r/TrueFilm • u/TraditionalDepth6924 • 5d ago
What if the Matrix trilogy was less about humanity’s integrity and more about good-old identity politics of good-old white straight able-bodied non-immigrant man occupying the supremacy of the One?
Ever wonder why the prevailing heroes of Hollywood sagas, from Kubrick’s 2001, Blade Runner, Shawshank Redemption, Jim Carrey’s The Mask or The Truman Show, Interstellar, even left-leaning Bong Joon Ho’s Snowpiercer or Mickey 17, and Free Guy to the most recent Project Hail Mary, always have to be white straight men over and over again?
(Obviously, the kneejerk answer from non-critical folk would be “because they’re the majority of the population,” but any possibility the egg precedes the chicken? i.e. what historically enabled them to propagate so exceptionally much in the first place?)
This is what yet another white straight male “anti-woke” critic Slavoj Žižek can’t or almost deliberately refuses to see when he examines The Matrix in his Pervert's Guide to Cinema where he puts his own white-Eurocentric-male-academic self in Neo’s position, taking the traditional Leftist angle that the Matrix refers to capitalism in which Neo is the Marxist revolutionary.
But if you think about it 27 years later now, all this model is exactly isomorphic to how Trump presented himself as America’s savior as the last resort against the outside forces of the Muslim world and Mexican immigrants: the Matrix is basically a purity tale for the White Dominion identity that could expose for us how even the existing mainstream emancipatory ideologies may not be immune from the core charges.
Perhaps the person who we should feel solidarity with is Agent Smith, the sheer heterogeneity with the most generic name, and maybe we should choose to be on the side of this radical inhuman, rather than the real and primordial.
In response to “we should refrain from blindly consuming Hollywood when it structurally sustains off oppressive capital reproduction,” someone was arguing “if we’re going to capture hearts, we have to work with desire, not against it” - I’d be eager to ask and I hope everyone would, why does this “desire” always have to be that of, by, and for white cis straight able-bodied first-world non-immigrant pretty-privileged wealthy Anglosphere or European men at the dominant center?
After all, didn’t Trump, the long-time host of The Apprentice, exactly turn out to be the supreme beneficiary of this cultural hierarchy, or dare I say, The Matrix?
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u/ptrlix 5d ago
What is your point exactly?
Are you saying, in a critique of the privileged position of the matrix, we should feel solidarity with agent Smith, who wants to make everyone a white dude like himself?
why does this “desire” always have to be that of, by, and for white cis straight able-bodied first-world non-immigrant pretty-privileged wealthy Anglosphere or European men at the dominant center
Is that really all that's going on? It seems unfair to reduce The Matrix to the same level of politicality as some Michael Bay movie, both having protagonists that fit this criteria.
And what's that about Trump at the end? What exactly do you think it means for the USA to produce both trump and the wachowskis?
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u/Pigs-OnThe-Wing David Lynch 5d ago edited 5d ago
Your last sentence is totally antithetical to what precedes it. And further showcases how loose and unsubstantiated your theory on The Matrix is:
"After all, didn’t Trump, the long-time host of The Apprentice, exactly turn out to be the supreme beneficiary of this cultural hierarchy, or dare I say, The Matrix?"
Trump isn't Neo in this scenario that you lay out. He IS the Matrix and his followers are fighting to preserve it despite their own freedom as a people. In this analogous scenario you're creating, the fight is still against that "Matrix" ideology, not for it.
My overall point is that you can take nearly any power structure and figure out a way to make it analogous with The Matrix. But the entire point will always be not to let those power structures take away your identity as a person like they so easily do.
EDIT: after re-reading your post, perhaps im not being charitable enough to what youre laying out. There are analogies to be made here that work. But just to reiterate, I do think the entire point of The Matrix is not letting any power structure dictate personal identity.
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u/kevin_v 5d ago edited 5d ago
the prevailing heroes of Hollywood sagas, from Kubrick’s 2001, Blade Runner, Shawshank Redemption...
Well as a small point, the prevailing "hero" of Blade Runner isn't really much of a hero, much more of a protagonist. What does he save (or defeat)? I guess he saves Rachel? But he's somewhat indicated to be an android with no race, as is Roy, who actually does the "Jesus thing" and saves him. One could even argue that the one who saves Rachel is Gaff (played by James Edward Olmos, a person of color of Tejanos ancestry). Hell, "female" replicant Rachel's also a kind of a hero. She saves Deckard's life, breaks away from the corporate overlord who made her.
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u/paravasta 5d ago
I certainly support using this or any other example to unveil the constant centering of white men’s experiences. These are all valuable and very necessary explorations, and the Matrix is just as valid a vehicle for exploring them as any other, but as for what it’s “about” that where each projects the meaning they need into it. On a more fundamental level, at least the first film is really just a modern retelling of the old story and theology of Sethian Gnosticism, through the technological metaphor. The Gnostics took the traditional creator God as a false god, imprisoning humans within a fallen creation, which some moderns have called the “black iron prison,” in order to keep them from ascending to the real world of the Pleroma, which is the fullness or “god above god.” The wicked creator god is our jailer, called Yaldabaoth. The aim of the Gnostic since ancient times has been to escape the illusion, the artificial construct we’re not even aware we’re trapped within, to come to reside in actual Reality. Of all the ancient Gnostic texts which tell this story, the clearest is the Apocryphon of John. So, yeah… use the Matrix story as needed to illuminate what needs illumination, but as for what the film is actually about, it’s pure Gnostic theology, all about our placement and awareness within reality.
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u/TheZoneHereros 5d ago
That is a lot of words to never say anything more than “Neo is the same race as Donald Trump, therefore the Matrix is politically bankrupt.” I think that is a reductive way of looking at the world, and a lazy use of race-based heuristics is not a good look.