The Matrix – Simulacra and Simulation

There were many flaws in the film, but given how rich it was in ideas and incredible visual moments – like the birth and resurrection scenes (plus the fact you can’t take a philosophy course now without referencing this film series at least a few times) it is hard to criticize it too much. I do wish the smugness of Neo at the end of the film had been left out (having him fly away in the last scene like a punk Superman is one of the most ridiculous endings I have seen in any film) and that the film explored more the symbiotic relationship of humans and machines (though the later, less successful films did attempt this with mixed results). In trying to make a great action flick (which they did), some of the philosophic ideas were short changed and at times subverted.

Having Neo kill so many people (who were not Agents but “coppertops” like he had been) within the Matrix seemed a little cold and the huge ego he seems to have at the end when he calls and threatens the Matrix seemed to go against the character he had been throughout the rest of the film.

The way the film explored the idea of what we consider real and what we consider a simulation was very thought provoking. When Morpheus first takes Neo in the simulation program and asks him, “What is real?” we are taken back to the arguments of Descartes , Kant, and Hume. If what we consider real is something we touch or see, than what we consider real can be reduced to the impulses our brain is receiving from our fingers and eyes – impulses that are electrical and chemical in nature and which may not accurately relay the outside world. And as Baudrillard would ask, what about the person that simulates an illness but in the process of feigning begins to have “true” symptoms? Can the mind alter the “real” world and fake itself out? We are reminded of the philosophical arguments with regard to vision that since the senses (themselves limited) are interpreting the “real” world and converting these images to (upside down) pictures in our brain via chemical and electrical reactions and the tree which we “see” in our mind is not the tree in the “real” world (if indeed there is a real world) and if Tree 1 does not equal Tree 2, how can we be sure of our understanding of anything outside of our consciousness? The Matrix played with this and I loved the house of mirrors (or perhaps just Alice’s one looking glass) the audience is challenged by, but at the core of the movie, the issue of man vs. machine seemed to be more dominated by the need to make a good action flick then to really explore the dependant relationships humans and machines have with each other.