Subverting a media monster

Rating: Null/10 (3 January 2000)

What message to draw from a film packed with pseudo-religious metaphors? It's clear to me that the Wachowski brothers are, at least on one level, calling for subversion of the media-industrial complex of which they now find themselves a celebrated component.
Their film extrapolates our current state of media suffusion to an unsettling conclusion, in which humans from birth are hooked into a sort of a massively-multiplayer RPG, one so convincingly real that they don't realize it isn't the only reality. The matrix is presided over by an evil robotic intelligence, which uses the oblivious human participants as a biological energy source. The first step in fighting back is to "wake up" and enter the real world, where free humans stage attacks against the matrix and its minions.
In our own increasingly mediated world, the brothers tell us, our consciousness is dominated by corporate media environments, which nourish themselves by enmeshing our lives with theirs - whether it be through Phantom Menace merchandizing, or "synergy", or hopeless schmucks posting movie reviews to IMDb. The media provide our lives with meaning, but deaden us to pain, and separate us from reality. Agent Smith, when explaining to Morpheus that a past matrix, which had depicted an idyllic world, was rejected by its human hosts, sounds suspiciously like a studio executive explaining why his movies are excessively violent - because it's what the people want.
How do you subvert a media monster? Taking lessons from the music industry, you can either go Frank Zappa (and be unlistenable) or Rage Against the Machine (and rock). Neo goes the Rage route, popping up with bigger guns and badder kung fu. And The Matrix does the same thing. It tries to subvert the predominance of the action film by out-doing it with a whole new class of bells and whistles. (As a friend of mine used to say, "You have to get behind the man to stab him in the back.") Will it work? Not a chance. More likely we'll all be drooling over the idea of a sequel.