Friday, December 29, 2006

Nature of reality in "The Matrix"



Sometimes, when I write my posts, the thoughts seem to be flying so fast that I am quite obviously not able to put it all down... At times what I want to express seems so elusive that I have to think it over several times before actually writing it in the blog.



Getting to the point, my friend has somehow urged me to some pondering upon the nature of reality as such and that is why I decided to organize my thoughts in this topic. Writing helps me a lot because I makes my thinking more precise and refutes all irrelevant or self-refutable ideas. Writing, as I see it, is essential to rational thinking and you can believe me or not, after reading a hundred pages on philosophy, ranging from Parmenides (or Heraclitus for that matter) to the beginning to modern philosophy (as understood with the coming of the name of the famous french philosopher - Descartes) or even to such radical critics or thinkers like Baudrillard, McLuhan or Donna Haraway, your head literally starts burning and your thoughts might as well be compared to butterflies.

There are some things in popular culture that can be referred to as anchors for starting some interesting philosophical musings, and I really came to consider Wachowskis' "The Matrix" a decent movie to do it. Why? Well, it is quite simple - you rarely find a Hollywood movie being a very successful blockbuster, an action movie, an intelligent reflection on humanity's bleak condition and notice that after several years it is broadly discussed in almost all circles, starting from movie fans and ending with computer graphics zealots and amateur philosophers. All right, let's do it!

Initially I must admit that I do not find the movie quite original nor the best movie I have ever seen, but you must know it if you consider yourself a part of the moder popular culture, you definitely must see it at least two times. If you don't like science fiction - make just one exception.

The idea presented in "The Matrix" has been previously exploited by several masters of science-fiction, but for some reason the makers did not really give any of them acknowledgments in the ending titles whatsoever. For that matter I could easily mention Stanislaw Lem's "Kongres Futurologiczny", William Gibson's "Neuromancer" (which served as a basis for the most of the ideas in "The Matrix", starting from the ship the chosen ones used to move in the real world) and some ideas of Janusz Zajdel. I could as well mention several more movies ("Truman Show," "Strange Days," "Thirteenth Floor") but this does not seem to make any point here. Anyway, aren't we living in the world of simulacra? Things are just copies of things and we are never meant to see if there is an original.

It is quite sure that Wachowskis have quite consciously wanted to raise awareness in Baudrillard's "Simulacra and Simulation" as the book appears for merely several seconds in the movie. It is a book-looking box where Neo (the lovely Keanu) is keeping his pirate copies of programs that he wants to give to the people that come to his (the girl with rabbit tattoo among them, but this is not relevant for now.) But hey! Can you see the wonderful irony here? Neo in fact does not have an original copy of the Baudrillard's book, he just uses it to hide cd's. The "book" itself is a kind of first-order simulacrum, intended to look like something completely different. Well, if we want to get a little bit deeper, we can see the strange coincidence that Neo is having just the COPIES of programs in the box. I am sure it was a kind of nice gimmick for the careful viewer. However, not having the copy of "Simulacra and Simulation" myself, I would never manage to notice it really appeared in the movie and could really mean something.

Baudrillard (he is crazy at times, but hey, I come to love him!) distinguishes three levels (actually he calls them "orders") of simulacra:

The first order simulacra is intended to leave the reader, viewer, observer or listener a little space for interpretation, since the rendering is not quite accurate. We can understand the first order simulacra in various ways, these can be just the blueprints of a builiding that seem quite accurate, bu however accurate they get, they never are three-dimensional for the simple reason that they are just drawn on a paper. These can be just human-like dummies that are used by a director in a play, and it can be simply a Matchbox car.

The second order simulation resembles reality so much that it could easily be mistaken for the real. There is quite crazy example in Jorge Luis Borges' fable "On Exactitude in Science" which tells a story of a cartographer who decided to create a map of an Empire exactly as big as the empire itself. Quite crazy idea, isn't it?

The boundaries between particular ilks of the simulacra are quite blurry and arguable, but we can for sure tell that Baudrillards THIRD order of simulation is that which we can see witnessing the matrix in the movie. The simulation is real because the people within it have no connection to the real objects even if they tried to. Neo is the chosen one and he decides to take the red pill from Morpheus to see what the real world is like. And the real world is the bleakest rendition of his most horrible dreams. Technically, Neo is born again, which is rendered by his coming out of the artificial womb into some sewer in the real world. He enters the world he has never had opportunity to see, and it is the world of the ideal objects. He is not able to see well because he is instantly blinded by the real light. He asks Morpheus why did his eyes hurt. The answer is simple: "You have never used them."

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