In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Seventeen years after E.T. demolished Blade Runner at the box office, an eerily similar scenario appeared in Hollywood. George Lucas’s heavily publicized first prequel to his space opera Star Wars bowed at theaters in May 1999, two months after the debut of an intriguing cyberpunk film by two geeky young brothers from Chicago. Once again, a feel-good, cross-marketed science-fiction blockbuster squared off with a dark, noirish film about human beings and technology. The outcome in 1999, however, was decidedly different than that in 1982. Although Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace more than recouped its production costs, it was the sleeper hit The Matrix, directed by brothers Andy and Larry Wachowski, that captured and seemed to reflect the public imagination at the cusp of the new millennium. At the time of this writing, The Matrix has grossed $460 million in total box office: $171 million domestically and $288 million internationally.1 It has generated a synergistic mass of Matrix-related paraphernalia, including an award-winning DVD documentary, The Matrix Revisited (2001); two sequels, The Matrix: Reloaded (2003) and The Matrix: Revolutions (2003); a series of animated shorts, The Animatrix (2003); a comic book series, The Matrix Comics, Volumes 1 and 2 (2003, 2004); two video games, Enter The Matrix (2003) and The One (2005); and a multiplayer online computer game, The Matrix Online (2005). These media products, in turn, have sparked a flurry of journalistic criticism, a formidable international fan base 163 6 The Virtual Orient We wrote the story for ourselves and hoped others would pick up on it. Every studio we showed it to thought no one would understand it. We told them it would be complex and dense, but we were also going to shoot the best action scenes and coolest computer graphics ever. Even if audiences didn’t get all of the references, we knew they’d at least have a good time with the visuals. —Larry Wachowski, quoted in Time linked though the Internet, and an ever-growing number of academic books and articles.2 The Matrix is a futuristic bildungsroman about a somnolent corporate drone by day and hacker by night named Thomas Anderson with the computer alias Neo (Keanu Reeves). Neo learns that what he has accepted as reality is actually a fake world called the Matrix. The Matrix is Plato’s cave, cyberspace, and Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony all rolled up into one“consensual hallucination”—a simulation of reality fed to human beings in order to keep them blind to the reality that they are energy sources for the alien machines, which have invaded the planet. Neo’s mentor on this journey of (self-) discovery is a well-dressed terrorist named Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne), who turns out to be the leader of a resistance movement against the machines. He and his crew, which includes Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss), Neo’s strong and sexy love interest, fly around the ruins of the real world in their ship, the Nebuchadnezzar, evading the metallic surveillance octopi called Sentinels and “jacking in” to the Matrix to fight the evil, blankfaced Agents led by Smith (Hugo Weaving). Morpheus believes that Neo might be the One (note the anagram)—the savior that the grandmotherly trickster known as the Oracle (Gloria Foster) has prophesied will free humankind from the machines. Once Neo learns and accepts the awful truth that his life has been a lie, the focus of the film shifts to whether he may or may not be the One. Found wanting in several ways, he eschews the issue to rescue Morpheus, who has been captured by the agents while trying to save Neo’s life. Neo’s willingness to sacrifice himself for his friend and teacher—as well as Morpheus’s continued faith in his protégé—leads the audience to suspect that he might indeed be the One, a suspicion confirmed and realized through Trinity’s expression of her love for Neo. For it is her kiss that resurrects our hero from the dead and gives him the power to defeat Agent Smith before shooting up to the sky with the promise of more pop-philosophizing and ass-kicking in the inevitable sequels. Immediately hailed as a classic of postmodern filmmaking, The Matrix is both heir and successor to the cinematic legacy of Blade Runner—a legacy that stresses mise-en-scène and, more specifically related to this study, depictions of...

Share