The Matrix trilogy is a titanic cultural force that you already know all about, so I am not going to belabor an introduction here and simply say that the release of the new film in the franchise, The Matrix Resurrections, has been hotly anticipated and theorized and combed over. There are a lot of forces to please when making a new Matrix film, from studios to diehard fans to the media theory people who mined that original film for every bit of insight they could drain from it. What could one expect from half of the sibling duo that made those original films (Lana Wachowski directed this one alone) and a script by knowing-and-winking genre writers Mitchell and Hemon? What I have here is not some grand take, but instead (in a long blogging tradition gone dormant) a series of scattered thoughts provoked by the film.
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Resurrections knows that it has a lot of different expectations to manage, and it attempts to resolve them by choosing the meta move as a “third way” beyond the axioms of pure nostalgia and pure novelty. Set after Revolutions, the film has Neo trapped in a new matrix governed by new machine overlords who work differently. They have tricked him into believing that the events of the original trilogy were merely a game he created (more on his role as a game designer later), and that he is unable to distinguish between the world he fictioned up and the world he lives in as a real person. In essence, this is just a replication of the original film, but wait: as an actual game designer, he can subcreate things within his game The Matrix, which allows him to resurrect his original friend and mentor Morpheus as a combination of Smith and Morpheus within his game, and this creation gains sentience and is rescued by people in the real world outside of The Matrix in order to liberate Neo from whatever who cares.
Look, this is tiring to explain, and the convoluted nature of it is both pleasing in that decentering way that the original trilogy was, but it also feels like wheel spinning for its own sake. This is one of many meta moves the film makes. Neo is informed that they’re making a sequel of his game with or without him, and he’s pressed into meetings with other creatives who are actively roasted by the film. There are constant references to the dangers of nostalgia, knowing callbacks to the original trilogy, and a political allegory that is both painfully thin and something desperately in need of unpacking.
In its worst moments, the meta move is hanging a lampshade on the whole ordeal, begging our pardon for the steps we have to go through. In its best moments, it is an extension of the ideas about determinism and free will that made those original films so interesting. In those movies, the joys and pains of human life were really just ambivalent content in a form that was set in stone by a machine logic, and Neo’s existence was a sledgehammer into that entire system that produced questionable results.
The creative team behind Resurrections goes for the meta move because that is really the only sensible one left to them. The original trilogy says that all of this was structured, and while there are some choices that can be made, they are not totally unfettered and free choices. Resurrections goes up a layer in order to dodge the deadlock, to provide a narrative through which the very fundamental logical process of that original trilogy can be rooted out and gotten under. The past was past, and we can goof on it and manipulate it so that we can work a crowbar underneath it to obliterate the whole thing.
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That’s what they say, at least. I’m not sure it happens. The film ends with the Analyst, the antagonist of the film, getting beaten up by Trinity in a weird replication of the end of Jupiter Ascending and told that her and Neo are going to recreate the world in their image. I’m not sure how that happens. Without original strain Morpheus here, a prophet and a visionary who can explain the faith-filled metaphysics to us, the film is a little light on the details of what happens to who and why.
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Let me back up. The big maneuver that Resurrections makes is a simple one. The structure of the original matrix was about control and freedom, and what Neo’s big intervention did at the end of Revolutions made it clear that that was not tenable. In the real world, the humans vs machines dichotomy broke down. Humans in the matrix were given a choice about whether or not they wanted to stay, as the Oracle and the Architect “explained” at the end of that film. Machines were also given a choice, and some of them (such as the ones we met in the latter two films, like the Keymaker or the programs in the subway) chose to stop dominating humans and instead lived with them in harmony. When we’re shown the results of this in the film, it looks like the world is objectively better. Humans live in better conditions, machines are helping them and making their lives better, and they’re less like rats in a warren overall.
The new matrix, operated by the Analyst (rather than the Architect), is less about direct control and more about the modulation of affects. Allegorically engaging with some very columist-y thoughts about social media, the Analyst argues that social control is best accomplished by simply giving the masses what they want emotionally at all times. Anger and satiation are drip fed, nostalgia is delivered when people need to feel at home, and the world moves along based on how well the Analyst’s system can provide these things as distractions. Bread and circuses, but the circuses are so good you don’t even need the bread.
Resurrections directly has the Analyst arguing that the workaround for human choice is that humans will, in the words of Deleuze & Guattari, desire their own repression given a certain organization of the world. This is a world that has moved from authoritarianism to protocol, from domination to management.
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The Matrix franchise loves to naturalize historical and contingent parts of humanity. In the 1990s, we were at the end of history and so the desire for humans to be placated and controlled what universal, as the Architect and Agent Smith told us repeatedly. In the age of social media and affect, the human desire to believe narratives and stories over material reality, and to defend them with all of their feelings and lives, is a universal human characteristic. As someone once said, pure ideology.
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Capitalism is getting invoked constantly here, and characters deliver twitter thread level analysis of the consumptive and agency-compromising abilities of the matrix. It robs you of what you have, and it takes your revolution and plugs it right back into the system. I think there is going to be a real drive to read this movie through Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, the idea that capitalist overcomes its contradictions and sets the horizon line for human thought at the same time.
I think a more productive route is to think of the film through McKenzie Wark’s gamespace. Wark conceives of gamespace as a kind of logistical and protocological thread that weaves through disparate spaces and knits them together through predictive and assumptive technologies. As the age-old phrase goes, live in your world, play in ours. Top-down control is obsolete, and instead it has been replaced by systems of rules and regulations that you learn at your own pace so that you can begin to master them. The matrix is now just a game where there is the possibility of freedom, but the odds are stacked beyond your favor.
