More on violence and The Matrix
Monday, July 7th, 2003 11:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robinturnerI've just finished the latest section of my essay:
When Neo is not doing kung fu, he has an impressive array of weaponry. In the first film, before entering the Matrix for the last time, Neo and Trinity ask for "Guns ... Lots of guns". Given that "product placement" is a feature of most films today, we might think that the Matrix films were sponsored by arms manufacturers. There is a fetishism of lethal hardware in the films, but then this is normal in Hollywood, and some films do it much more blatantly, Aliens being an extreme example (Hicks presents Ripley with a weapon, describing it lovingly as an "M-41A 10mm pulse-rifle, over and under with a 30mm pump-action grenade launcher").
At one level, we can look at this as just another example of America's obsession with guns. The film plays to a society where a gun is a symbol of masculinity and freedom from oppression. Reaction to attempts at gun control in America imply that if the government want to take your gun, they want to take your penis. Enjoyable as it is to satirise America's gun fetishism, we should not forget that it has real, and sometimes admirable, political roots. America gained independence and democracy through a people's army, and it was only because so many of the people were already armed that this was possible. While Europeans may associate guns more with the power of the State, in America they represent the power of the individual, particularly in films. State power is more often represented by larger military hardware, which is why the scene in which Trinity hijacks a helicopter is significant---the power of the State/Matrix has been appropriated by the rebels.
Of course the guns in the Matrix are virtual guns, a point brought home in the famous scene where Neo and Trinity ask for "lots of guns" and an entire warehouse-full of lethal hardware (or rather, software) slides into place around them. A Matrix gun is an idea, not a piece of metal, so it would make sense for the person it kills to be an idea too, thus making it analogous to Baudrillard's "intellectual terrorism."
However, this is not the case; someone who dies in the Matrix dies in real life (except for Agents, who are software anyway). This is probably necessary for plot reasons; if no one can be killed in the Matrix, then neither could our heroes, which would make the fight scenes dull, rather like watching over someone's shoulder while he or she plays a violent video game. It does complicate the morality of the film, though. Flannery-Daily and Wagner assert that "The filmmakers portray violence as redemptive ... the "reality" of the Matrix which requires that some humans must die as victims of salvific violence is not the ultimate reality to which Buddhism or Gnostic Christianity points," although Julien Fielding points out that this kind of violence is common in Hinduism. This confusion is only to be expected when the spiritual and the political come together, especially when they are constrained by
the conventions of Hollywood.
Given that our heroes are killing real people, some justification needs to be found for the casual way in which they do it. During Neo's training, Morpheus tells him:
This implies a disturbing ideology. The "people" in the Matrix are not really human, but part of a system; thus, if we kill them, we are not killing human beings, only potential human beings. Killing a person in the Matrix is not murder, then, but the moral quivalent of abortion, perhaps.
This is both morally and politically dubious. It is morally dubious, because the experiences people have in the Matrix are subjectively real, so there is no essential difference between losing a life in the Matrix and losing your life in the physical world, as Julia Driver points out.[Artificial Ethics] Given that this is an action film, and we expect deaths in an action film, there is little difference to the viewer; we do not, in any case, regard this kind of death in the sme way as death in the real world, or even death in a realistic film or television drama. The political message, though, is rather more worrying.
Extremist groups have frequently tried to justify their actions by something a little more subtle than old cliches about ends justifying means or not being able to make an omelette without breaking eggs. The idea is that the people you are killing are somehow not fully human. They may be thought of as irredeemably subhuman, like Jews or Blacks are for Nazis, but there is a more subtle version: biologically they are human, but mentally or spiritually, they have either lost their true nature, or been prevented from from realising it.
We see this attitude in many varieties of mysticism, which hold that the vast majority of people are alienated from their true (divine) nature through the illusion of the world (maya). However, in mysticism it generally takes a harmless form, largely because most mystics espouse non-violence and compassion. There are, of course, exceptions: the Thuggee of India and the Assassins of Alamut regarded murder of non-believers as a virtuous act, and a number of Medieval heretics did not regard crimes against the orthodox as sinful. These exceptions generally occur, however, when there is a political agenda involved. In politics, on the other hand, where the believers are in conflict with the rest of society, depicting the masses as ignorant, alienated from their true consciousness and in general less than human is a convenient justification for acting against their wishes, up to and including killing them. This is reinforced by the attitude that "those who are not with us are against us." (This sentence has been attributed variously to Lenin, Stalin and Krzhizhanovskii.)
