The problem with the Matrix sequels is that their target audience is a 13 year old boy
who has somehow earned a PhD in philosophy.
That is to say: someone who loves philosophical conversations and also enjoys ridulously over
the top action sequences.
Yes! That was a bowling pin sound effect! I didn't even add that!
These movies are goofy...it's okay. Embrace it!
So as a 13 year old kid in 2003 who didn’t have a philosophy degree, I hated the sequels
and spent the rest of my life up until about a month ago pretending that they DID not exist.
But then a funny thing happened.
I got old.
And when I popped these suckers in fifteen years after the fact, my thoughts on the movies
did a complete 180.
This feels like a confession, but I had SO much fun watching these movies.
More fun than Hugo Weaving had acting in them.
And if you’re thinking right now, “Hold on, Sage.
You’re running a YouTube channel mostly about movies and you want to tell me that
the Last Jedi AND the Matrix Sequels are good?
Do you know what F****** platform you’re on?”
And yeah, I can list just as many problems these movies have as anybody else can.
These are flawed movies by any measure that don’t live up to the tightly wound perfection
of the original.
The biggest obstacle to enjoying these movies is that the philosophy isn’t neatly woven
into the narrative.
The philosophical stuff in the first film was like a little side dish.
It didn’t dominate the rest of the story, and the emphasis was always on the characters
and the action.
The philosophy in the sequels?
Ooof.
It’s just dropped like an anvil onto the audience.
"As I was saying, she stumbled onto a solution whereby nearly 99% of all test subjects ...
What are you talking about?
Between every action scene we get a GIANT.
PHILOSOPHICAL.
LECTURE. about the nature of power, free will, determinism, purpose, causality, belief, and
systemic control.
I’ve talked about techniques to integrate exposition into a story before, and these
movies follow zero of those guidelines.
As a piece of mass market entertainment, this absolutely kills the pacing, so it’s no
wonder that 13 year old me was bored.
But nowadays?
Listening to some guy explain philosophy for 15 minutes at a time is something I do for
FUN!
Like, in my free time.
So again, my relationships to the films have changed.
Where all of this just went over my head as a child, I can now finally find a coherent
through-line to the ideas in the film.
My confusion with these films is epitomized by a pair of paradoxical statements made by Neo at the end of the trilogy.
To get anything from the films, other than pure indulgence, I have to make sense of these
two conflicting lines...
“Why Mr. Anderson?
Why, why do you persist?”
“Because I choose to.”
You were right Smith.
You were always right.
It was inevitable. Because I choose to. It was inevitable.”
How can we resolve this paradox?
Well, first it helps to clarify how Neo actually beats agent Smith.
Back in Reloaded, Agent Smith tells us that he has been freed from his programing as a
result of being killed by Neo in the original.
Usually, when a program no longer has a purpose, it is supposed to go to a place called The
Source where they are deleted.
But being freed from his programing also meant Smith suddenly had free will.
He could decide to NOT go to the Source, and instead starts making copies of himself, telling
Neo it’s inevitable that he will make a Smith clone out of Neo too.
“It’s inevitbale.”
As The One, Neo is also supposed to go to The Source.
The machines are trying to get him there because once The One reaches The Source, the Matrix
is rebooted.
(Man, it is sort of irritating that every name in this universe is just a noun with
the word “the” in front of it.)
At the end of the final film, Neo goes to the Machine City which is the location of
the Source.
So when Smith copies himself onto Neo, he unwittingly connects himself to the Source
which deletes him.
Since Smith has become so powerful in the Matrix, this is the only way that Neo can
possibly defeat him.
Once Neo has made the decision to fight Smith, it is inevitable that this would be the way he is defeated.
The mechanics of the plot don’t allow another option.
So that’s one explanation for the line about inevitibility.
The philosophical answer comes by way of asking: is Neo free to make the choice to fight in
the first place?
Is he free to make any of the choices he’s making?
This is where all of that talk talk talk talk talk in the Matrix Reloaded comes in handy.