It is also that way in the real world as well. Humans and machines working together have created a world where the worst thing possible is rocking the boat (until the boat gets rocked for arbitrary and plot-related reasons). Rules and how you operate within them are the way that life is lived, rather than a militant form of life-as-resistance that dominated the portrayal of the real world in the original trilogy.
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Wark in Gamer Theory:
The game has colonized its rivals within the cultural realm, from the spectacle of cinema to the simulations of television. Stories no longer opiate us with imaginary reconciliations of real problems. The story just recounts the steps by which someone beat someone else — a real victory for imaginary stakes. The only original screen genre of the early 21st century is not called “reality TV” for nothing. Brenton & Cohen: “By signing their release forms, contestants agree to end up as statistics, each player’s feelings and actions manipulated… leading to infidelity, tears, perhaps heartbreak.” Sure, reality TV doesn’t look like reality, but then neither does reality. Both look like games. Both become a seamless space in which gamers test their abilities within contrived scenarios. The situations may be artificial, the dialogue less than spontaneous, and the gamers may merely be doing what the producers tell them. All this is perfectly of a piece with a reality which is itself an artificial arena, where everyone is already a gamer, waiting for their turn.
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Much like Jupiter Ascending, Cloud Atlas, and Speed Racer, Resurrections is trying to do too much for its runtime. It has too many subplots, too many threads it is trying to weave together. It is a victim of self-StarWarsification, trying to drag too much worldbuilding together all at once to explain Neo and the new matrix and the real world and the machine / human alliance and the machine vs machine war and on and on. So many of these ideas feel like hooks for tv show side stories or to give us fanficable new characters. We’re being sold a continuation of some of the greatest science fiction films of all time while at the same time given a sketchy list of exciting developments that are given no time to breathe.
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Agent Smith is back, of course, although warped by the Analyst in such a way that he’s become a kind of Zuckerberg-esque social manipulator. “Mr. Anderson” is replaced by the overly familiar “Tom.” What do we do with this? Unclear. He seems to be here because it’s not a Matrix movie without him, but since the binary between him and Neo has been resolved he seems more like a vestigial limb than anything else.
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Less vestigial is the presence of Trinity, who transforms from a damsel in distress at the 85% mark to the One, which she either always was or is for this version of the matrix. It’s unclear, and for all of its discussion of feelings as forms of repression, the film’s conclusion rides on nothing but those feelings.
The trilogy worked because it was, in a lot of ways, a melodrama. People wore their affection and emotions on their sleeves, and the movies’ willingness to go full “body genre” and lean into emotions without artifice seems to have a lot to do with the parts that have been disavowed about them for so long (see: rave scene).
Resurrections is at its best when it is playing in this zone. Neo and Trinity have spent years imprisoned in a simulation that has kept them apart but familiar with one another; it is portrayed as a kind of torture, and the Analyst functionally declares this torture to be an engine of the matrix itself. When these two characters are able to speak with one another, to reattach to one another, the emotional core of the movie is really made very clear. There are stakes. They want to be together, or they want to not exist.
And then there are all of these other people standing around doing things. One of the most powerful things in The Matrix is the realization that people live in desperate times and that life is hard to live in the real world. When Cypher begins executing the other members of the crew, it really hits hard because we already know how they are barely scraping by. It’s a hard world made harder; Resurrections is a better world that never really gets much worse across the film, being that every moment of peril or possible death is dispelled and sort of immediately forgotten. It ends up feeling more like a theme park ride with a kooky cast of characters, a far cry from what I associate with the tones of the original trilogy.
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The tone change is on purpose, of course. It’s about hope and community, survival and thriving. Abundance and invention over scarcity. Cooperation and multiculturalism over “us vs them” politics.
Any criticism one has of this is literally made fun of in the film. The Merovingian shows back up as a disheveled mess, in another meta move, yells about how much better the previous films were than this one. The aesthetics he lived for are shunted back into the past; he mourns for condescension and class. If I want those things, I’m as foolish as he is, the film seems to say.
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Earlier this year I wrote about Space Jam: A New Legacy‘s video game logic. It is bizarre to watch Resurrections and see the same playbook being run through a different apparatus. Instead of bringing in a thousand intellectual property holdings, this film summons up its own mythology to remind us of all the pieces of it, all the connecting bits, and that presentation is the content itself. Watching Trinity do the over the head kick; seeing the white rabbit; watching Neo remember that he knows kung fu and saying it out loud. There’s a lot of Whedonism here, too much quipping for its own good, and it is quipping that is constantly in service of reminding us what universe we’re living in. Again, a theme part, made in the Matrix mode. Matrixland, coming to a Disney park soon.
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There are glimmers to that openness here that I wish I had been given more of; if the first three films were all about prophecy, and this movie is about the history after that prophetic moment, then what was learned? This is a material and philosophical question that is dipped into the smallest amount, and yet that is what I wanted the most of. I’m working over things here, and that’s because I am ambivalent on the thing. The original trilogy are some of my favorite films. They are open and weird and expressive in ways not normally see in cinema, even now. I would prefer if they never made another Matrix media object again. I think we are good where we are. But this film is, itself, telling me to prepare for the onslaught of a world beyond our control, a world that is powerful because it cannot be controlled, only managed. And so I wait for the announcement.