The Matrix

So I’ve seen The Matrix way too many times. Like honestly, it’s absurd. But for the first time in a long time I saw something new in it. While watching it for the aspects of Baudrillard that I was told existed, I realized that there was some confusion over what Baudrillard is saying.

You see, The Matrix is really the allegory of the cave mixed with Borges’ fable, not with Baudrillard’s interpretation/explanation of it. It’s really as if they read the first 7 pages of Simulacra and Simulation, and then assumed they could represent his ideas in a movie.

The allegory of the cave is an idea put forth by Plato. The idea is that we are all victims to deception and are far more prepared to accept blissful ignorance (as Cypher puts it) than a more painful truth. In this writing Plato writes of a group of humans who are chained down in a cave and forced to face the wall. Behind the captives there is a fire, and behind the fire another group of humans called who are “shadow makers”. Using the fire the “shadow makers” cast shapes of animals and other things against the cave wall for captives to look at. To those chained down, this is truth, all their reality exists as the shadows on the wall. Plato proposes the reader to think what would happen if one were to escape? The freed man would stumble out of the cave into daylight. At first the light would be overpowering and the man would be blinded from all his long years in the cave. Slowly he would begin to take in the world around him, first the close things such as the ground and trees in his area, after time all the world would be visible to him. This man would find himself enlightened, a whole new reality and truth just waiting to be explored. Surely, Plato states, this man would think back to his former fellow captives. Upon this recollection he feels the urge to return to the cave to free his friends and show them this whole new world. Upon return to the cave, however, he finds it impossible to see anything due to his recent stint into the sunlight. When he reached the captives and tried to tell them that all they were seeing was merely deceptive tricks and truth awaits them just outside the cave. The captives look upon him as man who lost his mind, an insane heretic. This man can no longer see the shadows on the wall, clearly the flaw is with him. The freed man’s ideas are rejected and he is cast out.

The way this defines the world of The Matrix is really clear. Cypher’s decision to go back makes it even more central to the plot. And Trinity says he can’t go back, much the way that in the true allegory of the cave, you cannot go back as long as you have seen the “real world.”

And the first seven pages of Baudrillard’s book talks about Borges’ fable of the map, where the world has crumbled away beneath it, creating the desert of the real (the argument from the first few pages, then book moves into other examples that clearly separate it from the Matrix). And I mean, even Baudrillard doesn’t think it was related to his idea of simulacra, and instead is the allegory of the cave.

In an interview he said, “The world as a complete illusion is the problem that faced all great cultures and they solved it thanks to art and symbolization. What we did invent in order to put up with this pain is a simulated real, a virtual universe cleansed of everything dangerous or negative and which now override the real, to which it is the final solution. Now, The Matrix is totally that! Everything that is related to dream, utopia, phantasm is present there, “realized”, a complete transparency. The Matrix is like a movie about the Matrix that could have produced the Matrix.”

So while there are undertones of Simulacra and Simulation, in reality, the movie is far closer to the allegory of the cave.

The Truman Show

I did always enjoy the Truman Show. It was actually the first movie I really watched for a lit class (10th grade teacher I really didn’t like was obsessed with it), and I’ve seen it more than any other movie we have or will watch for this class (except for, sadly, the Matrix). And yet watching it again I still saw a lot of new and interesting things.

The first time I watched it for fun. Then for plot elements. Then for little goofs (my favorite being when Marlon loads candy into the machine and the colors change). This time it was for all the elements that made it feel so perfectly put together. Honestly, I just want to run through them and say the Peter Weir is really rather amazing.

First of all, the aspect ratio. This summer while I worked at a video store with a good friend of mine, he taught me all about how different aspect ratios came about and why there is no standard one for movies. But Peter Weir made that not matter here, because he shot it at 1.66:1, the ratio closest to television. This is genius given that we’re supposed to (often) feel like we’re seeing what the people watching Truman in the movie actually see.

