<nettime> The Matrix: Theorized but Unseen

["Peter Lunenfeld" <peterl@artcenter.edu>]

The same rapturous critical reception the Matrix received earlier this year
in the States is being replicated as the film moves into its international
release. The Matrix is superbly crafted mysto-pulp, and like other examples
of its genre, anyone is free to read however much philosophy or critical
theory into it as he or she pleases. So, yes, there's a cave for
neo-Platonists, a dialectic between the material and the virtual for
cyber-Hegelians, and enough reflective surfaces to make any Lacanian
mirror-stage mad (although 65K of Zizekian bricolage did seem a bit
excessive). What's been lacking in the analyses posted to <nettime>, though,
is much consideration of the way the film looked. I would argue that how it
looked was something of greater concern, to both its creators and its
general audience, than the movie's pop-philosophizing.  One could make many
of the arguments offered about the Matrix on the nature/unnature of
virtuality using any one of a dozen or more popular films dating back to
Lawnmower Man that have used VR as an object to think with (to appropriate
Sherry Turkle's terms). 

It is in the realm of the visual that the Matrix both rises and falls, first
attracting attention and then ultimately squandering it. The kinematics and
choreography of the action were extraordinary. The "bullet time" sequences
offered the best filmic evocation of superheroic human motion that I've ever
seen in a major Hollywood action film. Combining Hong Kong balletics with
the sort of metahuman capacities that comic book readers have always had to
imagine for themselves made a real contribution to the cinema's ability to
conjure unworldly motion. But the rest of the Matrix suffers from a very bad
case of what I've called "permanent present"
<www.architettura.it/extended/ep04/ep04en.htm>. The directors,
cinematographer, production, set and costume designers all seem stuck in
1982. Didn't it bother anyone that the Wachowski Brothers and their team
offered their audience two completely different worlds in the Matrix, but
that both worlds looked like weak imitations of Ridley Scott's work in Alien
and Blade Runner? It's not just the Wachowski Brothers, of course, it's
virtually everyone making fantastic or sci-fi films today (think of Robert
Longo's dismal Johnny Mnemonic from 1995). The darkly lit, neo-noir
cyberpunk aesthetic is as tired today as were the brightly lit, shiny
surfaces of '50s/'60s sci-fi that the makers of Blade Runner were reacting
against.

To sum up, I'm less concerned about Keanu being lost in Plato's cave, or how
the alienation in the Matrix reflects our own desperation, or, god forbid,
that the whole thing just boils down into yet another reification of Lacan's
"big Other," than I am about how the Matrix demonstrates the limits of the
filmic imagination at the close of the art's first full century.

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