WARNING: This article reveals key plot elements of the first three films of the saga Matrix. If you intend to see Matrix Resurrections, the fourth installment hitting theaters Wednesday, December 22, we can’t recommend you check out the previous ones – and then read this article to put the pieces of the puzzle back in the right order.
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The world falls into two categories: those who think they have understood the trilogy Matrix and those who really understood it. The author of these lines believed for a long time to belong to the second category, before falling from the top, twenty years after having seen the first part in a crowded northern theater for the 1999 Film Festival. The release of the fourth part, Wednesday, December 22, is the perfect opportunity to share with you the progress of research in “matrixology”.
“Misleading the viewer was part of the project”, smiles Julien Pavageau. The co-founder of the YouTube cinephile channel Monsieur Bobine is also the author of the book The work of the Wachowski, the matrix of a social art. If like the 1999 version of the author of this article, you understood that Matrix told the fate of Neo, computer programmer called Thomas Anderson in what he believed to be real life, who discovers thanks to Morpheus and Trinity that in reality humans are exploited in incubators by machines that put them to sleep with a virtual simulation , you totally missed out on the film. Yes Yes. “Yet the Wachowski sisters waved all the clues under the spectator’s nose”, smiles Sofiane Aït-Kaci, host of the La Saga podcast and fan of Matrix from the start, to the point of having managed a forum on the subject for many years. We are going to dig together what is hidden between the omnipresent lines of code in the films.
Take the (memorable) opening scene. Trinity finds herself surrounded by a squad of police officers at the top of a building (from 1’30 on the video). “It is the most representative scene of the film, describes Julien Pavageau. We don’t ask ourselves any questions, we don’t know anything about the film, we don’t know who Trinity is. And yet, in two seconds, we identify with her when it doesn’t make sense, she’s the bad guy. “ The Wachowskis use a few tricks: Trinity expresses emotions, sweats, has a trembling voice, when her antagonists, notably the monolithic Agent Smith, do not emit any. All the ingredients of the founding misunderstanding of Matrix are here. “All this obliterates the rational reading of the scene”, supports Julien Pavageau.
The first scene in which the character played by Keanu Reeves appears – visible in the video above – is accompanied by strong references to Lewis Carroll, the author ofAlice in Wonderland (the white rabbit) and Jean Baudrillard. Our programmer hides his shadow mini-disks in a copy of Simulacra and simulation, the founding work of the French philosopher who, broadly, explains that we no longer live in reality because symbols have replaced our perception of reality. During a conference, film critic Rafik Djoumi summed up the trap into which 90% of the public fell: “You spectator, and especially the gentleman in the background who thinks he is clever because he has read Baudrillard and Carroll, in the film we are presenting, you are going to confuse the simulacrum and the simulation”, insists the author of a 150-page thesis on Matrix republished as a special issue of the magazine Rockyrama. “You are going to build a completely coherent universe for yourself from an absurd proposition, even though you will be constantly told that you are under the logic of a binary dictatorship”, he continues.
Then comes the famous scene of choosing between the blue pill and the red pill. “Morpheus explains verbatim to Neo the opposite of what everyone has understood”, jokes Julien Pavageau. “Choose the blue pill and everything stops. Then you can have sweet dreams and think whatever you want”Morpheus explains when he holds out both hands to Neo. “Choose the red pill, you stay in Wonderland and we descend with the white rabbit to the bottom of the abyss.” Neo of course takes the red pill and then believes he is switching out of fiction. Believe, only. “The spectator then plunges into the burrow of the white rabbit” who guides Alice in the fantasized wonderland of Lewis Carroll’s novel, supports Julien Pavageau. For “think what he wants”, you had to take the blue pill. Keep your free will, but stay in the matrix. Perhaps a better choice than the one that led him to be manipulated from A to Z by Morpheus and to drink his words during the first hour of the film.
Still convinced to have understood everything? We continue with the famous scene where Morpheus embarks Neo in the training program, represented by an entirely white decoration. The two men sit in leather armchairs in front of an antique television set which broadcasts a representation of the real world. We see ruined skyscrapers, an inky sky, everything evokes desolation. “Welcome to the desert of reality”, launches Morpheus, who quotes Baudrillard in the text. And you take at face value everything that the man in the dark glasses explains to you, when it is a video broadcast in a program: a representation in the representation. Matrix “operates exactly like a simulacrum, the signs and conventions it uses to reveal a truth to us (‘Neo discovers the real world’) are the very tools that prevent us from understanding the truth of the work (‘the world real does not exist ‘) “, writes Rafik Djoumi in his thesis.
