<nettime> The Matrix Rules

["Dr. Future" <richard@dig-lgu.demon.co.uk>]

The Matrix Rules



"The Matrix" is part of a sub genre of "virtual reality" films, a theme
that has gathered pace and urgency over the past decade and especially
over the last couple of years. We are not talking about films like
"Lawnmower Man" which explicitly fictionalise a technology that can
create artificial environments for whatever ends. There is a particular
narrative theme running through the movies we are referring to here,
that take their inspiration from a media critique which sees the new
information societies as having created and imposed on their populations
a form of organisation structured by mediated forms of experience. It is
supposedly the culmination of tendencies first noted over thirty years
ago in writings like Debord's "Society of the Spectacle" where
"everything that was directly lived has passed away into
representation".

Like Debord's critique, many of these films begin from the premise that
there is a "real" life and an artificial one, and that we need to
explicitly dismantle the illusory world in order to see things as they
really are, the relations of production finally laid bare. An early
example of a film like this is John Carpenter's sadly neglected "They
Live" of 1987. An unemployed working class Joe stumbles upon a special
pair of sunglasses which allows the wearer to see hidden media messages
which have been brainwashing people. Advertisements for cars or hair
spray reveal their true purpose in statements like "Do not question
authority" and "Marry and reproduce". Printed on dollar bills are not
currency denominations but the command "This is your God". Who or what
is creating this deception? The answer is a ruling elite who pursue
their own interests behind this smokescreen of illusion. This is a
conspiracy movie then, with the added twist that the ruling class turn
out to be a race of invading aliens whose hideous features are also
disguised by the brainwashing transmissions. They live, the rest of us
just struggle and dream.

A more recent film in a similar vein to "They Live" is "The Truman
Show", which combines a virtual reality with the paranoia of an
individual persecution complex. Unlike the world of hardship endured by
the lower classes in "They Live", the Jim Carey character Truman Burbank
is a comfortable middle class professional living in an all-too-perfect
world who nevertheless begins to suspect that his life is being
controlled. In fact he is the only "real" person, the "true man" who has
grown up in a huge stage set populated by actors and monitored by hidden
cameras to produce a 24-hour soap opera. Truman becomes the ultimate
surveillance subject – "Nothing in the show is fake, its merely
controlled", explains one of the cast members, who happens to play
Truman's "best friend".

"The Truman Show" was released in the US at the height of the Monica
Lewinsky scandal and some critics felt that it accurately reflected the
way that Bill and Monica had been forced to play in their own soap
opera. But as much as Truman's life is created by the television
corporation and its shadowy director Christof, the viewers of the "The
Truman Show" have their own lives constantly revolve around watching the
day to day antics of this totally fabricated "real" person. In fact the
similarities between the stage set town that Truman is trapped in and
the world outside create the impression that there is nowhere to escape
to anyway. When Truman is at school he announces that he would like to
be an explorer when he grows up - "You're too late", his teacher tells
him, "there's nothing left to explore". The system is presented as being
all pervasive - "There's no more truth out there than there is in here",
explains Christof when he finally reveals himself to Truman at the end
of the film, just "the same old lies and deceit".

In these scenarios the media dream world is explicitly created by a
ruling class for our deception and it therefore must be destroyed. For
Debord's theory things are a little less conveniently simplistic
however. The spectacle is the logical outcome of advanced capitalism and
partly becomes a celebration of its own success, justifying the
productivity of the capitalist economy by squandering its surplus value
on gratuitous media events. The spectacle is as inevitable a part of
capital's historical development as the socialism that must presumably
succeed it. This produces a conflict in the origins of the contemporary
world of mediated experience. The feeling that someone must have created
the mediascape but that no-one seems to entirely control it is a problem
that many of the films in this genre return to again and again just as
Marxist theories of social transformation found they had to.

