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EXPLORING THE MATRIX

A BYRON PREISS BOOK

Chapter One

To make The Matrix cost over sixty million dollars. I don't know if you've ever hung out much with people commanding dozens of millions of dollars. Once I attended the World Economic Forum, where the planet's ultra-rich people flock in large crowds. This event took place in New York, in the jittery, heavily armed post-9/11 period, and the vibe there was very, very Matrix indeed.

There were swarms of armed bodyguards, marbled halls with swishing bronze elevators, glum, impassive federal agents, expensive eyewear, Forum groupies in sexy tailored costumes, the Secret Service in black bulletproof SWAT gear.... Very intense, very out-there, very designery, very Wachowski Brothers.

The World Economic Forum is not supposed to be scary. It's a philanthropic event. The Forum is all for the public good, and the worldwide betterment of the human condition. That is the public rationale, at least. That is the Blue Pill version, as it were.

However, you don't have to be a Seattle rioter or Naomi Klein to get it about the World Economic Forum's extreme disconnection from the man-in-the-street. The attendees there ... they were uniformly courteous and scarily intelligent people, but they bear just the same relationship to a middle-class American that a middle-class American bears to an illiterate Venezuelan campesino. They are from a different level of reality. They dwell in a seamless world of private jets to the Waldorf-Astoria, where public space is the eight feet between the doorman and the limo.

Much the same goes for the galactic gulf that separates The Matrix from its street-level inspirations in underground comix and sci-fi paperbacks. I doubt that anyone understands this better than Larry and Andy Wachowski. Somehow, and I give them every credit, they were able to metabolize the Hollywood red pill and leap to the dizziest levels of the military-entertainment complex. I've never met the Wachowski Brothers, but I have every confidence that they get it. Otherwise, two guys with their exquisite design sense would never choose to wear Converse sneakers and backwards baseball caps.

Luc Besson directed the science-fiction film The Fifth Element, a film that eats at the same cafeteria with The Matrix, feasting at a global gumbo of counterculture sources. Luc Besson was at the World Economic Forum sitting at a table behind me, and he was the worst-dressed guy in the Waldorf-Astoria. Luc was so bad-boy, so confrontational, so in-your-face, that it was indescribable in any language other than French. And Luc really belonged there, that was the good part. When those Swiss captains of industry saw Luc in his four-day beard and bulging monocolor T-shirt, it cheered them all up. They sort of glanced at him sidelong and whispered. They were honored, really.

The Matrix may have budgeted for sixty-eight million, but for an ailing Warner Bros. it brought in way over two hundred million, and that was before the sequels. That was before the plastic action figures, the animé cartoons, comic books, and the thriving online Matrix cult groups. I enjoyed the hell out of that movie, and five years later I was still thinking about it fondly, and finally getting around to making this arch critical assessment. Man, a record like that speaks for itself.

Contemporary movie people, especially supremely rich and powerful ones like Steven Spielberg, they really get it about the homely authenticity of Levi's jeans and white tube-socks. Because they know all about how to dress very attractive people very attractively. They've got it down to a literal science, they can measure the colored glint off polyvinyl with digital light meters. Why would movie pros ever dress like their actors? If you're a director and you dress up like a star, it's like confessing to your colleagues that you swallowed the baited hook.

Therefore, in The Matrix's "real world," that world where giant Geof Darrow drawings writhe their tentacles and harvest babies like cantaloupes, all the Matrix heroes, slinky Trinity, delphic Morpheus, they have to wear collarless, ragged, functional clothes. They eat oatmeal and work overtime. Just like the Wachowskis do.

Whenever they leap through a telephone into the Matrix, however, they instantly become rich glamour people. They've got limos, couture clothes, and fully booked agendas. They've got bodyguards-actually, they are their own bodyguards, because they're also comic-book superheroes.

Their furniture shows up out of nothingness, as if they'd Web-clicked it off Design Within Reach. They have an infinite number of guns ... an elite education comes in a plug-in cartridge ... they are regal, kinky aristocrats.

What little we learn about these people in the early part of the film suggests that they are fanatical terrorists. Morpheus is an international fugitive. Trinity is a crooked hacker who broke an IRS code. But they're not outlaws, not really.

