SPOILER WARNING: this page talks about the whole movie, including the
ending. If you haven't seen it, go see it, then come back. It's on video
now. You have no excuse.
> MY THEORIES
THEORY 1: Every name means something.
Neo is "one" with the letters moved around, and the number on his apartment
door is 101. Morpheus is the Greek god of dreams. His ship, the
Nebuchadnezzar, is named after the king in the Bible who had dreams he
couldn't understand. A cipher is a zero, a nothing, which is what Cypher
turns out to be. Thomas, like doubting Thomas. Trinity, Zion, the Oracle.
None of this is an accident. The Wachowskis put in more stuff than anybody
will find in ten viewings. I've done six. Still finding it.
THEORY 2: Déjà vu is a glitch.
When Neo sees the same black cat walk past a doorway twice, Trinity tells
him that's what happens when the machines change something in the program.
So now every time I get déjà vu I stop and look around. My
sister Tina thinks I've lost it.
THEORY 3: The batteries don't add up.
In the movie, the machines grow people and use their bodies for power. As
a guy who passed physics: that doesn't work. You have to feed the people,
and you'd get more energy just burning whatever you're feeding them. You
always lose energy at every step. So here's my theory: the machines aren't
using us for power. They're using our brains for processing.
Billions of brains hooked together would be the biggest computer ever built. It's
like SETI@home, the program that uses people's computers to search radio
telescope data when they're not using them. I run it on our family computer
at night. Except in this case the computers are us.
THEORY 4: Agent Smith and Cypher are mirror images.
Cypher is a human who wants to go back into the Matrix. Smith is a
program who wants out. Watch the scene where Smith interrogates
Morpheus and takes his earpiece out. He talks about how much he hates the
place, how it smells, how he wants to be free of it. He's Cypher turned
inside out. I think that's the key to the whole movie, and I think if
there's a sequel, it's about Smith.
THEORY 5: The real world is another Matrix.
Some people on the newsgroups think the "real world" with the ship and the
hovercraft is just a second Matrix, one level up. I don't believe it. But I
can't prove it isn't, and that's sort of the point of the whole movie,
which brings me to...
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> THE READING LIST
After the third time I saw it, I realized I didn't know where half the
ideas came from, so I went to the library. This is what I've read since
April, or tried to. My English teacher found out and now she brings me
books. It's kind of embarrassing.
| Plato, The Republic (the cave part) |
| Over two thousand years old and it's basically the Matrix. People are chained in a cave
their whole lives, facing a wall, watching shadows, and they think the shadows are all there is. One gets
loose and sees the real world and the sun, and it hurts his eyes. Then he goes back to tell the others and
they don't believe him and get mad at him. Sound familiar? Read it. It's short. |
| René Descartes, Meditations |
| A French philosopher in the 1600s who decided to doubt everything he could possibly doubt.
What if he's dreaming? What if some evil demon is tricking all his senses? (Agents!) He decides the only thing
he can't doubt is that he's the one doing the doubting. Then he spends the rest of the book trying to get the
world back. I'm not sure he does. Hard reading but worth it. |
| Zhuangzi (the butterfly dream) |
| An old Chinese philosopher dreams he's a butterfly, wakes up, and can't tell if he's a man who
dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he's a man. One page. It messed me up for a week. |
| Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation |
| This is the book Neo keeps his illegal disks in, hollowed out, near the beginning. The
library had it. I read about twenty pages and understood maybe three. It's about copies of things that
replace the real thing until there's no real thing anymore. I think. I'll try again in college. |
| Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's World |
| The book my English teacher brought me. It's a novel about a girl who starts getting mysterious
letters that teach her the whole history of philosophy. If you liked the Matrix and you've never read any
philosophy, start here, not with Baudrillard. Trust me. |
| Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass |
| Follow the white rabbit. Down the rabbit hole. Neo touching the mirror and it goes liquid. The
whole movie is full of Alice. I'd never actually read them. They're way weirder than the cartoon. |
| William Gibson, Neuromancer |
| Not philosophy, but it's from 1984 and it calls the computer network "the matrix," and hackers
"jack in" to it. My favorite book on this list. Probably my favorite book, period. |
| The brain in a vat |
| My computer science teacher told me about this one when he saw my Matrix binder. A philosopher
named Hilary Putnam wrote about it: what if you're just a brain in a jar of chemicals, hooked up to a computer
feeding you everything you see? How would you ever know? (You wouldn't. That's the problem.) |
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> SO WHICH PILL?
OK. Here's where I've landed, after six theaters, one DVD and about a
dozen books.
You can't prove you're not in the Matrix. Plato couldn't, Descartes
couldn't, and I definitely can't. Every test you could run, the program could
fool. So the question isn't really "is this
real." The question is what you do when you can't know.
And I'd still take the red pill. Not because the real world in the movie
is nice. It's terrible. The food is gray slop and the machines are hunting
you. I'd take it because I'd rather know. Cypher wanted the steak more than
the truth, and I understand him. I just don't want to be him.
My sister Tina, who is 12, says she'd take the blue pill and keep her cat.
Honestly? Can't argue with that either.
E-mail me your theories. I read all of them, even the ones that are
wrong.
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