Front Burner - Why The Matrix still resonates today

Episode Date: December 21, 2021

The Matrix was a blockbuster hit when it came out in 1999. Now, more than 20 years later, the film still feels relevant — whether it’s people talking about “taking the red pill” or theorizing that we’re all really living in a computer simulation — the movie starring Keanu Reeves as Neo and Laurence Fishburne as Morpheus permeated the culture. With the Matrix Resurrections opening in Canada on Wednesday, Jayme Poisson speaks with John Semley about why the film made such an impact then, and how its influence is still felt today. Plus, Charley Archer explains why the original movie, made by two trans women Lilly and Lana Wachowski, is an iconic piece of trans art.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. me poisson. If you were a sci-fi movie buff in the last year of the last millennium, and I get that you might not like to admit it now, but you were probably holding your breath, eagerly anticipating the release of Star Wars Episode I, The Phantom Menace. And so, to avoid competition with that behemoth, post-production on another sci-fi film was sped up by a pair of siblings called

the Wachowskis, whose only other directorial credit at the time was an erotic lesbian neo-noir called Bound. The Matrix premiered on March 31, 1999. It's an honor to meet you. No, the honor is mine. It shot to the top of the box office in its first week, passing 10 Things I Hate About You and Shakespeare in Love. Fell to number two and then unusually crept back up to the top spot. Such was the word of mouth buzz around this movie. The Matrix is a computer-generated dream world. No.

I don't believe it. It's not possible. I didn't say it would be easy, Neo. I just said it would be the truth. Stop. And I think it's fair to say that more than 20 years later, it's Keanu Reeves' Neo and Lawrence Fishburne's Morpheus whose cultural impact is still felt today. More so, at least, than Jar Jar Binks. This is very, very bad.

Whether it's people talking about being pilled or theorizing that we're all really living in a computer simulation. The Matrix permeated the culture. And so with the new one coming out this week, we've got friend of the pod John Semley here with us to talk about the original film, why it made such an impact then, and how its influence has lasted till now. Plus, in a bit... I think it shows the importance of trans voices in film because it's really important to me that such a big film can have such a theme that's so relevant to my experience, which I find oftentimes I can't relate to anyone. Charlie Archer on why this movie made by two trans women is an iconic piece of trans art.

Hey, John, thank you so much for being here. It's always a pleasure. Yeah, good to be here. Thanks for having me to talk about the Matrix. Oh, I'm so excited for this. Take me back. Do you remember when you first saw the Matrix? I do. Yeah, it was 1999. So I would have been a 13 year old boy, which I think would put me squarely in the film's target demographic. Whoa. You know, I was kind of that generation where, remember dial-up internet and the excitement of being online. So yeah, The Matrix really kind of scratched an itch for kids that age who were spending a lot of time in GeoCities pages and Yahoo groups.

I remember A, loving it, and then also being very confused by it. You have this guy who's living inside a computer and then he's not uh i almost immediately had to see it again describe to me the hype around the film at the time you know you said you had to you had to see it again almost immediately yeah actually i think i waited until it came out on it would have been vhs was dvd even around when i saw it but anyways, the hype around it was like, so they did this trailer campaign where you were seeing all these images that look totally new or unseen. So the movie had that quality going for it. And then they're always trying to push you to this website, www.whatisthematrix.com. It's the question that drives us now.

What is the matrix? It is the world. It was almost like this little kind of mystery game that they were playing with you, where they were not only pushing the movie itself, but this idea of the Matrix. Like the Matrix was something you were going to find out about. And I think that was very tantalizing to people.

I wonder if that website is still active. I'm sure they've reactivated it for the new film. www. I feel like we should check it out right now just to see if it still exists what is the matrix.com uh yeah here it is the matrix resurrections december so so so it takes you right to a trailer for for the new the new film this that's quite smart wow good for them yeah them. Yeah. Okay, you mentioned DVD. Just maybe worth noting, I was around the same age when it came out as well.

I remember DVDs were pretty new at the time. And I remember the Matrix DVD had all of these special features, which I watched over and over again. And that the DVD was even used in ads to put on VHS tapes to sell DVD players to people. DVD. See how good a movie at players to people. DVD. See how good a movie at home can be. Yeah. And right now, leap into the most astonishing DVD experience ever with The Matrix on DVD. The Matrix DVD. The DVD of the millennium.

