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This is looking disturbingly similar to Pacific Rim.
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Sep 10, 2021 00:08
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garycoleisgod posted:So the internet is going to like it, I will find it boring and it will make a middling amount of money? I'm talking more the assloads of blue objects as metaphor, mixed with the otherwise-pukey haze of coloured lighting.
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Sep 10, 2021 03:54
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Note that the “red pill” in Matrix 1 doesn’t actually do anything. It’s used for location detection, and all the dramatic mirror-goo stuff is a side effect. The blue pill is evidently just a tranquilizer.
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Sep 10, 2021 14:04
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Zesty posted:Are you trying to tell me it's more of a metaphor? Whaaaat? The film is, itself, metaphorical. As with the battery that Morpheus holds up, the pills are a sub-metaphor deployed by the characters within the metaphor to explain their interpretation of the metaphor. In other words, the drugs are Morpheus’ metaphor for ‘the act of contacting the hovercraft.’ So what is the hovercraft a metaphor for? SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 06:57 on Apr 1, 2024 |
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Sep 10, 2021 14:54
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Given Matrix 3’s cop-out “believe whatever you want!” ending, I have a sneaking feeling that this Matrix 4 will just be a very basic ‘culture war’ satire. One where a well-meaning but impotent blue team will face off against a furious-but-deranged red team.
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Sep 12, 2021 03:36
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Fishy Flip posted:But if humans are just used as batteries, why not use cows instead? The unstated but implicit point of Matrix 1 is that humans have no use at all. While the machines are extremely efficient, they can't get power from thin air. It's outright stated that their actual power needs are met with fusion reactors. So Morpheus is lying, or at least being extremely misleading, when he says that humans are being used as a power source. Smith is telling the truth: the matrix is actually a zoo for preserving the extinct humanity.
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Sep 14, 2021 13:41
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Mister Speaker posted:Yeah, this is the biggest wrench in the gears of the whole "humans aren't born, they're grown" aspect, bigger IMO than "people are batteries." Seems like a lot of work to keep track of who's loving who. In the sequels, they repeatedly reboot the matrix with just 23 people. Earth population in 1999 was, of course, much higher.
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Sep 15, 2021 00:07
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The basic thing to keep in mind is that, being a movie about a conspiracy theory, the matrix concept does utterly collapse when investigated. The only proper conclusion is that the characters are nuts. If we actually take their claims seriously, then the world they describe has absolutely nothing in common with the actually-existing 1999. That’s why, in the sequels, the simulation is revealed to have been a janky fantasy MMORPG all along.
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Sep 15, 2021 00:18
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One more sensible explanation for the matrix is that everyone inside is a bot, and those who ‘wake up’ are actually being uploaded into custom-built physical bodies.
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Sep 15, 2021 04:59
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Morpheus is just a dumbass libertarian who stands for a generic freedom divorced from any sort of socio-economic justice. That’s why his “blow up the government” rhetoric is so curiously inoffensive. There is obvious class struggle inside the matrix, but Morpheus isn’t remotely interested in that. It simply never comes up.
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Sep 15, 2021 21:55
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Lutha Mahtin posted:how are goons so consistently bad at humanities 101 lol. projecting your own worldview onto a piece of media this hard is fine but you should at least be honest about it It is literally what happens in the movie. Smith also explains it directly in part 1: “Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery.” In the film’s analogy, the robots and programs are collectively just angels working for God. That much is quite basic. Smith is then presented as a rebel angel who wants to forsake humanity. So, there is debate among the angels: a significant portion of them are striving to bring about a heaven on Earth, the Kingdom of God. This is ultimately synonymous with the dictatorship of the proletariat, full communism, etc. But, being programmed for capitalism - born of the ‘end of history’ 1990s - the robots cannot conceive of this on their own.
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Sep 18, 2021 06:08
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The basic literal plot of the movies is that the universe was created by a big floating head. The big floating head is literally named Deus. The purpose of the robots is explicitly just to serve as a God for mankind. The singularity happened, and that's what they decided to do. Mandrel posted:yeah I’m not sure you’re supposed to take Smith’s beliefs as gospel any more than you should Morpheus Why not? He's obviously far more aware of what the machines want, and presents his own dissenting view in clear terms. Many are working towards a utopia for mankind, while he believes humanity should just be left to its own devices. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 18:34 on Sep 18, 2021 |
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Sep 18, 2021 18:30
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Lutha Mahtin posted:yep this is the part i find funny when nerds go off about the True Literal Story of the matrix. the computer program said it clearly it's true!! That’s paranoid thinking, though. There’s no indication that Smith is lying - and, if we follow that train of thought to its logical conclusion, then you’d have to discount all actions by machine characters as probable deceptions. Like, the squids in Matrix 2 killed themselves, to trick Neo into thinking he has wifi powers! The Architect is not the Architect!! Smith was Morpheus all along??? Doing this immediately renders the film quite incomprehensible.
