I went all-in on the fediverse when I realized you could be shadowbanned on establishment platforms at any time.
People who read my posts might disagree with them (or might not read them because they're too long), but a post talking about how the reason the matrix sequels sucked was because the wachowskis are postmodernists isn't exactly calling for desu desu to the juice.
People who read my posts might disagree with them (or might not read them because they're too long), but a post talking about how the reason the matrix sequels sucked was because the wachowskis are postmodernists isn't exactly calling for desu desu to the juice.
In my previous essay, I made the point that the first Matrix movie was the only one that was competently executed, and that is because the first movie is an anthem to postmodernism and that was the water in which the Wachowski fish swim, and they are made up of the same matter as the river thereby. The hero's journey is to understand that the world in front of him is a lie and it's only by rejecting the narrative his senses give him and embracing a literal deconstruction of reality in terms of the symbols of the matrix he sees near the end of the movie does he find the power to tear down the systems, and the final monologue is a proud statement that Neo will tear down the existing systems and reveal the falseness of the narratives.
The second and third movies were a mess in part because while they engage with philosophies, the movies don't really integrate those ideas in the same way the first movie integrated postmodernism. In my essay I proposed a second and third movies that would focus on Neo utilizing his inherent virtues as a hero to overcoming the challenges ahead of him. This would be what sequels rejecting postmodernism would look like in my view.
The second movie introduced a new power -- Neo's ability to interact with machines outside of the Matrix. This new power is a synecdoche, where a part represents the whole, of the problems with the movies. why does Neo have this power? Because the movie wanted him to have the power. Practically, there is no explanation for this power given the logistical hurdles of wirelessly manipulating machines. Philosophically, there is no connection between this power and the themes presented of the Matrix being the false simulacrum of the peak of human civilization and Zion being the Desert of the Real. Morally, there was no reason the he deserved this new power, he didn't engage in virtuous conduct to achieve it. It was a deliberate decision which was made ostensibly for the spectacle of it. The story and the narrative find themselves at a crossroads because the actions within the story and the narrative within the story are at odds, and that is a theme throughout the second and third movies, a disconnect between the themes and the events of the movies.
Instead, we got obtuse philosophical dissertations and action scenes that lacked any meaning. After the Architect scene, Neo "chooses love over logic" which has emotional weight, but lacks philosophical grounding and doesn't actually have any moral weight because it isn't clear that choosing to save his lover is the right thing to do, and his passivity limits the moral conviction he shows.
The sequels pivot from postmodernism to systems theory, free will versus determinism, and the cyclical nature of oppression and rebellion, but ultimately there is a difference between narrative and story, and I think that's best illustrated by the difference between the high-minded philosophical concepts spoken of in for example the Architects dissertation, and the actual themes the actions within the movie demonstrate. The themes are discussed but never actually integrated into the plot.
Another theme they somewhat ham-handedly tried to include was the idea of Neo as a messianic figure. They used the imagery at the end of the movie to imply that Neo was an embodiment of Justice and Christ-like, but the narrative is not the story and the trilogy doesn't really support this viewing.
The disconnect between narrative, the story, and the actions of the story makes the addition of philosophical ideas weak, and arguably serves to distract from the core themes of the story as such. If the addition of philosophical ideas was firmly rooted in the core construction of the trilogy then it could have been one of the smartest and best trilogies of all time, but most people found the sequels pretentious, bombastic, and boring because it's ultimately just a bunch of things that happen with little holding the events together once you start ignoring the dissertations on philosophy peppered throughout.
Contrast with the first movie which is explictly about postmodernism, and has a "real world" that's gritty and ugly and boring and a "Matrix" which is sexy, stylized, and exciting, and the core journey for the hero was to learn to deconstruct the world around him and to reject the narrative of the machines, with one of the main enemies in the story being someone who has been released from Platos cave but wants to return and never know the sun.
To your point about Debord's works criticizing spectacle, the Wachowskis neglected to give Neo an integrated arc by exploring the boundaries of his powers in ways that reflect his virtues or philosophical growth. We have many great examples of this in media, where the hero's journey is quiet and reflective instead of loud and reactive. Instead, they leaned on spectacle, which felt like a regression rather than an evolution.