Because The Matrix was almost like a benchmark test for DVD technology when it came out. You know, if you want to see what DVDs can do, you have to watch The Matrix on DVD. I want to get into all these sort of threads of the movie that touched a nerve with people then and still do now. But first,

for those who somehow haven't seen it or who haven't seen it in a while, because I will say I watched it last night, and there was a lot of stuff that I'd forgotten. Maybe you could give me a bit of a plot synopsis. Okay, so I had to write this down, because it's really easy to get off in these weird tangents. But at its most basic, The Matrix is about a guy named Thomas Anderson, who's played by Keanu Reeves. And by day, he's kind of this corporate cubicle drone, sort of like a hunky he meets a character named morpheus played by lawrence fishburne who tells him that the matrix is a large-scale computer simulation

that resembles our world this is the world that you know the world as it was at the end of the 20th century it exists now only as part of a neural interactive simulation that we call the Matrix. And this world has been created by computers who have, in the real world, enslaved humanity and are harvesting our bioenergy. The human body generates more bioelectricity than a 120-volt battery and over 25,000 BTUs of body heat. And the Matrix is kind of a virtual projection that we live inside to keep us from recognizing

what's really going on in the world. So it was kind of a twist on, you know, sort of tropes and what we call cyberpunk fiction. And the thing that Matrix did that was interesting is like, in cyberpunk, usually the virtual world is like liberatory or a place of escapism or fantasy in the matrix the twist is that you have to escape into the real world uh in order to sort of like realize your true abilities um sorry i'm just still a little bit hung up on your description of canaries as a as a hunky Dilbert by day. But yeah, that was great.

That was a mode at the time. Sort of like office space, fight club, corporate doldrums, you know, very engaged with that whole aesthetic, I think. What do you think really connected with audiences at the time of its release? Like, it was just at the cusp of the new millennium. Yeah, so there were a couple things going on, I think, to answer that. The one is that, you know, the 90s were kind of described as this end of history period, you know, the Cold War had ended, America at least had no sort of global enemies. This was pre 9-11, obviously. So there was kind of this mode in fiction where

people were getting very conspiratorial, people were looking inward. People are looking at like, okay, well, we're not, we don't have these sort of large scale antagonisms. So why are we still so unhappy? Another great pop culture phenomenon from this era was the X-Files, right? Where the enemy is all inside the nation. So the Matrix played with that. It also played with, and this is something that I'd barely forgotten existed, but like the Y2K anxiety, you know, where there's this whole thing that's like, as soon as the clock turns to being the year 2000, your blender and your computer is going to stop working or go insane.

And that anxiety itself was kind of about how connected we were to our electronic devices. And the Matrix really tapped into that. You know, it imagines this world where our whole concept of reality is being fabricated by computers. And I mean, you take that stuff, you add in the kind of trench coat chic fashions and the post-industrial kind of alt-rock soundtrack. And it was a real time capsule of 1999. And it felt pretty original. And I think it still does feel pretty original when you watch it. You believe it's the year 1999, when in fact it's closer to 2199.

I can't tell you exactly what year it is because we honestly don't know. This idea that it was set in 1999, it's funny that they thought that that was like the time that humans would want to be in, right? This is the height of civilization, 1999. Well, that's an interesting point because they bring that up in the sequels where it's like they tried to create a matrix that was a total utopia, but people wouldn't accept it. So they had to create a version of it that was boring enough and had people just engaged enough but mentally dulled that they would not question the nature of reality. So the Matrix as an enemy has, I think, a real insight into human beings, which is kind of scary. Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program, entire crops were lost.

So the perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. trying to wake up from. Which is why The Matrix was redesigned to this, the peak of your civilization. How do you think this film influenced and in some ways anticipated the way that we view technology? Yeah, so I think that The Matrix has kind of become like the cultural metaphor

of the past two decades, you know? If you see something like the commercial for the Mark Zuckerberg Facebook Metaverse app, it's like, oh, these people are literally building the Matrix, you know? 3D street art? That's cool. Send that link over so we can all look at it. If you guys like it here, I have another one that you're going to love. Check out this forest room. Huh, let look at it. If you guys like it here, I have another room that you're going to love. Check out this forest room. Huh, let's see it. Koi fish that fly?

That's new. This is wild. And even beyond that, I think the Matrix has kind of given us a sort of cultural lexicon. You know, people talk about this idea of red pilling, which comes from the Matrix, or even the idea of the Matrix itself,

you know, the idea of a wholesale virtual world. You can't mention simulation theory without mentioning The Matrix movies. People were going crazy over it. The Matrix was real. You know, it's something that people kind of mention in casual conversation. And it's like, I look back at other kind of cultural touchstones, and I don't see the same level of influence. I mean, The Sopranos, maybe, but you know, I don't hear people quoting Avatar or even Game of Thrones anymore. Like the Matrix has this real kind of long tail. It's sort of like the Star Wars of its generation, where it's a cultural touchstone that everyone basically understands and knows about. I want to come back to this idea of red pilling in one second. But sticking with these

