet that foretold the coming of Christ which fits in nicely with Neo
as Christ figure.
Trinity= That's just obvious. Morpheus is the father, Neo is the son, and Trinity is the
spirit.
Cypher is the Judas figure.
Neo is required to go through a symbolic death and rebirth which is important in many
religions- Christian, Wiccan, Hinduism, etc.
The Sleeping Beauty/Snow White imagery- Trinity woke Neo w/ a kiss. Gender reversal here
which is always cool.
Neo=new. Neo has come to usher in the new age.
Their is also correlation to lucid dreaming and astral projection as it is practiced by
Neo-pagans and some students of the Kabbalah. Lucid dreaming asks us to question reality.
Plus you can also slip a little extentialism in there.
One thing I found weird is when they take Neo to see the Oracle, (Delphi from Greek myth.
Apollo was the god of truth and oracles) everybody was wearing black except Switch. That
has to be significant I just can't figure out how since Switch is a secondary character.
Anyway, just my thoughts.
QUOTED FROM: http://pages.cthome.net/morrison/mighty/film/bound/matrix/whatis.html:
from Cecil
The Matrix is a very cool flick! But I wonder,...is it just a coincidence that it gets
released at Easter?! I don't think so. Consider these:
1) A Savior is born - LITERALLY, out of that mucky, womblike incubator that Neo is in.
2) A group of people willing to follow him believe him to be "The One" - the one
whose coming was foretold (by the Oracle) and who would bring about a new world order.
3) The name of the underground city that was almost holy to this group - Zion!
4) The girl's name - Trinity!
5) The ship's name - Nebuchadnezzar!
6) There were two brothers in this following of Neo's.
7) Neo (and the group) are betrayed by one of their own!
8) Neo is killed by the authorities, and, instead of 3 days - in 3 MINUTES he is
resurrected with a HIGHER POWER than he had before!
9) After invading the Agent's body and causing it to explode, Neo is represented as a
BRIGHT WHITE light!
10) After his resurrection, Neo was going to have a dramatic effect on his world.
Hey, I don't pretend to have all the answers, here. BUT,...I don't think Hollywood
believes in coincidences of this magnitude any more than I do!
These parallels and references are not idly done. Even with the high tech and the cool
(oh,...very cool!) shades, this is still a very well done Messiah movie! I loved it! I
even liked Keanu Reeves in this movie - and Lawrence Fishburne played a really together
role as Morpheus (or was he John the Baptist..........)
Go see this movie! It's a great ride!
QUOTED FROM: http://cgi.pathfinder.com/time/magazine/articles/0,3266,22971,00.html
Time Magazine
THE ARTS/CINEMA
APRIL 19, 1999 VOL. 153 NO. 15
Popular Metaphysics
In The Matrix, the Wachowskis make a hit film out of the Bible, cyberpunk and higher math
BY RICHARD CORLISS
Bunch of guys at a Manhattan 'plex watching The Matrix. Carrie-Anne Moss kicks some 'droid
butt, makes a streetwide leap from one building top to the next, then crash lands through
a small window. "The bitch is bad," one of the guys opines. "Go,
girl!" Then Laurence Fishburne shows up as Morpheus--a morphing Orpheus, a black
White Rabbit, an R.-and-B. Obi-Wan Kenobe, a big bad John the Baptist, a Gandalf who
grooves; every wise guide from literature, religion, movies and comix. Though he's in a
dark room in the dead of night, and as if he needed to be more cool, Fishburne is wearing
these teeny black shades. Another guy at the 'plex says approvingly, "Those glasses
are fabulous!"
To deliver a futurismo fashion statement and a can of whup-ass in the same movie--this is
smart filmmaking. Larry and Andy Wachowski, the Chicago-bred brothers who wrote and
directed The Matrix, are smart in a way moviegoers love and Hollywood moguls cherish: the
picture, shot in Australia for $63 million, had the year's strongest opening weekend and
pulled in a robust $50.7 million in its first nine days. The film's producer, Joel Silver,
says the boys have a sequel in mind, and cannily adds, "The more success the movie
has, the more willing they'll be to write it down." Suddenly Larry, 33, and Andy, 31,
are giving Peter and Bobby Farrelly (There's Something About Mary) competition as the
hottest brother act in town.
But the Wachowskis, whose first directorial effort was the seductive femme-noir drama
Bound, have deeper fish to fry. "We're interested in mythology, theology and, to a
certain extent, higher-level mathematics," says Larry. "All are ways human
beings try to answer bigger questions, as well as The Big Question. If you're going to do
epic stories, you should concern yourself with those issues. People might not understand
all the allusions in the movie, but they understand the important ideas. We wanted to make
people think, engage their minds a bit."
And blow their minds a lot. The film posits that life as we know it is a computer
simulation: it is, Morpheus says, "the world that has been pulled over your
eyes" by some creepezoid machines that look like spidery octopi. Who can free a
mankind that doesn't know it's enslaved? Morpheus believes the cybermessiah is Neo (Keanu
Reeves), a computer hacker. Early in the film Morpheus offers two pills to Neo. Take the
blue one, you wake up and remember nothing. Take the red pill, "you stay in
Wonderland. And I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes."
