NEW YORK, NY.- Neo, the hero of The Matrix, is sure he lives in 1999. He has a green-hued cathode-ray-tube computer screen and a dot-matrix printer. His city has working phone booths.
But hes wrong: He lives in the future (2199, to be exact). Neos world is a simulation a fake-out version of the late 20th century, created by 21st-century artificial intelligences to enslave humanity.
When we first saw Neo, though, it really was 1999. The idea of AI feeding on human brains and bodies seemed like a thought experiment. But the movies warnings about AI and everything else have sharpened over time, which explains why its been harnessed by all kinds of people in the years since: philosophers, pastors, technoboosters and technodoomers, the alt-right. Judged solely on cultural relevance, The Matrix might be the most consequential release of 1999.
The genius of the movie what makes it incredibly rewatchable 25 years later is that writer-directors Lilly and Lana Wachowski didnt try to control the meaning. Instead, they seeded symbolism throughout.
Look with me at how one introductory scene manages to draw together many thematic threads, explaining why in todays world of pervasive internet, AI, fake news and extremism, The Matrix feels more relevant than ever.
Neo is instructed by some shadowy presence seemingly in his computer to follow the white rabbit. Thats a reference to Lewis Carrolls Alices Adventures in Wonderland, one of the movies structuring literary allusions.
A chapter titled Down the Rabbit Hole coined the phrase that is now used to describe becoming so obsessed with something that you start to lose your grip on reality. We all know what thats like, thanks to the internet. One particular rabbit hole The Matrix has pushed people into is a philosophical inquiry known as the simulation hypothesis, which asks whether were actually living in a simulation. If so, what does that mean for our lives? The 2021 documentary A Glitch in the Matrix even centers on a man who came to believe that The Matrix literally depicts reality, and it drove him to murder.
But even if youre not in a simulation, your reality might start to seem unreal. A deeply Generation X-coded theme in The Matrix has to do with recognizing and eschewing soulless corporations and brainless systems. Neos day job in a cubicle farm visually echoes that human farm on which, he eventually discovers, the AIs feed. (The Matrix came out a month after the release of Office Space, which satirizes corporate malaise.)
Now, 25 years later, the Gen X dictum against selling out has been transmuted into a world in which influencers constantly exhort you to be your own boss at a time when its harder than ever to make a living. Thats scary for those whose jobs can be replaced by AI, which is trained on the products of human creativity frequently without the creators consent. The human farms of The Matrix were chillingly prophetic.
Theres more Alice to consider here. Carroll created a fictional world in which every character and scenario mirrored something in his Victorian-era reality. In the end, Wonderland is absurdist. Yet the reality that Alice lives in, with its imperious leaders and convoluted systems, is just as absurd.
Thats where The Matrix is headed from this moment. Whatever we think we know about the world around us is actually blinding us to the truer, deeper reality; were in thrall to an opiate.
Neo is a hacker by night who sells contraband on minidiscs from his apartment, including to a group of cyberpunk partyers. Neo keeps his discs and his profits in a hollowed-out copy of Simulacra and Simulation, philosopher Jean Baudrillards 1981 treatise, a foundational text for The Matrix. Much has been made about the links between the movie and Baudrillards ideas about how simulations and hyperreality colonize the real in a postmodern age, to the point that nothing is real anymore.
Baudrillard actually didnt like The Matrix. He felt it misrepresented his ideas about simulation overtaking reality, flattening and misunderstanding the argument.
But lets go down the rabbit hole further: Simulacra and Simulation is open to the essay On Nihilism. In it, Baudrillard suggests it does no good to point out the truth from within a system that denies or suppresses reality. In those circumstances, your only tool to combat oppression is violence. You can only fight nihilism with nihilism. This is where the Wachowskis differ. Based on all four Matrix movies including the last one, a swoony romance their biggest inquiry is about nihilism vs. humanism. Its about how we live amid systems that seek to deny and suppress who we are, and their answer, ultimately, is love.
Both Wachowskis have since come out as transgender women. A significant subset of fans now sees The Matrix as a metaphor for the experience of transgender people, an interpretation bolstered in the movie by statements about Neos very existence inside a literal binary system. In 2016, Lilly Wachowski said that while the ideas of identity and transformation are critical components in our work, the bedrock that all ideas rest upon is love.
Neos buyer also jokes that Neo is his own personal Jesus Christ, a moment that sets up the many biblical allusions in the film the city of Zion (a biblical name for Jerusalem as well as the idea of the city of God), Cyphers Judas-like betrayal, a very important character named Trinity. At the time, this was catnip to youth group leaders looking for a way to make religion cool.
And The Matrix as religious allegory has stuck. The past 25 years have seen books published with titles like Escaping the Matrix: Setting Your Mind Free to Experience Real Life in Christ, The Gospel Reloaded and Christ - The Original Matrix. If youre looking for it, its definitely there.
But still more themes present themselves. The moment before were even introduced to Neo, we see his computer screen, on which news headlines are loading and scrolling, though nobodys touching the keyboard.
In 1999, the term fake news wasnt pervasive, nor was it saddled with the same kind of baggage. But the question of official truths and who controls them had come to pervade pop culture at the time; when The Matrix premiered, for instance, The X-Files was at the peak of its popularity. In 1999, the open internet still held the promise of promoting more truth, not less. As weve learned since, if truth can be distributed on the internet, so can conspiracy theories or outright falsehoods.
And when we get a glimpse of Neos desk, we see another phenomenological allusion with a long tail into today. The word cave comes to mind. (The philosophical notion of Platos cave hangs thickly over this movie.) Its littered with computers and tech gadgets: monitors, an ergonomic keyboard, that printer. Theres also an Apple Newton, a tablet-style device with handwriting recognition that was a predecessor of our always-connected iPads and iPhones.
Neo is constantly wired into the internet. Back in 1999, most of us still thought of the internet as a place you visited, not a gooey nebulous entity to which you were always connected. The Matrix gave us a hero who knew what it was to always be on, and the sense of unreality that could come with a life lived in a virtual space.
It will be a while still before we meet Morpheus and discover all the truths about the Matrix, the machines and Neos role in all of this. That moment arrives with an image thats become so famous its a meme: two pills reflected in Morpheus glasses, one red, one blue. The idea of being red-pilled that is, choosing to face reality, rather than succumb to the lure of the comfortable simulation has become a meme on social media platforms, often associated with right-wing causes that have a heavy online presence, like the alt-right, mens rights activists and conspiracy theorists.
In fact, though, its to reject one narrative and adopt another. The red-pilled person is just accepting a new matrix.
All of these metaphors swim around inside The Matrix, and the one you see depends, ironically enough, upon which system youre most interested in dismantling. Twenty-five years later, metaphors about capitalism and gender binaries and technological cages and artificial intelligence have only become more relevant, not less.
That The Matrix keeps giving us more ways to read it reminds us of what an accomplishment it was. But its also a glimpse into how great art never has one fixed meaning, and because of that, its always a little dangerous.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.