Copyright 1999 Nationwide News Pty Limited THE AUSTRALIAN April 28, 1999, Wednesday SECTION: FULLPAGE, FEATURES; Pg. 40
LENGTH: 1023 words
HEADLINE: Horror of a world not centred on humanity
SOURCE: MATP
BYLINE: McKENZIE WARK

BODY: "WELCOME to the desert of the real." I'm not sure if I heard Laurence Fishburne say that in the movie The Matrix or if I dreamt it.

After walking out of the cinema, I wasn't sure of much at all, really.

The Matrix is one of those rare films that can do that. It's not often someone spends a few million dollars illustrating my favourite bits of esoteric theory. The Matrix is a rare example of the cinema of ontological horror.

The Matrix looks like a science fiction action movie. It has all of the comforting surfaces of a genre piece. Everyone dresses in cool black outfits and wears shades. The future looks exactly like Darlinghurst, Sydney, here and now.

And, of course, there's plenty of biff.

All this is sugar coating. You can't spend that amount of money on an ontological horror movie without adding some sweet excrescences to get 15-yearold boys into the cinema.

And forget about whether Keanu Reeves can act or not. All he has to do is look puzzled by all the weird things going on and he's good enough at that.

Besides, his long skinny body makes a change from all the beefy musclemen who animate the action cinema aesthetic.

At the heart of The Matrix, buried under layers of cinema craft, is a meditation on the difference between essence and appearance. It's a trip into Plato's cave.

Reeves plays a computer hacker called Neo who has some questions about the nature of appearances. The way the world appears to him just doesn't seem right.

He makes contact with Trinity and Morpheus, who, it is a relief to report, are played by capable actors, Carrie-Anne Moss and Fishburne. Morpheus persuades Neo that the world of appearances is not real and that appearances mask an ugly truth. He offers Neo the choice of returning to the world of appearances, or freeing himself from them. Neo chooses to escape from Plato's cave.

At this point, we get the 15 seconds of cinema experience that is worth the whole price of the ticket. Freed from the world of appearances, Neo has to confront the horror of a world not made to order for his point of view.

The Wachowski brothers, who made the film, opt to give this sublime vista of the real a political twist. The world of appearances, which is what the Matrix turns out to be, is a human-centred world not unlike our own. The world of the real, which it masks, is a horror of the complete subordination of the human to a vast inhuman apparatus.

Take away the comforting, self-centred point of view of human subjectivity and the human body appears enmeshed in a vast machinery that does not serve human ends at all.

It's the images that provide the ontological shock, the confrontation with the conceit of a "real" world that doesn't conveniently arrange itself around our point of view.

The story works overtime to explain the feeling of dread, the sudden shock of selflessness, or rather, to explain it away.

Borrowing from the Terminator movies, the story claims that in a war between humans and artificial intelligence, the machines won and now hold humans in subjugation via The Matrix, an entirely false world of appearances.

The narrative consigns the horror safely to the future, but the images suggest otherwise. The Matrix popularises the postmodern critique of humanism. The neurotic insistence on clinging to the conventional perception of the world, as if the real could be properly known from the point of view of the human subject, is the veil that the film would rip from our eyes.

Discard humanism and the sublime horror of a world not made for us, a world in which our existence counts for less than nothing, breaches the defences of the mind, dissolving the false certainties to which we cling.

Neo's liberation from Plato's cave, his escape from the doxa of everyday appearances, starts when he looks in the mirror but the mirror does not quite reflect back his comforting self-image. The mirror cracks, and when Neo touches that crack, the mirror merges with his finger, the boundary between self and other is breached. Neo's trip is about to begin. It's a trip western philosophy has taken many times, from Plato to Heidegger.

A big-budget movie has to be the ultimate in appearances. That one might be devoted to the ancient metaphysical art of the critique of appearances is a remarkable occurrence in screen history.

But the same limitations plague this film as plague the Platonist theory on which it rests. It gets off to a good start with a critique of human-centred appearances, but what it hastily erects is a new world of fantasy and concept behind those appearances. As in Platonism, so too in The Matrix -metaphysics opens the door to ontological horror just long enough to scare us into a more subtle, but no less false, metaphysical world view.

The exploration of what lies beyond the limits of humanism interested a good many thinkers who, like Heidegger, were not satisfied with ripping away the veil of appearances only to put another false construct in its place. Emmanuel Levinas, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Lacan all took the same trip to the desert of the real as Neo, only without the kickboxing.

Like the makers of The Matrix, they discovered the limits to what can be imagined to lie beyond the limits of representation.

Humanism dispensed with the postulate of a God who had made a world in which man was at the centre of all things.

But it left man at the imaginary centre.

Humanism put the human power of reason in God's place. Only now, late in the modern era, not many people are convinced that reason is up to the job.

The options are to go back to theology, or to try to invent a new way of thinking, one that accepts the horror of a world not made for us, indifferent to us and, perhaps, not ultimately knowable to our limited capacity to reason.

The philosophers have wrestled with this problem for some time but it's an interesting and rare moment for it to break surface in a work of popular cinema.

McKenzie Wark is senior lecturer in media studies at Macquarie University. His latest book is Celebrities, Culture and Cyberspace (Pluto).

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