The information society has produced a world where the behaviour of its
citizens is governed by rules that seem arbitrary and without challenge.
Modern living requires constant application for all kinds of licenses,
certifications and allowances. The corporations and organisations that
control these essential services like insurance, financial management,
access to medical provisions and educational qualifications all impose
regulations that seem far removed from any useful objective. Success
becomes dependent on the citizen's access to the right information that
can lever a contractual advantage and their skill at avoiding disclosing
facts that may disqualify them in some way. As we become more and more
embroiled in negotiating these sets of rules we start to feel distanced
from the immediate physical world around us. The very arbitrariness of
these regulations mean that it is impossible to find an objective basis
on which to oppose them anyway.

This feeling of living in some kind of a giant game is suggested in
David Cronenberg's recent film "eXistenZ". It is a movie about a group
of people who play a virtual reality computer game and uncover a
clandestine war between games companies who are trying to own the
ultimate mind controlling game. Cronenberg plays around with the usual
"it-is-reality-or-is-it-illusion" setups and finally gets us to the
point where you can no longer tell which is which. All you can now do is
play the game and hope you don't fuck up. At one point the male lead
Jude Law exclaims "I don't like this game – you don't know what the
rules are, you don't know what the goal is and you don't know who is
controlling it. I don't think this game's going to be very popular".
"But that's the game that people are playing already" says the game's
designer, Jennifer Jason Leigh. Finally they discover that they have
both been playing a game within a game – a meta-game called "tranScenZ".
Existence or transcendence, which do you prefer? Either way there must
be winners and losers.

Most of these movies contain scenes in which the protagonist is trying
to find clues that can tell them whether they are in virtual reality or
in the real world. One particularly tense example is in the film "Total
Recall" when the Schwarzenegger character is approached by his "wife"
and a "doctor" who try to warn him that he is still on an operating
table on earth and has dreamed the whole experience of fighting a
Martian conspiracy. Schwarzenegger has to decide whether to shoot the
"doctor" as an impostor and risk never being able to awaken or to
surrender to him and risk capture and possible execution. As he holds a
gun to the "doctor's" head and slowly squeezes the trigger he notices a
bead of nervous sweat appearing on the man's forehead. It is all he
needs to tell him that the "doctor" is a phoney and that his experiences
have indeed been authentic – a single crack in the man's story, he pulls
the trigger and blows his head off.

But of course there is no fundamental reason to suppose that nervous
physiological reactions cannot be faked in VR just like everything else.
Perhaps Swarzenegger is still on the operating table dreaming of having
saved the Martian colony after all. There are other films where this
dichotomy between the real and the vicarious is overcome by fusing the
two together into a kind of higher reality. In David Cronenberg's
seminal work "Videodrome" way back in 1982, the central character Max
Ren is seduced and brainwashed by hallucinations from a video signal
until he becomes an unwitting assassin for an reactionary political
group. No longer able to tell the difference between truth and fantasy
it is easy for his political masters to manipulate him. But Max is saved
by the intervention of Professor Brian O'blivion and his daughter, a
character that was explicitly based on the ideas of Cronenberg's fellow
countryman, the world's first media theorist Marshall Mcluhan. O'blivion
explains that the videodrome signal also creates a tumour in the brain
that will allow the subject to evolve a new form of human consciousness
that can live in both the world of flesh and the video world. With their
help Max finds that he can take control of his own hallucinations and
use this power to strike back at the conspirators. There is in fact no
longer any effective difference for him between reality and media – both
are joined in the new flesh.

Over the course of time between "Videodrome" and "eXistenZ" we can
detect a certain change of emphasis in the ideas they express. Until
quite recently theorists considered that an ideology exercised its
influence most forcibly in particular media forms – the TV soap operas,
the newspaper campaigns and the Hollywood blockbusters. "The spectacle
is […] but a social relation among people, mediated by images" states
Debord succinctly. But now it seems as though images have become social
relations themselves in quite explicit ways, partly due to the reduction
of both to digital information. The result is like the creation of a
huge machine structured by the information economy in which images as
code and relations as code are identical. The conceptual model for this
new situation is the computer game – images, simulations, rules,
trajectories. The system is now so integrated that all contradictions
can be absorbed, all deviance can be regulated, all conflicts are about
means, not ends. In this game we are each offered a character to play
that can suit any sensibility as long as we follow the rules. If we are
an ethnic minority then we can play a rap star or a black yuppie, if we
are working class we can aspire to buy our own council house, if we are
a woman then we can hire a lawyer to check that our rates of pay are
equivalent to our male colleagues who all work in the same multinational
corporation. So is the system now totally complete? Are there any more
cracks that can afford us a perspective? Is there anywhere left to
escape to?

