The Matrix - Simulacra and Dystopia

Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where our bodies live. (Barlow, 1996)

You’ve been living in a dream world Neo. This, is the world, as it exists today: Welcome to the desert – of the real. (Morpheus to Neo in The Matrix)

From Plato’s "Charmides" to the Wachowski brothers’ "The Matrix" (1999), there is a tradition of writing in Western literature, which thinks about and imagines the city as either a utopia or a dystopia, or both. I believe that what such imagining allows us is to do is locate ourselves within a type of dialectic of the best possible or worst possible outcomes that our own historical conditions may lead us to. By imagining utopian and dystopic cities we are alerted to the ethical and moral implications that constantly changing social structures, always under continual sway by developments in technology, hold for communities in cities. Visions of dystopia and utopia function as allegories of contemporary society – of the particular historical moment of society in which a particular utopian or dystopic vision is produced. They historicise given moments by alerting us to and imagining the possible implications caused by technological change. Most of all, they historicise by reminding us of the fact that ours is just a given moment – things do not stay the same.

Jameson (1992: 11) notes that, “If everything means something else, then so does technology.” Particularly in an era where technological change is so very rapid, and where traditionally accepted notions about the position and function of the subject in a community or society have come under sustained attack, visions of dystopia and utopia ask just what technology might come to mean for us, in an age where living in diverse city communities challenges the dominance of any single meaning.

"The Matrix", like a number of contemporary science-fiction films (eg "Bladerunner", "The Terminator") deals with themes of conspiracy, paranoia, the loss of privacy and the dissolution of human society in favour of a technology that has become supreme in its own right. Their space of action is within the city. In both "The Terminator" and "The Matrix" humans have lost out to artificial intelligence, which, soon after having been invented, quickly becomes malevolent and takes control of itself at the expense of human society. The implication seems to be that two different sentient, intelligent types of beings cannot possibly share this world together – one has to go, and it is inevitably the carbon-based humans which end up as the inferior life form.

Where "The Matrix" really fascinates though is in its rupturing of what we know as reality. In "The Matrix", the artificial intelligence (AI) has devised the ultimate conspiracy theory – where reality itself is nothing but a collectively dreamt conspiracy set in contemporary urban society. The story goes that when AI went bad, humans “scorched the sky” in order to deprive the AI of its power source, ie, the sun. Deprived of its power, the AI then came across the very novel idea of using humans themselves as its power source. In order to get (almost) perfect compliance, the AI constructed a virtual reality: a perfect replica or simulacrum of life in the city in 1999, put the humans to sleep and plugged them in. In the ‘real’ world it is actually the late twenty-first century. Humans lie peacefully unaware of their actual condition in endless rows of artificial wombs, digesting the liquefied remains of the dead, functioning as so many billions of Duracell batteries for the AI (it’s fascinating to consider the types of images and ideas corporations will desire to have their product placed with!), in a landscape that looks like it was taken right out of an H. R. Giger painting. This wholly computer generated simulation of reality, functioning to pull the wool over the eyes of the human race, is what is referred to as The Matrix. It is in a way the ultimate dystopia and the ultimate conspiracy – as no one submerged within the matrix is even aware of it.

Having not the space for detail here, I will limit myself to making a few comments as to themes in "The Matrix", and how it figures and allegorises the modern city, tying these in with ideas I have encountered in the reading for this essay.

The world of the matrix and that of historical reality beyond the matrix is exclusively the world of the city. Within the matrix all the action is played out within the western city of the late twentieth century. In the ‘real’ world it is played out in the remaining sewer systems of the once existent cities. Nowhere in the film is any space beyond the city alluded to. By this I conclude that "The Matrix" is commenting upon city life as we experience it now. It is warning against a ‘dehistoricisation’ of reality in the city and an uncritical acceptance of and attitude to technological progress and its ethical implications.

It is of note that "The Matrix" conserves the domain of an actual historical reality – the plot revolves around those few who have managed to escape the matrix back into reality and are waging war with ‘agents’ – sentient computer programs existing only within the matrix which serve as a kind of police force for the matrix. David Levery (2001, 158) has contrasted this conservation with Cronenberg’s film "eXistenZ" (1999), noting that

In The Matrix we know very well where the “real” world is. The real world exists [and]...can tell a heroic tale of its recovery. In contrast, Cronenberg’s eXistenZ...has no such faith. For even they [the characters] cannot escape from the ever-recursive game of eXistenZ and TransCendenZ.

Unlike the world of eXistenZ, this retaining of a sharp distinction between the real and the simulation allows for the possibility of resistance. As much as "The Matrix" may, in a critical sense, fail by its Hollywood style reliance on an individual hero (Neo, played by Keanu Reeves), who is almost messianic in his functions (he even ‘rises’ from the dead) and its somewhat unconvincing resort to mystical notions of the Oracle and prophecy in the ‘real’ world, the fact that there is some type of social movement of resistance is made possible only by an awareness of the ‘real’ world, by liberation from the suffocating ‘false consciousness’ of the matrix. Miller (2000, 60) focuses on this theme in the film in his article ‘The Matrix and the Medium’s Message’, noting that

The Matrix flirts with showing how an organized, multicultural movement can sustain resistance to a system run by “suits”. This sets it apart from much recent Hollywood fare [where]...aberrance from the norm is usually punished within the film.

We can see the simulated city that is the matrix also as a powerful allegorical figure of

Capital [which has]...completed, without resistance or remainder, the “real subsumption” of society, without the need to pass through any cumbersome entanglements with producers and consumers, except that they are pure “terminals” or “switching points” (to use Baudrillard’s terms) [compare the figure of humans as battery cells] in the parthenogenetic intercourse of capital with itself. It is precisely at this moment, when capital appears as the quasi source of all social life as such...that capitalism seems increasingly invisible and unnameable as a distinct entity.

Beyond posing questions about reality, "The Matrix" may be read as asking what the fundamental motive for the existence of the city is. Does the modern city blind us to the ‘real’ potential of social action and interaction by overwhelming us with the images and rhetoric of the movement of capital within the city, as if that were all there is to life? In "The Matrix" there is the last ‘real’ city named Zion, which we never see, but which seems to be the communal source of the efforts of the resistance and the place where hope for the future of the human race lies. This is the sort of city, which the film appears to legitimate as ‘real’ in opposition to the city life we (as viewers) know and experience as real.

Jameson (1992: 45) writes that,

In principle, indeed, the here-and-now ought to suffice unto itself, and need no further meaning; but that would only be the case in Utopia, in a landscape of sheer immanence, in which social life coincided fully with itself...

The extent of the dystopia in the way "The Matrix" figures the culmination of technology’s influence on life in the city, is such that there is no longer even a ‘here-and-now’ to speak of – history has stopped. The Matrix looks to a restoration of ‘real’ meaning by making people aware of their situation. Interestingly, in the final scene we are not outside of the matrix, but back in it, in control of it. "The Matrix" doesn’t seem to propose a nostalgic return to the real world, but hints that (besides allowing for a sequel), after all, the simulation may be negotiable and even acceptable as long as human beings are ultimately the ones in control.

References in Text