Down the Rabbit Hole...

In my previous post—yes! I know it’s been a while—I remarked on the centrality of Baudrillard’s notion of hyperreality in The Matrix, the most successful film by the Wachowski brothers—er…siblings. The film was a commercial success and, as many commercial successes will, became the target of much criticism. Admittedly, some of the acting just isn’t very good…and, yet, the film is so good as to more than make up for what is normally a crippling deficiency in filmmaking. But more to my point is that some of the criticism misses the key point of the film, indeed of most science fiction: SciFi isn’t about the Future or the Alien or the Technology or the Other—it’s about us, here and now.

Ya see, intellectual critics of The Matrix—and, to be clear, I am defending only of the first film, and not the sequels, which strike me as not much more than a money grab—like to argue that the Wachowskis misapply Baudrillard’s theory.  They argue that the movie asserts a “real world,” one which Neo can see with his “real eyes,” one to which Morpheus—in an unforgiveable act of bad faith—misapplies the Baudrillardian term “the desert of the real.”  Maybe they are correct.  The movie relies upon notion of “good guys” and “bad guys”: Neo—the messianic “one”—is the messenger of Truth; the “good guys” aim to bring humans back to a reality. And, of course, notions of objective morality, truth, and reality are quite inconsistent with just about any post-structural theory, Baudrillard’s included.  But bear with me for a moment as I attempt to delineate how the film—upon reflection—works to offer a Baudrillardian critique of our culture. [continued after the jump]

At the moment I’m teaching King Lear in my Brit Lit I course, and I’ve noted that, at first, it strikes students as odd that some of the most profound insights into Shakespeare’s tragedies come during moments of comic relief—I’m thinking particularly of the gravedigger scene in Hamlet.  And, hey, if it works for the Bard it can work of the Wachowskis, no?  Among my favorite scenes in the film is just such a scene of comic relief, the moment that immediately precedes Neo’s first reentry into the Matrix, a seemingly unnecessary scene in which Morpheus’ crew in the Nebuchadnezzar compares and contrasts their Spartan fare with the food they “ate” whilst integrated in the Matrix. Mouse, the ship’s Fool, points out that their gruel resembles “Tasty Wheat,” a fictitious brand name that one can only presume denotes Cream of Wheat™.

Mouse: Do you know what it really reminds me of? Tasty Wheat. Did you ever eat Tasty Wheat?

Switch: No, but technically, neither did you.

Mouse: That's exactly my point. Exactly. Because you have to wonder now: how did the machines really know what Tasty Wheat tasted like, huh? Maybe they got it wrong. Maybe what I think Tasty Wheat tasted like actually tasted like oatmeal or tuna fish. That makes you wonder about a lot of things. You take chicken for example, maybe they couldn't figure out what to make chicken taste like, which is why chicken tastes like everything. Maybe they couldn't figure out...

Apoc: Shut up, Mouse.

Mouse’s comedic point is that their lives are one of absurd uncertainty because these future humans—in a rather fantastic scenario of science fiction—have been deprived of a vast portion of their lives by a lie of virtual reality.  But the genius of the comic relief is that it refuses to let the viewer rest in the comedy of a philosophical conundrum that is purely fantastical.  Mouse’s ridiculous conjecture leads him to an explanation for a phenomenon with which we are all quite familiar—the curiously transportable flavor of chicken. Take any of the most exotic meats: rabbit, frog legs, turtle, rattlesnake.  What does it taste like? Chicken. Hell, one even remembers jokes referring to the female genitalia on this one, and what more embodies “everything” than that?!  In a subtle fashion we are pressed to relate to the inauthenticity Mouse’s—as well as the other crew members’—experience.

            The moment is far from isolated.  Who can forget the moment later in the film—just as the crew attempts to leave the Matrix just following Neo’s visit to the Oracle—in which Neo experiences déjà vu?  The sequence opens with a particularly Reevesque line:

Neo: Whoa, déjà vu.

Trinity: What did you just say?

Neo: Nothing, I just had a little déjà vu.

Trinity: What did you see?

Cypher: What happened?

Neo: A black cat went past us, and then another that looked just like it.

Trinity: How much like it, was it the same cat?

Neo: Might have been, I'm not sure.

Morpheus: Switch, Apoc.

Neo: What is it?

Trinity: Déjà vu is usually a glitch in the Matrix. It happens when they change something.