Silicon Valley types, you mentioned Mark Zuckerberg, making metaverse, I understand, you think that some of these, you know, technologists, some of these guys from Silicon Valley took the wrong message about the film and technology, right? Can you tell me about that? Yeah, I mean, I don't think they're necessarily literally saying we're going to build the matrix, but there's certain connections to it, right? I mean, the metaverse is similar to the matrix. It's a virtual space that you escape into that's meant to be superior to the conditions of your daily life. And it also exists so that algorithms can harvest information about us for the benefit of these corporations, not unlike the way the

Matrix harvests our literal bioenergy. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth. Born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch. A prison for your mind. There's also even, but before you get to the metaverse, like things like social media or this kind of, you know, training wheels version of the matrix, you know, where we can establish these sort of projected identities and social relationships that increasingly have less recourse to the physical world. You know, now we see stuff like cryptocurrencies and NFTs, the real kind of fleshy material world is kind of becoming increasingly less relevant to how we interact. As you can see, we've had our eye on you for some time now, Mr. Anderson. It seems that you've been

living two lives. In one life, you're Thomas A. Anderson, program writer for a respectable software company. You have a social security number, you pay your taxes, and you help your landlady carry out her garbage. The other life is lived in computers, where you go by the hacker alias Neo and are guilty of virtually every computer crime we have a law for. One of these lives has a future, and one of them does not. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection.

Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people, and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income.

That's not a typo. 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill.

The story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill. You stay in Wonderland. And I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember, all I'm offering is the truth, nothing more. Let's talk about the red pill for a second. I wonder if you could just briefly explain how that has endured, right? And where we're seeing it be used today. So again, in the film, the red pill and the blue pill are

these kind of choices that Neo was offered, where it's like, if you take the red pill, you'll understand the truth. If you take the blue pill, you can live happily in ignorance. Now, this has become an all-purpose metaphor. Taking the red pill is the idea that you know the truth, that you've kind of been awakened to a higher consciousness. Now, the nature of that truth or that shift or that consciousness is kind of contested. Red pilling became a popular term in sort of anti-feminist circles where people were using the term red pilling to refer to gaining the awareness that women control the world and that men are a kind of subjugated underclass. You also see it with sort of far right political conspiracies like QAnon.

You know, if you've been red pilled, it means you know the truth about the kind of QAnon cabal and all this. So, again, it's kind of become an all purpose thing that that people can use in various contexts. And they're not all that negative, I should say. Yeah. People use the term pilled pretty casually these days. Yeah. Totally. To suggest that you're kind of getting into something. I like the Grateful Dead, right? So you hear about people getting dead pilled, which means you're getting turned on to Grateful Dead music. There was even a joke during the height of the pandemic when I was in my apartment, I was listening to so much CBC that I was joking that I was getting C-pilled. So, you know, getting hyphen-pilled can kind of just mean that, like, you know, you're waking up

to a new awareness or appreciation of something. It doesn't always mean that you've kind of gone insane. And then one more thing I wanted to touch on, which feels like, you know, another way this movie rings true today is that, you know, obviously the movie is about living our lives online, being plugged in all the time, like literally plugged in in the movie. But, you know, of course, that was total fiction at the time, but it feels less like fiction now. I saw a tweet, someone saying, few things in movies have aged better than Agent Smith's just absolutely animalistic fury at being online 24-7. I hate this place, this zoo, this prison, this reality, whatever you want to call it. I can't stand it any longer. Yeah. I mean, Agent Smith, we should say he's the sort of one of the main villains of The Matrix. And he's a computer program who sort of tries to stop people from leaving The Matrix. And he despises it, he becomes angrier

and kind of gritting his teeth constantly. Because he realizes that he is stuck within this simulation and can't get out of it. And it basically drives him insane. So I guess viewed a certain way in our current context, Agent Smith is kind of a sympathetic figure. I feel for him, you know, as someone who feels too glued to their phone on many occasions. Obviously, we're talking because the new Matrix movie is coming out this week. And it's the first time that we've seen these characters since the last of the original trilogy came out in 2003, which feels like so long ago. Wow. And one of the two Wachowski sisters, Lana is back at the helm.

And I understand you've had a chance to see them in new movies. So no spoilers, please, because I'm really looking forward to seeing it. But I wonder if you think this new one can have a similar cultural impact to the first or at least sort of build on that impact. I sort of am sad to report that I don't think so. You know, I went into the movie expecting them to have at least some of the sort of thrilling action entertainments of the originals, which it does. But the problem is the original premise of The Matrix is so perfect and well executed that any attempt to improve or expand upon it is a classic case of gilding the lily, as they say. I compared it to a friend to when you get a cheeseburger,

then people start adding avocado and blue cheese and gold leaf on it. It's like nobody wants any. You don't like gold leaf on your cheeseburger? Tasteless, odorless gold, my favorite ingredient. No, but it's like you have something that works perfectly because it's so you have something that works perfectly because it's so compact. And the more you kind of expand it, you almost dilute the efficacy of the original. And I think that's what is happening in the new film

