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The Characters in The Matrix Essay

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The Characters in The Matrix

The Matrix (Wachowski & Wachowski 1999) is a battery powering an unending chatter of thought, images, productions, and discourse. In the film, a stabbing needle penetrates the black plug mounted on the back of a human skull, and the mind is overwhelmed by the matrix, an extensive simulacral world that, to its unknowing inhabitants, is in every way the same as reality, and to those merely passing through, is a sinister, green-tinted prison. The film sets, by dialogue and symbolism, a place for analysis, theology, theory, philosophy, and criticism that accommodates any stance within a language of freedom, choice, perception, reality, simulation, mind, computer code, and body. Rationalizations of and within …show more content…

The philosophical conventions at play are a string of universalizing contentions about the ways of Man, Truth, and the World. What is striking in the appropriation of so many minutes of screen-time into rational argument is the theoretical inevitability into which they stumble as if for the first time and in a serendipitous glee. Is (discussion of) the film finally to be a moment of truth?

It is high time we rid ourselves of the notion that we can somehow free ourselves from illusion (or from ideology) by recognizing and theorizing our own entrapment within it. Such dialectical maneuvers tend, ironically, to reinforce the very objects of their critique. They achieve their explanatory power at the price of transforming local, contingent phenomena into transcendental conditions or developmental necessities. The self-reflexive theorizing that allows us to become aware of certain structural constraints also ends up echoing and amplifying those constraints, reproducing them on a larger scale. (Shaviro 11-12)

When Žižek rejoices, “inconsistencies are the film’s moment of truth” (Žižek 12), the recognition of an ‘inconsistency’ in the film is the simultaneous codification of consistent principles where what was present before can be forgotten[1]. The wholism of such maneuvers follows theatrical trailers, wherein the

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