Trawling the Matrix

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.