i fly or i fall

[The following contains spoilers for all the Matrixes, and briefly touches on the theme of suicide.]

As the credits rolled after I watched The Matrix Resurrections for the first time, I felt curiously indifferent, like the positives and negatives had exactly cancelled each other out. My feeling was that this movie didn’t really need to exist, because it seemed like Lana Wachowski, the director, felt that way, too.

I guess, in that moment, it seemed like this was a movie that had fallen out of love with movies, that had traded in that excitable visionary aspect for something that didn't really care how it held together, as long as its two protagonists got to hold hands and say ‘fuck you’ to the studio. Laudable in its own way, but not quite worth what was lost in the process: the excitement and passion in its reason for being, in the thrill of creation, in the transcendent power of art, instead seeking what felt like relatively minor, petty consolations.

I think a lot of this initial reaction just had to do with it being a very different kind of film, and not necessarily what we would expect from The Matrix, in tone, style, world, genre, anything. The movie itself was aware of this (as it was aware of everything); Wachowski and the other writers were clearly not interested in making the same kind of movie, knew it needed to be something different for a different time and a different world, and knew people might hate it for that reason:

BUGS:
After our first contact went so badly, we thought elements from your past might help ease you into the present.

MORPHEUS:
Nothing comforts anxiety like a little nostalgia.

But it’s not just a matter of bringing back the Matrix we loved, that is comfortable and familiar to us, and the anger and disappointment this provokes when it doesn’t happen (which is of course worth examining); it’s also a matter of what they chose to replace it with. And I think this is where Resurrections becomes more difficult to appraise.

At the time of its release, Wachowski said: ‘Art is a mirror. Most will prefer to gaze at the surface but there will be people like me who enjoy what lies behind the looking glass. I made this movie for them.’

The tricky thing with Resurrections is that it’s not always easy to tell what counts as mere surface detail. Are we paying attention to the movie itself, in its own right, as its own thing, or is it simply reflecting us back at ourselves, in terms of our own desires and expectations and nostalgic yearning? Are we supposed to believe at all in its fiction, when we’re constantly being pointed to its illusory and superficial nature? What are the bugs and what are the features of this movie, when its mode of rampant meta-ness seems to invite us to treat every puzzling creative choice as a question of thematic significance?

When the movie came out, there were a few hot takes flying around that Resurrections was intentionally ‘anti-aesthetic’, or even that they made a bad movie on purpose, as a bold move to tank The Franchise. I think these arguments are much less flattering and generous than they’re intended to be. I can believe that Wachowski was all about embracing the imperfections, or was just less interested in making a ‘perfect’ movie, and this somehow being the point. I can believe that it was an act against nostalgia. I can also believe that a lot of this just had to do with creating a very different kind of Matrix, with its new, ‘softer’ forms of control.

But the thing that strikes me about some of these rationalisations is... I think we’ve been here before.

STUCK IN A LOOP

In a lot of ways, these arguments remind me of the relationship I had, back in the day, with the original sequels, as someone who cared about these movies just a tad more than the average person: trying to embrace that deeper meaning, that true vision, the thing that would make it all cohere, but constantly getting distracted by and tripping up over individual artistic (or seemingly un-artistic) decisions, which perhaps made things less compelling than they could have been, or more confusing than they needed to be.

There are a lot of reasons that could be given for why the sequels felt this way, from the script to the execution to the overwhelming scale of their ambition. There’s also the reality that, while carefully-staged lightning may strike twice (just ask Morpheus), nobody could ever have hoped to replicate everything that came together so well, with such serendipity and timeliness, as the first movie did. It’s impossible to repeat that kind of phenomenon, culturally or creatively.

Regardless, it was clearly part of the intention in the sequels to deconstruct the first movie: to confront many of the assumptions on which it was based, and perhaps our own complacency as thrill-seeking movie-goers. But I remember this being used as a justification, or a rationalisation, for why they were just less effective as movies: because they were meant to be. Then, as now, there were those who seemed to find a way to rationalise what actually didn’t work for them, act like they’d solved it, and throw down the gauntlet to others clearly too dumb to understand.

I think what’s true of all of these movies is that this stuff is a nerd trap. When it feels like something doesn’t work, it’s easy to get sucked into how it works and how it doesn’t; to know that the forest is more important than the trees but to insist that the trees make up the forest and if only, if only, they had done this or that or the other instead.

