(upbeat music)
- What's up, guys?
Helen here to talk about a franchise
that's preoccupied with leather, the meaning of existence,
and did we mention leather?
That's right, The Matrix.
And specifically, the fourth film in the series,
The Matrix Resurrections.
Considering the franchise* began in 1999
and laid dormant for 18 years,
the trilogy has maintained
a surprising amount of cultural relevance.
A lot of that was due to how revolutionary it was.
From the fight choreography to the visual effects,
from the deep world to the heady themes.
- Welcome to the desert of the real.
- The ways in which The Matrix influenced the trajectory
of the Hollywood blockbuster,
are seemingly endless.
But even as the film's cyberpunk aesthetic
waned in popularity,
the impact of its ideas only intensified.
Specifically via the growth of simulation theory,
the idea that all of human life and experience
takes place in a computer simulation.
And the notion of having to choose
between a blue pill and a red pill
serves as a perennial banner for many.
That includes some rather radical extremists
that we're hoping won't leave us comments
telling us to take a long walk off a short pier.
It's in this climate,
that "Matrix Resurrections" operates.
One where the legacy of the franchise is messy.
The film seems utterly preoccupied by this reality,
seeking to examine the legacy of the original trilogy,
and what it means to pick it up again
after more than 20 years.
So, how well does Resurrections accomplish
the ambitious goal of self interrogation,
and can it actually examine or even amend
the legacy of its own franchise?
Throw on some sleek shades
for this Wisecrack Edition
on The "Matrix Resurrections."
And major spoilers ahead for all things Matrix,
and some of "Blade Runner" too.
So how does The "Matrix Resurrections" engage
with the legacy of its own franchise?
According to co-writer David Mitchell,
the film's central conceit
is having the trilogy exist
as an artifact within its universe.
This artifact takes the form of a video game series
that Neo, now back in a new Matrix,
as Thomas Anderson designed.
The games play out exactly as our matrix trilogy does.
So of course, everybody (beep) loves them
and Anderson is the toast of geek ville.
- This is my very good friend, Thomas Anderson.
He is a bonafide famous person
and considered by most to be the greatest game designer
of our generation.
- Importantly situating the trilogy as an artifact
allows people's reactions to that artifact
to be a central part of the film.
This creates lots of capacity for self-examination,
an intention telegraph from the beginning of the film,
where we essentially watched two characters
watching the first scene of the original Matrix,
but of course there's no story without some conflict.
Thomas finds himself literally forced by Warner Brothers
to make a sequel to the trilogy.
Despite his oath to let sleeping leather jackets lie.
- I'm sure You can understand why
our beloved parent company Warner Brothers
has decided to make a sequel to the trilogy.
- What?
- And this is not unlike what happened
to the Wachowskis IRL, but we'll get to that later.
It's through this storyline that in our opinion,
Resurrections most directly and most successfully
examines the legacy of The Matrix.
In one montage, the dev team bickers
about what The Matrix means.
- Obviously the Matrix is about transpolitics.
- Crypto fascism.
- It's a metaphor of.
- Capitalist exploitation.
- They debate about what it means to revive the franchise.
- The Matrix means mayhem.
- And they rationalize just what it would mean
to return to the story over and over again.
- This cannot be another reboot retrend regurgitate.
- Why not?
It'd be a good sell.
- This is of course, boatloads of fun,
but it's also a sly reference
to the franchises reputation for opaqueness,
a quality that facilitated
so many disparate interpretations to begin with.
But this scene is also key to contextualizing
the developments and red cons of the entire movie.
The dev team, we are made to assume,
wasn't directly involved with the initial creation
of The Matrix games.
Yet each member seems to have
their own definitive interpretation.
Meanwhile, Thomas, the driving creative force behind it all
does (beep) kung fu in his apartment
and takes luxurious baths.
So what's going on?
Well, for us, it seems like a microcosm
of what notable French smart guy, Roland Barthes called
the death of the author.
Back in the late sixties,
Barthes was getting sick of the way literary critics
interpreted everything through the prism
of the author's life.
In short, he claimed that if a work is sufficiently complex,
we can't reliably glean an author's intentions
from the text alone.
To Barthes, this means what the author intended
can't be as relevant as what's in the actual text itself.
Of course, this opinion was misread and over time
was taken to mean that any interpretation of a text is valid
because the only thing that matters is how the reader feels,
which eventually led to say baseless speculation,
that Breaking Bad was all just a dream
after Jessie fell asleep in Mr. White's chemistry class,
or, you know, the whole red pill ideology.
The idea of the death of the author
and its subsequent misreading
have all been defined literary criticism
over the years.
So by excluding Mr. Anderson,
the author of the game, from the discussion,
Resurrections is depicting the dominant cultural form
of criticism and acknowledging the franchises capacity
to elicit varying interpretations.
But the film is really most concerned
with one interpretation.
The self-evidence cesspool that is the red pill movement.
Before you leap into the comments
to tell us our mom should have had an abortion.
No, this is not some spicy hot take.
The red pill interpretation flies in the face
of pretty much every other theme in the trilogy,
like realizing free will or resisting oppression.
What's more, the central villain of Resurrections
played with Gusto by Neil Patrick Harris,
parrots red pill rhetoric with a bluntness uncharacteristic
for the franchise.
- What a mess.
- I own that mistake,
shouldn't oppressed.
Women used to be so easy to control.
- Resurrections tries to belie faulty interpretation,
that is to make its intent as obvious as possible.
And it's pretty upfront about it.
Trinity is just as important as Neo,
and by the end of the movie is even more powerful.