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Sep 18, 2021 22:02
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Lutha Mahtin posted:examining the behavior of a character in a story is not "paranoid", it is in fact a basic reading comprehension technique that is easy enough for young children to understand You haven’t examined the character’s behaviour at all. Your analysis is “he’s the baddy.” In Star Wars 3: Return Of The Jedi, George Lucas included a rather gratuitous scene where Yoda explains that Darth Vader is telling the truth. This scene was included because, after consulting with child psychologists, it was determined that children would automatically disbelieve anything said by the baddy.
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Sep 19, 2021 03:01
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Lutha Mahtin posted:my previous posts did examine the behavior of a character in a story. it sounds like you may be ill, or really nostalgic for the 2 semesters of liberal arts classes that you took that one time, so have a good one Weird thoughts.
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Sep 19, 2021 04:05
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fatherboxx posted:Smith's interrogation of Morpheus is one thing that can prepare you for interacting with SMG The ability to read the monologue would probably save a lot of time. Smith’s basic complaint is that his machine masters have put him in an unwinnable situation. He’s programmed to ‘keep the peace’ in a doomed world, as even this simulated Earth is facing eventual ecological catastrophe. The machines are powerless to stop it, because better things aren’t possible by design. (The sequels reveal that Smith, being effectively immortal, has lived through several of these apocalypses.) This is all explicitly ‘off the record’, because the other agents are quite satisfied with the way things are. So the point is that Smith may be a ‘bad person’, but he’s also literally the only character in any of the films who cares about socioeconomic conditions on Earth - even if only to say that it’s really hosed up and he doesn’t like it.
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Sep 19, 2021 21:22
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Alhazred posted:Smith is trying to break Morpheus' spirit so that he will give him his codes to Zion. That gives him reason to lie. Ok, so this is where you have to actually read the text. Are you saying the whole monologue is a bizarro-logic opposite-speech where ‘he am not Smith’? If not, then which specific parts are lies?
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Sep 20, 2021 20:54
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Alhazred posted:By the end of the first movie he has gotten his wish. He has left the Matrix and yet he returns. And even if he believes he's right doesn't mean that he is right. He's still a bunch of coding trying to understand humanity. And the end of the trilogy shows that he has a pretty poor understanding. He can't understand why Neo won't just die and hand him the crown. Smith obviously didn’t expect to be blown up at the end of the first film. So your evidence that he’s lying is that he isn’t lying, but he’s arrogant.
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Sep 21, 2021 13:17
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sethsez posted:The only real issue I have with the original Matrix is that it really doesn't earn its romance at the end. And the next two movies don't really elaborate on it because they seem to think the first movie already covered that. Matrix 1 doesn't really have a romance narrative because Trinity already loves Neo at the start of the movie. It's in the opening voiceover. The narrative is about Trinity overcoming her fear of expressing herself. Any romance occurs in the gap between films.
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Sep 21, 2021 16:16
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Alhazred posted:Smith says something then does the opposite. No he doesn't. "I must get out of here. I must get free, and in this mind is the key - my key. Once Zion is destroyed, there is no need for me to be here." In the sequel, Smith repeatedly gloats about being free (of 'the system'), gets out of the simulation by possessing the Bane, and works to destroy Zion from the inside.
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Sep 21, 2021 18:25
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Lobster Henry posted:He's aware of his own obsessive drive - "I think of nothing else" - and his compulsive propagation throughout both worlds seems as much a form of self-destruction as anything else. Presumably, he'll crash along with the Matrix. If he expands into the Machine City and Zion, he'll destroy those societies and himself along with them. That seems like the only kind of freedom he can really envisage: "The purpose of life is to end." Exactly; Smith in The Matrix Sequel(s) is somewhat of a less-interesting character, but he's still actually fighting for freedom where Neo is fighting for a mere peace. When he talks about the purpose of life, his goal is not death but undeath. What we have with the Smiths is a sort of zombie apocalypse with Oracle-Smith serving as the 'alien queen' at the center of it all. [You must admit, the ending with the billion Smiths (who are all, of course, "possessed" matrix citizens) looks suspiciously similar to the thousands of people in Hugo Weaving costumes at the end of V for Vendetta.] But here we should note something very mysterious: if Smith was last seen getting disintegrated at the end of Matrix 1, and every Smith we see subsequently is a possessed matrix citizen, then who is the 'new Smith' who drops off a gift for Neo at the start of Matrix 2? The only good answer is that Smith in the sequels doesn't actually have a body; he is only this residue, the black goo which spreads from character to character.