At the climax of that movie, Neo confronts The Architect, the machine program responsible
for creating the Matrix, who informs him that everything he thought he knew about the war
is a lie.
The resistance has been created and guided by the machines at every step of the way.
Neo isn’t that special.
He is The One, but there have been many Ones before him, and if all goes according to plan,
there will be many Ones after him.
The Architect gives him a choice.
If he goes through one door, the Matrix will be rebooted and Neo will restart the Revolution
with 23 other individuals.
This is the door that the machines want him to choose, but choosing it means that Trinity
will die
He can, however, go through the other door and try to save her.
The Architect tells him that he will fail to do so even if he goes through that door,
and if he does choose that door, then the entire human race will die along with them.
So.
The way the Architect frames this choice is as one between Moral Duty and Love.
It’s a choice Neo has faced before: this is the third time he’s had to make this
decision in this very movie.
The first one comes early on in the film.
Neo wants to spend time with Trinity, but he is confronted by a crowd of people who
need him for spiritual support.
No one’s lives are at risk, so in a tensionless choice between Love and his Duty to the world,
Neo chooses to help others.
The second comes around the halfway point of the film.
When the Merovingian refuses to help him, his wife Persephone, (hey look an actual character
name) says she will help on one condition: "I'll give you what you want.
But you have to give me something." "What?" "A kiss." Excuse me?
Now the stakes are higher: humanity’s survival hangs in the balance, or so Neo believes,
so once again he has to choose: Love or Duty.
Again, he chooses to help others.
So by the time he reaches this point of the story, the Architect has every reason to believe
that Neo will promptly walk through that door to The Source and do his Job.
But Neo...doesn’t.
When the stakes are raised to their highest degree and when Trinity’s life hangs in
the balance, he chooses to save her, and the Architect tells us why:
“Already I can see the chain reaction, the chemical precursors that signal the onset of an emotion designed specifically to overwhelm logic and reason.
An emotion that is blinding you from the simple and obvious truth: she is going to die and there is nothing you can do to stop it."
Essentially, he’s saying that Neo is a slave to his passions, to emotion, which means that
him going through that door proves that he does not have free will.
His actions are in line with what the Merovingian was talking about earlier in the film: Causality.
"You see, there is only one constant, one universe that is only real truth: Causality.
Action, reaction. Cause and effect."
"Everything begins with choice."
"No, wrong. Choice is an illusion created by those with power and those without."
Neo was told Trinity was in danger, he had an emotional reaction, and then he sped off
to save her. Cause and effect.
But I don’t think we can just simply take the Architect at his word that Neo is blinded
by emotion.
In her paper on the film, “Neo’s Kantian Choice "The Matrix Reloaded" and the Limits
of the Posthuman” DANA DRAGUNOIU analyzes Neo’s decision according to Immanuel Kant’s
Categorical Imperatives, so let’s look at the first one of those.
Kant writes that we should, “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same
time, will that it should become a universal law.”
So what does that mean?
Well, basically you should only do things that you would be okay with everyone else
doing all the time.
So you shouldn’t throw a plate of cookies against a wall because you wouldn’t want to live in a world where everyone
was constantly violent towards dessert.
Hugo stop having so much fun!
This Categorical Imperative basically breaks the ethical dilemma Neo
is in.
See, the Architect is only capable of thinking in purely mathematical terms, so it’s no
surprise that he wants Neo to think like a Utilitarian.
Utilitarianism, for those who aren’t watching The Good Place as they should be, is the idea
that you should act so as to maximize utility, or for the purposes of this example, to maximize the survival
of the most number of people.
So since 23 people surviving is better than none, Neo should go to the Source.
It’s basically Thanos logic.
But when you think about this decision in Kantian terms, the logic falls apart.
To quote Dragunoiu, “If everyone (or, to use the language of the trilogy, every “one”)
were to sacrifice Zion and betray the Resistance whenever the machines threatened humanity
with extinction, the very notion of resistance would be rendered absurd”
Walking through this door to The Source would only continue to perpetuate the systems of
control that the machines have constructed to maintain power over humanity.
It dooms them to endlessly repeat the cycle of revolution and near extinction until the
end of time.
