As the dawn of a new millennium approaches, people from all walks of life find themselves asking questions like “what will become? ” and “what will destiny bring in the next century? ” An event that happens but once every thousand years brings with it a sense of anticipation. In some, this anticipation is one of nervous fervor, and in others, it may be a cautious eagerness for a fresh start. Whatever the polarity of this event may be on the individual, one cannot help but notice the way the millennium is engulfing our society.
Thousands of clever devices in our society pull for our attention every day using what is referred to by many as “Millennium Madness. ” Through using our anxiety, hopes, and fears for the new century, governments, corporations, and artists use various forms of media to get their agendas to our consciousness. One of the most popular comes in forms of moving pictures. Commercials tap into the madness by proclaiming their product is the official one of the millennium, while huge corporation hope that somehow through this moving picture many will trust them and make their product part of the millennium experience.
Another popular form in this particular medium is movies. Movies, although seen by the majority as entertainment, offer another chance to get ideas to the masses. One movie in particular, The Matrix, uses millennium madness in a much different way. The Matrix not only entertains with dazzling effects and stunts, but at deeper levels it challenges our very existence. The Matrix, to put it simply, is a graduate thesis on consciousness in the sheep’s clothing of an adventure flick. Keanu Reeves plays Thomas Anderson by day and “Neo” the computer hacker by night.
His world can be divided into two existences; one analog and the other, digital. In his analog world, he gets up, goes to work, and does everything that a “normal” life would entail. In his digital world, he lives in a virtual space with no rules or regulations. From the beginning, it is made clear that “Neo” is much more successful in his this society than “Thomas” is. When there is a knock at the door late in the evening, Neo answers to Troy, who is looking for some kind of virtual “fix. ” From here it is clear that Neo spends most of his time in a virtual space among hackers and freaks who rely on his expertise.
Troy, upon receiving what he came for, enlightens by proclaiming Neo as a savior. The meat of the story begins when Thomas, while in his little cubical at work, receives a cell phone form FedEx. It is Morpheus, the leader of a band of rebels, cautioning that some authorities are coming for Neo. As the story continues, it becomes a battle between Morpheus’ band of rebels (which Neo becomes a part of) and the authorities led by Agent Smith. What is being fought for, however, is the true insight to this story. Morpheus explains to Neo, when trying to recruit him, that the every day life he lives is not a reality.
The world “Thomas” lives in is actually a computer program created to keep humans occupied while a certain technology, The Matrix, uses their energy to stay alive. The real year is 2190, and humans are nothing more than batteries, hardwired into a computer, running a machine that in turn, runs the world. When Thomas doubts this, Morpheus calls on Neo to remember those occasions when he felt that things just weren’t right. Morpheus refers to this as a “splinter of the mind. ” It is this curiosity that allows Thomas to let go and let Neo find out the truth. The rest of the story takes place between the two worlds.
While being plug into The Matrix’s mainframe, Neo can go back into his old world, but with a new perspective. Once he is freed from the slavery of his prior perception, he can manipulate the 1999 society around him. The authorities, however, are programs designed to destroy these rebels. They can take the place of any human image within the Matrix mainframe. If an Agent were to kill these rebels within the mainframe, it would kill their minds, which in turn, would kill their bodies. As Trinity puts it to Neo, “the body can’t exist without the brain. ” Many struggles continue throughout the movie.
The overall goal is to destroy The Matrix, and in all prior attempts, Morpheus and his rebels have been unable to beat the agents. Neo, who is the savior in the story (notice the clever anagram Neo=One), has to come to terms with the fact that his true reality is much different than the Matrix’s. When Neo is “reborn,” he tells Morpheus that his eyes hurt, and Morpheus explains, “it is because you’ve never used them. ” This implies that Neo has never really seen anything, and it is his cathartic journey into really seeing the world that ultimately destroys the Matrix.
The first underlying structure of “The Matrix” is that of a modern-day, biblical parable. Just as in Christian understanding, where everyone is born into sin, humans in the Matrix are born into technology. In both examples, humans are slaves to evils, and look for someone to set them free. Like in the bible, when man chose sin in the Garden of Eden, man chose techno-bondage in “The Matrix. ” Agent Smith makes this clear when he explains that this is the second Matrix. The first was perfect, but humans wanted misery, so they refused to accept it.
Neo, being the “One,” has the daunting task to save the world when he is re-born. This scene is one of a baptism, where Neo is fully immersed and rises from his sleep. Although he is actually killed in the end, it is Trinity, who speaks to his dead body, and kisses him, ultimately bringing him back with love. This love brings new understanding to Neo, who then is able to see the Matrix for what it really is, a code. He then breaks the code, destroying the system. The biblical parallels continue, but rather than delving deeper into the structure of the Matrix, the true question needs to be addressed. What is the Matrix?
Is there really an answer, or like in the movie, do we humans just find new ways to ask the question. To find the answer to this question, we must do precisely what Neo did in the movie. First of all, we must learn to accept that this world is largely made up. Everything we are and everything we perceive is influenced by someone or something with power; power in our society to feed us what it wants us to eat. Unfortunately, we also choose to sit at their table. Most try not to ask why because like Cypher states, “Ignorance is bliss. ” It is far easier to work with the systems of the world because it was CREATED that way.