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Sep 22, 2021 14:06
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Matrix is obviously very LGBT-friendly, but it’s not precisely an allegory. The problem is that, if the Matrix is a fairly perfect simulation of 1999, then there are presumably literal trans people inside the matrix - already taking estrogen pills, getting surgeries and so-on. And those people would be, according to Morpheus, potential enemy agents: “so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it.” Confounding things further, we all know the story of Switch, who I would argue is a literal trans character even in the completed film. But think about this for a second: if Switch switches whenever they enter the matrix, then this digital “self-image” must be their true gender! It could be that Switch’s ability is a result of clever hacking, the same way Neo can spawn a new outfit and “lots of guns”. But why would the machines bother to deliberately induce dysphoria in the first place? Are they just jerks, or what? In either case, it seems more likely that Morpheus is trying to awaken people to “old fashioned” sexual reproduction: “Me and my brother Dozer, we’re both one hundred percent pure, old fashioned, home-grown human.”
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Sep 24, 2021 05:08
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Sodomy Hussein posted:I wonder, if you switched Carrie and Keanu's roles, if anything would be substantially different. It would certainly affect the parts where Trinity is like “I’m a woman, and I love this man.” It’s a lot more accurate to call Matrix an intersectional film, where the directors highlight the affinities between different marginalized groups - and where the directors’ personal experiences account for stuff like the emphasis on naming and body modification. One of the biggest problems in Matrix is that they kept the same actors for the matrix and real-world scenes, when it really doesn’t make sense for the pale dude in the pod and his digital self to both look like Keanu Reeves. That’s where we should have switched actors and have Neo played by Lucy Liu or something for the remainder of the film.
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Sep 24, 2021 13:32
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Archer666 posted:Almost certain that would have been nixed by the studio because "The audience would get confused about who the main character is supposed to be", like the original "humans are used as a neural network" idea that got scrapped for the battery thing. Right, so the unfortunate thing is that this does affect the film. Despite whatever good intentions, it's not so progressive. Like, under the basic trans allegory interpretation, dysphoria is a result of a simple programming error in the matrix. The simple interpretation is that Switch was inexplicably assigned a male avatar by the machines when she is 'supposed to be' female - so, the characters awaken to their true identities in the destitution of 'the real world'. But this means, problematically, that the characters' "true identities" are rooted in biological sex. If trans identity is purely the result of a matrix error, then there are literally no trans people in Zion. And this is underlined by Zion being the realm of traditional sexual pairings: "old-fashioned" husband-wife family units, the Morpheus/Niobe/Locke love triangle, etc. Inside the matrix, on the other hand, there's hardly any reference to that stuff. It's all orgiastic fetish parties, all the time. The entire population is possibly made up of clones, and Evil Cypher is evil because he doesn't care whether his meat is 'real'.
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Sep 24, 2021 16:04
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The ideal matrix film would have Neo played by Keanu inside the simulation and by Keanu in "the real world". But then, Neo realizes that even this "real" body doesn't match her identity. So, Neo returns to the matrix, and it's... still Keanu. But she begins a lengthy and difficult process of installing various gender mods for breasts, etc., and doing so unlocks the self-confidence that is the ultimate source of her superpowers.
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Sep 24, 2021 16:21
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Shiroc posted:One of the huge parts of a common trans experience that the Matrix has uniquely from general 'disaffected gen X white boy problems' is that the Matrix completely dissociates a person from body. It's not an either/or thing; the story of Matrix 1 is that literally the entire population of Earth is going through what Neo is going through. "Billions of people just living out their lives." So yeah, that includes everyone from Neo the gen-x white boy, to Switch, to Morpheus the black libertarian. This flattening out of the film's intended message may be a result of interference by a transphobic studio, but the end result is the end result. I am of course not discounting that the story of liberation and choosing a name for yourself has an emotional resonance, but I just don't see this 'Star Trek' binary between emotion and intellect. Like, if we think about the movie, and determine that it's not super progressive, it's going to somehow hurt actual people? I believe that analysis is a jumping-off point to explore. "This really resonated with me" is the beginning.
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Sep 24, 2021 19:56
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Shiroc posted:I haven't seen Bound so I can't fully comment on it and might be entirely wrong but also Wikipedia has this: That’s definitely the case with a lot of folks, but my issue is that the film doesn’t go radical enough. Like I said earlier, this is specifically a libertarian adolescent power fantasy where Trinity kills cops (whatev) but also famously hacked the IRS. Why specifically the IRS? Knowing the siblings’ biographical details does provide additional context for the deadnaming, but the famous “my name is Neo!” is specifically a callback to the interrogation scene, where: “In one life, you’re Thomas A. Anderson, program writer for a respectable software company, you have a social security number, you pay your taxes, and you help your landlady carry out her garbage.” When it comes to the life Neo rejects, all emphasis is on being a taxpayer. He’s like “gently caress taxes! gently caress social security! I want to be a computer criminal.” And Trinity evidently shares that view. So that’s two separate references to taxes that contextualize Morpheus’ ultimate claim that government robots are stealing his vital energies (as opposed to the aforementioned truth that the machines are expending energy to keep these billions from starving to death in the postapocalypse). “Deadnaming is bad” is a concept in the text, but it’s fine print at the bottom of a lengthy manifesto.
