Movies - The Matrix
Overview
The Matrix is an all-encompassing prison- a world that has been pulled over our eyes, blinding us from the truth. According to Morpheus, “you have to see it for yourself”.
Neo gets offered a choice: a blue one and a red one. If he chooses the blue pill, he remains in his everyday life and believes whatever he wants to believe. But if he chooses the red pill, he’ll set foot in the real world and find out what the Matrix truly is. Neo takes the red pill.
There seems to be a particularly close connection between The Matrix and Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.
The nature of Truth and Reality
The journey out of the Matrix
Before being shown the truth, Neo was imprisoned without being able to see the prison. When he wakes up from the simulated reality, his naked body lies in a pod filled with liquid. He notices that his body is full of plugs and then sees millions of other pods with humans connected to (what seems like) a giant machine. After a supervising drone notices that Neo has awakened, his body gets unplugged and discharged into a sewer.
As opposed to Plato’s reality, the reality in the Matrix isn’t beautiful. It’s terrible. Those plugged into the Matrix live in a vast, colorful, sunny world (although with a green haze) resembling the late nineties. They also have access to an endless variety of human pleasures. But in the real world, there’s only one human city left, Zion, where people live under subhuman conditions stuck in the outskirts, continually threatened of being obliterated by machines. So, one could argue that (in the case of The Matrix) living imprisoned in the cave is more pleasurable than living freely in the outside world.
Blindness to truth
Shortly after his liberation, Neo initially refuses to accept the truth. “No, I don’t believe it. It’s impossible,” he says after Morpheus showed him what the Matrix is. Neo asks Morpheus: “I can’t go back, can I?” To which Morpheus answers: “But if you could, would you really want to?”
Morpheus’ goal is to liberate the people from the Matrix. But he also realizes that as long as these people are part of the system, they’re the enemy: first of all, because so-called ‘agents’ protect the Matrix. These agents function a bit like a security program to keep Trojan horses and other malware out. And every human projection is potentially an agent. Second of all, most of them aren’t ready to be unplugged. Morpheus also states that many are so hopelessly dependent on the system that they’ll fight to protect it.
Rejecting a painful truth
Neo eventually accepts the truth and embraces reality. But what if someone knows the truth, but hates it so much, that he chooses a false reality? Here’s where a character named Cypher comes in. Cypher admits he regrets taking the red pill, saying to Neo, almost assuming he feels the same:
I know what you’re thinking, ‘cause right now I’m thinking the same thing. Actually, I’ve been thinking it ever since I got here: Why oh why didn’t I take the BLUE pill? - Cypher, The Matrix
But Neo’s body language clearly shows that he’s not on the same line as Cypher. Even though he’s stranded in the same dark world, he seems rather happy with his liberation. Neo finds meaning in it and sort of takes on the role of Plato’s enlightened man, as he takes responsibility to help the people still imprisoned. Moreover, he had always felt that something was off when he was still plugged in and unaware. He felt that he didn’t belong there. He wasn’t happy. Through his liberation, he found what he was looking for, which probably compensates sufficiently for having to face the bleakness of reality.
Cypher, on the other hand, doesn’t enjoy reality in the slightest. He also shows little faith in Morpheus’ prophecy of “The One.” Eventually, he plugs himself into the Matrix to attend a secret meeting with Agent Smith. Although his argument probably falls on deaf ears, he tells Smith:
You know, I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss. - Cypher, The Matrix
Cypher is well aware that he cannot unsee what he has seen, which results from encountering truth. For him, being ignorant was great until Morpheus came along and threw a wet blanket on the party.
Cypher realizes that he’s fundamentally stuck in a reality he despises. So, he asks agent Smith to plug him back into the Matrix, to make him someone rich and influential, “like an actor,” as he stated. But most importantly: he wants all of his memories of the real world wiped. In return, he gives him Morpheus.
Cypher essentially made a hedonistic decision exchanging reality and freedom for blissful ignorance. Interestingly enough, he reveals his idea of reality and freedom to Trinity, which makes his decisions reasonable in his eyes. During Cypher’s attempt to deport Morpheus, Trinity reminds him that Morpheus set him free. But Cypher disagrees and says that all he does is follow the orders of a man who lied to them. And if he has to choose between that and the Matrix, he chooses the Matrix. Trinity then argues that the Matrix isn’t real. But, again, Cypher disagrees, saying: “I think that the Matrix can be more real than this world.”
Suspension of disbelief
The people liberated from the Matrix have the technological ability to plug themselves into the system and be part of the simulated reality as their so-called Residual Self Image (RSI). They can upload programs directly into their minds that contain skills like martial arts and load various items into the Matrix, like guns. Lots of guns. So, they were exposed to an illusion first. Now, they have become illusionists themselves.
