REVIEW BY NICK FREDMAN
Matrix Reloaded
Written and directed by Larry and Andy Wachowski
With Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, Laurence Fishburne
At cinemas every-bloody-where
Recently, the US anti-war coalition Not In Our Name issued a leaflet, titled "Take the red pill — join the resistance", urging readers to join the struggle against imperialist wars abroad and police-state repression at home. Its title was a reference to a key scene in the 1999 film The Matrix, and capitalised on the hype surrounding the release of the first of two sequels, Matrix Reloaded.
In the relevant scene, mysterious underground leader Morpheus (played by Laurence Fishburne) offers a choice of two pills to disgruntled computer programmer Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves), who had attracted the attention of both the state and Morpheus by his activities as ace-hacker "Neo". Taking the blue pill would return him to his previous comfortable, if discontented, existence. Taking the red pill will reveal the horrifying truth about the world, and commit Neo to a life of struggle to liberate humanity.
The Matrix
The film's premise, that the "real" world is a computer-generated illusion (the matrix), downloaded into people's brains while they lie in tanks serving as energy sources for the machines that rule the Earth, was influenced by some of the more literary science-fiction writers, such as Philip K Dick and William Gibson. In between zapping baddies, characters discussed the nature of being and knowledge with references to mystical and philosophical traditions from Buddhism to post-modernism. The film's style drew freely on brooding film noir thrillers, Hong Kong action movies and innovative digital animation.
Matrix Reloaded contains much the same mixture of elements, and offers similar enjoyment. However, it has the feel of the lucrative Hollywood franchise the series has become, with some of the fight scenes looking like the more uninteresting kinds of video games, some very cliched mood music and a quite ludicrous love scene. In the process, the rebels of the first film, especially Neo, seem more like conventional superheroes.
The media-shy Wachowski brothers have not been too forthcoming about the intended message of their trilogy. One possible reading at least sees the matrix as a metaphor for the bourgeois ideology that binds people to the system, and the rebels who must both battle the state and free people from their illusions as anti-capitalist revolutionaries.
It may not be quite the Leninist understanding of the inter-relationship between the lived experience of the working class and oppressed and revolutionary organisation (in fact the "unsaved" masses are virtually invisible and irrelevant in Reloaded), but a rough analogy is there.
Reloaded hints at this as well as other meanings. We see a bit of the rebel human city Zion, a name which evokes both mystical promised lands, but also, particularly in Rastafarianism (and most inhabitants of Zion seem to be black and dreadlocked), the struggle for a better world on Earth. When Morpheus addresses a mass meeting, debating an impeding machine assault, he could be a Biblical prophet or Lenin at the Finland station, though inexplicably all he urges the people to do is throw a big dance party.
Later in the film, Morpheus' pat mysticism is in fact undercut with a surprising and intriguing suggestion regarding the ideological source of his prophecies. Watch out also for the contemporary political reference when Neo is shown a montage of people and events representing the evil side of humanity.
In recent years, Hollywood has produced some grossly patriotic advertisements for Team Bush (Black Hawk Down, Behind Enemy Lines), and, at the "alternative" end, some nasty people-hating pseudo-art flicks (Happiness, About Schmidt). However, at least some products of popular culture can't help but reflect radical moods in the populace, and some fairly big recent productions have had critical political messages (Three Kings, The Quiet American).
The Matrix's vision of liberation may be contradictory, mysterious (at least until part three, Matrix Revolutions, is released in November), and perhaps elitist. But that doesn't mean we can't exploit those representations in popular culture that can have a progressive meaning. Anything, even in capsule form, that suggests the need to tear away mystifying illusions, to be committed to a struggle for liberation and to organise for it can't be a bad thing.
After all, it was a red pill.
From Green Left Weekly, May 28, 2003.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.