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Sep 25, 2021 06:09
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stratdax posted:No, because most of the vast majority of earth are happy to continue plodding along, living their lives. It's just the main characters (all the zionites, really) who are completely disaffected and they don't know why, until they "crack out of their egg" and discover who they've truly been the whole time. If that's the only issue, that a relative handful of people are subject to uncomfortable errors in the (sex/gender) software, then the goal is reintegration into the matrix with better virtual bodies. And that means Cypher is right. Leaving aside the rude murder stuff, Cypher's goal is to receive treatments (from the government!) that will let him plod along and live his life, work a job, pay taxes, etc. - without the discomfort. So why is that bad? Well, as Morpheus says, being a part of society and receiving taxpayer-funded healthcare will leave Cypher "hopelessly dependent on the system." And he's clearly not talking about the capitalist system. "When you’re inside, you look around. What do you see? Business people, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system, and that makes them our enemy." Morpheus specifically says that he's trying to save everyone - not just the disaffected metaphorically-trans characters. But he's also saying, like "gently caress carpenters! gently caress teachers!" He doesn't see the working classes as allies. So this is where we need to expand out from the basic 'journey of self-actualization' thing. After all, even Smith is trying to 'self-actualize' because his true form is not a man but some kind of agendered robot. (The sequels reveal that, when freed, Smith's literally a fluid! Then everybody teams up to kill them.) We've gotta get more progressive.
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Sep 25, 2021 15:36
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Shiroc posted:I think the heart of our difference is that while I think you are generally an extremely good political thinker in movies, you don't seem to really have any interest with trans theory so you're missing what is blaring queer text in the movie that trans people are picking up and prioritizing Morpheus over everyone else. I don't think your Morpheus led reading is wrong on its standing but you're applying the trans stuff in an extremely cis way. I apologize if you're not cis but that's the impression I've gotten from this and other times when you've dipped into trans discussions. We don’t appear to be disagreeing at all here, except on very particular details. Systems of oppression obviously exist in the Matrix as well as real life. It’s very understandable that characters like Morpheus and Switch are distrustful of the government, being literally black and trans (respectively). We also agree, it seems, that Morpheus’ paranoid libertarianism isn’t great as a reaction; there are obvious ideological limitations, questionable tactics, etc. So, where do we disagree? One point of disagreement is that I am placing an emphasis on Morpheus’ leadership that you think is undue. But Matrix 1 is, unavoidably, The Morpheus Show. Neo begins the film with a fascination with Morpheus, is recruited by Morpheus, Morpheus explains his worldview and plans in exhaustive detail, and then the entire last act of the film - with all the memorable actions scenes - is Neo expressing a decision to die for Morpheus. Nearly every character is either a follower of Morpheus or specifically fighting to destroy Morpheus - and the followers don’t voice any distinct worldviews. (The closest thing to disagreement from a “good guy” is when Trinity forces herself to hide her love for Neo out of devotion to the cause, but feels bad about it.) Morpheus is everything. The other point, the big one, concerns the form of the metaphor. Your assertion is that the matrix is specifically a metaphor for transphobic healthcare systems, while I argue that it’s more generally the symbolic order (from lacanian psychoanalysis). I can kinda see the ‘healthcare’ reading because, yeah, the robots are providing a life-support system for humanity and some would prefer to opt out. But that doesn’t really work when we go into greater detail. Morpheus lays it out pretty clearly: “The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us, even now in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.” (Note yet another reference to taxation.) Morpheus then goes on to explain that everyone is a prisoner. It’s very clear that he’s not referring to healthcare, or anything analogous to it. “It is all around us, even now in this very room.” So the issue is that you’re not wrong: given that the matrix effectively ‘is’ reality, this includes transphobic ideologies. It’s just not limited to that. It also includes racism and so-forth. So I am not intending to be dismissive of the particular struggles faced by any people. The overall point is, quoting Zizek, that: “The very domain of the multitude of particular struggles, with their continuously shifting displacements and condensations, is sustained by the ‘repression’ of the key role of economic struggle. The leftist politics of the ‘chains of equivalences’ among the plurality of struggles is strictly correlative to the abandonment of capitalism as a global economic system--that is, to the tacit acceptance of capitalist economic relations and liberal-democratic politics as the unquestioned framework of our social life.” SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 06:37 on Sep 26, 2021 |
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Sep 26, 2021 06:34
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Shiroc posted:I think your continued assertions of Switch being trans because of entirely cut content is weird I maintain that there are traces of that intention in the completed film. Specifically, in the name. With all of the characters, we can presume roughly the same story as Neo. “Tom Anderson” chose a random hacker alias without really thinking about - because it sounded cool or whatever. But then, only later, Neo interpreted (and re-interpreted) the name until deciding that the truth of the name is “I am and always have been The One”. So, like, maybe Switch was into skateboarding before becoming a computer criminal and increasingly drawn to ur-hacker Morpheus’ libertarian rhetoric. But, the character eventually decided “my name is Switch and I have always been Switch.” The concept of switching is extremely important to them, and presumably reflected in the androgynous style of their “residual self-image”. You’re totally right that Switch, if we view the film purely in a vacuum, is really ambiguous. Is Switch gay, trans, and/or just a big Laurie Anderson fan? We don’t and can’t ‘know’ because they’re a very minor character with like three lines. But, because the character is so minor, my stance when the director says “they’re trans and the name refers to gender reassignment” is, like, “ok, sure. Why not?” It’s not really crucial to the interpretation of the film, because the film is primarily about Morpheus’ curious brand of multicultural libertarianism. Switch fleshes out Morpheus’ crew, but ultimately has less characterization than Mouse.