Because they never have to rob, swindle, corrupt, bribe or steal. They don't take drugs, have psychotic episodes, or do jail time, the homely, everyday things that most actual criminals do routinely.

They're not criminals, hackers or terrorists. They're masters of illusion. So if the Matrix people have a functional equivalent in contemporary society, it's not the Cosa Nostra or the Baader-Meinhof gang. It's Hollywood producers. Because they possess enormous resources, all out proportion to the flimsy nature of their enterprise. They can create and deflate vast fantasies at will. And yet, their lives and careers are in constant danger. Just like Warner Bros. executives!

As Howard Waldrop once said, all science fiction is really about science fiction. Movies tend to be really about movies. Movies are what movie people find most interesting in life. For real movie people, even bad movies are magic. Any act of cinema is magic for movie people, just like movies were magic when Méliès, the French stage magician, was inventing them.

Let's consider the justly famous dojo sequence in The Matrix. A dojo is not a place where people really fight. A dojo is a stage; it's a place to train and mimic fighting. In this scene, Morpheus is teaching Neo how to fight. But what he is really teaching Neo is how to think about the art of violence. And the real freight being hauled here is two young, breakout American filmmakers teaching Hollywood how to film action sequences.

You see, you don't need Hollywood stunt doubles! Not at all! That's just habit! Instead, you hire top-flight kung-fu action people from distant, global-economy Hong Kong, to fully train the actors so that they can act while they're fighting!

And now, check out this "bullet time" part where we freeze stuff just like a Marvel Comics two-page center spread! Watch and learn: now we wheel around it with this elaborate circle of synchronized cameras. See what we just did there? You think that was air we were breathing? Stop trying to make action films and make one!

The Wachowski Brothers are too young to be real cyberpunks. Besides, they work in the wrong industry. They do however have one great commonality with cyberpunk science fiction. They can't resist opening up the fabric of their artwork to stuff in every single idea they have ever had in their entire lives. In cyberpunk critical diction, this practice is known as "eyeball kicks." This term was first coined for the graphically overloaded comics pages of MAD magazine, so it is a cultural contribution of comics to science fiction. Blade Runner had it. The Matrix has it in spades.

H. G. Wells declared there should be only one weird element in every scientific romance. Wells was an author in a solemn Edwardian world that would allow itself only one or two really weird elements. Any more than that, and you weren't entertaining anymore; instead, you were raving and blaspheming.

The Wachowskis are native sons of the 1990s. It is impossible for them to think in such a limited way. If they ever found a world with just one freaky thing going on, they would assume they were in a cemetery.

In The Matrix, everything is going on. It's been blenderized and synthesized. It's tossed like brain salad.

First and most importantly, the film's got pop appeal elements. All kinds of elements: suicidal attacks by elite special forces, crashing helicopters, oodles of martial arts, a chaste yet passionate story of predestined love, bug-eyed monsters of the absolute first water, fetish clothes, captivity and torture and daring rescue, plus really weird, cool submarines.

Some of my favorite films are made entirely of clichés: Casablanca, Every Which Way but Loose, The Prisoner of Zenda. They're clichés, yes, but they have broken free of that problem, because the clichés slide through the narrative at refreshing orthogonal angles. In Casablanca the clichés are always tipping their hats at each other, "Hello war movie trope; pleased to meet you, women's weepy riff; how do you do, police procedural." They backflip from cliché to archetype. They generate tremendous narrative power. The clichés no longer tire us in these movies; they exhilarate.

The Matrix is a postmodern philosophical movie in which fragments of philosophy do this Casablanca cliché dance. There's Christian exegesis, a Redeemer myth, a death and rebirth, a hero in self-discovery, the Odyssey, Jean Baudrillard (lots of Baudrillard, the best parts of the film), science-fiction ontological riffs of the Philip K. Dick school, Nebuchadnezzar, the Buddha, Taoism, martial-arts mysticism, oracular prophecy, spoon-bending telekinesis, Houdini stage-show magic, Joseph Campbell, and Godelian mathematical metaphysics.