As Morpheus says, "It is important to understand that if you are not one of us, you are one of them." This is the classic Leninist view, and The Matrix can be seen as a revolutionary Leninist parable:
On the other hand, this violent elitism fits in equally well with the vision of America's libertarian Right; as Hunter also points out, "The Matrix fits satisfyingly into a long history of American fantasies about the individual living outside the repressions of the law ... and exerting his will existentially against the world, urged on by disbelief in the law, a sense of higher purpose and a vigilante enthusiasm for not letting bureaucracy (or society) get in the way."[ibid] Parts of the film look as though they could be used as adverts for the National Rifle Association.
When Neo is not doing kung fu, he has an impressive array of weaponry. In the first film, before entering the Matrix for the last time, Neo and Trinity ask for "Guns ... Lots of guns". Given that "product placement" is a feature of most films today, we might think that the Matrix films were sponsored by arms manufacturers. There is a fetishism of lethal hardware in the films, but then this is normal in Hollywood, and some films do it much more blatantly, Aliens being an extreme example (Hicks presents Ripley with a weapon, describing it lovingly as an "M-41A 10mm pulse-rifle, over and under with a 30mm pump-action grenade launcher").
At one level, we can look at this as just another example of America's obsession with guns. The film plays to a society where a gun is a symbol of masculinity and freedom from oppression. Reaction to attempts at gun control in America imply that if the government want to take your gun, they want to take your penis. Enjoyable as it is to satirise America's gun fetishism, we should not forget that it has real, and sometimes admirable, political roots. America gained independence and democracy through a people's army, and it was only because so many of the people were already armed that this was possible. While Europeans may associate guns more with the power of the State, in America they represent the power of the individual, particularly in films. State power is more often represented by larger military hardware, which is why the scene in which Trinity hijacks a helicopter is significant---the power of the State/Matrix has been appropriated by the rebels.
Of course the guns in the Matrix are virtual guns, a point brought home in the famous scene where Neo and Trinity ask for "lots of guns" and an entire warehouse-full of lethal hardware (or rather, software) slides into place around them. A Matrix gun is an idea, not a piece of metal, so it would make sense for the person it kills to be an idea too, thus making it analogous to Baudrillard's "intellectual terrorism."
However, this is not the case; someone who dies in the Matrix dies in real life (except for Agents, who are software anyway). This is probably necessary for plot reasons; if no one can be killed in the Matrix, then neither could our heroes, which would make the fight scenes dull, rather like watching over someone's shoulder while he or she plays a violent video game. It does complicate the morality of the film, though. Flannery-Daily and Wagner assert that "The filmmakers portray violence as redemptive ... the "reality" of the Matrix which requires that some humans must die as victims of salvific violence is not the ultimate reality to which Buddhism or Gnostic Christianity points," although Julien Fielding points out that this kind of violence is common in Hinduism. This confusion is only to be expected when the spiritual and the political come together, especially when they are constrained by
the conventions of Hollywood.
Given that our heroes are killing real people, some justification needs to be found for the casual way in which they do it. During Neo's training, Morpheus tells him:
The Matrix is a system, Neo, and that system is our enemy. When you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, lawyers, students. People. Everywhere you look, there are people. Somewhere else, somewhere in the future they may be human beings but here these people are a part of the system. That makes every one of them our enemy.
This implies a disturbing ideology. The "people" in the Matrix are not really human, but part of a system; thus, if we kill them, we are not killing human beings, only potential human beings. Killing a person in the Matrix is not murder, then, but the moral quivalent of abortion, perhaps.