The original Matrix movie is so powerful that today its imagery is used as shorthand for major political movements (The Red Pill). The second and third movies by contrast were ephemeral, and nobody talks about them much today except to mention that they weren't very good. Nobody uses Colonel Sanders, extended rave sequences, stopping robots with your mind or Neo-Jesus as metaphors for anything. that's in spite of the fact that we're in a world that wants meaning and is seeking it desperately. This helps illustrate the difference between them.
One argument could be made that the disjointedness of the sequels was intentional or that the big dumb action scenes were intended to be hollow and meaningless as an intentional philosophical statement. I tend to think neither of these are true based on how self-satisfied the writing seems to be, and how the cinematography really seems to want to convince you that the big dumb action scenes are actually interesting and cool (for example, the slow motion focus on a cool flip from Trinity in Matrix Reloaded). It would suggest that there's further disconnects within the movie where the visual language it's using aren't consistent with the message allegedly being portrayed. Contrast with a highly philosophical piece such as Spec Ops: The Line, which starts off playing things straight but slowly changes the character of how it is portrayed to enhance the discomfort the player would be feeling from the actions the player character has taken in the player's name.
As Morpheus said in the first movie, "Quit trying to hit me and hit me!" -- If the movies were doing their job as implementations of a compelling philosophical framework, they would be engaging through the embodiment of those values. Instead, the movies are boring to watch even during the most incredibly choreographed fight scenes (and one could argue that it was intentional, but I'd counter that the cinematography didn't imply it was intentional, it seemed to imply "you should think this is really cool and epic"). This likely wasn't what they were aiming for, but instead was a symptom of a Hollywood that by this time was starting to be disconnected from the material world and like a car stuck in the snow continued to push the gas harder hoping to move forward but instead just digging a deeper rut in the ice.
So given this perspective, what do you think makes the sequels a cohesive and integrated whole that is greater than the sum of its parts? How does one great movie and two poor movies equal three great movies as a whole? How do you counter the criticism that instead of leaning back from spectacle they instead leaned into it with action sequences that were ultimately boring and hollow in ways that harm the piece instead of helping them?
The second and third movies were a mess in part because while they engage with philosophies, the movies don't really integrate those ideas in the same way the first movie integrated postmodernism. In my essay I proposed a second and third movies that would focus on Neo utilizing his inherent virtues as a hero to overcoming the challenges ahead of him. This would be what sequels rejecting postmodernism would look like in my view.
The second movie introduced a new power -- Neo's ability to interact with machines outside of the Matrix. This new power is a synecdoche, where a part represents the whole, of the problems with the movies. why does Neo have this power? Because the movie wanted him to have the power. Practically, there is no explanation for this power given the logistical hurdles of wirelessly manipulating machines. Philosophically, there is no connection between this power and the themes presented of the Matrix being the false simulacrum of the peak of human civilization and Zion being the Desert of the Real. Morally, there was no reason the he deserved this new power, he didn't engage in virtuous conduct to achieve it. It was a deliberate decision which was made ostensibly for the spectacle of it. The story and the narrative find themselves at a crossroads because the actions within the story and the narrative within the story are at odds, and that is a theme throughout the second and third movies, a disconnect between the themes and the events of the movies.
Instead, we got obtuse philosophical dissertations and action scenes that lacked any meaning. After the Architect scene, Neo "chooses love over logic" which has emotional weight, but lacks philosophical grounding and doesn't actually have any moral weight because it isn't clear that choosing to save his lover is the right thing to do, and his passivity limits the moral conviction he shows.
The sequels pivot from postmodernism to systems theory, free will versus determinism, and the cyclical nature of oppression and rebellion, but ultimately there is a difference between narrative and story, and I think that's best illustrated by the difference between the high-minded philosophical concepts spoken of in for example the Architects dissertation, and the actual themes the actions within the movie demonstrate. The themes are discussed but never actually integrated into the plot.
Another theme they somewhat ham-handedly tried to include was the idea of Neo as a messianic figure. They used the imagery at the end of the movie to imply that Neo was an embodiment of Justice and Christ-like, but the narrative is not the story and the trilogy doesn't really support this viewing.