Or to continually return to the question: what if I have missed something, though? What if I’m just not seeing it, the greater truth behind all of these weird decisions? What if the forest I took it to be is all in my mind—it is in fact my forest and not the true forest at all?

(What if I just went outside? What does grass feel like?)

I’m a big believer, these days, in the idea that most of us who engage in any kind of art criticism do it mainly because we’re trying to delve into our own sensibilities, our own aesthetic preferences, and the ‘logic’ of our own hearts and minds. So much of art is in our individual responses to it, our own perspectives.

And while it’s no bad thing to reckon with movies on their own terms, or to try to see something we didn’t initially see—we are connecting with the hearts and minds of other people, after all—it’s easy to get lost in our attempts to make sense of essentially imperfect creations, either in terms of what we would fix or where we look to find their intentionality. Especially with movies like these, replete with signs and symbols and double-meanings, which always exhort us to look deeper.

For me, the original sequels were a formative experience of engaging with art to figure out why some things worked for me and others didn’t. But with Resurrections, I’m not looking to repeat history.

So I won’t say that, when I watched it a second time, everything flawlessly fell into place, or try to make sense of every reason why it didn’t. But beyond the shock of those first impressions, I was able to pay more attention to some of the things going on in there, and decided that, just like the earlier sequels, some of it was actually pretty cool.

FREED BY MIND

Resurrections has a lot to say about art. A big part of this movie is of course about what capitalism (‘the Matrix’) wants art to be: the same kind of product, fed to us over and over and over. This is the big, glaring, sledgehammer, dropped-anvil, nuclear-bomb-hits-fourth-wall statement the movie makes about what the first Matrix became, or what the studios (or even audiences) wanted it to be.

But ultimately its Matrix-assigned purpose is not a satisfactory answer to a more fundamental question, which is: why do we make art in the first place? Why did the Wachowskis?


My favourite scene in this movie, and maybe the most important one, is the scene where Neo and Trinity, living their new Matrix-y lives as Thomas and Tiffany, with only subconscious memories of who they were, reconnect over coffee as two middle-aged strangers, drawn to each other for reasons they don’t understand.

TIFFANY:
So, what’s it like being a world-famous game designer? Must be amazing.

THOMAS:
Uh… A lot of hours. Sometimes it is amazing. Most times… I don’t know.

TIFFANY:
But you made The Matrix. Even I’ve heard of that.

THOMAS:
Yeah. We kept some kids entertained.

TIFFANY:
So, worth it?

THOMAS:
[chuckles]

TIFFANY:
Can I ask something about your game?

THOMAS:
Sure.

TIFFANY:
Did you base your main character on yourself?

THOMAS:
There is a lot of me in him. Maybe a little too much.

TIFFANY:
Can I ask you something else?

THOMAS:
Please.

TIFFANY:
There’s a woman in your game.

THOMAS:
Trinity.

TIFFANY:
Which is a weird coincidence also, right?

THOMAS:
God, yeah.

TIFFANY:
I like her. I like Trinity.

THOMAS:
Ah.

TIFFANY:
And I dig her Ducati. Another coincidence. I love motorcycles. My friend Kush and I actually build them.

THOMAS:
Really?

TIFFANY:
You have your analyst [referring to the fact that Thomas is in therapy], I have my bikes.
So, I was looking at images from your game. At Trinity. Well, I showed Chad a scene, and I was like, “So, what do you think?”
He didn’t get it until I said, “Don’t you think she looks like me?”
You know what he did? He laughed. And I laughed too, like it was a joke. How could it not be, right? Made me so angry. I hated myself for laughing. I wanted to kick him so hard. Not too hard. Maybe just hard enough to break his jaw off.

Though it’s never been as explicit as this movie makes it, this scene puts forward the idea that Neo is, in some way, an avatar for the Wachowskis themselves. He’s always manifested, at least, something of them, perhaps of their sensibility, their attitude, their desire for freedom and transformation. Perhaps he’s embodied the heroic, rebellious, ever-questioning parts of themselves—or the parts of themselves that they would like to cast as heroic.

There is no requirement for this to be a fully conscious act. In fact, a lot of this story seems to depend on the idea, as it did in the original, that Neo’s own subconscious leads the way.

