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The Matrix: The Truth of the Exaggerations

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The truth behind this fantasy can be detected through its very inconsistencies. When Morpheus (the African-American leader of the resistance group who believe that Neo - Keanu Reeves - is the One who will liberate them) tries to explain to the still perplexed Neo what the Matrix is, he - he links it to a failure in the structure of the universe:
"It's that feeling you have had all your life. That feeling that something was wrong with the world. You don't know what it is but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. /.../ The Matrix is everywhere, it's all around us, here even in this room. /.../ It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth. NEO: What truth? MORPHEUS: That you are a slave, Neo. That you, like everyone else, was born into bondage ... kept inside a prison that you cannot smell, taste, or touch. A prison of your mind."
So the experience of the lack/inconsistency/obstacle is supposed to bear witness of the fact that what we experience as reality is a fake - however, towards the end of the film, Smith, the agent of the Matrix, gives a different, much more Freudian explanation:
"Did you know hat 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 /of the humans serving as batteries/ 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 suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from.Which is why the Matrix was re-designed to this: the peak of your civilization."
Here the film encounters its basic inconsistency: the imperfection of our world is at the same time the sign of its virtuality AND the sign of its reality. Linkied to this inconsistency is the inconsistency about death: WHY does one "really" die when one dies only in the VR regulated by the Matrix? The film provides the obscurantist answer: "NEO: If you are killed in the Matrix, you die here /i.e. not only in the VR, but also in real life/? MORPHEUS: The body cannot live without the mind." The logic of this solution is that your "real" body can only stay alive (function) in conjunction to the mind, i.e. to the mental universe into which you are immersed: so if you are in a VR and killed there, this death affects also your real body... The obvious opposite solution (you only really die when you are killed in reality) is also too short. The catch is: is the subject WHOLLY immersed into the Matrix-dominated VR or does he know or at least SUSPECT the actual state of things? If the answer is YES, then a simple withdrawal into a prelapsarian Adamic state of distance would render us immortal IN THE VR and, consequently, Neo who is already liberated from the full immersion in the VR should SURVIVE the struggle with the agent Smith which takes place WITHIN the VR controlled by the Matrix (in the same way he is able to stop bullets, he should also have been able to derealize blows that wound his body).
As to this ambiguity, see Paul Virilio, The Art of the Motor, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press 1995.
==Source==* [[The Matrix: The Truth of the Exaggerations]]. <http://www.lacan.com/matrix.html>
[[Category:Works]]
[[Category:ZizekSlavoj Žižek]][[Category:Articles by Slavoj Žižek]]
[[Category:Essays]]
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