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Stalling Zion: Hegemony, Whiteness, and Racial Discourse in The MatrixPhenomenon Douglas A. Cunningham You’re white as snow, and you think like a slave. —Philip Roth, The Human Stain . . . unhappily while this class of people exists among us, we can never count with certainty on its tranquil submission. — James Monroe, governor of Virginia, responding to the 1800 slave rebellion of Gabriel Prosser The great thing about being me is there’s so many of me. —Agent Smith, The Matrix Reloaded In The Matrix (1999), cybernetic resistance leader Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne), a black man, endures Agent interrogation within the computer-generated reality called the Matrix. During his interrogation , a computer-generated white man, Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving), explains to him that the first version of the Matrix—designed to imprison the minds of humans so that their bodies could act as battery power for a world run by machines—had originally been a place in which “everyone would be happy.” Unfortunately, Smith explains, humanity refused to accept the program. In other words, the captive human minds within the first Matrix could not accept the possibility of a world in which, among other things, all social and economic barriers to human happiness had been removed. In an attempt to salvage the “entire crop” of artificially produced humans lost to this “disaster,” the machines reconfigured the Matrix to mirror what Agent Smith Douglas A. Cunningham 256 calls the “peak” of human civilization, replete with all its racial judgments and inequities. The Matrix, then, suggests that even within the pseudo-reality of the Matrix, racial antagonisms play a significant role in the everyday existence of human beings. That is to say, the racial antagonisms of the extradiegetic, “real” world have been purposefully recreated within the Matrix. Police swarm and violently club men of color.Marginalizedpeoplesoccupytenementprojects.Whitenesspervadesassumptionsabout “normalcy,”privilege,andpower.Interestingly, The Matrix phenomenon foregrounds the ubiquity of whiteness in the extreme and “embodied” form of “Agents,” mysterious “G-men” types who monitor and punish transgressions that threaten to expose the conceit of the Matrix. These Agents, all of them Caucasian, come to represent not simply the power structure of authority within the Matrix itself but also the power of whiteness in the extradiegetic, “real” world. Other entries in The Matrix trilogy and, indeed, the collective Matrix phenomenon—The Matrix Reloaded (2003), The Matrix Revolutions (2003), The Animatrix (2003), the video game “Enter the Matrix” (2003), and even The Matrix Comics (2003, 2005)—reinforce the first film’s critical engagement with questions of racial antagonisms . On the surface, these Matrix products merely examine issues of race in a reductive and science-fictional way by pitting the human race against the “race” of machines. Ultimately, however, the conflicts on display in these films speak more to the modern racial reality in countries like the United States than to the trilogy’s more simplistic universal human-machine conflict, which merely serves as a metaphor to describe real racial contentions among humans.1 This essay investigates the ways in which The Matrix trilogy and its ancillary products communicate ideas about the legacy of human racial conflict and its impact on Western, late capitalist societies. To begin, it employs Michel Foucault’s theory of the Panopticon to discuss how issues of race within The Matrix series speak to the hegemonization of power inside the narrative and to issues of ideology outside the narrative. What arises from the phenomenon’s treatment of race are subliminal scenes in the series that universalize themes of oppression and slavery by exploiting the viewer’s familiarity with cinematic ,literary,andtelevisualcodesderivedfrompastimagesofracial conflict residually embedded in collective memory. Of particular Stalling Zion 257 interest, however, are the assimilation threats portrayed in these films and the extreme whiteness they imply. The latter two Matrix films of the trilogy and “Enter the Matrix,” in fact, present the hegemony of machine power, as maintained through the perpetuation of racial conflict among its human subjects, giving way to the greater threat of homogenized assimilation in the form of the self-replicating program , Agent Smith. Finally, since understanding the racial ambiguity of the character Neo (and of Keanu Reeves, the actor who plays him) is essential to discussions of this assimilationist threat within The Matrix trilogy, the essay revisits theories of both Jeffrey M. Fish and Foucault (specifically the latter’s theories on governmentality ) in an effort to explain how the series portrays racial ambiguity as a liberating force and, indeed, as a force that celebrates progressive theoretical ideas about individual...

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