Long have I waited for the opportunity to write an article addressing my two favorite topics: Marxism and Keanu Reeves. Now, with the imminent release of the two sequels to 1999’s cult classic The Matrix, the time is ripe. With a launch date scheduled for some time in May, The Matrix: Reloaded will surely draw hordes—activist and mainstream alike—back to the cinemas. The Matrix: Revolutions, set for release in November, will likely generate the same hype. While the sequel trailers seductively reveal the unfolding plot, it was as much ideas as intense action that drew people to the first film. Testament to this intrigue, The Matrix website features an extensive collection of scholarly articles. A Cultural Studies student’s wet dream, the upcoming films will no doubt continue to pose difficult philosophical questions. It is therefore useful, in light of the upcoming feast, to revisit some of the ideas from the original.

The Matrix introduces us to Neo, a young, intelligent computer hacker (Keanu Reeves) who experiences perpetual dissatisfaction with his job and constantly seeks glimpses of another world. Before long, Neo encounters a group of suspect characters who reveal to him that the life he has been leading is nothing but illusion.

Other films have, of course, tackled this possibility: Released around the same time, Truman (featuring Jim Carrie) addressed the struggle to find the world beyond orchestrated false consciousness. But only through The Matrix’s stunning visual hyperbole are the metaphors of power Marx or Foucault might have used to describe subjugation fully expressed.

Soon enough, Neo’s dismal fin de-siècle existence gets peeled away to reveal a much more horrific scenario. The result of a cataclysmic battle with their own creations some time in the early 21st Century, people are now subordinated to artificial intelligence robots who farm their bodies for energy. Gathered in a city called Zion, only a few remain free. The problem thus posed, The Matrix recounts the heroic attempt to liberate humanity from captivity.

ALIENATION

From its outset, The Matrix recounts the drama of alienation. Initially, Neo’s experiences follow the shape of a middle-class malaise, a search for meaning in a vacuous world. As the story unfolds, Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) reveals how the people of the 20th Century fell prey to a power that they themselves had created. Here, Neo’s alienation is visibly politicized. Coming to consciousness—”finding out how deep the rabbit hole goes,” as Morpheus puts it—is achieved by selecting a red pill over a blue one. We thus follow Neo on a journey from middle-class alienation, angst, to a condition similar to one articulated by Marx in 1844. Under capitalism, “the more the worker spends himself,” Marx pointed out, “the more powerful becomes the alien world of objects which he creates over and against himself…It means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien.” Almost prophetic, Marx summarizes the problem posed by The Matrix: “Since the worker has sunk to the level of a machine, he can be confronted by the machine as a competitor.”

Literal appendages within a network of power, The Matrix shows people in a devastating state of exploitation and alienation. The objects created by human ingenuity at the beginning of the 21st century become the objects with power over and against their creators. This scenario, visible to Neo from the outside, is not known to the vast majority of humanity who remain bound within the power farms, living out lives of false consciousness—lives unsettlingly familiar to the movie’s viewers—pumped by wires directly into their brains. Morpheus characterizes this situation as equivalent to slavery. The audience is pressed to consider: “is that me?”

CONSCIOUSNESS

But even as the film makes clear that Neo’s capacity to resist has been enhanced by the organization of power occasioned by the new conditions of domination, resistance is nevertheless presented as a kind of return to paradise. Encountering someone born outside of the Matrix, Neo marvels at his body which doesn’t bear the marks of having been plugged into the machine. Zion, the name of the human city, further elaborates the theme of resistance as return. While, in the film, resistance is almost always played out inside the Matrix, the assaults are always launched from outside—a space unattainable to all but the film’s heroes. Morpheus, recounting the inevitable disorientation experienced upon being unplugged, points out how the stress would be too much for most people and would likely kill them. Humans, he suggests, need to be brought to consciousness slowly. All the while, the farmed humans live unaware of their actual condition. Instead, they bask in the mythic high point of human history, ironically cast as the end of the 20th century. With “agents” that look like CIA goons and credits that roll to a Rage Against the Machine track exhorting the audience to “wake up”, the film takes on a decidedly lefty feel. Nevertheless, its characterization of struggle remains troubling. Discussions about liberation between characters not bound by the Matrix, for instance, often take on a mystical tone—especially when reflecting on their own past false-consciousness, now long-transcended.

MESSIANIC REVOLUTION?

This mystical factor is made explicit when Neo visits the Oracle (Gloria Foster) whose vision sets people on the road to freedom—each blessed with a unique role to play. Similarly, Morpheus—a modern-day John the Baptist who’s spent a lifetime looking for the savior—reminds Neo that “there is a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.” While waiting to see the Oracle, Neo meets another candidate who might be “the One” destined to lead an insurrection against the machine. The young boy (Rowan Witt), dressed like a Buddhist monk, is bending spoons with his mind. Suggesting that this is impossible, “spoon boy” (as he’s listed in the credits) advises instead to remember that there is no spoon. By the film’s waning moments, Neo has taken the words under advisement. “There is no spoon,” and, by logical extension, nothing in the Matrix that isn’t already him, a product of his thought.

The distinction between “knowing the path and walking the path” does cast suspicion on the utility of idealist thought and suggests a kind of philosophy of praxis bearing strong resemblance to the worldview of activists. Nevertheless, in the film, the transposition between knowing and doing is only made possible by Messianic conviction. Admittedly, “I think therefore I am” never looked so sexy. But what are the consequences of this seduction? Despite his hyper-rational approach, expressed as computer hacker cynicism, Neo, in the end, falls back upon a frame of action governed by pure will. Indeed, his plan to save Morpheus from the clutches of evil will work, he muses, precisely because “nothing like this has ever been tried before.” Marxist inflections in the articulation of its problem notwithstanding, the film’s solution—made manifest in Neo’s irrationalist triumph of will—bears a disturbing resemblance to fascism.

ANTI-GLOBALIZATION ETHOS

Despite disconcerting ambiguities, The Matrix remains a poignant call to action. Released just months before the N30 explosion in Seattle, the film anticipated much of the ethos of the riots that followed. Cautioning about the dangers of technology, for instance, The Matrix nevertheless eschews small-is-beautiful, back-to-nature sentiments and, following the lead of cyberpunk, suggests that technology can be appropriated by the oppressed. Similarly, despite its own residual Luddism, the Internet has been important to the global justice movement. In a recent annual public report, CSIS claimed that activists were doing so much of their organizing online that, unless the intelligence service was provided with the means to “legally” spy in this domain, they would not be able to effectively regulate dissent.

A similar parallel between the movie and the movement emerges in the spatial metaphors applied to struggle. In The Matrix, liberation is cast as an escape from the constraints of the machine. Getting unplugged is the goal. In our last contact with Neo, he promises to show us “a world without rules or controls, without borders or boundaries, a world where anything is possible.” CrimethInc, echoing this sentiment, puts it this way on their website: “Accepting no constraints from without, we countenanced none within ourselves, either, and found that the world opened before us like the petals of a rose.”Fine, fine. But I want my spoon back. I’m hungry and it’s breakfast time.