Some of the pleasure of this sequence derives from the ironic explanation for a rather uncanny experience for which we—humans living at the turn of the millennium—have absolutely no explanation.  Once again we relate to the Nebuchadnezzar’s crew; once again we wonder whether we are living in the Matrix.  The repetition of the trope provokes a certain paranoia, a concern that “THEY” are telling me what chicken tastes like or “THEY” are causing my déjà vu.  “Is there somehow a possibility that I myself am living in a virtual reality?”  And what’s the Wachowskis’ point in provoking such paranoia in the viewer?

            To answer such questions we must return to the common critique of The Matrix, that it belies Baudrillard by allowing the “good” guys to bring the “Word,” the “Truth” from an external, objective “reality.”  But what is the nature of that “reality”?  Recall that Trinity initially guides Thomas Anderson/Neo to her by encouraging him to “follow the white rabbit” in what becomes an extended allusion to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland books.  When Anderson finally meets Morpheus he offers him a choice of two pills—the red pill and the blue pill—one of which will allow Anderson/Neo to leave the Matrix, or, in Morpheus’ terms, “You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes...” 

The moment resembles the iconic eat me/drink me episode from Carroll’s tale, but note that Morpheus’ employment of the allusion contradicts our expectations; rather than figuring the supposed “fake” world—the Matrix—as Wonderland, Morpheus unexpectedly figures Neo’s life with him and his crew as Wonderland. When Neo takes the red pill and both goes through the looking glass and down the rabbit hole, he wakes up to the “real world.”

            And, again, what is the nature of the “real world?” Well, it’s a post apocalyptic nightmare on which a few scant humans struggle for survival on flying space ships that run from squid-like predatory killing machines.  Yup, that sounds real to me.  And what is the nature of the “fake” world?  Oh, it’s an American megapolis—actually, Chicago, a fact that viewers fail to note because Chicago is so “normal”—around the turn at the millennium. The skyline is dominated by mirror-windowed skyscrapers adorned with corporate logos. Thomas Anderson works in a cubicle in one of them.  He has a boss that gives him a hard time for showing up late to work. We get the sense that he resents authority figures in general and dislikes his job.  He feels his post-modern discontent when, as Morpheus explains it, “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.”  Now you tell me: what sounds more like the world you live in? I think you get my drift.  Any notion of “good” or “truth” or of a “real, authentic world” is located in the most absurd imaginative space of science fiction; conversely, the space that is the focus of the film’s Baudrillardian critique closely resembles the life we live, right here and right now.

So, what the movie offers in an extended critique of the inauthenticity of post-modern human experience. Rather than simply using Baudrillard in some disingenuous attempt to add intrigue to some greedy SciFi plot, the Wachowskis make a similar point Baudrillard makes in his critique of Disneyland, amusements parks, and fantasy spaces in general…albeit from a different angle.  You might be surprised to learn that I’m planning a trip to Disneyland this month; hell, you might cry hypocrisy in my obvious enjoyment of fictions cinematic, novelistic, and poetic.  But you see there is nothing wrong with the falsity of Disneyland or a Las Vegas casino or even of a CGI F/X laden film: the problem with Disneyland, as Baudrillard points out, is that it hides the fact that the rest of our so-called reality is fake, it hides that simulacrum that is the real world of Mid Rivers Mall Drive or Boone’s Crossing or the Galleria or downtown Clayton.  

The sterilized opulence of downtown Clayton must be the “real world,” never mind the fact that poverty dominates rows of houses little better than shanties situated just a few blocks to the north… Do we even have room for Darfur in our imagination? Do you even think about Africa—the largest populated continent on the globe—when you think about “the world”? Ya see, we semi-consciously use the explicit falsity of the New York, New York Casino to hide the fact that the “real” New York is now a cliché, is touristy, is a place that a person can’t even really live unless they are ungodly wealthy.  In fact, most “New Yorkers” live in places that we would not even recognize as “New York.” The Wachowskis make the same point—and do so even more clearly and more obviously than Baudrillard—by locating a narrative in two spaces, an absurd space that we buy into as, at the very least, more authentic than the one that so closely resembles our own.  It’s really quite something when you think about it: that we can so thoroughly see our own world as a grand lie when placed in opposition to a dystopic future at the very bounds of our imaginative capabilities…. That should really say something about our culture.

