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CHAPTER 6 The Posthuman Rebel O f all of the decades of the twentieth century, the one evoked most obsessively by American pop culture is the fifties. Films, fiction, television, comic books, and computer/video games are fixated by that decade and have enveloped it in a haze of mythology that obscures our view of the period’s actual events. Fredric Jameson refers to the fifties as the “privileged lost object of desire” for Americans in his influential analysis of the postmodern nostalgia mode.1 In Jameson’s analysis, “the fifties” have become a mythical historical time through frequent cinematic recycling, and their ubiquity is evidence of our contemporary inability to imagine a future; we inhabit a world in which the past, the present, and the future are all subsumed by a pastiche of earlier styles and themes. Even some films acclaimed for their highly innovative visions of the future are actually indebted stylistically and thematically to the midtwentieth century. Among the films that have consistently conjured up the fifties are science fiction films—perhaps not unexpectedly, since the genre experienced its Golden Age during that decade. Nowhere is this more apparent than in The Matrix, released in 1999 and lauded for its dazzling, futuristic environment powered by innovative special effects. Its enormous success bathed it in an aura of novelty and tended to obscure its nostalgic ethos and its similarities to earlier films, for, despite its breathtaking effects, the film hearkens back to the fifties. Rebellious youth, technological thrills, loss of identity, and conflicted relationships with mother figures are themes transported from the century ’s middle to its end. The Matrix is immersed in fifties cultural beliefs and film conventions, and its two sequels continue the trend. Nowhere is the trilogy’s evocation of the fifties more apparent than in its reenactment of young white Americans appropriating black cool in an effort to The Posthuman Rebel 165 become rebels. It is a distinctly Hollywood conceit to suppose that a style produced during centuries of black suffering should be bequeathed to a young white man who alone has the ability to use its powers to save humankind from extinction. The Matrix not only looks cool; it is also about the attainment of cool, about the transformation of a geek into an icon of incomparable cool. Thomas A. Anderson (Keanu Reeves) is a nondescript company drone, the nineties’ version of the man in a gray flannel suit, indistinguishable— except for his dissatisfaction with his monotonous life—from the other clean-cut corporate employees who labor at identical desks in their office cubicles. Anderson is also a misfit computer hacker who spends his free time alone at home. But he is destined to escape geekdom and become Neo, an incomparably stylish and composed master of his surroundings. The Matrix follows the process of his transformation into a man who is impervious to pain, who can dodge bullets effortlessly, who struts through the city with supreme nonchalance clad in a black trench coat, and whose insouciance becomes transcendent as he soars upward through the sky, leaving the phony city below. Neo continues to perfect his imperturbable self-control over the course of the next two films in the trilogy. Anderson ’s transformation from computer geek to superhero reenacts the familiar scenario popularized by comic books but dating back to earlier übermensch aesthetics of an unexceptional person’s metamorphosis into an undefeatable powerhouse, a well-worn but still attractive fantasy. The goal in the Matrix trilogy is to achieve that most stylish of fantasy roles: the über-rebel. Thomas A. Anderson’s transformation into Neo in The Matrix recalls the fifties’ appropriation of black cool by whites, for the film relies on black characters to guide its white protagonist toward truth and fashion flair. Although Keanu Reeves is biracial—Asian and white—the film does not present him in those terms, and his role in relation to the film’s black characters evokes the fifties paradigm of white malcontents learning from black trendsetters. It is the black characters who reveal the arti ficiality of what passes as the world, and they lead their white protégé to the last vestiges of reality, in the process imbuing him with the telltale signs of cool. Neo learns sartorial style and nonchalance from Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne), his hip black guide, who shares his name with the Greek god of dreams and proves he is a hipster by teaching Neo the difference between phoniness...

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