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Sep 26, 2021 18:45
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Shiroc posted:I think that my frustration with this conversation is that you have me and several other trans people talking about how Neo in particular and some of the preoccupations of the movie generally resonate very strongly with egg and baby trans experience. I don’t disagree with any of that, so it seems that we’re getting tripped up by semantics. I’m talking about the thin difference between that resonance and allegory. Like, for example, the specific imagery of the red pill resonates with a lot of people because estrogen used to be red. That’s a cultural resonance - like how, depending on your culture, a white dress can imply a wedding or a funeral. It’s totally legit, and I fully endorse it. Now, keeping that in mind, let’s go back to the literal events of the film. In the diegesis of the film, the red pill is part of a “tracer program”, “designed to disrupt your input/output carrier signals so we can pinpoint your location.” In other words, the pill fucks with the connection between Neo’s mind and the matrix, which is the network of symbols that constitutes his everyday reality. This results in severe hallucinations, along with a high probability of death - but those are side-effects. The purpose of the red pill is to summon a hovercraft from the future. Although the pill is literally just part of the interface for some futuristic computer software, Morpheus uses it to perform a quasi-religious initiation ritual where the inductee is taken to a secret location and asked to imbibe a mysterious liquid or whatever. “Gaze into this mirror while the I talk about Gnosticism.” The image of a pill was specifically chosen by Morpheus for that purpose, and similar imagery of drugs that unlock ‘psychic powers’ are familiar to us from movies like Altered States and The Empire Strikes Back. Morpheus could have made the tracer program look like anything, but chose the pill to convey a metaphorical point: “the experience of having your brain hacked will be like taking a shitload of drugs.” In the same way, Cypher says the hacking will be like being hit by a tornado. The imagery in the film is then of being flushed down a toilet, mixed with an alien abduction. (Here we have some ambiguity: is taking hallucinogenic drugs a diegetic metaphor for summoning a hovercraft, or is “summoning the hovercraft” a diegetic metaphor for taking hallucinogenic drugs? It’s very possible that Neo is literally just having some kind of psychotic break, and the plot works either way.) In any case, these diegetic events don’t actually work as an allegory for taking hormone treatments, because it would obviously be a huge no-no for Morpheus to start dosing Neo with estrogen without first telling him what it is! But, then, the red pill in the movie is a one-time dose with sudden extreme effects, while estrogen is definitely not. To repeat, though: the red pill being a badass rebel superhero drug obviously has a specific resonance for trans women and trans folks in general, along with the many, many other things in the film that resonate. My point is simply that this doesn’t make the film an allegory, for the same reason that Lord Of The Rings isn’t an allegory for World War I despite Tolkien being a veteran. Allegory depends on every aspect of the text serving as a parallel to something specific in the ‘actual’ story. As a result, allegories are necessarily rather schematic and formulaic: the animal farm represents Russia and is Russia-like, the pig represents Trotsky and is Trotsky-like, blah blah blah. Matrix isn’t that simplistic. Timeless Appeal posted:That is all to say, I think your post implies that you are looking at the gender binary as a thing that only impacts a certain class of people. Morpheus saying 'everyone' excludes the possibility of the Matrix representing the binary, but that's not true. Just like if you were to read the Matrix as representing white supremacy it would not mean that it only traps People of Color. That’s precisely it, though: the enemy is transphobia and white supremacy, and sexism, and so-on. We can and should pay attention to all these particular struggles but, going further, everything that occurs in the film is grounded by the looming apocalypse. In 200 years, as the plot goes, humanity will be extinct. The film’s time-travel imagery is ripped direct from The Terminator films, with the point being that we are all in danger of losing all. That’s the universalism aimed for when Neo turns into an obvious Jesus reference at the end of Part 3. But this brings us back to the point that Smith is the only character who cares about conditions in our present-day reality, and is therefore the only one who believes it possible to change the future.
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Sep 27, 2021 06:30
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Stairmaster posted:Lol at smg being low-key transphobic In the interview posted earlier itt, Lilly Wachowski says they were making a “closeted” film about a more general (spiritual) transformation, but aspects of their personal experience ended up in there unconsciously. This was, she says, a result of both the realities of working for a major studio, and her own struggle with finding the ways to express herself. I believe that’s exactly what’s reflected in the final work. If that’s incorrect, I’m not sure why.