It's centering the lead woman of the franchise
in the face of a misogynistic misappropriation of its ideas
by you know, pickup artists.
It's an assertion of what The Matrix is supposed to mean
from one of the key minds of the series, Lana Wichowski.
In this way, the film actively defends
the authors right to dictate how we interpret their works.
Now that's cool and validating for people
who have interpreted the text correctly,
according to that author,
but the practice of privileging the author
does have unfortunate implications rooted in class
and notions of elitism.
Regardless of how it was misread
to be a free for all orgy of interpretation.
Barthes says death of the author was instrumental
in shifting literary criticism
away from snobby intellectual circles,
and opening it up to anyone willing to engage
in close reading of texts.
It expanded the field to accommodate new voices,
including those systemically excluded from academic circles.
This complicates Resurrection's argument
that the author can swoop in and tell people
their interpretations are wrong.
That complication becomes even more gnarly
when you consider the medium of film,
which is inherently collaborative.
When the final product has had input
from a ton of different creatives,
who counts as the author?
The answer here might seem obvious.
It's the Wichowski sisters, right?
The vision for the franchise came from them
and as directors, they enacted that vision.
But this only works according to the definition
of authorship taken from literary criticism,
ie, a singular entity.
Film theorist in the sixties and seventies
actually did try to appropriate this approach.
Introducing auteur theory,
as an attempt to elevate the way film was viewed
in academic circles.
Auteur theorist argue that the director functions
essentially the same way as the author of a book.
This arguably risks understating the contributions
of say the writer or the cinematographer,
production designer, and yeah, even the studio executives.
So film theorists C. Paul Sellors proposes
collective authorship as a better fit for movies,
where the author is an entity made up of the people
who had an artistic effect on the final product.
This can get weird sometimes though, take Blade Runner.
The question of whether protagonists Deckard
is a replicant or not,
is alluded to throughout the film.
And it's perhaps the most prominent area of discussion
for fans.
Director Ridley Scott has been super vocal about his take.
Scott says Deckard is a replicant,
and scenes that would tacitly confirm this,
were removed from the theatrical cut of the movie,
but pretty much everyone else involved in making the film,
including star Harrison Ford
and the very dudes who wrote the script, disagree.
Scott got to make his own cut of the film years later,
and use the opportunity to albeit confirm his stance.
- Too bad you won't live,
but then again, who does.
- Situations like this draw attention to the fact
that even when altering our notions of authorship
to include collaboration,
the question of who should have final say over a film
is always going to be tricky.
And it gets trickier when we apply collective authorship
to a franchise,
because you get studios eager to leverage their valuable IP.
Sometimes over the artistic concerns of the creators.
In fact, Warner Brothers was openly developing
a fourth Matrix movie for years,
even though the Wichowski's were not on board,
and pretty much all of the biggest Hollywood franchises
like the MCUs, Bonds, and Fast and Furious,
the studio was the only consistent party
across the installments.
Philosopher Theodor Adorno explored this,
calling Hollywood out as a major contributor
to what he called the culture industry.
Now Adorno's thoughts on this are sweeping,
and occasionally elitist,
but of note to us is his exploration of the Hollywood movie
as a product.
According to Adorno,
Hollywood films are defined and ultimately diminished
by their adherence to formulas.
He believed that things like tropes
and strict act structures are used to make films viable
as a product and nothing that might devalue that product
will be tolerated.
In the culture industry,
any meeting that commodified art wants to convey
is at best compromised by financial concerns.
We see this tension at play in Matrix Resurrections 2,
which seems to be constantly apologizing
for its own existence,
and going on tangents that explicitly attack
the whole notion of sequels in the first place.
- I felt either I'm having a mental breakdown again,
or I'm living inside a computer generated reality
that has imprisoned me again.
- At the same time,
it plays into plenty of the obvious IP
and profit-driven sequel tropes
Adorno might've complained about.
This makes it all feel a little messy.
Sure, the film pokes fun at the studio,
but overall it protects the franchise.
Still, it does raise some interesting questions
as it wrestles with its own existence.
Fittingly, the analyst who produces The Matrix
to generate energy
feels almost like an embodiment of the content industry.
- It turns out in my Matrix,
the worst we treat you,
the more we manipulate you,
the more energy you produce.
It's nuts.
I've been setting productivity records every year
since I took over,
and the best part, zero resistance.
People stay in their pods,
happier than pigs in (beep).
- This seems to be commenting on the way this industry
and its wealthy gurus thrive on generating controversy
and stimulating heightened emotions
in order to capture the attention of the masses.
More so than taking issue with fan interpretations then,
the film saves its most serious criticism
for the content industry at large.
Matrix Resurrections seems to almost be asking,
am I really just a good version of Space Jam 2,
another piece of IP leveraged
to drive HBO max subscriptions?
Ultimately this film seems nervous about its own existence
and the loss of the Wichowski's authorial control,
amidst Warner Brothers zest for more IP driven content.
Whether you can successfully take issue
with the existence of unnecessary sequels
within a sequel, however,
remains an open question.
As does the question of how successful
you can tell people they got your film all wrong
more than 20 years later.
The way we see it,
it's a bit late to undo aspects of The Matrix's legacy
that Lana seems to dislike,
but it was still pretty fun to watch the film try.
But what do you guys think?
Was The Matrix Resurrections successful
in critiquing its fans in the content industry?
Or did it get too meta for its own good.
Let us know in the comments,
and hey, try to keep it friendly.
Big thanks to our patients for all your support,
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and as always, thanks for watching.
Peace.
(upbeat music)