"The Matrix" continues many of these themes and introduces some new
ones. One difference is that "The Matrix" is a Hollywood summer
blockbuster special effects film which is already rarefied by its very
form. Because of this, although the film's writer/directors, the
Wachowski brothers, try to introduce ideas about the condition of
virtuality they are always submerged again in the maelstrom of
spectacular Kung Fu fights and explosive gun battles - the very
phenomena that they are trying to address. But in spite of this, with an
effort of will it is still possible to recover some of these more
conceptual materials.

The film's main character Neo (played by Keanu Reeves) is a humble
office worker by day and a hacker by night who is trying to discover the
meaning of the mythical "Matrix". He is contacted by a group of hacker
rebels who are lead by an equally mythical hacker called Morpheus
(Laurence Fishburne). After being persecuted by a group who appear to be
FBI "Agents" he decides to accept Morpheus's offer to reveal the secret
of the Matrix to him in return for joining his underworld group. He
suddenly awakens to find himself plugged into a tank along with a
multitude of other human specimens in classic Cronenberg body-horror
style. He is picked up and allowed to recover in Morpheus's ship. Now of
course, it is revealed that Neo has been living his life in a collective
virtual reality construction designed to subjugate his mind. So far it
is conspiracy theory territory with the "Agents" representing the
oppressors who enforce the Matrix's rules and are ever vigilant in their
efforts to crush those who are asking too many questions. But at this
point we take a swing away from nascent human power politics into
further science fiction because the builder's of the Matrix are not
human themselves but are a race of artificially intelligent machines.
Morpheus explains to Neo that in a premise very similar to the
"Terminator" movies of the previous decade, most of the human race has
been destroyed hundreds of years ago in a war between themselves and the
artificial intelligences they created. Most of human race that is left
is enslaved by the AIs and their bodies turned into biological batteries
in gigantic power plants while their minds are kept alive by engaging
them in a virtual simulation of the late twentieth century. There is a
small human resistance group left who try to disrupt the Matrix by
hacking into it.

By this time the conceptual potential of the film might have finally
collapsed into a simplistic binary conflict between man and machine, but
the Wachowski's, a pair of former comic book writers, manage to retain
some semblance of hacking their own Hollywood film by using several
sub-plots to leave some questions unanswered. For a start, it is not
entirely clear what the human resistance is fighting for. The "real"
world outside the Matrix has been devastated by war and only one
underground human city remains – Zion. This city is itself run by a
mainframe computer, albeit supposedly for the emancipation of humans. In
fact the outside world is so bleak and inhospitable (the "desert of the
real" as Morpheus describes it) that one of the rebels is so fed up that
he betrays the others to the Agents in return for being plugged back
into the Matrix. (When negotiating with an Agent he asks that for his
co-operation he is rewarded with a fairly important position in Matrix
society – "like an actor". "Whatever you want, Mr. Reagan", agrees the
Agent). Once again it seems as though there is nothing really worthwhile
left outside the system. In true Nineties underground style, we are left
with the prospect of a harsh nomadic and militaristic life spent
fighting a constant guerrilla action by nipping at the heels of a vast
state machine.