            And you object, “But certainly you do not mean my reality is inauthentic.” And I say, but certainly I do. And you retort, “By Jove, you don’t!”  And I reply, “By Juno, I do!”  You see, it’s not simply that we are all living a lie.  It’s that within our reality we are consistently cut off from the truth.  It’s that we live in a society that is dominated by a mass media which conditions our very way of understanding, of speaking about, and of imagining our world. And that’s a whole new hall of mirrors: it is precisely a “world that has been pulled over our eyes.” You see The Matrix is just a movie.  It’s a fiction.  It’s a lie.  But it tells us what it is.  So, what the hell is cable news?  You tell me.

            I’m not even going to take the time to criticize the rhetoric of right-wing extremism: the Tea Party and Fox News are the Disneylands that merely lend credibility to relatively benign simulacra that are MSNBC and the Democratic Party.  It’s not the right-wing nuts that need to be called out; rather, it’s the wolves in sheep’s clothing that claim to represent the rational needs of the people that need to be shown for what they are.  Allow me to explain how such an avid leftist as myself can make this claim….

My favorite MSNBC pundit is Rachel Maddow; she’s good at what she does.  Lately she’s worked to ask why it is that the GOP continues to pursue controversial legislation limiting access to women’s reproductive health.  It’s such an obvious political loser, so why?  Good question.  And her answer is correct: it a long term strategy to draw the political debate, the public’s sense of “normal” to the right.  Off the bat, Maddow’s insight demonstrates that the notion of “normal” is subject to revision, is a function of a rhetorical strategy. So, what’s real about that? 

Yet, even more crucially, the best of the cable news commentators takes two actions that only serve to derail any conversation about rebooting the entire system. First, she takes the bait.  I’m not gonna say that women’s reproductive health isn’t important; I’m the father of a little girl, so I’m well acquainted with the seriousness of the issue. Yet, fighting for such issues would have been like Martin Luther King fighting only for the right sit at lunch counters.  Come on! A political battle over contraception doesn’t even deserve consideration, and yet somehow in our “reality” it sucks the air out of the room. As such, cable news commentators are merely entertainers who fight battles, not wars. 

Second, she never points out the true culprits: the Democrats. Look at Obama. He’s so happy to stride to “the middle,” to play the reasonable adult in the room, as if the Civil War should have ended in a compromise, a new half-slavery of sorts. He’s happy to provide a reasonable compromise on contraception rather than direct Eric Holder to start investigating bankers. Look at what we have for an alternative to Republican Party; look at the post-Clinton “new” Democrats. The “stimulus” was mainly a tax cut containing only $60 billion in infrastructure spending.  The affordable care act isn’t a horrible bill because it’s “government run healthcare”: it’s a horrible bill because is giveaway to insurance corps dreamt up by the Heritage Club.  Don’t believe me?  Ask a good lefty like Chris Hedges.  How different is our foreign policy under Obama as opposed to Bush?  I don’t see much difference.  It’s like we have a Republican Party and a Republican Lite Party. Coke or Pepsi. Who is gonna put a Wall Street Banker in jail? Who is gonna end privately funded political campaigns? Who is gonna make the media legally responsible for telling the truth? Did you know they weren’t? Who is going to oppose the coming war with Iran? Who is gonna end insider trading by members of congress? Who’s going to point out that we didn’t even have winter this year?

Who is gonna stand up and say we need to reinstitute democracy in this nation?  I’ll tell who is not: Barack Obama and the Democratic Party. And you won’t hear that reported on MSNB… or even Fox News….  We’ll still be arguing about the President’s birth certificate.

In my darkest moments I envision a collapsing society leading to the end of our foolish race.  Sometimes I wonder whether it’s all worth it.  Should I even bother to rant and rave?  Should I even bother to vote? It is the vision with which Agent Smith taunts and  torments a captive Morpheus as The Matrix comes to a climax:

Agent Smith: Have you ever stood and stared at it, marveled at its beauty, its genius? Billions of people just living out their lives, oblivious. Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world. Where none suffered. Where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed that we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from, which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this, the peak of your civilization….  I'd like to share a revelation I had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus.

The central irony here is that Smith returns a figure of speech for a feature of the computer realm borrowed from the biological realm upon Morpheus: it is the computer virus that is the most destructive force in the virtual world. Is the human virus the most destructive in ours?

So, who is going to come from outside of this simulation to save us?  Who is going to crack through our oblivion? So, who’s gonna show us that we can unplug…the “news” or senseless assertions of "common sense" or folly masquerading as "conventional wisdom"? Who could even get us to acknowledge that we are all victimized a grandly irrelevant show? And most importantly at this moment, who is going to show us that we don’t need to fight this war with Iran? Who is the One? Is there anybody out there?