Parabolas of Science Fiction

9. Coded Transmissions: Gender and Genre Reception in The Matrix

( ( ( 143 ( Generation Starships,” Brian Attebery argues that narrative parabolas are “unlike formulas” because they “do not dictate either a story’s ending or the writer’s ends. Stories that utilize such scenarios may start in the same place, but then they go wherever thematic concerns may lead. If a formula is a closed circle, the sf scenario is an open curve, a swing toward the unknown : a parabola.” He further suggests that the parabola also functions as a parable: it is both “an open-ended curve and a vehicle for significance” (chapter 1). This notion of the parabola as an “open curve” and as a “vehicle for significance” is insightful when considering the transformation of a narrative as it is reiterated in new contexts; different authors reshape a parabola’s recognizable pattern in different ways with different endings and alternative thematic concerns as they revisit a given story in new and subsequent narratological repetitions. At the same time, however, Attebery ’s argument elides a consideration of the rearticulation of ideological patterns in the parabolic “swing toward the unknown.” Familiar sf stories may resolve in different ways due to the open-endedness of the parabolic form, but to what extent does this open-endedness extend into the domain of ideological repetition and reproduction? Gender and Genre Reception in The Matrix Individual artists and media consumers inevitablyadapt narrative parabolas to the concerns (especially the ideological concerns) of their historical moments. Within given historical moments, however, how ideologically flexible are these parabolas? What is the range of openness available, what are the limits of this openness, and what structures such limits? In order to explore these questions, this analysis examines the narrow reception of a specific iteration of a given parabola in order to investigate how engaged 9 Coded Transmissions Gender and Genre Reception in The Matrix daVid m. Higgins In chapter 1, “Science Fictional Parabolas: Jazz, Geometry, and 144 ) ) ) ParaBles of remediation readers and writers experience the open-ended possibilities of an sf narrative pattern. My investigation considers how spectators of the science fiction film The Matrix (1999) accept or resist the film’s basic formulations concerning gender roles and gendered identities when generating their own potentially parabolic spin-off narratives. The Matrix contributes to the formalization of the awakening-fromsimulacrumtrope (withantecedentsinPhilipK.Dick’snovels,inSamuelR. Delany’s Fall of the Towers trilogy [1966], and in television shows such as The Prisoner [1967–1968]) into a recognizable sf parabola.1 As Christine Mains notes, a recognizable science fiction story involving a protagonist who awakens from existence in one reality to discover an alternate life in another (and the subsequent struggle to determine which world of experience is authentic and which is a dream or simulacrum) is so prevalent in sf that almost every contemporary science fiction television series has adapted this pattern at one time or another (2008, 145). The specific examples Mains cites, such as episodes of Stargate SG-1 and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, predominantly emerge from the early 2000s in the immediate period after The Matrix was released, and it seems likely that The Matrix (alongside films such as The Truman Show [1998] and Dark City [1998]) helped to popularize the contemporary excitement for this awakeningfrom -simulacrum narrative (which is observable more recently in television episodes like Doctor Who’s “Amy’s Choice” [2010] and in films such as Inception [2010] and Source Code [2011]). In addition to crystallizing the awakening-from-simulacrum trope into a popular contemporary parabola, The Matrix offers an inversion of what Carol Clover describes as the possession formula in contemporary horror films. Clover notes that in a typical possession narrative such as The Exorcist (1973), an overwhelming demonic force possesses a woman’s body, and a male protagonist rescues her by opening himself up to the feminine realm of black magic (as opposed to remaining entrenched within the masculine rationality of white science). In Clover’s view, these possession narratives center on the emergence of a new masculinity in response to the threatening dangers of feminism and postmodernity: “Crudely put, for a space to be created in which men can weep without being labeled feminine, women must be relocated to a space where they will wail uncontrollably ; for men to be able to relinquish emotional rigidity, control, women must be relocated to a space in which they will undergo a flamboyant psychotic break; and so on” (1992, 105). The Matrix transforms the coded...