Thoughts on The Matrix Reloaded
May. 19th, 2003 11:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldSpoilers abound, of course.
Zion, of course, fits as the biblical stronghold of the elect against the sinful world outside. You have to love Abrahmic eschatology.
And it's a pity that Elrond went astray.
The characters of Merovingian and Persephone (played nicely by Lambert Wilson and Monica Bellucci, respectively) are exceptionally interesting. We know, through Agent Smith's autonomous existence, that the Matrix has frayed edges. The characters of Merovingian and Persephone ably demonstrate that these edges are not limited to those characters and environments with which Neo has interacted, but that they are systemic.
Names have meaning. The name "Persephone," for instance, refers to the daughter of Demeter and Zeus, unwilling wife of Hades; she was abducted from her sylvan homeland by Hades to the shadowy realm of death. As things developed, she was shared between the two realms; in winter, when she was with Hades, the world outside would be cold and dead, while in summer when she was with her mother the world would be alive and warm.
Merovingian is a particularly interesting name. The Merovingians were a dynasty descended from the Franks, Germans who had conquered Gaul in the 4th and 5th centuries. The Franks were fairly quickly assimilated into the superior civilization of Gaul, even post-Roman Gaul; the decision of Clovis to accept conversion to Catholicism in 476 hastened the acceptance of the Franks by their subjects and the spread of the Catholic Church north and east into Germanic Europe, for instance. They gave their name to Gaul, however, and the Frankish custom of dividing family lands between all the sons played a pivotal role in destabilizing the Merovingian kingdom. This instability eventually led to the overthrow of the Merovingians and their replacement by the Carolingians, the family that had exercised real power for generations before the formal coup. The Merovingians, then, were barbarians who had only imperfectly assimilated local Gaulish and Roman mores. Isn't that the case with The Matrix Reloaded's Merovingian?
It is interesting how Counsellor Ham in the depths of Zion's engineering level, and the Architect at the core in the Matrix, both talked about how the relationship between machine and man was two-sided. In Zion, the machines are under the control of man; in the Matrix, the reverse is true. In neither place, however, is the matter of control as clear as might be thought: Zion's citizens depend on the machines that clean the city's air and generate its electricity and purify their water with their very lives, while the level of survival that the Matrix could endure without its human generators likely wouldn't be very enjoyable. They need each other.
After Morpheus gave his speech, I realized that Zion reminded me of the Caribbean. It wasn't just the multiracial population, or the music (initially like that of Trinidadian steel drums); rather, it was the marginal nature of Zion itself. The Caribbean colonies of the European seafaring powers, it has been said, are peripheral even by colonial standards; they were useful only in the first phase of European imperialism (from the 15th to the 18th centuries), and afterwards were neglected. In many senses, the Caribbean colonies had a cut-rate version of modernity: the colonial experience had completely destroyed indigenous Native American cultures and severely dislocated imported African and other extra-regional colonial cultures, European cultures and European languages still dominate officially if not popularly, and the ideals of mass consumption and high technology are still popular even if only a minority of the population can afford either. Zion's inhabitants live in a high-technology world that is terribly poor and desperate, on the margins of the Matrix.
So. The Prophecy was a lie; or more accurately, it was a social convention, created by the Oracle in collaboration with the Architect to create a social outlet for that small minority of humans enslaved by the Matrix who would not consent. The outlet would thrive for a time; when it became too potentially menacing, it would be destroyed and the survivors would be left to rebuild. The Matrix is essentially sterile; its existence depends on the creation and maintenance and destruction, over and over again, of an outlet in Zion where dissenters could congregate.
It seems to me, in light of the dependency between man and machine admitted by both sides in the conflict, that the third Matrix movie (coming this summer!) will involve efforts to try to arrive at a new synthesis. Neo (unlike his five predecessor champions of humanity) rejected the Architect's offer (unlike his five predecessors) to admit defeat and take 23 people to repopulate Zion after its destruction; instead, he chose to re-enter the Matrix to save his love Trinity, and to tell the others about the true history of the conflict (or at least of the meaninglessness of the Oracle's prophecy on its own terms).
I don't know how this will be resolved precisely, but I think that the intermediate characters--the humans who move inside and outside of the Matrix, the programs which have acquired autonomy and free will--will be crucial. Hopefully we'll see the Merovingian and Persephone again; Agent Smith, definitely. I know I'll be watching.