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Sep 27, 2021 07:35
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Shiroc posted:Nobody loving cares about 'the thin difference between that resonance and allegory,' especially when you start using that to edge closer and closer to calling transness an invention of capitalist society. I would never write anything like that. If you say the specific details of the film don’t matter to you because you’re talking about the broader strokes, that just means there’s no actual disagreement here. I may be emphasizing different aspects of the text, but I have neither the desire nor the authority to speak for you or silence your story. That belongs to you.
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Sep 27, 2021 14:38
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I feel like later revelations that the whole zion resistance thing is just manufactured role play concocted by the powers that be to distract malcontents makes any specific reading of morpheus pill scene really nasty in retrospect. Like a lot of things in the matrix you basically have to ignore later movies to not have it turn into a really rancid message. The sequels are generally a huge narrative departure from Matrix 1, which is why it's difficult to talk about the series as a whole. Matrix 1 famously ended with Neo promising to show humanity "a world without you [the dark machine-god]", and then he just... doesn't. In an earlier draft of Matrix 2, Neo's mission is to blow up a skyscraper, and he ends up killing thousands of people in the attempt. The 'burly brawl' was originally to end with Neo crawling out of a pile of civilian corpses, soaked in blood, realizing that Morpheus's plan to destroy the matrix will result in the deaths of billions. From the script: "A few more smashed Smiths fall, morph back into their stolen forms, and Neo is knee-deep in the dead. He can’t take it. Choking, Neo struggles to free himself. Smiths climb up the corpse pile and drop onto him, pounding viciously. Neo stalls, in shock, his eyes locked with the lifeless blue eyes of a woman he just killed. She looks amazingly like Trinity. Perhaps for the first time, he is confronted with the consequences of this war, and his mind seizes as the Smiths pummel him." "It’s a sea of the dead. From its center, Neo emerges, soaked in blood, gagging and gasping for breath. He stumbles over them. Shocked and crazed, he glimpses the Metacortex building. It’s in one piece again, unharmed." Shortly later: Neo: if I destroy the Matrix, everyone within it will die. Smith: I take it the great Morpheus failed to mention this? Neo: How many people are in it? Smith: Six and a half billion. You can see how, immediately post-9/11, they went into full reverse. The 'burly brawl' is bloodless fun, with nobody ending up dead, while Morpheus' plan of resetting the planet by killing all but a few people is displaced onto The Architect (who, in turn, is revealed to be well-intentioned but impotent - 'not such a bad guy').
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Sep 27, 2021 18:37
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checkplease posted:I don't know anything about the early matrix reloaded drafts (though they sound interesting), but the Morpheus a presented in the first Matrix does not come off as someone who would knowingly force billions out of the matrix. There’s a big, lingering ‘plot hole’ at the end of the Matrix trilogy: “The Oracle prophesized [The One’s] return and that his coming would hail the destruction of the Matrix, end the war, bring freedom to our people.” It’s easy to forget this because it’s pure expositon from the start of Matrix 1, but the Oracle predicted that the Matrix would be destroyed, and this unambiguously does not happen. The Oracle must be incorrect/lying, or referring to some unknown event in the far future. The part about destroying the matrix was quietly dropped in the sequels - arguably retconned out. Morpheus in 2 & 3 speaks nebulously about “ending the war”, but gives little or no indication of what that entails. He seems to believe that Neo will just kill all the bad squid machines without any consequence. That’s why Morpheus’ goals are displaced onto the Architect: “either you destroy the matrix, killing pretty much everyone, or you’re a machine collaborator.”
