Even Neo Can’t Log Off
The Matrix Resurrections makes a convincing case that the Matrix franchise is keeping us plugged into the Matrix. Unfortunately, it exhausts the viewer in doing so.
What many people were looking for in a new Matrix film was a little nostalgia to ease our very real collective anxiety. But watching the proverbial snake eat its own tail for almost two-and-a-half hours, it’s easy to lose your appetite. (Warner Bros.)
In the early aughts, Jean Baudrillard was asked to pontificate about The Matrix.
The French philosopher’s work was among the countless influences and references that the Wachowskis had stuffed into the code of The Matrix — along with Christianity, Buddhism, Alice in Wonderland, and various science fiction and martial arts movies. Early in the first film, Keanu Reeves’s Neo hides illicit software in a hollowed-out copy of Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, and Laurence Fishburne’s Morpheus echoes one of its most notable lines when he introduces the postapocalyptic world outside of the computer simulation as “the desert of the real.”
Baudrillard, himself a kind of Cheshire Cat of media theory, refused to follow audiences down the rabbit hole. He believed The Matrix promoted a false dichotomy between the artificial world of computers and the real world of flesh and blood that had long since collapsed into a state he dubbed hyperreality.
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