THE GILLIGAN'S ISLAND QUESTION

What All the Fuss is About: A contrarian view of the Matrix phenomenon. (Eric Cox, The American Enterprise)

The basic idea behind the Matrix movies is simple: What we think we know and what is true are not necessarily the same things. Moral: What we want might therefore not be what?s good for us. Take away the dark sunglasses, the black overcoats, the martial arts, and the semantic sophistry, and the Matrix movies are The Truman Show (1998) or The Wizard of Oz (1939), or any number of other stories with similar themes. (The filmmakers at least pay tribute to the latter movie with several clever leitmotifs.)

Interesting, yes. Profound, hardly. There is nothing profound about mysticism. Indeed, once you entertain the notion that the world is not what it seems, that reality is not reality, you can come up with any number of intriguing notions (recall that one theory has the universe resting on the back of a turtle?now that would make for an interesting movie).

As to the films? supposed critique of technology?and it might not be fair to suggest, as most critics do, that the films even attempt to offer one?nothing resembling a coherent, let alone subtle, critique is offered. The films certainly posit that it is possible for machines to become so complicated that they will one day develop minds of their own and attempt to destroy us (even Rod Serling saw that one coming), but so far, at least, the films haven?t been interested in suggesting how we might stop such a thing from happening.

In The Matrix Reloaded, Neo and another character pause to consider this question in the subterranean colony where humans who have chosen to resist the matrix hold fort, but they come to the common-sense conclusion that destroying all machinery is certainly not the answer, and beyond that, like most of us, they can only offer a shrug. (It is convenient for the film?s contrast between high technology and basic humanity that it has the humans living in primitive-looking caves and relying at least partially on torchlight for a hundred years, but that hardly seems plausible, given that there are surely one or two folks down there who could figure out how to generate enough electricity to hang up some more light bulbs.)

Enough hype. The Matrix (1999) was a good movie; The MatrixReloaded?oversexed and over-reliant on fight sequences and cheap sentimentality?is not even that.

It?s no wonder, though, that both movies have become the phenomena that they are: in addition to being entertaining (the first one more so than the second), they suggest that a smorgasbord of shallowly conceived religions and philosophies are enough to cope with the perplexities of what many people today take to be a complicated world.

One wonders if maybe Mr. Cox hasn't missed the more interesting question raised in The Truman Show and The Matrix as well as in Brave New World--we call it the Gilligan's Island Question: if it were you there, would you want to leave? As far as Gilligan's Island is concerned, the answer has seemed to me--since I was five--heck no, it looked like fun. The castaways were given the opportunity to create a society of their choosing--to start the world anew.

But where the other three are concerned, where humans have had their freedom taken from them and are being manipulated by tv directors, computer programs, and drugs (respectively), we see the opposite scenario. Each world features a certain security, but is that level of security worth the sacrifice of control of your own life? The important thing here is that, though generations of us were brought up reading Brave New World as a dystopic novel and The Matrix is shot in such darkness as to imply dystopia, they are in reality utopias for many technophiles and Leftists. What, after all, is the promise of the Leftist project isf not that your every need will be satisfied at the hands of someone else? If egalitarianism and the satiation of material want is the end goal of your political philosophy, what exactly is wrong with Truman's life? Why leave the village? If happiness is what you seek, why leave the Brave New World? And if good looks, long life, physical happiness, etc., are the end goal of your philosophy, why leave the Matrix? How do Neo and Trinity (assuming they can control the program too) differ from the bioengineered/nanoteched beings that the clonophiles hope to become?

So here's the Gilligan's Island Question: would you break the matrix?



N.B.: I thought the Wachowskis' answer, in the first film, was: yes. However, as as Charles Murtaugh pointed out to us, Chris Suellentrop, writing in Slate, has warned that their answer may well be: no. Perhaps we might think of it this way: if "yes", the series will represent the Judeo-Christian/Anglo-American vision of Man's existence--to live in freedom; if "no", the French--to live in security. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 22, 2003 10:04 AM