As someone who teaches philosophy at a regional public university, which is to say a school without a lot of students who could ever imagine majoring in philosophy, I have never found a pop culture reference to philosophy I did not like. I have talked about Breaking Bad and work, Fight Club and alienation, and Get Out and W.E.B. Dubois to name a few. I have never done anything with The Matrix though. I have never shown it or screened it.
This is in part because I do not think that there is much there to work with, a few lines about the nature of reality, a little brain in the vat, and then a lot of kung fu and gun fu. For a long time I thought that the film was better seen as a kind of genre pastiche than a metaphysical or even political meditation. Its main gimmick is salvaging the cliches of the action film, the hero who knows every style of martial arts, can pilot any vehicle, and dodge bullets, by situating them in a science fiction context. As far as an allegory for ideology, I have always preferred They Live to The Matrix.
Things changed a bit when I finally read Joshua Clover's little book on The Matrix and liked it so much that I decided to teach it. Clover's little book shows what is at stake in claiming a Marxist interpretation, claiming against all of the pop metaphysics that The Matrix "is about work."(Incidentally such a claim would be the beginning of the argument that The Matrix Resurrections is the true sequel of the first film, the one that asks the question is not what happens when you escape the matrix but what happens when work moves outside of the cubicle.)
Beyond the focus on work, Clover also points out that in its most conceptually dense scenes, such as those of Lawrence Fishburne's Morpheus providing he needed exposition for the film, one finds the logic of another earlier film, Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle. To borrow a concept beloved by the situationists, The Matrix could be even considered a detournement of the latter, putting the lines about the alienating effect of the image in the pages of comic book of kung fu versus robots.
Society of the Spectacle
As Clover writes summing up the argument of the former,
"The book accepts the classic account of a social shift from phase of being to a phase of having. Its significant extension is to describe a world that has entered a phase of appearing. In this society, spectacular images reign, and those with the power to produce them, to manage the symbols that seems to occupy the breadth of the public sphere, reign supreme."
This answers the question of how an underclass, floating in images, would be unable to see its sea of troubles and, by opposing, end them. The vast effect of those in power go into disguising actual conditions, agains any such revelation. History itself must be concealed under a welter of false appearances, lest it be recollected and awoken from. Thus, one quality of this period is that history has in effect disappeared. Time has stopped for everyone. If the machine of history must eventually drive toward revolution, the 'spectacle' serves to lock the machine's gears in place, while providing the appearance of forward motion."
The Matrix could be understood as a pop reboot of The Society of the Spectacle. The same basic thesis is common to both films a reign of images conceals and maintains a condition of universal servitude. The former just has a more ambivalent relation to the spectacle, it produces its own spectacle while denouncing the spectacle (more on that in a bit).
To continue this detourning of scenes, concepts, and texts, in the same class I also taught some films by Jordan Peele, and was struck by the parallels that Kevin Wynter draws between The Matrix and Get Out in his Critical Race Theory and Jordan Peele's Get Out. Wynter draws a parallel between the two films through their most potent, and persistent, visual metaphors, the matrix and the sunken place. They are both about subjection, or slavery, and the kind of consciousness that is necessary to sustain such a condition. One could say that it is a matter of two scenes involving leather chairs, in one a character is being explained his imprisonment in order that he can break out in the other he is being placed deeper with it.
Of course their conditions differ as well, Neo's subjection is tied to exploitation, an exploitation of his vital energy, and as much as Morpheus tells him he is a slave, this is a generalized slavery free from the racial division of humanity and labor that defined chattel slavery. This fundamentally alters what it means to be liberated. As Wynter writes,
"Despite their similarities, there is a crucial difference in the existential predicaments of Chris and Neo that underscores a key point reiterated throughout this book. Neo fights to restore a world that holds forth the possibility of a return to a time prior to rupture. So while he enters the desert of the real and his psychic integrity is broken by the impact of the truth of his condition, he (quite literally, as The One) embodies the possibility of restoration of life before the rupture. True to the formula of the final brother, for Chris his entering the desert of the real is precisely what Dionne Brand describes as passing through the door of no return. In a second alternate ending one imagines it is Morpheus and not Rod who arrives to take Chris away from the Armitage estate, and rather than Rod's attempt to layer humor over devastatin with the line "Consider the situation, fuckin' handled," it is Morpheus who turns to Chris invitingly and says, "Welcome to the desert of the real." Chris sitting in the passenger side of Rod's side TSA vehicle, his body exhausted and rigid, his eyes darting around at the world outside, has entered a desert of the real that I have been calling Black America Now: a world pulled over his eyes leading him to believe that he is a free and sentient Black man, but is revealed to be a mirage blinding him from the truth. That truth--to paraphrase Morpheus--is that he has been living a dream (maybe even Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Dream") in which the possibility of inclusion, equity, and social integration seemed within reach when, in reality in Black America Now, Chris was, is, and will always be looked upon as a slave in world that is, ideologically, as scorched and blasted as the one Morpheus unveils to Neo."
A few remarks on Wynter's detourning, or mashup, of The Matrix and Get Out. First, for those who have not read the book, and despite the title, Wynter's analysis is as much afropessimist as it has to do with Critical Race Theory. Second, any intersection of The Matrix and Get Out has to consider not only the theoretical work that went into them, creating their concepts, but the way that they have produced two of the most persistent pop concepts to understand the distortions of the present, namely, the red pill and the sunken place. Finally, and this is the direction that I want to end with, as much as the sunken place can be understood as life under the spectacle, it is Nope that might be considered Peele's particular remake of Society of the Spectacle.
The term "spectacle" features prominently in the film's epigraph, and the term is used several times throughout the film, most notably when Jupe talks about the viral life of the horrifying images of a chimpanzee attacking the cast of a television show, stating "it was a spectacle." It is not just the word that is repeated, but its logic, the Spectacle is something that is not only separated from life, but consumes it (quite literally in the film).
The spectacle is not just an image that is alienated and separated from us, but in doing so it takes on a life of its own. Muybridge’s clip lives independently of the jockey that is filmed in it, just as Gordy’s attack lives on even as it is suppressed by the studio. The spectacle ultimately does not just have a life, an existence independent of its creators. It lives by consuming others. As we see with Jupe, OJ, and Emerald, the desire to capture the spectacle and be the spectacle, to get the “Oprah shot,” can become an all-consuming passion. Or, as Antlers Holst puts it to Emerald, evoking the same language of dreaming while awake that Morpheus used, “This dream you’re chasing, where you end up at the top of the mountain, all eyes on you. It’s the dream you never wake up from.”
If Nope can be considered another reboot of Society of the Spectacle it is also an updating of it to changing conditions. As much as the spectacle exists to repress history, as Clover argues, it cannot escape it, including the history of the spectacle itself. The "power to produce" images has been disseminated to everyone with a camera or a phone, and far from being a liberation, a democratization it seems to put us more under the spectacle's power. We are no longer trapped in pods, just providing our energy, or locked away in the sunken place, passively enduring what happens, but have become active producers of the very spectacle which consumes us. Or, as Nope puts it, "why aren't you filming this" has become the question of our era.
Guy Debord made Society of the Spectacle into both a book and a movie, and while the movie probably got more viewers than ever read the book, despite its long life as a pirated and cheap text, it is not exactly a spectacle. The pop philosophies of The Matrix, Get Out, and Nope, have had bigger audiences, more effects, but they do so by embracing the spectacle. In the society ruled by the spectacle the question is how to capture it, how to use images to produce ideas, without being captured by the image.
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