“Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world, where none suffered, where everyone would be happy? It was a disaster. No one would accept the program, entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world, but I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from”. [Agent Smith, The Matrix]
The Matrix and its two sequels were a remarkable undertaking in attempting to use the shell of an action movie genre within the customary trappings of sci-fi, and then go on to embed its complex ideas and philosophical trapping (some would say pretensions) and allusions within this canopy. The first Matrix film in particular was held as exemplary and highly innovative in its various fields of editing and pyrotechnics. There were multilayered post modernist themes running throughout the narrative, such as the idea that what we take as ‘reality’ may actually turn out to be something altogether different, as well as the usual cyberpunk concerns of existential quests within the technosphere of virtual reality and simulacrums aplenty. Philip K Dick seems to be the godfather of these sci-fi quests for identity and authenticity amidst the synthetic and manufactured identities provided by mysterious corporations. A well established lineage of sci-fi films from Blade Runner (1982), Total Recall (1990) Minority Report (2002), A Scanner Darkly (2006), The Adjustment Bureau (2010) are derived from Dick’s stories or similar existential premises- The Truman Show (1998), Vanilla Sky (2001), The Sixth Day (2000), The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), The Island (2005), Moon (2009), Source Code (2011) and Inception (2010). Of course I could go on – this is not an exhaustive list and does not necessarily constitute the best of genre etc…
I suppose a certain amount of millenial angst must have helped with the Matrix cult and put forward the audacious idea that the world as it appeared back in 1999 might have been a simulacrum, that surface appearances may in fact be concealing a very different and very counter-intuitive basis for reality! The Matrix manages to posit one of the classical philosophical conumdrums, that about can we really ever be sure that there is an external verifiable concrete reality outside of my head! Most of us go about our daily grind without ever really stopping to pause about this because it just seems so obviously manifestly true that there is in fact an objective reality out there, rather than endorse a philosophical position called solipsism (subjective idealism), which remains steadfastly skeptical about the reality of anything else apart from an individual mind of the person thinking those thoughts.
Plato wrestled with this conumdrum in spectacular fashion (The Allegory of the Cave), and if the European philosophical tradition can be defined as footnotes to Plato, we’ve been going around in ever more obscurantist circles ever since. Descartes in particular posited the unnerving idea of a demon deceiver (gnostic demiurge?), whereby Descartes tries to pull the rabbit out of the hat by a process of systematic doubt. When everything had gone that it was possible to disbelieve, there was one small but fundamental nudget of truth which would not budge. Cogito Ergo Sum – ‘I think, therefore I am”.
Of course Descartes answer has been firmly critiqued and found wanting by many others since. Therefore our ‘trust’ in reality must inevitably be a leap of some faith. The Matrix takes great pleasure in throwing up this antinomical dilemma (a real or apparent incompatibililty, essentially unsolveable), by Neo’s (Keanu Reeves) deep conviction that all is not well with the world, particularly in Neo’s discordant perception of reality.
As Morpheus explains to him:
You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me.
Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure it was real? What if you were unable to awake from that dream? How would you know the difference between the dream world, and the real world?
The Matrix also raises many other possibilities about the world, our perception of it from different points of the compass and also intriguingly suggests some very dark possibilities about human nature and our predilection for misery and pain over more sanguine possibilities.
I’d like to explore this aspect of human nature that is invoked by the opening quote from my article, whereby Agent Smith has summarised human being’s proclivity to misery.
Take British soap opera entertainment for instance. The resolutely downmarket and downbeat BBC soap, Eastenders, has been with us now since 1985, a paradigm of human misery and unpleasantness. Yet this diet of dross and gritty uglyness draws huge ratings, hence the show’s longevity. From what little exposure I’ve had, the on screen agnst and levels of aggression, confrontation, raised voices and general aura of menace that hang over this tawrid show, mark it out as perhaps the most lamentable soap ever on British tv. Eschewing the more balanced and measured offerings of 80s era Coronation Street, Eastenders was resolutely gritty and brazen. The characters seem difficult to engage with, their problems and lifestyles often so sensationalist and confrontational, in your face version of ‘gritty realism’ (whether this really is ‘realism’ is of course another question). Why do shows like Eastenders draw in regular audiences figures like 9/10 million? Eastenders now leads the field in shaping the obiligatory pyrotechnics of misery, witness the upping of the character strife and violence during peak Christmas shows. It seems a shame that the more nuanced northern humour of soaps like Coronation Street feel they have no choice now but to emulate the putrid misery bucket of Eastenders.
Without wishing to further dwell on the complete lack of redemptive possibilities for modern British soap, why then are such huge masses stacked up as fodder for this rot? I suppose that capacity for buying into the decadence of misery is ingrained deep in the human psyche. This is yet another outlet for our restless collective psyche, mashed up in the inane rat race of modern turbo-capitalism. Schadenfreude could explain an awful lot here. And also people enjoy gossip, tittle tattle and earwigging on other people’s affairs. We are naturally curious as a human species and also peculiarly imitative at an unconcious level. Given our own dysfunctionality within our particular neck of the woods, and the necessary conflicts that emanate within the nuclear and extended family, we seek to displace our animosity and our toxic fallout by any number of Freudian defence mechanisms. Soap opera as one distinctive genre of entertainment, serves in part to exercise our morbid fascination about the extended community we partake of. Soap exists in its contrived and manufactured guise to capture and titillate its curiosity. I suppose the soap is simply the offshot from earlier forms of narrative entertainment such as the novel and theatre, and latterly film and tv dramas. But soap seems to afford other decadent possibilities altogether, via its ongoing and open ended structure – clearly they are meant to go on and on and one ad infinitum.
Soaps offer a kind of first level simulacra. Unbelieveable but true, many soap devotees have problems discerning the fiction from the reality. Perhaps rather amusing (or not!), several soap actors who have played seasoned villians in their time have been verbally accosted and even worse, because the soap watchers actually begin to think that the on screen narrative is an actual portrayel of an ongoing reality. Soap devotees will also incessantly discuss plot lines and devices, only having to remind themselves at some interval that the likes of ‘Ken Barlow’ or ‘Dirty Den’ are indeed fictional characters in a fictional universe.
So soaps and other narrative forms such as films often gain great currency by offering highly noxious and dysfunctional presentations. Periodically and at suitable regular intervals people will stand back collectively and discuss the legitimacy of what we are consuming in the media. A few generations previously, we proceeded from a completely different set of assumptions and conception of just what was suitable in terms of public morality. Whereas now we might start from a premise of ‘is there such a thing as pubic morality?’ and ‘what do we understand by a public space/public domain and public decency?’
However what is not so much in dispute is the fact that our media and television have become much more visceral and graphic in their entertainment, the explicit depiction of sex and violence have become much more potent than the offerings from say the 1960s, a decade which is sometimes held as a watermark of liberalising attitudes in general. The fact that a not inconsiderate part of entertainment consists of distressing and disturbing and unsettling material serves to remind us that human beings are complex creatures.
We are generally not accustomed to recognising how irrational and problematic human beings are – we are still basking in the afterglow of the Englightenment although post-modernist thinkers have been critiquing this sharply over the last couple of decades. So we have thinkers like John Gray around to remind us of our fallacious thinking. By recognising the limits of rationalism, we may better understand our own natures and at least use what rationality we do have in an attempt to quell our anti-social impulses in so far as we can.