Naive viewers may think The Matrix is just a cool way to pass the time while sitting in
the Phantom Menace waiting room. They should think again, breathe deep, get strapped in
for a brain-popping trip. The Matrix is a careering cyberride without the headset, a
virtual masterpiece. Every other movie out there is the blue pill. This one is the red.
An anthology of dystopic science fiction, The Matrix plunders Blade Runner and The
Terminator: bad machines, grungy rebels and rain, rain everywhere, even indoors. It
invokes the kung furiosity of prime Jackie Chan and the heroic bloodshed and long coats of
John Woo movies; the Hollywood-Hong Konglomeration has never meshed so suavely as in this
film's fight scenes and wire-work aerobatics. Never seen the mega-imaginative,
ultraviolent Japanese cartoons known as anime (Akira, Ghost in the Shell)? Now you
have--in whirling live action.
Those are just the movie references. The Wachowskis, both dropouts from good colleges
(Larry from Bard, Andy from Emerson), want to weld classic lit, hallucinogenic imagery and
a wild world of philosophical surmises to pop culture. The Bible meets Batman; Lewis
Carroll collides with William Gibson; Greek and geek mythology bump and run. Hell, you may
find string theory in The Matrix.
As the children of a businessman and a nurse, the boys created comic books, and the
obsession continued into their 20s. "Jack Kirby comics interested us," says
Andy. "We liked the idea of punching guys through brick walls and over-the-top action
like that." But they connected as well with older, more revered sources. "The
Bible seeks to answer a lot of relevant questions for man," says Larry. "In the
film we refer to the story of Nebuchadnezzar; he has a dream he can't remember but keeps
searching for an answer. Then there's the whole idea of a messiah. It's not just a
Judeo-Christian myth; it also plays into the search for the reincarnation of the
Buddha."
The search--the quest--informs Greek myths ("We have Orpheus and Morpheus in the
film," says Larry) as well as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: "It's a story
about consciousness," says Larry, "a child's perception of an adult's world. The
Matrix is about the birth and evolution of consciousness. It starts off crazy, then things
start to make sense." It can also be read as a variant on Gibson's Neuromancer, the
1986 cyberpunk classic about a computer cowboy on the run. "It'd be near impossible
to make a movie out of that," says Larry. "We knew the way to make it relevant
was to turn what we view as the real world into a virtual reality."
And now, for extra credit: theoretical mathematics. The lads became fascinated, Larry
says, "by the idea that math and theology are almost the same. They begin with a
supposition you can derive a whole host of laws or rules from. And when you take all of
them to the infinity point, you wind up at the same place: these unanswerable mysteries
really become about personal perception. Neo's journey is affected by all these rules, all
these people trying to tell him what the truth is. He doesn't accept anything until he
gets to his own end point, his own rebirth."
Great, guys, but is Joe Popcorn supposed to carry a Matrix concordance in his head?
"We wrote the story for ourselves and hoped others would pick up on it," says
Larry. "Every studio we showed it to thought no one would understand it. We told them
it would be complex and dense, but we were also going to shoot the best action scenes and
coolest computer graphics ever. Even if audiences didn't get all of the references, we
knew they'd at least have a good time with the visuals."
Kind of like Star Wars, eh, where the kids came for the laser show and stayed for the
course in Joseph Campbell? Well, maybe not. "The Force is good, fun stuff," says
Larry. "I grew up on those movies. But we were hoping to do something a little more
sophisticated with The Matrix."
Comparisons aside, the brothers have shown they can make a science-fiction epic that both
probes and throbs. George Lucas' May tricks are a month away, but Andy and Larry have
proved that right now they're the big Wachowski.
--REPORTED BY JEFFREY RESSNER/LOS ANGELES
The Matrix Concordance
Finnegans Wake has its skeleton key, Gatsby its Cliff Notes. A film as densely allusive as
The Matrix needs a box score, with Wachowski footnotes:
The Bible
As in the Scriptures, only the true messiah can save humanity. But this one must first
conquer his own doubts.
Greek Mythology
"We have Orpheus and Morpheus in here," Larry says. The Odyssey, with its
prophetic oracle, was a touchstone text.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
In this version Alice is a guy, the Eat Me cakes are pills, the White Rabbit is black, and
the rabbit hole is a toilet.
Japanese Anime and Hong Kong-Fu
In Asian cartoons and live action, flying is the only way to travel. Here characters walk
up walls and leap-frog buildings.
Cyberpunk Novels
As in Neuromancer, our hero enters a virtual world where he pits his cunning against dark
lords of artificial intelligence.
Theoretical Mathematics
The boys read The Tao of Physics and Godel, Escher, Bach. Where do physics and metaphysics
meet? At The Matrix.
Jungian Psychology
Archetypes in hyperspace. Larry: "Mythology lets you talk to old cultures and future
ones." The movie is Jung at heart.
--