The End Of Cinema As We Know It: American Film in the Nineties

8. The Zen of Masculinity—Rituals of Heroism in The Matrix

8 The Zen of Masculinity—Rituals of Heroism in The Matrix Pat Mellencamp I F I R S T S AW, or experienced, The Matrix in New York, in the summer of 1999, the day it opened to a packed theater of savvy, sophisticated movie fans from the Upper East Side. I loved the film immediately , from the opening credits’ alteration of the sacrosanct studio logo, followed by the torrential strings of green computer code, the matrix itself, cascading down the huge screen. On the soundtrack is a telephone connection that sets up Trinity’s (Carrie-Anne Moss) daring rooftop escape from the police and the smarter, stronger agents/bots—a dash through a maze-like building and a death-defying leap between buildings, Vertigo (1958) meets Street Fighter.1 It is an energizing scene, an adrenaline rush. It will be ten minutes of this exhilarating chase before the film’s star, Keanu Reeves, is introduced.2 Groggy, disheveled, he is slouched, dozing in front of his computer monitor, barely conscious. (Some critics might say this state is a constant for Reeves.) Subsequently, we are never certain whether Thomas Anderson/a.k.a. Neo is asleep or awake, in reality or virtuality. It will take the entire film before he gets up to this woman’s speed, fighting skills, awareness, and black-leather fashion. Immediately, it is apparent that the film’s energy, its artistic invention , is considerable. It could be that John Gaeta (visual effects supervisor ) and Zach Staenberg (editor) are right on when they claim The Matrix as the “first film of the millennium, monumental, groundbreaking, with a new visual style that will be remembered.”3 To them, The Matrix is art, made by artists, the Wachowski brothers, who have a consistent, unswerving, and clear vision—an auteur imprimatur. At first glance, The Matrix is postmodern punk—high-tech, over83 the-top aggression, martial arts fights tempered by a narrative of minimalist facial expressions, flattened emotions, and few words. Agent Smith speaks his pithy epigrams in a modulated, singsong monotone: “Human beings are a disease, a plague, and we are the cure.” Or, my favorite , “Never send a human to do a machine’s job.” Bots are better fighters than humans because they never die; they instantly reproduce and multiply, like bacteria. The “real world” is a mise-en-scène of black and blue/green, a grunge techno aesthetic, exemplified by the S and M club in Sydney where Trinity, in black leather, first meets Neo/Thomas Anderson. The Matrix eclectically blends Asian and American film genres (particularly action adventure, sci-fi, Kung Fu/Hong Kong martial arts), live action and animation (Japanese anime, Warner Brothers cartoons), and other media (comic books, TV, and computer/video games, in the latter, particularly architectural form and visual style). The Wachowski brothers, the film’s writers/directors, wanted to bring Japanese animation to life, to add flesh to a cartoon and soul to a machine. They love and know film history, particularly genre films, which they cite, mix up, and alter. The title, The Matrix, suggests more than computer code, its main referent. It represents a confluence, a grid, of aesthetic and structural forms—theater, film, graphic arts (particularly comic book drawings and stories), television, and centrally, I think, computer games. It seamlessly merges analog and digital effects and forms, live action with CGI (computer graphics) so that it is “virtually” impossible to discern any difference between staged and computer-generated stunts, between real and computer-generated bodies fighting. This synthesis between live action and CGI, between film and TV, like the theme of the film itself , joins realities by passing through portals, images of screens and windows, transversing one dimension, and one medium, into another. I see the film as a hybrid, mutable object—simultaneously old and new, physical and ephemeral, real and virtual, analog and digital , an intermix of Western and Eastern thought and practices. Interestingly , the technology that is essential to the narrative and to the characters’ lives is a nineteenth century invention—the telephone. The only way to get out of virtual reality is to make a telephone call back to the home base, the mother ship Nebuchadnezzar. (The telephone call is a key structuring narrative principle of the 1998 German film Run Lola Run as well.) 84 PAT MELLENC AMP While 110 digital artists and 40 photographic artists worked on individual shots...