My Favourite Stories - Part 12: The Matrix
Just when you thought I couldn’t possibly include another sci-fi story with deeply religious and philosophical themes…BAM!!! Here comes the most notorious one of them all.
The Matrix is one of those stories which I keep coming back to at various points in my life. I remember seeing it first when I was twelve, and being completely enraptured by the badass cyberpunk fight scenes. Something about the combination of epic kung-fu choreo and slow-motion bullet dodging scratched an itch on my prepubescent brain. I immediately incorporated the aesthetics of the film into my highly impressionable identity. Neo would become my go-to halloween costume for the next several years.
I watched it again when I was about sixteen, and this time I actually paid attention to what was going on beyond the punching, kicking, and shooting (though I still enjoyed all that just as much). It was at this age that I realized that The Matrix is actually a really well-written story, full of rich, compelling characters and a well-paced plot that kept me on the edge of my seat all the way to the very end.
When I was around nineteen I revisited it with my younger siblings to share my passion for the film. Upon this rewatching, I started to catch some of the religious references, such as characters being named ‘Trinity’ and ‘Morpheus’. Seems a bit obvious in hindsight, but this was the age that I realized the story wasn’t just an awesome sci-fi shoot ‘em up. There was clearly something important going on beneath the surface, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.
My most recent rewatch came when I was twenty-two. I was attending Toronto Metropolitan University, and was coming to the end of my Philosophy of Film course (shoutout to Abhishek Mishra for making that class infinitely more fun and engaging for me). The last movie we studied was The Matrix, and this time I was able to analyze the story with a rigorous postsecondary educational lens.
On this final watch, I realized that this is fundamentally a spiritual enlightenment story, following a similar theme to Plato’s Parable of The Cave. That metanarrative tells us that once our eyes have been exposed to reality, we cannot return to ignorance even if we wanted to.
The Matrix takes this idea, modernizes it, and adds yet another layer of wisdom. It warns us that sometimes the reality we wake up inside of is horrifically worse than the dream we were trapped inside. It shows us that serious mental fortitude and willpower is necessary to accept the enlightened reality, and that trying to escape back into the dream is futile. Cypher is the perfect personification of this; a villain who would rather live inside a comfortable fake life than deal with the struggles of the life which actually exists.
It removes some of the romanticism of Plato’s enlightenment, showing us that abandoning the perfect, beautiful dream world and facing the atrocious, cruel real world is an act of profound heroism.
Even though my twelve-year old self was unaware of all this, I’m glad he aspired to be more like Neo. Little did he know he was striving for something great.
