The Matrix has been interpreted countless times from all possible angles – philosophical, religious, metaphysical, psychological, social, political, and technological; it’s a multi-layered beast of a film that everyone has an opinion on. No doubt it has been one of the most interpreted and analysed films of the last few decades. However, I choose to look at this film from the complete opposite viewpoint – the simplest explanation. This film, no, in-fact – the whole trilogy perhaps, is a tale of the paranoid delusions of a Mr Thomas Anderson.
Think about it. Thomas Anderson is a boring loser who works as a computer programmer in a generic American city. He works in a bland office cubicle behind a desk all day, pays his taxes and helps his landlady take out her garbage. When he’s not falling asleep after being up all night on his computer looking up conspiracy theories, writing illegal software and hiding it in hollowed out Baudrillard books, or hanging out in dingy nightclubs with his weirdo goth friends; he’s getting scolded by his boss for turning up late to his job. His only solace is the digital world, where he can live out his fantasies as his idealized self: “Neo”.
The first scene of the movie is Anderson dreaming about his perfect girl – Trinity kicking police ass in bullet-time and running away from anonymous agents. He then awakens in his dark, cramped apartment asleep at his computer. Within the next few minutes, we learn that Anderson is prone to paranoid delusions and bouts of fantasy when he sees a few words flicker across his screen that seem to be a person talking to him. “The Matrix has you” it says. He tries to get out of this and get his computer monitor back to normal, by pressing “Control-X” and “Delete” on the keyboard, but alas it is to no avail – the message continues regardless, because the message is not on the computer screen, it is actually in Anderson’s mind. Later he makes his state of mind obvious when asking his Goth buddies who show up late at night outside his door if they’ve ever had a dream that seemed real. If they were any kind of decent people, they’d probably tell him to see a doctor, but instead one of them simply compares this to taking mescaline, telling him he needs to unwind. Anderson hears this as “unplug” – a word that subtly foreshadows where Andersons delusions will take him.
They coerce him into going to a nightclub even though he has work the next day. These are the kind of people Mr Anderson associates himself with outside of his respectable office job. Anderson, or “Neo” as he begins to think of himself, actually only goes because of a fixation he has with white rabbits, (which he probably gets from reading his favourite childhood book – Alice in Wonderland, a story that his fantasies repeatedly reference). He sees that one of the Goths has a tattoo of this animal he is obsessed with and has no choice but to follow as his fantasy told him to.
Later at the club, the sleep deprived Anderson’s condition becomes worse and he begins to hallucinate about his ideal fantasy woman – a dark-haired, leather-clad babe named Trinity; probably one of his internet-hacker friends he has a crush on and who he only secretly suspects is a woman, which is why he has to tell her upon first seeing her that he thought she was a man. Any normal woman might take offence to this, but Anderson/”Neo”’s perfect fantasy girl shrugs it off. “Most guys do” she says, assuring Anderson that he is a normal guy and not some paranoid weirdo. She addresses him by his hacker name “Neo” and tells him about the Matrix, but merely entices him to know more, egging him on deeper into his fantasy world – deeper down the “rabbit hole”. Notice how nobody else in the club is paying attention to them and that Trinity stands very close to him, so that anybody looking probably just thinks the awkward nerdy guy is mumbling something to himself, when in reality he is talking to a mental projection that is not real. Both of them whisper and Anderson says only a few questioning words.
After this, Neo wakes up – presumably his fantasy caused him to pass out, and his friends; thinking that he had drunk too much, help him home, take his keys from his pocket, open the door and dump him on his bed. Awakening to his alarm clock, Anderson realizes he is late for work, probably not for the first time. His Boss tells him off like he is a little school boy and tells him he has a problem with authority. His condescending speech is quite revealing when it comes to Andersons thought process.
You have a problem with authority Mr Anderson. You believe that you are special, that somehow the rules do not apply to you, obviously you are mistaken. This company is one of the top software companies in the world, because every single employee understands that they are part of a whole, thus if an employee has a problem, the company has a problem. The time has come to make a choice, Mr Anderson. Either you choose to be at your desk on time from this day forth or you choose to find yourself another job. Do I make myself clear?
This exposes several ways that Neo sees the world. He has delusions that he is special and different, and that he is an exception to the rules, he also sees companies, corporations and perhaps the system itself as a kind of machine. Faced with the overwhelming stress of losing his job, and feeling that the system is against him, Anderson begins the final stage in his descent into madness. He begins hallucinating once more, this time believing that his hero Morpheus (a hacker that he admires) is contacting him and can somehow see his every move as if he is omniscient. Anderson, being a computer programmer, interprets that this is because he is inside a computer program, that Morpheus somehow has access to, though this doesn’t manifest itself until he meets with Morpheus face to face. This time Anderson’s behaviour does not go unnoticed as he squats down, peeks over his cubicle and runs into another cubicle whilst talking to himself on an imaginary phone, getting imaginary directions from what he believes to be an omniscient voice. They call security to take him away, but Anderson has paranoid fears that they are government agents come to take him away. “No way! No way! This is crazy!” shouts Anderson as he goes to the window, thinking in his fragile mental state that he is whispering to himself and that no one else is around. Thinking that the weird nerdy guy has finally lost it, and is going to throw himself from the window ledge, they manage to talk him down and he is escorted from the building.