This is both morally and politically dubious. It is morally dubious, because the experiences people have in the Matrix are subjectively real, so there is no essential difference between losing a life in the Matrix and losing your life in the physical world, as Julia Driver points out.[Artificial Ethics] Given that this is an action film, and we expect deaths in an action film, there is little difference to the viewer; we do not, in any case, regard this kind of death in the sme way as death in the real world, or even death in a realistic film or television drama. The political message, though, is rather more worrying.
Extremist groups have frequently tried to justify their actions by something a little more subtle than old cliches about ends justifying means or not being able to make an omelette without breaking eggs. The idea is that the people you are killing are somehow not fully human. They may be thought of as irredeemably subhuman, like Jews or Blacks are for Nazis, but there is a more subtle version: biologically they are human, but mentally or spiritually, they have either lost their true nature, or been prevented from from realising it.
We see this attitude in many varieties of mysticism, which hold that the vast majority of people are alienated from their true (divine) nature through the illusion of the world (maya). However, in mysticism it generally takes a harmless form, largely because most mystics espouse non-violence and compassion. There are, of course, exceptions: the Thuggee of India and the Assassins of Alamut regarded murder of non-believers as a virtuous act, and a number of Medieval heretics did not regard crimes against the orthodox as sinful. These exceptions generally occur, however, when there is a political agenda involved. In politics, on the other hand, where the believers are in conflict with the rest of society, depicting the masses as ignorant, alienated from their true consciousness and in general less than human is a convenient justification for acting against their wishes, up to and including killing them. This is reinforced by the attitude that "those who are not with us are against us." (This sentence has been attributed variously to Lenin, Stalin and Krzhizhanovskii.)
As Morpheus says, "It is important to understand that if you are not one of us, you are one of them." This is the classic Leninist view, and The Matrix can be seen as a revolutionary Leninist parable:
Certainly, The Matrix can be read as leftist in so far as its totalising vision offers, as Marxism used to, a seamlessly paranoid negation of surface reality. Acquiescence requires all-encompassing conversion rather than a slight readjustment of one's view of things. We see democracy, but the reality is fascism. We think we're free, but actually we're prisoners, ticking over on life supports. In short, this is the theory of false consciousness taken to an heuristic, barmy extreme. Only by the actions of a sort of Leninist groupuscle, a visionary avant-garde of technologically savvy white men, spiritually attuned blacks, and sexy leather-clad women, will humanity find salvation, whether it wants to or not.[Hunter, 2002]
On the other hand, this violent elitism fits in equally well with the vision of America's libertarian Right; as Hunter also points out, "The Matrix fits satisfyingly into a long history of American fantasies about the individual living outside the repressions of the law ... and exerting his will existentially against the world, urged on by disbelief in the law, a sense of higher purpose and a vigilante enthusiasm for not letting bureaucracy (or society) get in the way."[ibid] Parts of the film look as though they could be used as adverts for the National Rifle Association.
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no subject
Date: 2003-07-07 03:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-07-07 04:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-07-07 09:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-07-08 01:21 am (UTC)I think the paraphrasing of Morpheus's speech leaves out perhaps the most interesting part of it where he goes on to say "You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged and many of them are so inurged(?) so hopelessly dependent on it they will fight to protect it ... anyone we haven't unplugged is potentially a agent, inside the Matrix they are everyone and they are no-one". This passage seems to mimmick the revolutionaries paranoia about Counter-Revolutionaries being everywhere!(lenin, robespierre etc etc)
Yes, my first attempt was far more interesting :)
no subject
Date: 2003-07-08 02:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-07-08 01:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-07-08 02:11 am (UTC)(a) he's the One;
(b) he gets snogged by Trinity.
no subject
Date: 2003-07-08 03:27 am (UTC)In the Animatrix there is the story of "The Kid" who is contacted by Neo but unfortunately the Kid Dies in the Matrix, only to wake in the real world, fully functional! In Reloaded we get a brief glimpse of "the kid" when the Neb. returns to Zion, the brat who offers to carry anyones luggage and who thanks Neo for saving him is the "the Kid". Neo in all his Reevian wisdom says "I didn' save you, you saved yourself".
The actor who plays "the kid" says he has a big(ger?) role in Revolutions, but couldn't say much more?
no subject
Date: 2003-07-08 03:49 am (UTC)