When Neo goes back into the Matrix for the first time after his liberation and visits the city he lived in, he sees it in a different light. He realizes that none of his memories ever really happened. He recognizes places where he used to eat, work, and live, but ‘lucidly,’ with the knowledge that they’re just simulacra.
However, interestingly enough, people still can find joy in what they know is fake. An example of this we see in the Matrix is the behavior of a character named the Oracle. The Oracle appears as an elderly woman but is a program that initially served as one of the founding forces of the third “current’ version of the Matrix. But when she finished her purpose, she went into exile and started supporting the resistance. Even though, as a computer program, she is very well aware of the world’s illusory nature, she seems to enjoy it. She clearly shows delight in the smell of cookies, smokes cigarettes, loves candy, and the sunset. We see the same happening with the Merovingian, a character from the sequel The Matrix Reloaded, who is passionate about the French language and loves beautiful women and serving them dessert with a happy ending. He also seems to enjoy the taste of olives, like a true Frenchman. Of course, as these characters are both “software,” these enjoyments could be part of their programming. Nevertheless, they show the human capacity to treat an illusion as if it’s real. There’s a philosophical term for this phenomenon, namely: “suspension of disbelief.”
When it comes to the Matrix, the possibilities regarding the enjoyment of fakery are endless. Unlike the illusionists in Plato’s cave, the Matrix produces an illusion that we can consider better than reality. We can see this with today’s technology as well. How people can immerse themselves in a video game is almost like they’re living a second life: an existence mostly more pleasant and rewarding. But the objects that appear on the screen aren’t real but mere projections. To enjoy them as if they were real, one needs to suspend that truth temporarily. Likewise, characters like Neo and Trinity could delight in the Matrix: perhaps, by enjoying a romantic dinner and an evening walk along the river Seine in Paris.
Do we actually want the truth?
Both Plato’s work and The Matrix show people’s disdain for a truth that threatens their reality. We tend to attach to the familiar, the comfortable, the meaningful, and are sometimes willing to defend it with our lives. When it comes to the latter, we just have to look at how people are ready to die for their religions and political ideologies.
However, the effect that truth has on us doesn’t necessarily depend on the truth itself; it also depends on the person receiving it. In the case of Neo and Morpheus, the state of the world provided them with meaning and legitimized the battle they were fighting as liberators of humanity, which is quite an incredible goal to have in life. On the other hand, Cypher pokes fun at that goal, which shows his cynicism and lack of meaning he found in his existence.
There is no spoon
In the moments proceeding Neo meeting with The Oracle in The Matrix, he finds himself in a waiting room amidst other people, mostly children, seeking to find out if they are ‘The One’. He encounters a young boy entirely monk-like in appearance. His head is shaven and he’s draped in a robe much akin to a saffron, the traditional garb of Buhhdist monks. The boy is holding a spoon and making it bend purely by his intent. Neo pauses, perplexed. The boy then says “Do not try and bend the spoon, that’s impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth… there is no spoon. Then you’ll see that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.” Neo then attempts to bend the spoon, with momentary success.
What does it mean when the boy says “There is no spoon”?
His quotation appears to be something of a Koan
So when the boy muses about the only way to bend the spoon is to realize it isn’t there at all, it is possible he’s trying to get Neo to silence the perpetual dialogue running through his mind by negating that part of his psyche with a question beyond logic.
Consequently, it’s pivotal to view his philosophy as a message to open up Neo’s consciousness to all that is possible. Anything is possible in the Matrix, yet Neo’s lifetime of conditioning within this system has kept his belief in his own ‘Oneness’ from truly taking root. Logic implies that all things are known and must follow certain parameters and patterns, yet nature is anything but logical. In this context, “there is no spoon” is meant as a means for Neo to let go of his logical presumptions of what constitutes reality. As the boy says, “…you’ll see that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.” The limitations of Neo’s reality are self-imposed by the lense through which he’s been taught to see the world. By letting go of what he’s so sure ‘he knows’, he finally opens up to what’s possible.
Earlier in The Matrix, Morpheus tells him “You have to let it all go Neo; fear, doubt, and disbelief.” The boy helps drive this lesson home. For it’s only when Neo moves beyond his own disbelief that he truly becomes the person he was prophesied to be, ‘The One.’ This is succinctly seen on his rescue mission with Trinity to save their mentor. As the two rescuers are on the precipice of being flung to the top floor by way of an elevator cable, Neo echoes the boy’s wisdom. In The Matrix, when Neo says “There is no spoon”, it signifies his evolution to a consciousness beyond logic, where anything is possible.