Astonishing Modern Myth-Making

Rating: Null/10 (7 March 2003)

At its deepest level, The Matrix ponders the question of human alienation, a problem first contemplated by Karl Marx. Although Marx's answer was insufficient, based as it was on an unrealistically sanguine view of human nature, the problem remains just the same: we are all slaves to a machine like system that sucks the very life out of us.
Ezra Pond described our current life in Postindustrial society so well in a few lines of verse: `This thing, that hath a code and not a core, has set acquaintance where might be affection, and nothing now disturbeth its reflections.' A code and not a core: I once had a boss, as I'm sure we all have, who had a code and not a core, a puny man who treated himself, and others, as little machines Â– nothing more than isolated parts of the larger machine. As if a cruel joke by the almighty, this man's surname happened to be `Lord,' which compelled him to refer to himself in the third person as `The Lord.' He had a code but not a core. In The Matrix, the machine code of cybernetic self-regulated social development is not only non-human, it is anti-human; and people who have lost their souls to conform, who have codes instead of cores, are the norm and not the exception. It's as prophetic as old Elijah himself.
What I love about this film is the solution it presents. The answer is not found in a radical change of human nature, which isn't possible, or in technology, which would be like adding fuel to the fire. Instead, borrowing from Plato's cave metaphor, which says, basically, that the world of matter we perceive with our five senses is an illusion, a mere reflection of a deeper, more permanent, reality, The Matrix also takes Augustine's belief that the road to God runs within (the whole `Zion' motif), and places the divine act of creation the very hands of humans. Rilke thought that we are dreams in the mind of God. According to The Matrix, however, God is a dream in the minds of men. The power of human imagination makes it so. In this scenario, Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams, is the voice in the wilderness who cries `prepare the way of the Lord.'
The Matrix is an astonishing piece of modern myth making. This is what great film is all about. If you haven't seen it in a while, it may be time for another look.