Now a dangerous, erratically behaving man, he is taken to the police station where they discover links between him and the recent infamy of the computer hacker who calls himself Neo. Putting the two together they decide to interrogate him and see if they can offer a solution to his problems. Anderson sees the police in his mind as anonymous Men In Black style agents – part of the system that sets itself against him.
This interrogation scene is quite pertinent in describing how Anderson is living a double life in his own head.
As you can see we’ve had our eye on you for some time now Mr Anderson. It seems that you’ve been living…two lives. In one life, you’re Thomas A Anderson, Program Writer for a respectable software company. You have a social security number, you pay your taxes and you help your landlady carry out her garbage.
Notice how the interrogator tries to ground him into his “real” life by mentioning the physical reality of his monotonous existence.
The other life is lived in computers, where you go by the hacker alias “Neo” and are guilty of virtually every computer crime we have a law for. One of these lives has a future. One of them does not. I’m going to be as forthcoming as I can be Mr Anderson. You’re here because we need your help. We know that you’ve been contacted by a certain individual. A man who calls himself Morpheus.
The interrogator believes Anderson will “do the right thing” and tells him they will wipe his slate clean and pardon his history of cybercrime so long as he helps them capture Morpheus. Anderson puts on a brave face, gives the interrogator the finger and tells him he’s not afraid of his “Gestapo crap”, but really his will is beginning to break.
Faced with the knowledge that he has most likely lost his job due to his recent outburst, and asked to betray his personal hero Morpheus, he now enters fully into his own fantasy world. He asks repeatedly for his phone call, but then finds that he is unable to talk and his mouth has become stuck. This is the first time Anderson imagines a physically impossible phenomenon, as his mind has fully broken. He shouts and screams and retreats into a corner, his imagination begins to run wild, and he believes that they are trying to plant an impossibly advanced insect-like robot tracking device into him. The police try to restrain him, but it is too late and he slips into a paralytic state of paranoid delusions and lives in his fantasy world for the rest of his sad life. From then on, everything in the movie is happening inside Anderson’s head. He wakes up in his apartment, wondering if it was all a dream, at which point he is contacted on the phone again by Morpheus…
I won’t bother going into the details of the rest of the film, you should all know it well, but it is obvious that Anderson has created an elaborate fantasy world for himself that he experiences for the duration of the film. With the help of his hero Morpheus, his fantasy girl Trinity, and a few other cyber punk hackers like himself, he escapes reality as he knows it and into the “real” world by unplugging from the “Matrix” – the word he uses to describe the system. He thinks of this in his head as “tumbling down the rabbit hole” – another link in his mind with Alice in Wonderland. Anderson is clearly a smart man, with extensive knowledge of computers, and we have also seen that he is a reader of philosophy – particularly Simulacra and Simulation, which appears at the beginning of the film in his apartment. Anderson uses this knowledge to convince himself that his delusions are true, using his hero Morpheus in his own subconscious to convince himself that reality is subjective and that this is must be real.
“What is “real”, how do you define real? If you’re talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain”
Morpheus even explains that this is the “mental projection” of his “digital self”. Anderson has become his alter ego: Neo – like a Word of Warcraft Player who believes he has become his level 70 Paladin. And of course, he has now become the hero to Morpheus, who is adamant that Neo is the “chosen one”, sent to fulfil a prophecy. Anderson draws on all of his knowledge of religion and philosophy, and combines this with his love of Martial Arts movies and becomes an ass-kicking Kung Fu master who is destined to save the world. The situation gets more and more preposterous as the film continues. Free of the Matrix, he learns to live with his underground resistance fighter/computer hacker friends, who just happen to be half-robot/cyborgs with cybernetic implants that allow them to interface with a photo realistic virtual reality, including one of their own design in which they can load anything they want (probably a dream for computer-nerd Anderson). They live in the dystopian wasteland outside of the Matrix; the void inside his imagination that he has convinced himself is the “real” reality, only returning to the “Matrix” in his imagination to attempt to free others from the system and show them a world without rules or controls, or borders or boundaries. He battles against machines and the “system”; and his nemesis just happens to be a generic, anonymous government agent in a plain black suit – what Anderson feared he would become. He dodges bullets in slow motion and shoots bad guys. He dies in his fantasy but is brought back to life by the love of his fantasy girl, and goes on to save the world.
The real message of the Matrix is that reality is harsh, impersonal, unfair and boring; and that we must escape into fantastical imaginings of our own heroic fantasy world. The Wachowski brothers have a nihilistic view of reality and believe that salvation, happiness and meaning can only be achieved through the human imagination. Thomas Anderson is a paranoid office drone who believes society is an impersonal machine and retreats into a fantasy of computer systems, virtual reality and heroic Kung Fu action in order to escape a horrifyingly dull and ineffectual existence. The Matrix is a very sad movie about how a depressingly boring office job drives a man insane.
Though it may be slow and tedious at times this film offers one of the most unique depictions of time travel of any movie in recent memory and is worth seeing for that alone. I can’t elaborate much without spoiling the plot so go see it. It’s also quite stylishly noir, if you’re into that kind of thing.
Badd Motivator 