The Propaganda of War vs War's Harsh Reality:
Another Look At The Matrix Compared To Its Sequels.

(With special thanks to my roommate(s), who helped with
the idea-bouncing, editing/beta-reading process.)

09/16/2011: The above scene from an XKCD webcomic pretty much epitomizes how many feel upon viewing the Matrix Sequels Reloaded and Revolutions. As a fan of the saga, I endured many of what one online pundit called the "The Sequels Sucked" vs. "You Just Don't Get It" debates that raged once the trilogy drew to a close. The Matrix has been hailed as a sci-fi classic; the fact that its two sequels were so thoroughly denounced made me wonder what exactly went wrong.

At the time the sequels were released, America was only a few months into the war in Iraq. During the run-up to the ill-advised conflict, it seemed that much of the nation was set against the idea of going to war on the sketchy grounds that there may or may not have been weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Anti-war protest soon gave way to numb acceptance, followed by staunch flag-waving and pro-war propaganda. They attacked us on our own soil, we were told, even though it was already a well-known fact that Saddam Hussein's regime had nothing to do with Al Qaeda, the true perpetrators of the attack on 9/11. "We will be greeted as liberators," the Bush Administration said. "It'll only take a few months." (Or, as the British thought before entering the horror of World War One - "It'll all be over by Christmas.")

As a nation, we were soon blindsided by the harsh reality of war – a conflict that took a heavy toll, despite the fact that the Bush Administration tried to prevent the sight of flag-draped coffins from being shown on the evening news.

Another thing I remember about the run-up to the conflict was the ridiculous public castigation of the French for their opposition to the war. (You probably remember "Freedom Fries" and all that.) When I saw Matrix: Reloaded, it seemed to me that The Merovingian embodied every stereotype of the snooty Frenchman, the type that anti-French protesters at the time were probably seeing in their heads as they emptied out bottles of French wine into the streets in defiance of France's display of conscience. Perhaps, I surmised, moviegoers at the time simply didn't want to be lectured in causality and consequence by a Frenchman.

Too bad, because it wasn't until I read French philosopher Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation - required reading if you're a hardcore Matrix geek – that I realized that there may have been something to that, after all. Which leads me to my current theory, regarding the tone of the first Matrix film against that of its sequels.

WhenThe Matrix was released in 1999, it was quickly held up as a classic of its time. Other filmmakers scrambled to emulate its effects, until “bullet time” was so ubiquitous that it eventually became a punchline (example: Fiona from Shrek emulating Trinity's signature bullet-time jump kick.) People embraced its story, that of a heroic everyman who finds that he has the potential for godlike power within the digital world called the Matrix, a world in which the human race has been enslaved by sinister machines who use human bioelectricity as their primary power source.

I was an instant fan. I was already familiar with other “simulated reality” films (Dark City and The Truman Show for example.) However, walking into the theatre, I somehow knew that this was going to be the most important film I had ever seen up until that point. All the film's ads and trailers leading up to its release had taunted us with dazzling acrobatic spectacles that seemed to defy the laws of physics, with the enigmatic tagline, "What Is the Matrix?"

Once I knew, I was hooked. A budding Gnostic, I overlooked the violence and instead focused on the movie's theme of a humanity trapped within a simulated reality by sinister inhuman beings - along with the idea that, like Neo (and John Murdoch from Dark City) we could somehow "hack reality" if we could only figure out how. Also, it was freaking awesome with a cool soundtrack, and the closest thing to live action anime that had been achieved at that point in Western cinema.

The movie was a critical and a box-office success. The sequels were announced to be in production shortly after that. Four years passed, and the fandom waited in breathless anticipation for the next chapters in the saga. Reloaded came out, and left us with more questions than answers. Then Revolutions happened, and the Matrix sequels were suddenly the most reviled movie event since Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.

I went to the mat for my fandom along with the other Matrix diehards, and was left with the question – just what the hell happened? What had I and the other remaining fans seen in the sequels that the majority of moviegoers had apparently missed?

Most of the trilogy's detractors seemed upset because they just hadn't gotten the story they wanted, or the story they were expecting to get. The biggest issue most people seemed to have was the death of Neo and Trinity. What kind of heroic action film killed off its main characters? It wasn't until I began to consider the time in which the sequels were released - Reloaded, during the major media propaganda push for war in Iraq, and then Revolutions, about six months into the conflict - than I felt I had an answer.

The first Matrix film came out in a period of relative peacetime, during the longest stretch of prosperity that American filmgoers had enjoyed in recent memory. The sequels were released during the first months of the Iraq war, when many Americans were trying their damndest to disown the misgivings they'd had regarding Bush's reasons for going to war in the first place. Whether we were aware of it or not, we were going to relate the wartime situation going on in real life with the fictional war scenario we were seeing presented to us on the screen.

