Once upon a time, if you wanted to get an idea into popular culture, you wrote a short story or a novel: “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”; “The Time Machine”; “1984.” Those are still important, but a more effective way to reach popular culture has emerged: the movies.
Take “The China Syndrome” about a fictional nuclear reactor whose meltdown threatened to take it “all the way to China!” It hit America’s screens a mere 12 days before a real-life nuclear accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania and the uncanny timing helped sear the concept of meltdown into America’s vocabulary.
Or “Wag the Dog” from 1997. People still use this phrase to mean a president who starts a phony war to distract from a sex scandal.
Then there’s “The Matrix.”
I’ve been hearing about this film since it came out in 1999, but somehow never took the time to see it. Not until my own children were aghast at my ignorance.
I had read someone’s blog post about “red-pilled” America. “Are they talking about Red State America?” I asked my kids.
“No, Mom,” they replied. “It’s completely different.”
“Different how?”
“You still haven’t seen ‘The Matrix,’ have you? You must be the last person in America. Go see it, and then we’ll talk.”
So I borrowed a copy and watched it. I don’t suppose we need worry much about spoilers, but — just in case I’m only the second-to-last one to see it —let this be your warning to stop reading now.
The film takes place in a maximally dystopian 2199, when machines have taken over the Earth to such an extent that humans are bred, and fed, and kept all their lives in tanks, simply to provide bio-energy for the machines. To keep humans pacified, the machines have woven a completely false digital reality all around them, sending appropriate information to all the senses … to the point that almost everyone believes they are living, working, and walking around, when really they’re just naked bodies in tanks.
Morpheus, a charismatic leader played by Laurence Fishburne, offers Keanu Reeves, or Neo, two options: a blue pill, which would return him to the world he has known, where he can continue to “believe whatever you want to believe,” or the red pill, which prompts an awakening to a bitter and scary reality.
There is much chasing and violence — including innovative scenes where Neo and his compatriots seem able to bend time, walk up walls and play limbo with slow-moving bullets.
These cutting-edge techniques soon cropped up in other films and ads in the years after “Matrix” debuted. That’s one way the film was influential.
Another was the concept of having one’s body hooked up in one place, while it was having experiences somewhere else. That has since been used to great effect in many other works — most notably in James Cameron’s “Avatar,” of 2009.
But, in fact, this is merely a high-tech, big budget version of an idea I first heard in my philosophy classes. The idea of a “brain in a vat” goes back at least to René Descartes, who
hypothesized that perhaps all of consciousness was just a bunch of sensations being fed to us by an “evil demon.”
Then Bishop Berkeley came along and said that these sensations were sent, not by a demon but by God. And if things continue to exist when we’re not looking at them, that is proof, not of the objects’ reality but of God’s.
Writer Samuel Johnson had no patience with this kind of talk. “I refute you thus!” he supposedly said, kicking a rock. That line became one of my husband’s favorite quotes. (Without the kicking, of course; tickling is his weapon of choice.)
“So, Mom — let’s cut to the chase…”
“Not more movie talk!”
“Do you get what ‘red pill’ means now?”
“I guess so.”
Red pill means waking up to unpleasant reality. Blue means the pleasant illusion. It’s independent of the Red State/Blue State division, which didn’t arise until the Bush/Gore election, a year after the movie’s release.
But the sad truth about America today is that many of us, both “Red” and “Blue,” are having a hard time facing reality — about climate change and so much else.
Perhaps our situation isn’t as dire as that of “The Matrix” — yet. But we must manage without any color pills or Morpheus or Neo. I hope we are up to the task.