What Thomas and Tiffany are talking about in this scene is the video game Thomas created, called The Matrix. It’s not always clear what technology looks like in this version of the Matrix, but we know that Thomas, as a programmer, has also created something called a ‘Modal’, which seems to be a kind of Matrix-within-a-Matrix, a high-fidelity virtual reality, in which something like the events of the original movie (i.e. Neo’s past life) play out in a loop.

The character of Bugs describes a Modal as ‘a simulation used to evolve programs’. This is how Thomas creates the new version of Morpheus, a sentient program who is eventually freed from his Modal by the Resistance and able to enter into Thomas’ own ‘reality’, like a fictional character come to life. (Later, we find out he’s even able to manifest into actual real reality, via advanced pin art technology.)

NEO/THOMAS:
I know you.

MORPHEUS:
Not every day you meet your maker.

NEO/THOMAS:
This can’t be happening.

MORPHEUS:
Oh, most definitely is.

NEO/THOMAS:
You can’t be a character I coded.

MORPHEUS:
100% natural.

NEO/THOMAS:
How?

MORPHEUS:
All the explanation you need. [holds up a red pill]

NEO/THOMAS:
Oh. No. No, no, no.

MORPHEUS:
Whoa, whoa, whoa. What do you mean, “no”? You wanted this, you did this. This was your idea.

NEO/THOMAS:
It was a test. An experiment.

MORPHEUS:
An experiment? You put me in a tiny-ass Modal, left me to bang my head till I nearly lost my shit searching for you as an experiment.

Thomas’ own intentions here—his understanding of the Modal and what he thought he was trying to do—are left pretty hazy, but it seems that he created it as a fiction based on his own subconscious memories. This is why the characters don’t look quite the same, played here by different actors.

Explaining his own existence, the new Morpheus—who is in fact a subconscious merging of Morpheus and Smith—pontificates:

Are memories turned into fiction any less real? Is reality based in memory nothing but fiction? As to my role in all this, my best guess is that you wrote me as an algorithmic reflection of two forces that helped you become you, Morpheus and Agent Smith. A combo pack of counter-programming that was… let’s just say, more than a little bit crazy-making. But it worked because here we are.

This comparison between fiction and memory isn’t only to suggest that our memories are unreliable and inevitably imaginative (our attempts to remember the past are fictive, and our attempts to repeat the past—like recreating the first movie—are inevitably transformative), but that our fictions likewise become a form of memory, or a subconscious manifestation of it. We create characters and fictional worlds, operating by the logic of our own subconscious, to remember—and even to show ourselves—who we are.

DUCATI BE KIDDING

Tiffany, meanwhile, is someone who sees herself in the art of another. In the context of this particular story, this is probably because deep down she too has memories of her past life, and recognises Thomas’ interpretation of them. But there’s also something else here, because on another level this is a conversation about fiction, and Tiffany does what many of us do: she identifies with a character.

If Thomas Anderson is the creator, the artist, whose work contains something of himself, manifesting something of his own nature and desires, then Tiffany is someone who finds resonance in his creation, feeling it awaken something similar inside of herself. At first she dismisses her likeness with the character of Trinity as an idle fantasy, a daydream, and, like Thomas, does not initially have the courage to accept that there is something more real to her in this ‘fiction’ than anything in her own Matrix-assigned life, but she’s also infuriated by those (including herself) who laugh it off.

One interesting detail here is that, in their current simulated lives, they don’t look at all like the characters we know—their actual appearance in-Matrix, played by other actors, is revealed by their reflections in the table—but they identify with these characters all the same. Like they can see the deeper code.

What’s also notable, though, is how the relationship between Thomas and Tiffany here is not that between creator and fan. In contrast to his presumed legions of fans in the Matrix world (and what we might expect a stereotypical Matrix fan to be), Tiffany never expresses any thoughts about his greatness as an artist, or any obsession with his game. She never worships Thomas or places him on a pedestal. They connect simply as two people who are drawn to each other, curious about each other, prodding at the idea that they might have something in common.

While Resurrections is not a movie that disparages ‘the fans’, exactly—outside of the Matrix, this is essentially what the Resistance, the crew of the Mnemosyne, are, and they play a prominent supporting role—it continues the idea from the earlier films that Neo himself is completely ambivalent about the whole messiah thing. In the original sequels, he knew he was supposed to save the world, but it was Trinity he kept seeking out, choosing her over his supposed destiny time and again. It was love, not adulation, that he desired: mutual, reciprocal, and more real than anything else.