Zion, of course, fits as the biblical stronghold of the elect against the sinful world outside. You have to love Abrahmic eschatology.
And it's a pity that Elrond went astray.
The characters of Merovingian and Persephone (played nicely by Lambert Wilson and Monica Bellucci, respectively) are exceptionally interesting. We know, through Agent Smith's autonomous existence, that the Matrix has frayed edges. The characters of Merovingian and Persephone ably demonstrate that these edges are not limited to those characters and environments with which Neo has interacted, but that they are systemic.
Names have meaning. The name "Persephone," for instance, refers to the daughter of Demeter and Zeus, unwilling wife of Hades; she was abducted from her sylvan homeland by Hades to the shadowy realm of death. As things developed, she was shared between the two realms; in winter, when she was with Hades, the world outside would be cold and dead, while in summer when she was with her mother the world would be alive and warm.
Merovingian is a particularly interesting name. The Merovingians were a dynasty descended from the Franks, Germans who had conquered Gaul in the 4th and 5th centuries. The Franks were fairly quickly assimilated into the superior civilization of Gaul, even post-Roman Gaul; the decision of Clovis to accept conversion to Catholicism in 476 hastened the acceptance of the Franks by their subjects and the spread of the Catholic Church north and east into Germanic Europe, for instance. They gave their name to Gaul, however, and the Frankish custom of dividing family lands between all the sons played a pivotal role in destabilizing the Merovingian kingdom. This instability eventually led to the overthrow of the Merovingians and their replacement by the Carolingians, the family that had exercised real power for generations before the formal coup. The Merovingians, then, were barbarians who had only imperfectly assimilated local Gaulish and Roman mores. Isn't that the case with The Matrix Reloaded's Merovingian?
It is interesting how Counsellor Ham in the depths of Zion's engineering level, and the Architect at the core in the Matrix, both talked about how the relationship between machine and man was two-sided. In Zion, the machines are under the control of man; in the Matrix, the reverse is true. In neither place, however, is the matter of control as clear as might be thought: Zion's citizens depend on the machines that clean the city's air and generate its electricity and purify their water with their very lives, while the level of survival that the Matrix could endure without its human generators likely wouldn't be very enjoyable. They need each other.
After Morpheus gave his speech, I realized that Zion reminded me of the Caribbean. It wasn't just the multiracial population, or the music (initially like that of Trinidadian steel drums); rather, it was the marginal nature of Zion itself. The Caribbean colonies of the European seafaring powers, it has been said, are peripheral even by colonial standards; they were useful only in the first phase of European imperialism (from the 15th to the 18th centuries), and afterwards were neglected. In many senses, the Caribbean colonies had a cut-rate version of modernity: the colonial experience had completely destroyed indigenous Native American cultures and severely dislocated imported African and other extra-regional colonial cultures, European cultures and European languages still dominate officially if not popularly, and the ideals of mass consumption and high technology are still popular even if only a minority of the population can afford either. Zion's inhabitants live in a high-technology world that is terribly poor and desperate, on the margins of the Matrix.
So. The Prophecy was a lie; or more accurately, it was a social convention, created by the Oracle in collaboration with the Architect to create a social outlet for that small minority of humans enslaved by the Matrix who would not consent. The outlet would thrive for a time; when it became too potentially menacing, it would be destroyed and the survivors would be left to rebuild. The Matrix is essentially sterile; its existence depends on the creation and maintenance and destruction, over and over again, of an outlet in Zion where dissenters could congregate.
It seems to me, in light of the dependency between man and machine admitted by both sides in the conflict, that the third Matrix movie (coming this summer!) will involve efforts to try to arrive at a new synthesis. Neo (unlike his five predecessor champions of humanity) rejected the Architect's offer (unlike his five predecessors) to admit defeat and take 23 people to repopulate Zion after its destruction; instead, he chose to re-enter the Matrix to save his love Trinity, and to tell the others about the true history of the conflict (or at least of the meaninglessness of the Oracle's prophecy on its own terms).
I don't know how this will be resolved precisely, but I think that the intermediate characters--the humans who move inside and outside of the Matrix, the programs which have acquired autonomy and free will--will be crucial. Hopefully we'll see the Merovingian and Persephone again; Agent Smith, definitely. I know I'll be watching.