and kind of in the sequels in general. They try to deepen it. They try to expand it. But it kind of has the effect of diminishing the original. So, you know, I think the new one is probably worth seeing if you like this stuff. There's a few interesting ideas that it introduces. But they're all ideas that are implicit in the originals premise. Yeah, okay, fair, fair enough. Fair enough. And I guess I'll say that to people, if you're looking for something to do over the

holidays, having just watched the original, like it holds up as a really great movie, too. I had it's a good one. if you got some time to go in the next couple of weeks uh john thank you so much for this as always thank you my pleasure i'll see you guys in the matrix well won't be in real life omicron um uh okay cool that was awesome john thank you so much. Awesome. My pleasure. Now, I don't think that any conversation about The Matrix and its legacy would be complete without talking about the film as a piece of trans art. The Wachowski sisters both came out after the release of the original trilogy, and Lily Wachowski has actually said herself that the film is a trans narrative.

I'm glad that it has gotten out that, you know, that was the original intention, but the world wasn't quite ready. At a corporate level, the corporate world wasn't ready for it. You know, the Matrix stuff was all like about the desire for transformation, but it was all coming from a closeted point of view. And so we had the character of Switch, who was like a character who would be, you know, a man in

the real world or and then a woman in the Matrix. And, you know, that's both where our head spaces were. It's an interpretation of the film that struck a chord with Charlie Archer. Charlie is a 20-year-old student at Oxford University, which means it makes me feel very old to say she wasn't even born when the original movie came out. But she's found a lot of meaning in it since. So we're going to hand it over to her now. I saw it when I was 15 at like a special cinema screening.

But like it really made an impression on me then because that was quite like a formative time of my life. So it's like so much in pop culture that like I literally, I was like, oh my God, that's that thing. That's when that happened. And like the experience of a trans person is quite hard to find unless you experience it yourself. And so so for me I was trying to figure out what I was experiencing was actually trans or not and so at the time that was quite important for me because I felt

because it gave me something to like kind of like use as a understandable example what you know you can't explain but you feel it You felt it your entire life. I have never found a better metaphor and explanation for the unique experience of unknown gender dysphoria as being like your whole world is a simulation that you feel trapped in, and yet you have no idea why. That there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is. As Morpheus says, like a splinter in your mind.

But it's there, like a splinter in your mind but it's there like a splinter in your mind it's this idea of this sort of person living a fake life a life that's not sort of true to him although it is a life that you can have it's him breaking free from that life like choosing his like sort of true self which could apply to anything, but there's specific uses of terminology and things like that. So the main villain, I guess, Agent Smith, keeps calling him Mr. Anderson throughout the film. You hear that, Mr. Anderson? That is the sound of inevitability.

Even though he prefers to be called Neo. And in one of his defining moments he's like, my name is Neo. Goodbye, Mr. Anderson. My name is Neo. Like a lot of things in the film sort of represent the different ideas. I've certainly felt sometimes where I'm like, is this really worth it, transitioning because it's really hard and like maybe it'd just be nicer if i could just like try and forget about it which is like what cypher does in the film when he like betrays them all

then we have a deal i don't remember nothing nothing you understand like some people like, oh, you're reaching with this allegory, but, like, I think if the Wachowskis themselves had said it, then it's kind of, like, I think it's okay to sort of pick out all the different bits, because it kind of does, I think it's quite important if you can see yourself in a film, in quite a populist film, I think.

Welcome to the real world. Am I dead? Far from it. The thing about the red pill, blue pill is the binary choice. Because it is a binary choice, I think, in terms of, once you decide this, once you realise it,

you can't go back anymore. I can't go back, can I? No. But if you could, would you really want to? But then, like, as the film goes on, he accepts it more. He accepts being in the real world more and also being in control of the Matrix more. And it's sort of allegorical to um accepting

like yourself and who you really are and then by the end sort of neo becomes the one or something and then actualizes himself through declaring his own identity which is like basically the most sort of trans thing of all he is the one. It is extremely dated in quite funny ways, but I kind of just go with it because everyone's wearing leather

and there's a heavy metal soundtrack. Why not? But I think there's something so timeless about it because it just gets everything. Like, I think it's never been more relevant. I mean, I'm going to be

a bit pretentious here, but like some of the ideas in the film go back to Plato and like you don't need to talk about Plato to understand ideas sort of everyone always thinks about which is like reality and truth and like identity and stuff and then the rest of it the stuff to do with technology

and AI and then also the trans thing just keeps it constantly in the public consciousness as what everyone is thinking now it is anyway it never gets less relevant all right the matrix resurrections opens in theaters here in canada tomorrow that is all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson.

Thanks so much for listening to Friend Burner. Wake up! Wake up!