...I'm okay with being REALITY-based.




Wednesday, May 28, 2003
      ( 3:53 PM )
 
There is No Spoon

You're going to need to take the Red Pill to follow this one... George has a great review and commentary on The Matrix today. He talks about the first movie and it's allegorical relation to today's corporate and media control of our culture. It's really well written, and I encourage you to read it, especially if you are a Matrix fan. While George thinks no sequel is necessary, and I have to agree on some level with that, I think the sequel is good for several reasons. Without giving away anything about the sequel for people (like you, George!) who haven't seen it yet:

First, it approaches the question of free will, examines it, and then leaves it for the viewer to decide whether it even exists...or if this overwhelming power that influences our daily lives is making the choices for us. I'm not talking about God, I'm talking about this combined power of the corporations and the mass media that have lulled the collective American mind into submission and acceptance. If BushCo or whoever controls what is spun in the media decides one day to tell the world that such and such a thing is happening and so we must do such and such in response...there seems no more to exist a willingness on the part of the recipients of that information to question or to choose for themselves whether to believe and/or investigate what is being told to them. So even if we have free choice theoretically, have we abdicated our own power to use it and opted for the Matrix' version of events to unfold around us?

Second, I enjoyed the sequel because it caused me to question my belief as to whether Neo was the One. He had awakened to the truth, and he had begun to subvert the system that was hiding the truth from the rest of sleeping humanity...and yet when confronted with the idea that he might be no more than an anomoly that the system had dealt with before, he had to stop and wonder if it was true. In our own culture, we seem to have acquiesced into a numbed species that willingly accepts the idea that the corporations deserve more recognition as rights-deserving entities than we do as human beings and citizens of this country. We seem to have forsaken our one, true, original belief that we are the ones who hold the keys to our own freedoms and to a society led by a government that we can not only be proud of, but that will represent us and work to make the world a better place. Am I just a dreamer? Well, isn't Morpheus just a dreamer to most of his comrades? And in the end of Reloaded (not trying to give anything away), we are confronted with the idea that if we just would take hold of the power that is ours, it would translate outside this system of subterfuge we're living in --- and we could actually engender real change.

One way of doing this is direct action. In Reloaded , Morpheus takes direct action even when his own society of resistance disagrees with his methods. But it is the only way that a door could have been opened. It's the same for us in our own society. I was happy to see that link to the direct action that is taking place in Nashua, NH - a town I lived in for part of my childhood. It is action like this one that wakes people up. And even if they wake up screaming because you're getting in their way...at least they're paying attention to something other than Fox News.

Finally, I guess what I liked most about the sequel was that though I knew at the end of The Matrix that Neo would continue to fight to reveal the truth, in Reloaded, that fight is shown not as a simple good v. evil contest, but rather the contest is within Neo himself. For us, as activists, progressives, patriots and human beings, it's time to allow this contest to take place and stop reclining back into inaction and numb acceptance of the line our government and the media is feeding us. But we can't take too much longer fighting within ourselves before we actually decide to do something.

All in all, I recommend the sequel, just to see it. I'm not saying you'll agree with me, but I think it's worth seeing. In the end, as George said, we have our own matrix to deal with. And so far, the only Neo around is us.

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