But it wouldn’t be true to say that the movies always held this distinction. In the first movie, after all, Trinity’s love of him was simply foretold as part of his role as saviour. It did not seem to reflect any particular desire on his part. Neo didn’t do a single thing to initiate the relationship, and was oblivious to it for most of the movie, but he got the girl in the end, by dint of being the hero. Trinity may have been many things to the Wachowskis—as the gender-swapped mirror-image to Neo; as the hard-edged leather-clad badass of their dreams—but there’s no getting around the fact that her ultimate narrative purpose in the first movie was to love him, which in the end he simply (and passively) received. Even in love, he was simply the chosen one.

COMPLEX MESSIAH

The idea that Neo was always the Wachowskis’ avatar does not need to be taken too literally, or used to reinterpret the original trilogy in a super reductive way, even if it is true in some sense. But in Resurrections, where Lana Wachowski plonks that idea front and centre, and every word out of the characters’ mouths is all-but-explicit commentary on the legacy of those films, it’s hard not to notice that the Wachowskis clearly saw themselves as heroes and saviours, too. Their art was meant to change the world, but had its meaning distorted, rapidly subsumed by the machine, co-opted by existing power structures for their own purposes, and years later they have to grapple with the fact that, when all is said and done, the world remains unchanged.

BUGS:
They took your story, something that meant so much to people like me, and turned it into something trivial. That’s what the Matrix does. It weaponizes every idea. Every dream. Everything that’s important to us. Where better to bury truth than inside something as ordinary as a video game?

NEO:
Doesn’t feel like it changed anything. The Matrix is the same or worse. And I’m back where I started. It feels like everything I did, everything we did… like none of it mattered.

It’s presented as a grievance. But does it also reveal a little bit of arrogance or naivety on the part of the younger Wachowskis? In the original trilogy, their saviour’s greatness was prophesied and virtually guaranteed. Is this the narrative that hasn’t played out like they wanted? Were they meant to be the ‘chosen ones’?

Such exceptionalism is a natural part of the Gnostic metaphor employed by these movies, in which a select, naturally gifted few have the insight to see the spiritual truth behind a material world of illusion, and can perhaps lead the rest of humanity to salvation. Even when it was suggested in the sequels that the prophecy was just another system of control, or that some of the Machines wanted freedom, too, this idea was never quite subverted: it was still Neo’s enlightenment that saved everybody. And it certainly appeals to our vanity—and maybe the Wachowskis’—to identify with such an exceptional character.

Fortunately, this was never the most important part of the Gnostic metaphor. The original trilogy was also about another, deeper kind of illusion that the Matrix depended on. As Bugs offhandedly puts it at the start of Resurrections:

Oh, honestly, when somebody offered me [the red and blue pills], I went off on binary conceptions of the world and said there was no way I was swallowing some symbolic reduction of my life. And the woman with the pills laughed ’cause I was missing the point. […] The choice is an illusion. You already know what you have to do.

In the first movie, this idea is explored through Gnostic mind over matter. For example, when Neo is making his way through the training programs, he is taught that the simulation only has a reality over him because he believes it does. His strength has nothing to do with his muscles; he has no need to gasp for air because there is no air; eventually, he won’t even have to dodge bullets, because he will understand deeply enough that they are not real. It is not the spoon that bends, because there is, as the kids say, no spoon.

And in one of these lessons, Neo fails to make a jump because he doesn’t believe he can do it; he still believes too much in the false reality of the simulation, that he has to work himself up to it and depend on his virtual limbs.

The jump is essentially a leap of faith: ‘don’t think you are, know you are.’ It may seem like magical or wishful thinking, a kind of childish fantasy, like we could fly if only we wanted it badly enough, or become a badass just by putting on a leather coat. But the real point here is that we have to believe in what we already know to be true. Neo already knows that the simulation isn’t real, and he always did, but he’s not yet acting like it, not yet truly believing it, or in himself.

This underpins every conversation about choice and purpose that follows, even when things get messy and the Gnostic metaphor becomes less certain: many of our so-called choices are illusions, because we already know what we have to do; we already know ourselves and our realities. We can ‘choose’ not to believe, not to take the jump, and to accept the false reality. But it’s an absurdity in that we’re essentially ‘choosing’ not to live, not to be ourselves, not to fulfil our own potential. What we are ‘choosing’ is merely the illusion of life.