Second, the way every little thing that is in the background fits the film. Weir has the papers read headlines like “Who needs Europe?” and so on to ensure Truman never wants to leave. My favorite is the series bottles of Vitamin D, which is taken by those without exposure to sunlight. There are just so many tiny things like that, which I really think make the film far more brilliant than it would be otherwise. This extends to the motto of the town. Despite what the class was saying the words meant in Latin, I took it for 5 years and it says “one for all, all for one,” which is the inverse of the usual saying and really fits the circumstances. Truman is one for everybody to identify with and see. And at the same time, everyone in the city lives solely to help the world see Truman- they all live for one.

Third, finally, and most obviously, the switching back and forth between the world of the movie and the world of the television show is beautiful. It creates a sense that the two are scarcely different and we really can’t tell when we’re watching something real and something created. The true voyeurism of our lives is displayed here. It’s honestly just masterful.

And thus while I did not like (read: hated) Master and Commander, watching The Truman Show again has made me excited for his 2008 and 2009 releases.

Conceiving Ada

I did not particularly enjoy Conceiving Ada.

I mean, it has a lot of really interesting aspects to its cinematography. The use of a photographed background instead of an interactive one helps the film’s quasi-flashbacks seem more distinct and actually in the past (I realize this was mostly done because of its cost, but still, it has a nice effect). The digital touches were nice, and the acting was not shabby at all.

But I just didn’t like it.

I think part of the reason for this is the absurdity involved in the whole plot. Going back in time by use of a picture? I know I’m supposed to suspend my disbelief in a movie, but Conceiving Ada really seemed a stretch for me. It tried to explain how it worked (which needs to happen, even if it can’t work), and that explanation made absolutely no sense. Not to mention how poorly the scientific field was used anyway. Note these lines: Emmy: "information waves have a half-life", Ada: "I'm not at all certain that half a life is better than no life at all".

Besides, the reason this obsession with meeting Ada exists was never made clear, so the film seemed to really lack a purpose. I mean, why do we care about Ada? Why does Emmy particularly care? Who does she really work for? Etc

Not to mention how trvial most of the drama and such in the film actually is. I mean, the fights were just kind of silly, and everything with the horse racing problem was just stated, and you didn’t see any effects on anyone from it, really. That actually brings me to another problem: most of the film is spoken, and not shown. We hear Ada has a gambling problem, but we don’t see her life change, and then that eventually just drifts into the background of the movie.

Oh, and that dog really annoyed me. What was the point of that dog’s existence? I mean really?

I wish there was an anti-mnemonic device I could use to forget this movie.

When I looked at the syllabus, I thought the only movie that would be ruined by its acting was Total Recall. I was so wrong. Johnny Mnemonic has far less than stellar performances by none other than the wooden man himself, Keanu Reeves, backed up by Ice T pre-SVU, and the always delightful Henry Rollins (this time playing a geeky doctor whose only costuming was a pair of glasses- I half expected him to turn into super man at one point).

As a whole, the movie has a lot of interesting aspects to it. Particularly that of its various moments of being a modern film noir. The seed for this idea is planted explicitly early on, right when Johnny is loading the data that would today simply fill an ipod into his advanced tech brain. The Pharmakom people are playing Humphrey Bogart in the background. There are then a series of canted shots throughout the film, creating a lot of unease, along with shots so dark they may as well often be in black and white and only accented with other colors. The clearest shot of this, though, is during the chase scene where Keanu says WHAT-ARE-YOU-DOING in the most robotic of ways, and he runs and you see first his shadow then him run in and out of the shot. Furthermore, the plot follows a noir story, with the expected result, twist, and then final twist.

The reading for last week was far more interesting and even touched on some movies I really like (or at least the stories they are based on, like Crash). As a whole, the article is a discussion of whether or not computers, cyborgs, etc ought to inherit the earth (a la Moravec) and how this has played out in most Hollywood movies. First of all, Moravec is insane. I agree with Deleuze and Guattari, that his ideals are based so entirely in the idea of capitalism, the free market, to the extent where the accumulation of spectacles becomes so great and the system is so determined to reproduce itself that even the consumers are consumed. But second, I think the argument about Hollywood is really interesting, and ties to the movie well. Springer writes, “Cyborgs in Hollywood films are often motivated by repressed human memories than by mere mechanical problem solving.” She then goes on to cite the examples of RoboCop and Eve of Destruction, as well as a slew of newer movies including Johnny Mnemonic.