The disconnect between narrative, the story, and the actions of the story makes the addition of philosophical ideas weak, and arguably serves to distract from the core themes of the story as such. If the addition of philosophical ideas was firmly rooted in the core construction of the trilogy then it could have been one of the smartest and best trilogies of all time, but most people found the sequels pretentious, bombastic, and boring because it's ultimately just a bunch of things that happen with little holding the events together once you start ignoring the dissertations on philosophy peppered throughout.
Contrast with the first movie which is explictly about postmodernism, and has a "real world" that's gritty and ugly and boring and a "Matrix" which is sexy, stylized, and exciting, and the core journey for the hero was to learn to deconstruct the world around him and to reject the narrative of the machines, with one of the main enemies in the story being someone who has been released from Platos cave but wants to return and never know the sun.
To your point about Debord's works criticizing spectacle, the Wachowskis neglected to give Neo an integrated arc by exploring the boundaries of his powers in ways that reflect his virtues or philosophical growth. We have many great examples of this in media, where the hero's journey is quiet and reflective instead of loud and reactive. Instead, they leaned on spectacle, which felt like a regression rather than an evolution.
The original Matrix movie is so powerful that today its imagery is used as shorthand for major political movements (The Red Pill). The second and third movies by contrast were ephemeral, and nobody talks about them much today except to mention that they weren't very good. Nobody uses Colonel Sanders, extended rave sequences, stopping robots with your mind or Neo-Jesus as metaphors for anything. that's in spite of the fact that we're in a world that wants meaning and is seeking it desperately. This helps illustrate the difference between them.
One argument could be made that the disjointedness of the sequels was intentional or that the big dumb action scenes were intended to be hollow and meaningless as an intentional philosophical statement. I tend to think neither of these are true based on how self-satisfied the writing seems to be, and how the cinematography really seems to want to convince you that the big dumb action scenes are actually interesting and cool (for example, the slow motion focus on a cool flip from Trinity in Matrix Reloaded). It would suggest that there's further disconnects within the movie where the visual language it's using aren't consistent with the message allegedly being portrayed. Contrast with a highly philosophical piece such as Spec Ops: The Line, which starts off playing things straight but slowly changes the character of how it is portrayed to enhance the discomfort the player would be feeling from the actions the player character has taken in the player's name.
As Morpheus said in the first movie, "Quit trying to hit me and hit me!" -- If the movies were doing their job as implementations of a compelling philosophical framework, they would be engaging through the embodiment of those values. Instead, the movies are boring to watch even during the most incredibly choreographed fight scenes (and one could argue that it was intentional, but I'd counter that the cinematography didn't imply it was intentional, it seemed to imply "you should think this is really cool and epic"). This likely wasn't what they were aiming for, but instead was a symptom of a Hollywood that by this time was starting to be disconnected from the material world and like a car stuck in the snow continued to push the gas harder hoping to move forward but instead just digging a deeper rut in the ice.
So given this perspective, what do you think makes the sequels a cohesive and integrated whole that is greater than the sum of its parts? How does one great movie and two poor movies equal three great movies as a whole? How do you counter the criticism that instead of leaning back from spectacle they instead leaned into it with action sequences that were ultimately boring and hollow in ways that harm the piece instead of helping them?
I think we can agree on two points:
1. The Matrix sequels did at least try to engage with philosophical points, and
2. The Matrix sequels weren't really well executed as works of media, at least not compared to what they could have been.
In a related post shortly after my original Matrix essay, I wrote another short one describing a scene in "reincarnated as a high elf" which is a good example of applied philosophy leading to an earned pay-off. There was not one word said about the power of connections with diverse people, instead you had two people of relatively equal beginning. Both of them were high elves who had memories of being sent to another world, both of them had roughly the same powers as high elves. The battle was won decisively because the MC used all the fruits of the skills he earned through 6 books by engaging with all kinds of people. He used the swordsmanship he learned from his first human love, with a sword he was taught to make by the king of the dwarves, Imbued with magic spells from a mage, using spells he learned from the same, the sword is powered by mana he acquired by rubbing a dragons scale he got by talking to a dragon for 7 months on a mithril armlet he got from the dwarves, and all the spirits he met and befriended along the way came to help. Meanwhile all the other elf had was the angry ghosts of dead soldiers whispering hate in her ear. In the end, he was already strong enough to kill the other high elf, but the spirits responded to his righteous pain over the idea of killing the other high elf, meaning that the final bit of help he got to act with virtue was a result of his virtuous heart. One thing that's really crazy about this fight is it isn't the climactic battle of the book, it's just one vingette near the beginning of the 6th book.