A few minutes later, Morpheus takes Neo for a walk in the Matrix. At least he believes it. The teacher continues to monologue in front of his pupil, a little stunned by the mass of information, just like the spectator besides. At the bend of a street, Neo’s gaze is drawn to the woman in the red dress. “Hey, are you listening to what I’m telling you?” tance Morpheus. Obviously not – Rob Dougan’s cult music doesn’t help – and that’s a shame. Otherwise, you would have noticed that the rebels managed to recreate the Matrix in its entirety with stunning reality, including Agent Smith, the system program tasked with taking them out. Who then tells us that the whole story we are told does not take place in a program of the same kind? The truth is elsewhere, feathered Fox Mulder and Dana Scully in a popular series of those years. There is one who had seen everything, by the way. Jean Baudrillard in person, in an interview with New Obs in 2003 : “Matrix, it’s a bit like the movie about the Matrix that the Matrix could have made. “ Bingo!
“The Wachowskis are very fond of playing with the spectator and questioning the notion of good and bad, asserts Julien Pavageau. Have you wondered who the bad guys are in The Matrix? “ It is never formulated explicitly. Some fans have even fabricated theories that Agent Smith is the real hero of the film. “And when you think about it, agents do virtually no collateral casualties in movies, unlike heroes.”
Add to this a four-year hiatus between the first and the second film, which for many sealed the initial vision of the story and you will understand the violence of the rejection of the second part by some of the fans. In the first script, rewritten half a dozen times, the scheme theorized by Joseph Campbell in his book The hero with a thousand and one faces is applied to the letter. Roughly speaking, Campbell defends the thesis that there is only one type of hero, in religions and mythology. Jesus, Luke Skywalker and Neo, same fight. The general public has the feeling that Neo’s journey is therefore over at the end of the first part …
Now is the time to quote Morpheus: “I didn’t say it would be easy Neo, I said it would be the truth.” In the second opus, Matrix Reloaded, the directors are working to deconstruct everything we thought we had understood from the first. One example among a hundred: we discover that the kisses between characters are in fact exchanges of information. In retrospect, the one Trinity gives Neo at the end of the first movie, while the hero is clinically dead in the Matrix, is none other than downloading the line of code to become the Chosen One, going back to life and derail Agent Smith. Is Neo just a program when Smith called Morpheus a “virus” during his interrogation?
At the end of the three episodes, it is difficult to have the slightest certainty on the nature of Neo, nor on what exactly happened during the final battle of Matrix Revolutions. On the DVD of Matrix Reloaded, Harold Perrineau (who plays the role of Link) even mentions “400 reading levels” that do not encroach on each other. Don’t look for too many keys from the directors: “They are in the same process as David Lynch, who systematically answers ‘no’ when we discuss with him a theory about his films, emphasizes Sofiane Aït-Kaci. Their answer is that it’s all in the movie, it’s up to you to see what you want. “
The only clue would be in the yellow code that engulfs Neo at the end of the third part. If we see Buddhist symbols there by looking at it frame by frame, it’s a bit short to cry “Eureka” like Archimedes plunged into a tub of lines of code …
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What then did the Wachowskis really want to do? “Matrix Revolutions asks its audience to participate”, Lana says in a rare interview on the show “DP / 30: The Oral History Of Hollywood“. The intention was “from the start, to try an experiment: can we continue to change the way audiences experience an action movie? Movies are a matrix. You come inside: they’re immersive and envelop you like a cocoon. They tell you what to see, what to think, what to feel. For us, that was problematic. “
Their approach goes beyond the framework of cinema. “This is the first real interactive film, advances Julien Pavageau. What is called the gameplay are emerging in the world of video games. They did it ten years in advance. It’s when the creation escapes the game designer, for example, via a bug exploited by players to cheat or play differently. “ Rafik Djoumi even speaks to him of a “artistic happening”. “The most gigantic ever.”