And on this level I take real issue with the movie on a plot level. Johnny’s brain was removed. HOW ARE HIS MEMORIES FROM THAT PART OF HIS BRAIN REPRESSED? I just feel like they should be gone. Oh well. You can’t expect the plot of a movie with a drug-addicted hyper-intelligent dolphin and a Jesus-like assassin to make perfect sense, I suppose.

Total Recall

There are two things I find really interesting about Total Recall.

1. How intricate the story is, particularly to leave doubt in the audience’s mind.

2. How much Arnold’s very existence in a movie can make me think it’s poorly done.

Now, the story is rather well put together (which is not surprising given its basis in Philip Dick). It takes the viewer back and forth through believing what is happening to be a dream and believing it to be real. This occurs first when the doctor says he’s reacting poorly and the nurse says she hasn’t implanted anything yet. It then flips back to perhaps being a dream with the entrance of the doctor, and then back out of it when the doctor begins to sweat. But it’s never conclusive. There is a lot of explicit linking to it being real, like Arnold’s perspective, the story being set up to need Rekall’s existence, and so on. But at the same time, all of the subtlety points to it being a dream. Like Arnold creating the girl that shows up, him choosing there to be alien relics identical to those on Mars, the very spy program being called blue skies on Mars, and so on.

And then you can look elsewhere for how obvious this is. No one can make convincing arguments about it, IMDb is completely unresolved (not that those posting are always the brightest).

I think this brings about something interesting, though. Those that pay more attention to the subtext of a movie and the seemingly random comments that are unimportant will lean toward thinking the entire movie is a dream because of the hints dropped earlier, while those watching just to be entertained will think it is real because that is what is explicit in the movie.

But of course, a lot of this depth is lost because Arnold stars in it. I can’t explain why, but his very presence makes me think the movie was just thrown together and a hack and slash job. Even though it’s made from an amazing story and actually is decently (actually, not really decent anything but plot direction) done. But still. I think we all understand.

Arnold makes bad movies.

Blade Runner

Blade Runner is a really silly movie now that I look back at it. I mean, I really do like it. I really like Phillip Dick novels. He writes well. But there are just so many silly things that now detract from the film (though at the time they may have enhanced it), like hover cars. Hover cars are the one thing I cannot forgive a film set in the not so distant future for having. What are they expecting, the world to create some powerful anti-gravity machine that cars can use? Or to have much less learn how to use properly enough fuel to keep a car in flight for long periods of time? Honestly. The glow stick umbrellas make more sense.

But what I find most interesting is how Ridley Scott leaves it ambiguous as to whether or not Harrison Ford is a Replicant. I don’t know if it actually would have any impact on the movie if he was or wasn’t. Rather, I think the doubt that exists when you carefully watch the movie is the most useful thing. It makes clear a point about AI, that once perfected those machines really will be able to walk among us unnoticed.

At the same time, what didn’t jive so well with me was the notion of “retiring.” I really like the inclusion of it as a concept, though. To me, it feels like a commentary on our semantic differences and how they make certain things more acceptable. For example, you don’t take an animal to the vet to be killed, rather put down. You don’t eat cow, you eat beef. It continues on. This to me was quite interesting, because it posits the same possibility within cyborgs and emerging technology. To be seen as apart not for any logical reason but simply because of the label.

Tron

I’ve always loved Tron. And because of that, I was really excited to see it on the syllabus for this class. That being said, Tron is an interesting departure from the other movies we’ve seen so far. In every other movie, the religious aspect fit the dystopic nature of the film. Indeed, religion was often a part of the “evil” technocratic society.

But not in Tron. In Tron, the “religion” of the computer world revolves around the users. To the programs, the users are a metaphysical group that guide their every action, telling them what to do, what’s good, and what’s evil. This marks an obvious departure, since the programs that do not leave their users are the protagonists, and the ones that leave their users, cease being religious, are the evil.

So I suppose Tron makes clear its view that atheism leads to the decline of society. The only way this could be seen to fit with the rest is with the thesis that only real, meaningful religion that is personal (as nothing can be more personal than each person having a different god, like in Tron) and not co-opted by the state is beneficial.