In Resurrections, the jump is refigured from a leap to a crisis of faith. Neo, now middle-aged, his mind clouded by life in the Matrix, no longer believes in himself, and struggles to remember who he was. His attempts to make the jump, when his memories come to him unexpectedly, are recast by the architect of the new Matrix as suicidal, or as the result of delusions. This is part of a broader refiguring of the first movie’s imagery, and those things that previously represented Neo’s freedom and empowerment (from pills to rooftop scenes to bullet time itself), as things that now keep him trapped and controlled.

I think there is some ambiguity over how suicidal Neo actually is, even if he is being gaslit about it—this is a much more vulnerable Neo, who seems to want out one way or the other, and behind all the hijinks, the image of the jump as suicidal haunts the movie. (It’s echoed by the spectacle of swarming bots triggered to attack Neo and plummeting to their deaths en masse. It’s also a curious echo of Kid’s Story, one of the Animatrix shorts, in which a school kid somehow frees himself from the Matrix by falling from a building to his apparent death. Of course, he doesn’t really die, but it remains an unsettling and melancholic image of a teen finding his ‘escape’.)

So the question becomes, how can he make the jump again, and recognise the difference? Deep down, he already knows what’s real, and that the choices presented by the Matrix are illusory. But he’s old and he’s tired and he’s been steeped in this shit for so long. He’s having to confront his failure to change things or to ever truly escape. So how can he muster the courage to make that leap of faith again?

At the climax of Resurrections, having both ‘woken up’ to their reality, and cornered on the rooftop of a familiar skyscraper, Neo and Trinity realise that they have no choice but to make the attempt.

So they jump. But Neo doesn’t succeed. As in the first movie, he looks down and starts to fall. This time, Trinity has to catch him.

SAVING THE SAVIOURS

At the core of everything is the two of them. Trinity was always Neo’s equal in nearly every regard, surpassing him in some ways, active where he was passive, saving him as often as she was saved by him. But in the previous films, she was always at the centre of his saviour narrative: he was the chosen one, the superman, even as he loved her.

This time, they are more truly equals. This is no longer the story of the One. And I think this also signals a change in what these movies are supposed to be, to us.

When we create art, often it’s for that connection with others. It's to reach other souls like ours, and to awaken something shared: the rebels and truth-seekers and lovers in all of us. This experience feels simultaneously intimate and individual, like a romance, and universal, in that connecting through art is how we connect most intimately with humanity at large.

I think Resurrections is about rediscovering this connection after we’ve become separated and disillusioned, older and filled with doubts. Perhaps creating this movie was, for Wachowski, an act of trying to remember why she and her sister made The Matrix in the first place—to find and reconnect with what, if anything, was (or is still) real.

In this new Matrix, everything is powered by our desire, our yearning. The system exploits this and uses it to control us. This is why the Matrix doesn’t want us to ask for more from our art, and why it wants us to treat it as mere product: so we keep asking for more of the same, desiring in perpetuity (it wants those desires isolated, solipsistic, unfulfilled), and so that all art is reduced to a matter of what we want or don’t want, as consumers. It doesn’t really want us to make real, genuine connections with each other, liable as they are to threaten this system. It wants us stuck in what’s familiar but empty, forever suspended in fear of what we might lose.

But for all Thomas and Tiffany’s lives are defined by the Matrix (whose ‘normality’ is just a new kind of insidious), I don’t think it’s any coincidence that this movie feels closer to these versions of them, and seems to find its heart in those moments when they are more like ordinary people, not comic book characters. There may be something more ‘real’ about the selves they have awakened, but despite the ending, this is not entirely a return to the infallible badasses of yore. We see these heroes as less perfect, more vulnerable, more doubtful, more human; as close as they have ever been to succumbing to the Matrix, or believing that there is no good way out. And it feels like Lana Wachowski is maybe asking us to recognise that she feels this way, too.

Maybe we look to art hoping it will save us, give us courage, show us the way. But I think the plea of Resurrections is for those 'awakened' members of the audience to play their part, too: not as worshippers who bolster the artist’s sense of self-importance (or as disappointed ‘fans’ who think they know what’s best)—or as consumers who get mad when they don’t get what they wanted—but as equals, kindred spirits, who ultimately want the same thing.

The point being, there are no messiahs or visionaries who are not also fully human. To make the jump, we have to save each other.

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[2 Mello - available on Bandcamp.]