We went in expecting another tale of epic Hollywood popcorn heroism and dazzling special effects, and were instead presented with images of war as it actually is. We wanted a story about a just war being fought against a truly despicable enemy by plucky, invincible heroes - not a morally ambiguous fight against a foe that might actually have feelings like ours, in which civilians would be killed and people we cared about might actually die. This, I feel, is responsible for the backlash against the Matrix sequels, at least in America.

We wanted more reinforcement for the course upon which the USA was currently embarked. Instead, we got the truth.

I mean, The Matrix has all of the hallmarks of a war propaganda film; larger-than-life good guys who literally have God on their side (in this case, "The One," a Messiah Figure who can literally bend reality within the digital world of the Matrix itself.) The good guys are presented as being 100% in the right; the bad guys are all bad, and show no redeeming human qualities whatsoever. In fact, they're not human at all, they're machines, machines who (we are told) have enslaved the human race; therefore, the good guys are able to blow them away without having to feel any remorse whatsoever for their actions.

This is despite the fact that, within the Matrix, sentient programs who guard the system (“Agents”) jump in and out of human hosts, and when an “Agent” is killed, the human host dies also. This is justified in the scene where Neo is distracted by the Lady In Red, where Morpheus tells him that an Agent can literally be anyone in the Matrix who hasn't been unplugged yet – a “Bluepill,” and therefore any Bluepill is a potential threat.

Indeed, Neo and Trinity blow away an entire lobby of human security guards on the basis of this one fact. During the DVD commentary, the filmmakers sort of chuckle and handwave this event, talking about how events in the Matrix “aren't real,” but savvy viewers soon put 2 + 2 together. Neo and Trinity march into a lobby and blow innocent people away. When Trinity shoots Agent Jones (“Dodge this!”) he reverts back to his human host – a helicopter pilot – the moment the corpse hits the ground. During the climactic rescue of Morpheus, an aircraft – in this case, a helicopter – is crashed into a skyscraper. Neo and Trinity have just committed an act of domestic terrorism, and we have been cheering them on.

In the context of your typical Hollywood Action Film, all of this is perfectly acceptable. It's a war, people die in war, and their commander is being held and interrogated behind enemy lines. The information he holds could endanger the lives of everyone in the last free human City on Earth (Zion) if it were to fall into enemy hands. That doesn't change the fact that the people that Neo and Trinity are killing are, well, people. Yet all of this is shown in an epically heroic context. Our Heroes execute a stunning special-effects ballet as they riddle the entranceway with bullets to the tune of rousing techno music, and nobody seemed to be thinking "wait a minute – what if these are just every-day working stiffs with wives and kids and lives who probably just wanted to go home, eat leftover pizza, and watch the Big Game later on?" until after they'd left the theatre.

All of these are tactics used when a society pushes propaganda in preparation for a war, along with the general isolation of anyone perceived as "different" or "other." The enemy is demonized and dehumanized (“They don't hold the same values as we do/don't put the same value on human life that we do.”) The “good guys” are upheld as infallible heroes who are all that stand between us and the forces of fascism and tyranny. If civilians are killed in the course of an operation, the event is held as “collateral damage.” After all, “to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs.”

In the sequels and the animated companion anthology The Animatrix, everything we have been told about the Machines in the first film is all turned on its head. The sequences within The Animatrix titled The Second Renaissance, Parts 1 and 2 are relentless in their depiction of war's savagery, and in the depiction of an oppressive, paranoid human race who caused the war with the Machines in the first place. In the sequels, We learn that the sentient programs themselves have factions, feelings, families, and human qualities, embodied in Sati and her parents, Ramachandra and Kamala.

In Revolutions, Neo sees the Machine world illuminated by his otherworldly senses. He realizes that the machines, being sentient, have just as much of a right to exist as humanity does - and begins to fight not only for the humans back in Zion, but for the Machines whose system has begun to implode upon itself, thanks to Smith – who, as we remember from the first film, wanted only to be free from the same system in which the human race was entrapped. His bitterly expressed hatred of humanity, along with the realization that the humans he hated and the machines were ultimately interdependent, was what drove him virally mad. For him, cognitive dissonance could only go so far.

One of the most interesting bits of dialogue that takes place in the sequels is the bit of dialogue that occurs between Councilor Hamann and Neo in Reloaded. It wasn't until I actually sat down and read Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation, specifically the section entitled “Moebius-Spiraling Negativity” that it all came together in my mind.

Viewed in this context, the whole machine-human war could be seen as a ruse to disguise the fact that the human race and the Machines were interdependent, as, I realized, the Iraq war itself, as well as the entire War On Terror, could be seen as a simulation to hide the fact that the West and the Middle East are interdependent, caught up in a network of socio-political and military-industrial entanglements (mostly thanks to our dependence on fossil fuels here in the West.) What has set right-wing fundamentalist Christians and right-wing fundamentalist Muslims to fighting each other is not because their dogma is different, but because right-wing religious fundamentalism is pretty much the same everywhere, regardless of the names of the deity or deities being invoked.

We were being lectured on causality by a Frenchman the whole time, and we didn't even realize it.