The Matrix

Why does The Matrix enjoy near-universal appeal among college students? Of course it's got great kung fu, nifty special effects, an intriguing story, and so forth, but I think there is more to it than that.

The main premise of The Matrix is that the reality presented to us is phony. This is an idea that resonates deep in the hearts of young people today. The normal life presented to us, we suspect, is phony. We sense that if only we could wipe away the veneer, we would experience a totally different reality.

Moreover, we also have the feeling that this phony reality in which we all believe has not been created for our benefit. We sense that perhaps life-as-we-know-it is the product of something sinister, something behind the scenes, all-controlling, that manipulates us for its own purposes. Think about it: in the movie, the true reason for human life was to feed energy to the machine. This taps into the suspicion that our lives are not our own, that we are not living for ourselves, but for something powerful, unseen, and callous to human dignity and self-fulfillment. And like a machine it runs on and on, senselessly, destructively, toward an end that no same human being would ever choose.

Sometimes we may even feel that our lives are programmed for us, played out according to preset parameters. Superficially, maybe we buy into life-as-it-is-presented and try to convince ourselves that yes, we have freedom and self-determination, but underneath that gnaws an undeniable sense of impotence and confinement, our spirits held in stasis much like the bodies - the true selves - of The Matrix's VR-dwelling humans.

In the movie, Neo takes a pill that awakens him to the real, non-virtual world. His first reaction is amazement, terror, and horror at the truth of the human predicament. Later, one of his shipmates on the rebel submarine indeed voices regret at choosing to awaken. And in our own rebel mission there is also that betrayer, submerged below conscious awareness, who urges us to buy in, to believe, to sleep. The danger is very great that the mutiny will prevail and we will deny as youthful idealism or immaturity that vaguely urgent feeling that life is supposed to be more than Just This.

As in The Matrix, the forces that present us with a virtual life are forces of our own making. In the movie it is a vast computer linked to loathsome bio-mechanical organisms; in the real world it is technology in general that has incrementally separated us from authentic human life. In the movie it is said that people became more and more lazy and dependent, until the machines just took over. Can we say this is fiction? Technology has separated us from nature, from each other, and from ourselves. The Matrix has already come true, in the sense that we live in an inauthentic world of our own collective making.

In The Matrix, rebels who threaten the status quo are hunted down by Agents, which are sentient computer programs appearing in human form in the VR world. The machine can take over the body of anyone and transform him or her into an Agent. This runs in nearly exact parallel to the way that impersonal forces, acting through the agency of nearly any human being, persecute anyone who threatens the collective illusion and corral us all into behaviors that perpetuate it.

The same loan officer who is a loving mother and generous friend outside her role, can be an agent of economic oppression within it. A corporate executive who loves nature feels compelled to make business decisions that harm the environment; or more likely, does not even associate those decisions with their environmental effects. Many activists of all stripes, social, political, or environmental, observe that they are complicit by their very membership in society in precisely those collective behaviors they denounce.

Just as we all occasionally act as Agent Smiths to preserve the functioning of the virtual world, so also do we harbor an internal Agent Smith who seeks to thwart our awakening. The internal Agent Smith tells us that we are mistaken, to play by the rules of the VR game and everything will be all right. Dressed impeccably in the uniform of legitimacy, he wields fear as his main weapon. He says you are insane if you don't listen to him. He implies that you are the only one who questions the reality handed to us. Don't be a minority of one, he counsels.

In The Matrix, Neo eventually discovers that he gains amazing powers in the Matrix when he disbelieves in its ultimate reality. He can jump incredible distances, move at great speed, even fly. Similarly, when we begin to disbelieve in the version of reality that has been handed us, it begins to lose its power. When you stop believing that you have to go to school in order to learn, that you have to choose a practical major, that you have to get good grades, that you have to get a job to survive, that you have to go to doctors, that you have to do as your boss says, that you have to make people like you, that you have to submit to anything humiliating; when you stop believing that you should maximize security and minimize risk; when you stop believing in every "should" that's ever been fed to you, then you will become powerful. Freedom is in the mind.

And that is why, despite its darkness and violence, The Matrix is for many of us uplifting. We identify with the band of rebels; we know that they are us; we see in their ends-justified violence the truth: that to break through to the authentic world is overridingly and urgently important.