More important though, is the degree to which one must become absorbed
into the dynamics of the Matrix in order to fight it. The way the rebels
train is very similar to learning to play a computer game, they work to
quicken their mental reflexes and to exercise their strategic and
imaginative thought processes. Hand to hand fighting is performed with
superhumanly precise "Street Fighter" style Kung Fu moves and everything
else tends to involve loading and aiming an inexhaustible supply of
automatic firearms, so many that their virtual bodies are practically
encased in weaponry. The protagonists tend to walk and move with the
logical deliberation of robots and to execute acrobatic stunts all with
a mind numbing clarity of purpose. At one point the Agent that is
interrogating Morpheus tells him that the AIs do not consider humanity
to be mammals at all – the organism that has most in common with the
human is the virus. Humanity is viewed as a disease, a cancer that has
exploited and defiled the planet and one that the new machine race is
duty bound to eradicate. At the end of the movie Neo wins an important
battle against the Agents when he literally invades the "body" of one of
them and ruptures it from the inside. The virus is so simple an organism
that it is debatable whether it can be called a life form at all – it is
just a sack of proteins that reproduce a DNA sequence – little more than
a machine replicating its own code. This allows us to see both
protagonists in terms of each other, a common enough narrative device in
the context of hero and nemesis. The Agent also reveals a psychosis in
the Matrix itself when he reveals to Morpheus that the real reason he is
personally trying to penetrate the rebels home city is because he is
revolted by the Matrix and wants to escape it. The system itself needs
its Other to prevent it from imploding.

The main sub-plot however,  is that Morpheus believes that Neo is "The
One" – a Messianic figure who many humans think will rescue them from
servitude. There is also an "Oracle" who lives in the Matrix and who has
prophesised to Morpheus that he will find The One. Feeling optimistic,
Morpheus takes Neo for a private audience with the Oracle, who turns out
to be a elderly Grandma Moses character, but she tells Neo that he isn't
The One after all and that he will one day have to give his life to save
Morpheus. Clearly spurred on by this knowledge, Neo finally does decide
to risk his life to save Morpheus when the Agents capture him and in
doing so focuses his mental energy to such an extent that he effectively
does become The One. We discover that the Oracle's gift is not to
predict the future but to create it. The Matrix may be a space in which
every move is preprogrammed and delimited and all hackers are eventually
traced and eliminated but nevertheless the film tries to rescue a space
in which human agency is capable of executing transformative actions. It
is in fact by the judicious application of the "rules" of predestination
and prophecy that the future is paradoxically made accessible again.

In "The Matrix" both human and machine life have rules to live by, but
the rules that the human resistance have are myths like the belief in a
Messiah, in a Utopia, in redemption – they generate possibilities and
change. They are rules that are beyond a simple logical extrapolation of
the present. By contrast the rules of the Matrix form a closed
deterministic system without leaving space for imagination or
transformation, dominated by a meta rule that instructs us to accept our
current condition as given. As Neo warns the Agents at the film's end,
"You're frightened of change". Theirs are static rules without a history
and therefore without a future.

In our own information society we often appear to have sets of rules
that work against each other. For each insurance policy, grant
application or condition of sale we enter into there are also complaints
procedures, feedback mechanisms and public relations offices. Each of
these generates its own stream of bureaucracy, a counter current
generating unpredictable collisions of regulations, priorities and
authorisations. A decision has to be made to exit the game when one of
these currents of paperwork threatens to consume more resources than it
generates. Debord's concept of "separate power" in which the capitalist
state overwhelms us as a separate power beyond human control is now
superseded by a world of competing logistics that perforate and animate
power structures and result in bureaucratic wars of attrition between
agents. The ability of one particular power to dominate us through the
world of rules seems to rely not so much on their universal enforcement
but on the universal consistency of the rules themselves, and this
possibility is by no means certain at present.

Although none of the ideas suggested in "The Matrix" are strictly new,
the Wachowski brothers manage to bring them together in a highly visible
and often self referential form. Although this Matrix has been created
by a non-human intelligence it finally seems quite a natural place for
human beings to move about in. The world of rules is finally expanded by
the human presence to include rules that have the power to create
contradiction and transformation. Even the most closed system cannot be
complete and consistent enough to prevent the future from leaking in.


3,382 words.



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