Unreading “Reloaded”

Unreading “Reloaded”

I’ve been told that coffee grounds, packed on top of cocaine, throw off the drug dogs. It’s only the clever sleuth who, combining intellect with instinct, can pick out the real Colombian Supremo from the wan commercial stuff brewed and filtered for general consumption.

The adage is, of course, as true for the critic as for the Narc, and judging by most of the mainstream reviews of “The Matrix: Reloaded,” the sleuths have gone to the dogs. They say the movie’s dialogue, a solemn stagger of pseudo-intellectual solipsisms, has outworn its welcome; its special effects don’t excite and go on too long. Whereas the original “Matrix” was taut and lean, “Reloaded” seems confused, overwrought and bloated. Even the usually perceptive Stanley Kauffmann of The New Republic slams “Reloaded,” calling it “aggrandized juvenilia” and refusing to review this “familiar utilization of serious thought” as “adolescent fodder” quite beneath him.

They’re probably right, in terms of the movie. Only one thing: there is no movie. There is text.

The original “Matrix” challenges Neo to defy a passive compliance to both order and the Pleasure Principle (a defiance that Cipher, Neo’s Judas, explicitly renounces) for an active role in a chaos of opposition, via the interpretation of a virtual universe. “Reloaded” ups the ante: we, as viewers, are compelled to choose between passive visual entertainment and an interactive reading of “Reloaded” as text, as an arena of symbols and ideas in play. And “Reloaded” forces your hand — watch it as a movie, as passive entertainment, and it falls apart into its own infernal chaos of explosions and kung-fu. In this sense, the original “Matrix” is its own Matrix — passively accept it as entertainment, and you’re victimized by “Reloaded.” William Blake phrased this phenomenon nicely: “If Perceptive Organs vary: Objects of Perception seem to vary:/ If the Perceptive Organs close: their Objects seem to close also.”

Readings of the “Matrix” series, though, are all too often shipwrecking themselves on the shoals of what they exclude. The sheer omnivorousness of “The Matrix”’s intellectual diet, with its loose interweavings of multiple cinematic, literary, theological and philosophical references, defeats any attempt to systematize it. As Slavoj Zizek notes, “The Matrix is one of those films that function as a kind of Rorschach test, setting in motion the universalized process of recognition, like the proverbial painting of God that seems always to stare directly at you from wherever you look at it — practically every orientation seems to recognize itself in it.” Just as film critics have gotten trapped in the idea of “The Matrix” as movie, theologians are stuck in the nets of Biblical allegory and Platonists can’t discern their allegory of the Cave as but another shadow. The obsessively maddening thing about “The Matrix” is that frameworks of meaning are just more signs of the Matrix — the Matrix, in its general sense, signifying the imprisonment of thought within a construct.

The series, then, is nothing less than a radical deconstruction and — my bet is, in “Revolutions” — a reconstruction of meaning itself. And “Reloaded” begins the process by compelling us to read the visceral entertainment of this “action movie” symbolically. For example, take “Reloaded”’s oft-maligned “rave” scene in the subterranean city of Zion. It’s been denigrated as gratuitous. It is, and that’s its point. It’s an ecstatic communal celebration of human energy and sensuality devoid of any purpose other than an assertion of the viscerally human. Its meaning is pleasure — and through it “Reloaded” sets up an opposition between human meaning and pleasure on the one hand, and the machines’ programmed purpose on the other, in which meaning, other than the simple perpetuation of existence, has an ambiguous status. Indeed, deconstruction has shown us that it can be a pleasure to play with meaning; there’s no play in purpose. There’s only submission or resistance to it.

This battle between meaning and purpose is brilliantly visualized in the scene that begins with Neo’s conversation with the Oracle, and ends with the so-called “burly brawl.” Watch carefully, beginning at 1:15:

When the Oracle describes Neo’s task to him, she remarks, “We’re all here to do what we’re here to do.” It’s a laughable solipsism, unless it’s considered as a circular statement of purpose that protects itself from exterior meaning — in other words, machine language. A moment later, ravens scatter and the rogue Agent Smith appears. Watch the first 10 seconds:

The ravens themselves are doubly symbolic. The Oracle had spoken of the complex program meant to govern them, and their scattering signifies Smith’s threat, his version of control (not by stable and cyclical regularity of the Matrix programming, but by a virus’s totalizing force). They’re also a neat CGI effect, not only reinforcing the idea that we are within a digital environment, but also clearly referencing Madonna’s video “Frozen,” which first used this particular effect.

Could Madonna’s lyrics be any more appropriate here?

You only see what your eyes want to see
How can life be what you want it to be
You’re frozen when your heart’s not open
You’re so concerned with how much you get
You waste your time with hate and regret
You’re broken when your heart’s not open

It could almost be an anthem for Agent Smith, who, as Neo’s alter-ego and nemesis, contrasts Neo’s love for Trinity with his totalitarian egotism.

I’ve often been asked, “Why is the ‘burly brawl’ necessary at all, other than to showcase special effects? Why doesn’t Neo just ‘do his Superman thing’ and fly away?” The answer is that within the Matrix, every object and environment is an intellectual construct. All of the action within the Matrix consists of the intellectual interactions of contending consciousnesses. To be specific: that ain’t kung-fu fighting, daddy-o, that’s a philosophical debate — and an existential crisis. Again, watch carefully.

“Purpose,” intone the Smith clones closing in on Neo, “Purpose is what drives us,” “What binds us,” “What unites us.” Neo is constantly questioning, “Why am I here?” The burly brawl emerges as Neo’s fight for meaningful purpose, while the Smiths are piling upon him arguments for his existence as functionary, as mere machine. And Neo’s ability to fly, while an aspect of Superman or the übermensch, here more completely signifies Neo’s complete freedom of thought — and love — beyond limiting constructs, echoing Hamlet’s words, “with wings as swift as meditation, or thoughts of love.”

Love is, of course, the selfless, illogical and — in matters of strict utility — purposeless aspect of humanity that appears to so perplex the Matrix’s AI. Since the Oracle is revealed to be an intuitive program, in effect the “mother” of the Matrix, the question of whether humanity will free itself from the control of the Matrix, indeed the entire question of free will or causality, seems to be dependent upon whether Neo and Trinity’s love for each other is of their own free desire or a function of the Matrix. Remember, in the original “Matrix,” the Oracle tells Trinity she will fall in love with the One; and, when Neo breaks the vase, the Oracle wryly remarks, “Now, what’s really gonna bake your noodle later on, is whether you would’ve broken the vase if I hadn’t told you.”

What is certain is that the text of “Reloaded,” which masquerades as a movie, throws into question the purpose of the movie critic. It’s an encouraging irony for humanity that more and more, meaningful flights of thought on “Reloaded” aren’t the constructs of professionals in the confines of a page, but are being uploaded, out of free will – not the purpose of a paycheck – into the digital realm. My bet’s on us.

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