To ask is to think, to think is to challenge, to challenge is to lose comfort in what the majority of our world finds comfort in. Like technology created Thomas’ world, our world today is created by those who wish to create their “worlds” around us. For hundreds of years now, the nation-state has created its own Matrix. Lines, that do not normally exist in nature, have been drawn. Citizens within a state are led to believe ideas so that the state can further itself. Like the Matrix feeding off of humans, but keeping them occupied, governments feed off of the people to support them economically.
They keep us occupied by giving us what we believe we need to survive: structure. David Held, in his article “From City-states to a Cosmopolitan Order,” discusses his view of democracy and the need to establish a global state. One thought states: At issue here is a civil society that is neither simply planned nor merely market oriented but, rather, open to organizations, associations and agencies pursuing their own projects, subject to the constraints of democratic processes and a common Held insists that “civil” society is one that is subject to democracy.
In Held’s view, in order for humans to organize at a national, or even, global scale, we must be “subject to the constraints” or slaves of democracy. Held is admitting that for the nation-state to work on any level, the state cannot work for us, but rather, we must work for the state. The evidence of this is all around us in the form of taxes, laws, and law enforcement. By living in state and claiming its identity for yourself, you automatically subject yourself to the “constraints” of that system. Like the humans constrained to the Matrix which feed it, we now are constrained to the state which we feed.
States are not the only entities which seek to create our world. More and more, corporations are challenging the state for power. Like the government, corporations thrive on money, and in order to achieve success, they produce goods and services, that according to them, should enhance our lives. Microsoft is the supreme example of this. They are a corporation which dominates a basic human necessity: communication. In “A Interview with Noam Chomsky,” Chomsky is asked about the social and cultural impacts of this. He reacts: “It’s a form of tyranny. But, that’s the whole point of corporatization-to try to remove the public from making ecisions over their own fate, to limit the public arena. to control opinion, to make sure that the fundamental decisions that determine how the world is going to be run-which includes production, commerce, distribution, thought, social policy, foreign policy, everything-are not in the hands of the public, but rather in the hands of highly From companies trying to sell you the “cool” soda, to the media itself (large corporations that sell audiences to the soda-makers), the world is being created for us. And while it is being created for us, we are identifying ourselves through it, leaving little room for critical thought.
Once it is understood that our world is already mostly made up, we have to analyze what other threats may exist. Simply put, technology is the greatest threat. With rapid advances in technology, the globe is changing at a rapid speed. Virtual space is not limited by space and time. There was a time when ideas where limited by these factors, but in this day and age, ideas can be sent world-wide at mind-blowing speeds. Baudrillard, in his article, “In the Shadow of the Millennium,” states: “Beyond the Wall of Time, we only find broken lines that break in all directions. That’s what globalization is.
With globalization, all human functions are .. spread out on a planetary scale which becomes a more and more speculative virtual space. … the human race manages to abolish the human perception of both time and space. ” The globalizaton Baudrillard speaks of is happening at the speed of the technology responsible for creating it. This new force, through economics, military strategy, and access to information has led to the erosion of the nation-state, according to The Economist. This article, “The Nation State is Dead,” also explains: “Scientific progress embodies and depends on open communication, common discourse rooted in rationality, collaboration, and an easy and regular flow and exchange of information. Business, banking, and commerce all depend on information flow and are facilitated by new communication technologies. …. electronic telecommunication and information systems are an ideology at 186,000 miles per second-which makes for a very small planet in These advances in technology are changing the world so rapidly, we fail to ask whether these changes are good or bad. While we try to understand what is happening, technology, being so powerful, is destroying the other Matrices while creating its own.
The movie takes these facts about our technology today, and gives us a taste of what may come. The Matrix, after its creation by man using Artificial Intelligence, realizes at some point that the human species is a virus that threatens the ecological balance of the world. A. I. then reacts when humans are a threat to its survival. In the movie, the technology was smarter than us, thus figuring out how to survive using us. However, in looking back at our technological advances this century, it is clear that technology does not have to be smarter than us to rule our lives.
As long as humans continue to think that technology is the answer to any particular human problem, we are making technology smarter than we are. We give technology the power to create Matrices for us. While we use it to balance our checkbooks or help us in our jobs, it is, unfortunately, taking us somewhere we do not want to go. We may be enjoying the trip, but we have clue as to our destination. Looking back at the film, when Neo was being interrogated by Agent Smith, Smith highlighted Thomas’ normal life. “You work for a respectable software corporation, you have a Social Security number, and you pay your taxes. These are all aspects of today’s world: our reality. The film is trying to tell us that this is an issue to deal with now, not when it is already too late. The Matrix is telling us that we are already slaves to a technological society where life is all around us, but hardly ever affected by us. The film ends with a challenge from Neo to us. He challenges us, now that are eyes are opened, to see the world for what it really is, not the world created for us to be. He asks us to fight the Matrix, and escape form it.
