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?