Anxiety of Perception in the Matrix

Not long ago, I watched the Matrix for the first time in many years. As I sat there thinking about how long it's been since I watched it, I had a shocking epiphany. The Matrix was the first R-rated movie my slightly over-sheltering parents had allowed me to watch when I was 16. After that first viewing, I had never seen it a second time! In one respect, I didn't have to watch it more than once. The most well-known images and lines of dialogue from the movie have so thoroughly saturated the popular consciousness that I had the movie more or less constantly in my mind, despite never having seen it a second time. But, of course, you can't remember everything worth remembering from a single viewing and finally giving the movie another watch gave me a lot to mull over.

...and I show you how far the rabbit-hole goes...

Watching it again brought to mind the slight dissatisfaction I had felt with the movie, though I was not able to articulate it well at 16. I was too caught up in the well-choreographed action and too mystified by the pop-philosophy laden dialogue too parse through it. This time around, I still found it a solid, unique action film. However, its greatest strength-- its unique premise-- is simultaneously what makes it less philosophically coherent.To this day we still refer to red pills when we talk about revelations that fundamentally alter the way we see the world. The idea that our whole conception of reality is an illusion created by machines is a frightening concept that cuts right to the heart of the anxiety we all feel about the limitations of our perceptions. 

But, even though the Matrix is probably the most modernized and visceral dramatization of this anxiety, the realization of our perceptive limitations is not new. From the Christian emphasis on the kingdom of God over worldly concerns, to the Hinduistic concept of Maya, to Plato's theory of Forms and his allegory of the cave, humankind has long known of the continual dialectic between the actual and the potential, that there is more to the world than immediately meets the eye. It was Nietzsche, however,  that most eloquently encapsulated this anxiety over our limited perceptions. He remarked in The Birth of Tragedy on the malaise that afflicts Shakespeare's Hamlet:

Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion: that is the doctrine of Hamlet, not that cheap wisdom of Jack the Dreamer who reflects too much and, as it were, from an excess of possibilities does not get around to action. Not reflection, no--true knowledge, and insight into the horrible truth, outweighs any motive for action, both in Hamlet and in the Dionysian man.

Now no comfort avails any more; longing transcends a world after death, even the gods; existence is negated along with its glittering reflection in the gods or in an immortal beyond. Conscious of the truth he has once seen, man now sees everywhere only the horror or absurdity of existence; now he understands what is symbolic in Ophelia's fate; now he understands the wisdom of the sylvan god, Silenus: he is nauseated.

Here, when the danger to his will is greatest, art approaches as a saving sorceress, expert at healing. She alone knows how to turn these nauseous thoughts about the horror or absurdity of existence into notions with which one can live: these are the sublime as the artistic taming of the horrible, and the comic as the artistic discharge of the nausea of absurdity.

"Alas, poor Yorick!"

No one does better justice than Nietzsche does here to how unpleasant truths threaten a person's ability to act in the world. It is not that things aren't as horrible as you suspect. They often are and, in a sense, you're right to be paralyzed with fear and hopelessness. But, in another sense, the mark of maturity is the ability to willingly blinker one's perception of suffering. Many adolescents see this and think that all adults are cowards and sell-outs, but often they miss the point. It's only giving up if you stand still and do nothing about the horrors that are actually within your power to confront. Part of that means accepting the limits of what you can do in the face of life's horrors. It means adopting an "illusion" that funnels the horror, allowing you to do something constructive about it. What's more, our "veils of illusion" don't remain static. We enrich them throughout our lives, making them more sophisticated, or at least less crude. Every "illusion," even the ones that someone is trying desperately not to enrich in any way, have some tiny kernel of truth to it that allows them to believe that way.

The Matrix makes no such concessions. It draws a harsh, unforgiving line between the Matrix and the real world. One is definitely fake and the other is definitely real, unlike life, in which there are varying degrees of validity to everyone's perceptions of the world. Not only that, but once Neo has undergone his painful initiation into the real world, Morpheus informs him that the basis for his power is the very illusion that he just managed to escape and which still has the majority of the human race in its clutches. Most of the movie then proceeds to take place within the confines of this illusion.

One may well ask, "But isn't that what Nietzsche was talking about? Isn't Neo just literally drawing down the veil of illusion that allows him to act as Nietzsche talked about?" Not really. Nietzsche understood perception as a spectrum with each person able to shoulder as much truth as they can stand, while still appreciating that even the most perceptive can never know everything. If the Matrix had more accurately dramatized this idea, Neo would have ventured further out into the real world. He would have faced an escalating series of hurdles, forcing him to call on reserves of real strength, as in a more typical hero's journey, rather than being a badass in a completely fake world. In more traditional stories, the hero doesn't broaden their perceptions all at once by suddenly being sucked from a fake world into the real world. They broaden their perceptions bit by bit, seeing more of the real world than they had at the beginning of the story.

What's interesting and disturbing about why the Wachowski's made the choice they did rather than a more traditional one, is that it seems entirely motivated by what Nietzsche called nausea, an antipathy towards the conditions of the world. Nietzsche observed that "nauseous" people, while quick to condemn the world as nothing but illusion, often weren't content with merely extracting themselves from the world. They resented those who seemed to survive and thrive in the world that they had dismissed. They seek to make sure that everyone knows the truth that they have come to know. But people of this type often don't actually develop skills or insights that place their feet courageously into new territory. Their only virtue is their knowledge of how shitty the territory that they're currently in is. Then they begin feel cheated when they're not lauded for this penetrating insight, and they're suddenly struck with a terrible realization that they never can quite fully articulate to themselves: they really did crave the success that comes with drawing down the veils of illusion and making one's way imperfectly and courageously in the world, but they never had the guts to actually do it.