This is a real mess. It would seem like a farrago if not for the film's premiere genius move, which is to reveal that the lysergic nightmare of cyborganic human-farms is this narrative's base reality. That's where people are born and die, and the rest of it is so much pixels. Since the world is a nightmare, the behavior of the bio-robot überlords makes no coherent sense. It isn't required to gel. If it ever gelled, it would lose its power. It would no longer be dreamlike, so it wouldn't tap in to the huge yet remarkably stupid creative powers of the Surrealist unconscious mind.

This brilliant concept allows every bit-part of metaphysics to float like flakes in a snow-globe, tight, contained, glittering, fragmented, and cheap. You get all the intellectually sexy head-trip kicks of philosophizing without any of the boring hassles of consistency or rigor. It conveys the dark, goofy thrill of reading Milton or Dante when you're really stoned. I don't know how this wack stunt can ever be repeated, but that is one of the greatest achievements ever in the science-fiction cinema.

True, it veers perilously close to another Wells problem: "If anything is possible, nothing is interesting." But that's where the design comes in. In The Matrix, everything always and infallibly looks interesting. The visual tone is never lost; as moving images on a screen, the thing is as coherent as a laser.

Movie critics tend to wallow in the auteur theory: If anything cool happened, then Larry or Baldy must have done it. But no one spends sixty-eight million dollars on the efforts of two people.

Geof Darrow must have come pretty cheap-all he needs is a pencil and paper-but he was the genius behind the writhing technorganic look of The Matrix's version of hell. The high-concept guru guidance here came from Kevin Kelly, the magisterial author of Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World. Out of Control is a Californian work of pop-science speculation that is one of my personal favorites. It is a very Petri dish of unwritten science-fiction novels.

Geof Darrow is an American midwesterner, like the Wachowskis, who hale from Chicago. Darrow threw that over to move to France and hang out with Moebius and the European bande dessinée/Metal Hurlant crowd. Geof Darrow is therefore a global comix artist.

It used to be that if you worked in a downmarket artform like comix, you were so dirt-poor that you didn't know much or see much, other than the subway route from Queens to the office. Geof Darrow draws comics and does TV kids' cartoons, and yet he is an international man-of-mystery and a genuine design sophisticate. There's just no getting around it: He's really good.

You cross Darrow's pencil with Kevin Kelly's visonary intensity and out comes a hellish monsterscape. It is so far beyond the conceptual and technical limits of rubber-monster '50s sci-fi that it looks like a movie from another species.

If a SETI dish decoded a message from Betelgeuse, and we saw that our new friends were some Geof Darrow robo-octopi doing their buck-and-wing, everybody would just sort of nod. In six hours there would be talking heads on CNN: "Oh yes. Those are alien beings, all right. We always thought they'd look like that. Completely divorced from earthly standards."

These Darrow sets have a weird beauty, but the accomplishment doesn't end there. In The Matrix, when one returns from hell to the Earth, the Earth possesses weird beauty. The frenetic dot-com daily life in the 1990s looks frail and menaced and perishable, as indeed it turned out to be. "Normality" freezes at a blink. You can run it back and forth, chop it like videotape. It has pathos, mono no aware, like Japanese cherry blossoms.

The clothing is very beautiful in The Matrix, a feat I credit to costume designer Kym Barrett. Kym Barrett is Australian. Oz is not generally noted for its couture industry, and Ms. Barrett does not make and market clothes. She makes theatrical costumes. She did tremendous work in Romeo + Juliet, the bizarre adaptation where the Capulets and Montagues are rival Miami drug-mafia clans. But she hit a career high note in The Matrix. They aren't just professionally tailored costumes. They come from the heart. They somehow convey a young Australian woman's passionate, painfully distanced love for European and Hollywood glamour. Behind the menace of the oil-slick PVCs, the trench coats, and the guns is a bright little girl with her nose pressed firmly on the cold glass of a display window.

Punk fashion has always been protective armor. The spikes, the leather, the razors, the zippers, they are what you put on after flower-power has choked to death on its own vomit.

Continues...

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Excerpted from EXPLORING THE MATRIX Copyright © 2003 by Byron Preiss Visual Publications, Inc.
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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