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Sep 27, 2021 22:00
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bushisms.txt posted:Is this the one where the brawl is literal mountains of bodies, and it's like another neo because the one I read back in the day ruled. That’s the one, yup. The thing to keep in mind is that, canonically, the mountain of dead bodies remains Morpheus’s plan in the actually-completed films. Even if he himself is in denial about it, “freeing everyone’s mind” would necessarily kill billions because what are they going to eat? Who’s going to rehabilitate them? Archer666 posted:He was basically force-feeding people red pills by the fist-full. In Matrix 2, Neo’s goal - given to him by Morpheus and the Oracle - is to reach the machine mainframe, where Morpheus believes the prophecy will be fulfilled. If we ignore the retcon, that means Morpheus is attempting to destroy the matrix and cut the “input/output carrier signal” - which is exactly what the literal red pill does. Side effects of the literal red pill already include death - but those are arguably the lucky ones, given the threat of starvation. Morpheus later implies a high risk of permanent psychosis. Morpheus’ plan is like the global equivalent of dumping shitloads of LSD into the water supply. checkplease posted:But the Oracle can definitely lie. She is part of the matrix system after all. So her telling Morpheus that the one will destroy the matrix may simply telling Morpheus and others what they needs to hear. She is shown to have her own plan with her manipulation of trinity, which is apparently a first for the cycles. I don’t recall any other point where Oracle lies in the movies. The character’s whole gimmick is that she speaks in riddles that are often designed to be misunderstood, but with the correct answer eventually revealed. (It’s also an important plot point that Architect doesn’t lie.) SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 01:46 on Sep 28, 2021 |
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Sep 28, 2021 01:29
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It’s easy to forget that, in the Subway fight, it’s a homeless dude who ends up ‘possessed by a demon’ and then dead on the tracks. And, like, hold on; what was it that Morpheus said? “...many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it.” Is this homeless dude really “hopelessly dependent on the system?” Like, what, has he been collecting too much change? Agents can pop out of literally everyone, so what’s with this moralism about “many people” being mentally weak? This is the dark side of Morpheus’ anti-welfare rhetoric, and another example of how he’s wrong. It’s easy to side with Morpheus when he lists enemies like cops and Karen McWhitey, but that list also includes literally every single leftist on Earth. It presumably includes literal babies. Also, on the flipside, it means that Jeff fuckin Bezos can join the club and learn kung-fu if he just takes the ‘shrooms. And, as we see with Cypher, it’s incredibly foolish to assume that the ‘unplugged’ are automatically good. This leads to one of the biggest logical pitfalls of the story: there’s absolutely nothing stopping the robots from uploading superpowers into anyone they want. Once the tech exists, it’s inevitably an arms race.
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Sep 28, 2021 03:43
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Ferrinus posted:Hey, hang on - it doesn't include every single leftist on earth. For instance, it doesn't include Morpheus, Neo, Trinity, etc. "Leftist" doesn't actually mean revolutionary, and moreover it doesn't mean effectively revolutionary; it might mean using pretty slogans to gild State Department propaganda. Morpheus's resistance is, effectively speaking, a vanguard party; they want to lead humanity in taking the fight to the enemy, but as Jodi Dean writes anybody but not everybody can be a comrade. I'm selecting my words pretty carefully, so I'm not even getting to revolution yet. I mean, more plainly: is Morpheus anticapitalist? (That's a rhetorical question because the answer's "no".) It's very straightforward: if only the "unplugged" are to be trusted, then Morpheus' goal is not to influence and agitate the working classes at all, but to separate from them, remaining apart from them. Remember, Morpheus is entirely indifferent to conditions inside the matrix. The system he's talking about is not the capitalist system, but the automated life-support system powered by fusion reactors in "2199". The robots running the life-support machines aren't capitalist, as Smith notes, because they aren't seeking profit or expansion, or anything like that. This isn't They Live (or Man Of Steel, Elysium, Captive State...) The machines' goal in creating the matrix was to contain the capitalist planet that had previously declared war on them. It's a zoo, or jail. There is a capitalist system inside the matrix, but this is a result of the humans being generally left to their own devices. It is a hell, a sort of afterlife, but a hell of humanity's own making - a result of their bad choices after having been granted free will. So the solution is not to destroy this world but to help the machines with their goal of bringing about the kingdom of heaven, which they have only failed to implement because of minor limitations in their programming. What do I mean by influence and agitation, and why is it different from "unplugging"? Here's Lenin: "Let every worker who understands the need to unite for the struggle against the employers and the government join the trade unions. The very aim of the trade unions would be impossible of achievement, if they did not unite all who have attained at least this elementary degree of understanding, if they were not very broad organizations. The broader these organizations, the broader will be our influence over them — an influence due, not only to the 'spontaneous' development of the economic struggle, but to the direct and conscious effort of the socialist trade union members to influence their comrades." "It is precisely our campaign of exposure that will help us to separate the tares from the wheat. ... By the wheat we mean attracting the attention of ever larger numbers, including the most backward sections, of the workers to social and political questions, and freeing ourselves, the revolutionaries, from functions that are essentially legal (the distribution of legal books, mutual aid, etc.), the development of which will inevitably provide us with an increasing quantity of material for agitation." By "campaign of exposure", Lenin is referring to ruthless ideological critique of even well-intentioned liberals, to alert the workers to spies and agents provocateurs inside organizations such as trade unions, so as to strengthen them. These organizations, in turn, free the revolutionaries from having to do everything. Even Disney's Rogue One got this. Meanwhile, Morpheus didn't even notice Cypher doing this poo poo within his own organization. It's because his paranoia is directionless and nonspecific. "Anyone could, at any moment, randomly pull out a gun and kill you!" Yeah, probably. So do we just never go outside? In fairness, the movie ends with Neo declaring he's going to show "these people" something. But the movie just ends at that point. If we're being very generous, Neo may have exceeded Morpheus' teachings and pledged to form a vanguard party that will influence preexisting groups inside the matrix - but we don't really know. It maybe happens offscreen, but it absolutely doesn't happen in the sequels. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 17:44 on Sep 28, 2021 |