Under this thinking, the danger Trinity faces is irrelevant.
If Neo actually wants to fulfill his duty to save humanity, then he needs to walk through
this door no matter what.
The choice isn’t between Duty and Love.
Both of those values are behind the same door. Only servitude is behind the other.
Because Neo is acting on principle, doing something, doing something that is
outside of his own self-interest,
his decisions become unpredictable to the machines, suggesting that he does have free will.
He won't sacrifice one life to save many
but instead insists on finding another solution.
It’s basically Captain America logic.
“We don’t trade lives.”
But the fact that Trinity’s life also hangs in the balance complicates our analysis
of Neo’s motives here.
Was he a slave to his passions after all, or did he choose to do what is more morally right?
What actually motivated him to go through this door?
Love or moral duty.
Because the first indicates determinism, and the second indicates free will.
Luckily, the events of the third film clarify this by removing Trinity from the equation.
Instead of trying to keep Trinity out of the line of fire like he did in Reloaded, in Revolutions
he doesn’t stop her from joining him on his suicide mission to the Machine City.
Doing so demonstrates his willingness once again to sacrifice his own self-interest,
his love, in order to do what is morally required of him.
Her death along the way essentially allows him to have clarity over his own motivations.
That’s what the Oracle has been telling him he needed to do this entire time: to understand why he
makes the decisions he makes. To know himself.
"It's Latin. It means know thyself."
"But if you already know, how can I make a choice?"
"Because you didn't come here to make the choice, you've already made it. You're here to try to understand why you made it."
Neo’s journey is, like all epic stories, about finding a deeper understanding of self,
and what Neo discovers about himself after making all of these choices is that he always
chooses to serve others over himself.
I’m reminded here of a more recent story about the nature of free-will, which argued
that the principles that people hold are actually akin to programming.
In Westworld, your moral attitudes can be
calculated for and are thus predetermined.
but in the Matrix
morality confounds the machines.
The deterministic universe they've set up only caters to
the common urges like hunger and pleasure
that humans experience.
Neo and the other resistance fighters
operate outside of those bounds
fighting for a higher purpose that these machines cannot account for or understand.
But at the end of the story, Neo has become self-aware about his own character.
Giving him the knowledge to know that he would
always make the hard choice
and that he would
always choose to oppose Smith.
The question at the heart of the sequels
isn't just about
whether or not
humans have free will
or Neo has free will
but do we have free will
when it comes to
resisting the systems of control
put upon us
by the powerful.
These movies are about
all the ways that
those with power
maintain control over
a population.
Controlling both sides
in an eternal struggle
creating the illusion that descenders
are powerless.
That we are caught in a loop without end.
Its conclusion is that through moral courage, changing the system isn't just possible...it's well...
"It was inevitable."
So while I went into a rewatch of these movies expecting to loathe every scene every step
of the way, I came out of these movies exhilirated, thrilled to finally see through what I once
thought was totally unclear.
Opinions need refreshing every now and then.
There are some movies whose reputations are so seemingly universally agreed upon, good
or bad, that we stop questioning them.
We take it as a given.
But the great thing about art is that while it stays the same, you don’t, and when you
take a look back at something you thought you knew, it feels like waking up to a new
reality when all you’ve ever known was the illusion.
I think the most exciting part of the fantasy of the Matrix trilogy for me has always been
this idea of living in a world where you can just download a skill into your brain and
instantly know how to do something.
And while we sadly don’t have that technology yet, the next best thing is Skillshare, a
platform where experts in the fields of design, writing, animation and more explain how they
do what they do in accessible, well-curated online classes.
I want to thank Skillshare for sponsoring this episode.
For writers, I recommend checking out Steve Alcorn’s Writing Academy courses.
He’s got a bunch of different classes on topics like creating characters, writing dialogue,
and structuring a story.
So if you're interested in Skillshare, the first 500 people to click this link in the description will get a 2 month
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Thanks for watching everyone, and a big thanks to my Patrons on Patreon for supporting this
channel.
Keep writing everyone.