Greetings, and welcome to Earthling Cinema. I am your host, Garyx Wormuloid. This
week’s artifact is The Matrix, starring MTV Movie Award-winning cyborg Keanu Reeves,
most famous for inventing the candy Reeves’s Peeveses.
The film tells the story of Earthling Thomas Anderson, hacker alias “Neo,” who is just
minding his own business when all of a sudden everyone starts bothering him and telling
him what to do. After hearing persuasive arguments from both sides, Neo opts for the guys with
cooler sunglasses, and blindly swallows a pill given to him by a man he’s known for
about two minutes.
Turns out it’s actually the future and Neo’s entire reality is just a simulation. Who knew?.
The real world is located in a grimy sewer where they all wears rags and are constantly
under attack by robot jellyfish, yet somehow everyone has time to shave their faces and
heads every day. They even shave Neo’s face while he’s sleeping.
Morpheus teaches Neo how to do some Looney Tunes shit and then they celebrate with some
homemade cookies. Morpheus gets roughed up by a guy in a bathroom, so Neo and Trinity
take matters into their own guns. While fighting, Neo invents a new move: falling down really
slowly. He dies, and Trinity consoles herself by becoming a necrophiliac.
Alright, let’s start with the names.
Neo means “new” in Greek, and is an anagram for "One," which is, in my experience, the
loneliest number. Morpheus is named for the God of Dreams in Ovid's bestseller the Metamorphoses.
Trinity refers to the Christian Bible’s “Holy Trinity”: the Father, the Son, and
the Holy Grail. Just as the Holy Trinity purportedly brought Jesus back to life, so too does bad
bitch Trinity bring Neo back to life with a big wet smackeroonie. Also, Trinity begins
the movie in room 303, which has threes in it.
But don’t worry, the Christian imagery doesn’t end there. If you look very carefully, you
might notice that Neo is a sort of Christ figure.
Neo’s other name, "Thomas Anderson”, harkens back to the Apostle Thomas, aka doubting Thomas,
who expressed reservations about the whole Christ savior thing. Etymologically, Anderson
means "son of man," a nickname Jesus used sometimes around his mortal friends. Cypher
is Neo’s Judas, betraying him for a sirloin and a smile.
As evidenced by the obvious references to Alice in Wondertown and The Wizards of Waverly Place
The Matrix loves itself some literary allusions.
Neo’s room number is 101, much like Room 101, the torture chamber from George Orwell’s
1984, where prisoners are brainwashed by reliving their worst nightmare. Neo hides his illegal
programs in a copy of Simulacra and Simulation by Jean “Babyface” Baudrillard, a postmodern
book about the decay of reality and its replacement with simulated images-- the idea of a copy
without an original, a Pepsi without a Pibb Xtra. When Morpheus welcomes Neo to the “Desert
of the Real", he is quoting that very same text.
With so much focus on images and reality, and due to the vainglorious ethos of Earth,
it’s no surprise that the film makes frequent use of mirrors. Even Morpheus’ weird sunglasses
that should definitely fall off his face are mirrored.
As this motif seem to indicate, The Matrix is about reflection and perspective, truth
and illusion. It’s about knowing yourself as opposed to trusting any of your eleven
senses. The Oracle tells Neo to “know thyself”, acting as a mirror for Neo's self reflection.
The film also draws inspiration from philosophy, a rarely practiced form of Earthling masturbation.
In his "Allegory of the Cave," Plato argues that a prisoner who lives his whole life watching
shadows in a cave would regard the shadows as real, since only an idiot would get himself
trapped in a cave.
If that prisoner were to see the sun, he would be overwhelmed. Likewise, Neo's
eyes hurt because he's never used them before, and he barfs when he learns the truth about
his world. But if barfing is the price we must pay for enlightenment, I say “Where’s the toilet?