Last Friday night, I attended the showing of the 1999 film The Matrix directed by Andy and Lana Wachowski. The story is based around the experiences of a seemingly normal software designer named Mr. Anderson who works on the weekends doing some kind of morally questionable business under the alias Neo. Mr. Anderson is contacted by a mysterious character, Morpheus, who vaguely tells him that there is more to life than he might believe. Mr. Anderson is skeptical until he takes "the red pill", a catalyst that launches him into the truth. He awakes in a post-apocalyptic world where machines rule the world and humans are contained by a program known as "the matrix", an illusion of the time period just before the world ended projected onto the very mind of every person. In this movie, humans are not born, they are grown to be harvested for their body heat to fuel the robotic infestation that has completely covered the earth. This movie is a wake up call to the modern everyman to make him think about how he thinks. It forces one to question their very existence by creating the story of an entire civilization that was simultaneously duped. Some might say that this artifact preaches a conspiracy theory that nothing is actually real but I believe that it's actually just a thought exercise to break the status quo of the typical american lifestyle. It encourages the viewer to be creative; to base his actions on his own creativity rather than trying to serve a greater system. One might even say this movie goes as far as to cry out for the kingdom of heaven: If we, the human race, don't figure out how to live in harmony with the world we've been given then we will inevitably be farmed by robots for our body heat.
A few questions I'd like to raise about this film are:
Was the creation of the matrix unethical if it were meant to protect the human race from the harsh reality that is the future?
If you took the red pill but you were given the opportunity to go back to the matrix world with no real world consequences, would you?
Thanks for your analysis, Andrew. What do you think we would see if we took the red pill and opened our eyes to the control mechanisms within our own world?
ReplyDeleteIs our class a red pill? :)