Current mood:	thoughtful
Entry tags:	btvs, movies, philosophical musings

Taking the red pill
So for years now people have been telling me to see "The Matrix" and the reason I haven't is... I don't even know the reason I haven't, except that for someone who claims to like movies I actually see very few of them. I'm either too cheap to spend the 9 bucks at the theater or find them too distracting on home video when I'm busy thinking Deep Thoughts.

But I've been doing this netflix thing, mostly to catch up on a lot of cable TV shows I never get to watch because I'm too cheap to spring for anything other than basic cable (are we sensing a money theme here? I'm just poor!)

So, OK, I rented "The Matrix" because Gloria and I want to go see The Matrix II and we need to see The Matrix I first, but of course, Alice invited herself over on our movie night, so I didn't bring The Matrix with me to Gloria's house because I wanted to catch up with Alice and her life, and as a result we three ended up watching an Andrew Lloyd Webber video that was so awful it turned me into Masqueradus and sent me on a murderous killing spree across Sunnydale. Er--I mean San Francisco.

So I watched "The Matrix" last night instead. Good thing about netflix? No due dates on DVDs. Keep'm for a week. Hell, keep'm for two weeks. Keep'm 'til you actually get around to watching the video, which for me, can be months.



Where was I? Oh, yeah. The Matrix. I expected, given the number of respected people (ATPo board posters) who have been telling me to "see this movie!" that I would have liked it more than I actually did. It started out with intriguing promise. You knew exactly where it was going--Neo's world isn't real--but that was cool. I was ready to see what they would do with that, especially after Morpheus says to him, "You've felt it your entire life. That there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind."

Then he wakes up in that vat in the "real world" and it's so chilling!

After that, the movie falls into that familiar ennui-filled post-apocalyptic sci-fi stuff that is broken only by action!packed moments of gratuitous violence.

The basic premise behind the future world was incredibly lame--machines harvesting people for energy? Puh-lease. There are much more efficient ways to create energy. This was something someone made up at the last minute to have an excuse to keep humans locked up in virtual reality.

And the idea of the "Matrix" itself is, of course, totally derivative, a contemporary spin on a standard brain-teaser that's been around since the 17th century--"just because we can sense things with our five senses, does that make them real?" BtVS' "Normal Again" did a better job of driving home the genuine philosophical dilemma and existential horror of the good ol' empiricist "problem of the external world".

The whole thing with the oracle was a plot device that didn't fit into the larger metaphysics established in the world of the movie. I suppose it was meant to add a spiritual level to the movie, but I didn't buy that a mundane world like that, built on machinery and computers, had a place for prophecy and destiny at a spiritual level. Maybe if they'd made more of it--if they'd try to push the idea that humans living their real lives were capable of higher spiritual attainment than machines and the machine-generated world could, I would have seen it having at least metaphorical importance in the story. As it was, it felt tacked on. Plot-devicy.

The one genuine truth to come away with from this movie is the truth of the absurdity of our socially constructed reality. When I was a young teen, I had this fantasy. And in the fantasy, I'm living my life, when one day, I suddenly fall down and find myself looking back up at my life as if it's a play on a stage. Suddenly I realize that everyone around me, including myself, is an actor, playing a role. Suddenly I don't know what's real, what's genuine. What's "really me" or "really you" and what's us doing what we think we're "supposed to be doing".

You see, unlike "The Matrix" or even the (apparent) cause of Buffy's reality-switch in "Normal Again", there is no conspiracy of machines or demons or "Other"'s creating a false reality for us. We do it to ourselves. We create social rules and mores, roles and social constructs for each other, and we create them as individuals for ourselves. And we do it because we're programmed by nature and nurture to have this deep need for a "reality" to live in.

That's why "Normal Again" did this philosophical dilemma better than "The Matrix". Because when Cypher says he wishes he'd taken the blue pill, you know the He Knows he's accepting a lie. He Wants to live a lie, and it's made quite clear in the universe of the movie that the world create by the machines is the false world. Buffy is never quite sure which world is the real world, and you know both worlds--the world of the Sunnydale super hero, and the world of the asylum--they are both worlds that are in some sense products of her mind, her needs, her conflicted life. Not for Cypher. There is a real world, and a fake world in the absolute metaphysical sense, and neither is a product of his needs and wants, he simply chooses one over the other due to his needs and wants.

Buffy, on the other hand, has "created" both of those realities through her choices and needs. The demon in the episode merely makes them come alive for her through magic. And in the end, when Buffy makes a choice between them, it is not a choice between which is "more real" in an absolute metaphysical sense, but which is more real to her as an individual choosing the way she wants to live, choosing which way she wants to think about herself.

In my teen-aged fantasy, I imagined myself superior to those around me because I fell off the stage of life and saw it in all its absurdity. I could see "reality" on a different level than those around me. Unlike them, I didn't buy into the necessity of the social constructs. I was Neo, choosing the red pill. Yeah, me.

Now I understand it's a little more complicated than that. Taking the red pill, seeing the basic non-necessity (god, I've totally lost my philosophical vocabulary. I know there's a better word for tha) of the way the world is structured is only the first step. If there's a "higher reality"--a more "real" world beyond the one we imagine around us--who knows if we are even capable of seeing it for what it is? We may just have to built a new construct to live in. And that demands choices.

Or if, like Morpheus and his gang, we do find a "more real" world, we still have to live in it, build in it, create it. Cypher was unhappy in the "real world" because it was all fighting, a daily grind of bad food and fear of being caught. Was that "necessary"? Could they have built a better life for themselves in the "real world" than they did?

In so many ways, reality is a choice. So easy to say. But not easy to put into practice. Most of us just end up taking the blue pill.