Another great example of a story about rejecting postmodernism whose narrative is integrated that's contemporaneous with The Matrix is Fight Club. The first part of the movie is tearing down all the systems and narratives of the world, the second is a new (and terrible) thing being sucked into the vacuum of meaning that's left, and the third act is the narrator re-establishing that there are values worth fighting for in the world and working to act upon that realization by fighting the nihilistic cult his subconscious pulled him into before he's lost to it.
If anything, whatever the themes it claims to be discussing, the final battle in Matrix: Revolutions is ostensibly about a fight between The One and The Many, which can be an interesting idea, but ultimately there's nothing about the conflict between Neo and Smith that makes use of this idea. Instead it ends up being an existential rant about meaning, and the argument might be that lacking meaning is what ultimately destroys Smith, but it's an unearned payoff, especially compared to these other works. You can interpret the work as actually meaning many different things, but the work itself doesn't ground the things that happen in those ideas, it just talks at you.
In the end, I'm not arguing that The Matrix sequels are intended as monuments to postmodernism. I'm arguing that the Wachowskis ideological grounding in postmodernism which helped the first movie succeed so thoroughly was missing with these other ideologies and as a result the movie isn't really about any of these things, it just says it is. The first movie, however, says it's about postmodernism, and is about that thing.
I'm saving you from my fight club analysis for now because I'm making it a separate effortpost (two, actually...)
1. The Matrix sequels did at least try to engage with philosophical points, and
2. The Matrix sequels weren't really well executed as works of media, at least not compared to what they could have been.
In a related post shortly after my original Matrix essay, I wrote another short one describing a scene in "reincarnated as a high elf" which is a good example of applied philosophy leading to an earned pay-off. There was not one word said about the power of connections with diverse people, instead you had two people of relatively equal beginning. Both of them were high elves who had memories of being sent to another world, both of them had roughly the same powers as high elves. The battle was won decisively because the MC used all the fruits of the skills he earned through 6 books by engaging with all kinds of people. He used the swordsmanship he learned from his first human love, with a sword he was taught to make by the king of the dwarves, Imbued with magic spells from a mage, using spells he learned from the same, the sword is powered by mana he acquired by rubbing a dragons scale he got by talking to a dragon for 7 months on a mithril armlet he got from the dwarves, and all the spirits he met and befriended along the way came to help. Meanwhile all the other elf had was the angry ghosts of dead soldiers whispering hate in her ear. In the end, he was already strong enough to kill the other high elf, but the spirits responded to his righteous pain over the idea of killing the other high elf, meaning that the final bit of help he got to act with virtue was a result of his virtuous heart. One thing that's really crazy about this fight is it isn't the climactic battle of the book, it's just one vingette near the beginning of the 6th book.
Another great example of a story about rejecting postmodernism whose narrative is integrated that's contemporaneous with The Matrix is Fight Club. The first part of the movie is tearing down all the systems and narratives of the world, the second is a new (and terrible) thing being sucked into the vacuum of meaning that's left, and the third act is the narrator re-establishing that there are values worth fighting for in the world and working to act upon that realization by fighting the nihilistic cult his subconscious pulled him into before he's lost to it.
If anything, whatever the themes it claims to be discussing, the final battle in Matrix: Revolutions is ostensibly about a fight between The One and The Many, which can be an interesting idea, but ultimately there's nothing about the conflict between Neo and Smith that makes use of this idea. Instead it ends up being an existential rant about meaning, and the argument might be that lacking meaning is what ultimately destroys Smith, but it's an unearned payoff, especially compared to these other works. You can interpret the work as actually meaning many different things, but the work itself doesn't ground the things that happen in those ideas, it just talks at you.
In the end, I'm not arguing that The Matrix sequels are intended as monuments to postmodernism. I'm arguing that the Wachowskis ideological grounding in postmodernism which helped the first movie succeed so thoroughly was missing with these other ideologies and as a result the movie isn't really about any of these things, it just says it is. The first movie, however, says it's about postmodernism, and is about that thing.
I'm saving you from my fight club analysis for now because I'm making it a separate effortpost (two, actually...)
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