Trawling the Matrix

[robinturner]

I've nearly finished compiling my Matrix coursebook. I have three texts on religious/mystical symbolism and two on philosophical questions, but only one text (Rovira's "Baudrillard and Hollywood") for the third part, which is about the social and political implications of the film. While academics are happy to go on about Gnostic symbolism or brains in vats, I've found surprisingly few online essays on the politics of the films that meet the criteria for inclusion in the course: they need to be written coherently and grammatically, logically argued, and understandable to a non-native speaker (my students can look up "precession" or "epiphany" in a dictionary, but not "nu-metal" or "domi-matrix").

On the other hand, it's been fun trawling through all the rants, conspiracy theories and bitchy reviews. If I were to believe them all, The Matrix would be a left-wing, right-wing, elitist, egalitarian, nihilist, terrorist, macho, feminist, utopian, pessimistic, blatantly commercial anti-consumerist, naive yet calculated polemic with no real message.

This review of Reloaded might be the unfairest of all the things I read tonight, but it does have the following great paragraph:

"The Matrix" perfectly captured the late-adolescent male computer nerd's mindset:

You can't trust anyone but your online friends. Maybe you really will save the world. Computer games are more real than what adults, who are zombies or evil mechanical brain controllers, call real life. It would be cool to have a girlfriend who is a butt-kicking videogame character and doesn't care about dumb girl stuff.

Comments

[chr0me-kitten.livejournal.com]

I think people project onto the Matrix films what they want them to be. Kind of like a multi-million dollar Rorschach test.

I hope you post your syllabus when you're done.

[katminnaar.livejournal.com]

I agree with this part:

Rated a pointless R for a snooze-inducing bedroom scene and some bad words that don't jibe with the otherwise orotund dialogue.

What are the texts you're using for the religious/mystical symbolism? (or should I read a previous post?) :^)

[alsoname.livejournal.com]

understandable to a non-native speaker (my students can look up "precession" or "epiphany" in a dictionary, but not "nu-metal" or "domi-matrix").

I suppose you could write a glossary for such terms. It would be worth it if you found an otherwise great paper to include in your reader ...

[solri.livejournal.com]

I may well write a glossary anyway, since there are a lot of specialist terms in the texts. I'm working on an index at the moment, even though I still haven't found my final text.

[solri.livejournal.com]

Two are from the Journal of Religion and Film: Frances Flannery-Daily and Rachel Wagner's "Wake Up: Gnosticism and Buddhism in The Matrix" (which also appears on the official Warner Bros site) and Julien Fielding's "Reassessing The Matrix / Reloaded", which is more-or-less a response to the first piece. Fielding advocates the same theory I thought up (and should have published immediately!) that the name Trinity refers not to the Christian trinity but to the triple-natured goddess of Hindu and Celtic mythology (Hacker-Lover-Kung Fu Fighter?). The third piece, Eric Furze's "Jesus, Buddha and Gödel: Unravelling the Matrix Mythos" popped up in a forum - unfortunately I don't have the URL to hand at themoment, but I'm sure it'll turn up if you do a search on it. The part on Gödel is a bit dodgy, but I like his thesis that the Matrix films attempt to reunify Occidental and Oriental versions of the hero myth.

[solri.livejournal.com]

I'll have a course website, though I don't tend to post much syllabus-wise on the web, largely because I seldom have much in the way of lessons plans until the day before I do a class ;-) In a unit discussion a few weeks ago, we were considering whether it would be useful for everyone to submit a fifteen-week plan. My comment was "Fifteen-week plan? I'm lucky if a have a one-week plan!" I have a list of learning objectives (which are common to the unit), a set of texts, some ideas for assignments and a repertoire of classroom techniques, then I just go in and see how they fit together.

[katminnaar.livejournal.com]

Fielding advocates the same theory I thought up (and should have published immediately!) that the name Trinity refers not to the Christian trinity but to the triple-natured goddess of Hindu and Celtic mythology
I thought of that too! The Christian trinity refers to male deities, so to me it seemed more fitting that they based it on the Triple Goddess of older religions. Dang. Guess I'm not as dumb as I think I am. :Þ

I'll look up that link; thanks. :) Fascinating stuff here...