I tried to obtain a DVD of Wag the Dog last night from my local software/video shop in the city. No luck at all. So I got The Matrix instead. Why? Everyone is talking about the sequel, THE MATRIX RELOADED. See here
It only took Suzanne and I a couple of hours to figure out how the DVD player worked--it was our first foray but too many glasses of wine is our excuse for the Ludditism. I realized I'd seen the late bits of the Matrix on free-to-air television before, and not really clicked to what I was seeing. No b doubnt it was the time when I used to surf the tv. channels in an attempt to experience television as one big media flow -----life as a chaotic and nihilistic flux of images.
The Matrix was an interesting film even though I gave up before the ending and took the poodles for a walk--it was well after midnight. The dogs wanted to check out their friends at the local brothels and to hunt a few possums in Whitmore Square.
I liked the key idea. That world, with its office buildings and restaurants and teeming populace, was, like its book, a hollowed-out illusion, a virtual universe filled with computer code, a simulacrum of ordinary life. We are then taught or educated to see the world for what it actually is----a nihilistic matrix in which the machines now rule human beings. It was all very Baudrillard-----well, the simulacrum bit. I can see where Slavoj Zizek picked the idea of the desert of the real.
The Matrx would be a central part of postmodern cinema studies in the university--along with Blade runner. It has a big appeal as it is seen as brainy sci-fi film with a tough cool street edge.
It was also very American--an action movie in which a bunch of independent and macho cowboys in a hovercraft liberated the world from the bad guys. The action movie was overlaid with great costumes, excellent computer graphics and wall-to-wall sound. But I did get bored with the cowboy/action narrative even if did proceed at a good pace. Despite the cyborg dimension, in which part of the inputs and outputs from the computer are plugged directly in the brain’s sensory motor-system, and the salvation themes, it got a bit tiresome by the end----hence my walk down the street with the poodles.
Thinking about the film today I can see that it is tailor made for academic philosophers. A key theme is about living in the world of illusion rather than reality. The philosophers are immediately reminded of Descartes, the evil demon and private inner experiences, and off they go into the origins of modern philosophy with long detours into analytic philosophy's concerns about brains in a vat. The film has been forgotten.
Yet the illusion reality theme works quite well without the need to return to Descates. You only have to think about the political spin that comes out of Washington, Canberra and London about the war with Iraq to understand that. We are living in a world constructed by the national security state. A world of illusion has been created where everything is now read through the signs of terorism.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at June 1, 2003 07:49 PM | TrackBack