10 Best The Matrix Moments
8. Kansas Going Bye-Bye
We’ve been asked the question many times throughout the film so far: what is The Matrix? And now we finally get to be shown it.
A surrealist run down Neo’s throat, flushed down by a liquified mirror, followed by coughing and spluttering in a cold, womb-like pod, ripping wires and tubes out of us, we look around and see we’re just one of a row of pods, and all around us are towers looming high above and down to the depths, filled with lightning and terror.
It’s hard to replicate the feeling of seeing this scene for the first time. This is the grand unveiling of what is really happening, though we can’t comprehend exactly what it is at first. It’s too big, too horrific to imagine. With gothic towers and lightning strikes, it is horror imagery at its cyberpunk finest. When we’re flushed down the pipes by the machines to be picked up by Morpheus and his crew, everything moves so fast that it’s hard to get a grip on exactly what’s going on. The score gives a great, choral feeling of religious awe. It is the moment of walking out of Plato’s cave, taking us a while to fully understand that everything we thought before was a lie. The scene’s power lies in its incomprehension, a barrage of visual and audible stimuli that stays with the viewer long after the final reel ends.
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7. Opening Chase
Back in the day, you didn’t need a big opening scene to kick things off. You could introduce everything slowly, get used to the characters, the world, and then get going. Now, Hollywood demands something explosive for its cold open, something to make sure viewers don’t walk out three minutes in because there aren’t any bodies. The Matrix goes and gives us an all-out chase between Trinity and the police/Agents, giving us the genre, the tone, and a look at the visuals all in the first five minutes. Boy does it make eyeballs pop out of skulls.
Agent Smith’s remark to the police chief that his men “are already dead,” gives all the buildup we need for Trinity. Showing her martial arts prowess is one thing, but nobody watching for the first time is ready for her to spring into the air, poised to engage, the camera to rotate around her as the world freezes, and then to lash out with the kick. This is the first bullet-time effect in the film and it shows us something impossible, something astonishing. But it’s not over, because then Trinity has to run from the agents. How can someone this good at defending herself be this scared?
They leap over the tops of buildings and across roads, the camerawork enhancing the impossibility of their abilities, and we understand that something is abnormal about them. Trinity’s eventual vanishing in the phone booth as it is demolished only goes to further demonstrate that we are in a world where rules don’t apply as we’re used to.
6. The Desert of the Real
In his 1981 book “Simulacra and Simulation“, Jean Baudrillard describes a short story by Jorge Luis Borges from 1658 called “On Exactitude in Science“, where an empire creates a map so detailed it covers the entire empire itself. Generations later, sections are found tattered and worn in the desert. Baudrillard puts this as an example of simulation, second-order simulacra, which is a copy of something real, a simulation being a copy of that copy, and therefore with no referent to anything real (it’s immediate ancestor, if you like, the simulacra, was a copy of something real, and not real itself. Therefore a simulation is complete fiction, nothing about it referring to anything real.) He describes the modern world, through the proliferation of mass media (TV, film, advertising, etc) as becoming hyperreal, where our understanding of what is real is drawn purely from simulations of reality, which now come to our mental processes of understanding the world around us before what is actually real. The map, blanketing the empire, is more real than the empire it was designed to simulate, and out there on the borders, everything turns to an unrecognisable dust of what is true or not. This is what Baudrillard terms ‘The desert of the real.’
Despite Neo getting his hardware-hacked disk for his customer from a hollowed-out copy of this book, Cypher discussing that The Matrix could be more real than the real world later on in the film, and the book being required reading for all the cast, Morpheus’s allusion to it is the most overt reference in the film. His desert, and the film’s desert, is true and tangible, a ruin of the world before the artificial creation and generation of the new world of The Matrix. But Neo initially rejects this. His world, the hyperreal world, is truth, more real than actual reality, and it takes him a long time to process that it can be anything other.
The explanation scene of what really happened between humans and the machines breaks traditional filmic continuity, flowing from one image into the next, from one illusionary state into another, in and out of television screens. The direction and editing adds to this dreamlike state, a world without clear definitions of truth and illusion, and the final image of Morpheus holding up a battery, of people powering their own dreamworld, is haunting at its existential core.
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Can’t argue with this order! I’ve never particularly been a The Matrix is a masterpiece cheerleader, but the hit rate of its iconic moments can’t be denied.
Trouble is deciding which ten make the cut. Had to leave some out and merge others. Very ashamed the 2001 reference in the score when Neo finally becomes The One had to be left out.