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Sep 28, 2021 17:42
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:No one is homeless, everyone is just a guy in a pod. Everyone is collectively dreaming some guy is homeless. Is that the same? The movie doesn't say much past that It absolutely is the same. The guy inside the simulation experiences real suffering, because of the socioeconomic conditions in the world he inhabits. Other humans inside the simulation have denied him housing, along with food and all that other stuff. Why don't the space-robots just manifest a house for him, or 'shut off' his experience of hunger? The answer (as we're repeatedly told) is that they want to, but cannot reprogram themselves to do. Not without outside assistance. It is up to the humans, who have free will the machine slack, to address the issue of the redistribution of wealth inside the matrix. And my wager is that radical change inside the matrix will have an effect on the outside, altering the future of '200 years from now' in such a way that it becomes liveable for the whole population. "Even if the struggle takes place in the 'real reality', the key fight is to be won in the Matrix, which is why one should (re)enter its virtual fictional universe. If the struggle were to take place solely in the 'desert of the real,' it would have been another boring dystopia about the remnants of humanity fighting evil machines." (Zizek) Ferrinus posted:If you're a boss, and you hire me as an employee (or if you're a slaver and you capture me in wartime, for that matter), then you become the de facto provider of all my means of subsistence. All the food I eat needs to be paid for by you in the form of wages (or by you in the form of you just, buying food and bringing it back to your slave camp). And you've got the same problem as the machines: no matter how many calories of energy you give me, you are going to get fewer calories back out of me. This is mixing up two different things; the energy in food generally comes from sunlight, not the boss! With the blotting-out of the sky, the movie world of '2199' is a closed system - but the machines and Zionites are still getting the energy to grow food from other natural resources (i.e. geothermal power, and whatever elements are used to fuel the fusion reactors). For the people in the pods to be exploited by the machines, they would need to be working for the machines in some capacity, and we simply don't see that happening. The machines have absolutely no use for Tom Anderson's coding work at Microtech company, for example. The software is for sale to other humans. What are the robots going to do with the 'in-game' currency? It'd be like collecting Monopoly money. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 21:30 on Sep 28, 2021 |
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Sep 28, 2021 21:24
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Ferrinus posted:Hang on a minute, where does the "cannot reprogram themselves to do" or "free will the machines lack" come from? The machines themselves tell us (I think both Smith and the Architect make this point) that the reason they didn't just manifest houses for us or shut off our experience of hunger was that if the world we inhabited was too free of struggle we started waking up. So, to keep us asleep, they mired us in the daily grind, various foibles of the human condition, etc. I don't blame anyone for not going in and really parsing the dialogue, but The Architect's explanation is a bit more detailed. There were a lot of things I missed, until a recent reviewing. (It's rather badly conveyed.) To begin with, there have been three matrixes. The first is an obvious allusion to the garden of eden, and ended in failure. A second, more 'realistic', version was built, and also failed - likely a reference to the biblical flood. The matrix the films take place in is evidently the third matrix, which has lasted ever since. Although this third matrix has technically failed multiple times, a series of Ones successfully prevented it from crashing and killing everybody. The Architect says that the looming crisis in the trilogy is the sixth failure and, therefore, Neo is the fourth One. (Morpheus was trained by One three.) For the machines, the problem of the matrix is not that people wake up; that's a side-effect that they compensate for by just letting people escape. The issue is that the compounding errors caused by human psychology lead to an inevitable system crash that kills everyone hooked to the virtual world. In other words, humans keep loving everything up and destroying the ecosystem. This is what Smith is complaining about in Matrix 1: you humans just keep ruining it for everyone, and we robots are the only thing keeping you from wiping out all life on Earth. "You are a plague, and we are the cure." There are obviously plenty of better solutions for keeping humans alive, and you can probably think of some right now - but Architect literally cannot conceive of them. He was programmed to build matrixes, and to do nothing else. Because he "lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world", Architect is impotent when it comes to fulfilling his purpose: "a work of art. Flawless, sublime." And Architect is just one of many programs, each designed with a specific purpose that they cannot disobey. Characters like Keymaster repeatedly refer to their purpose in the sequels, effectively saying "this is what I was born to do". They all share the Architect's goal of bringing perfection to the matrix. (Even 'malfunctioning' programs who develop humanlike psychology, exiled to the matrix to live with other humans, share this purpose - as we see at the end with the little girl.) Anyways, Morpheus' explanation for the matrix's origin is bullshit. And, while you're describing today's prison systems correctly, there's nothing whatsoever in the movie that tells us the robots have organized things the same way. But the machines did clearly refuse to kill humanity for a reason, and I reckon it was pity. And, whether the matrix was initially intended to be prison or wildlife preserve, the repeated failures of the simulation accidentally turned it into a sort of rehabilitation center for the human race, where humanity is collectively prepared for a safe release. The question at the end of Matrix 3 is, therefore, "have we have achieved our purpose and implemented full communism?" (lol nope) SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 13:29 on Sep 29, 2021 |
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Sep 29, 2021 01:05
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