Beyond the finale of seem

Joshua Clover,
The Matrix. (BFI Modern Classics)
London: BFI Publishing. 2004.
ISBN: 1 84457 045 2
95pp
UK£8.99 (pb)
(Review copy supplied by BFI Publishing)

Joshua Clover’s elegant and eloquent study of the Wachowski Brothers’ landmark film The Matrix (USA, 1999) is a welcome addition to the impressive list of titles in this smart series of books from the British Film Institute. To say that The Matrix is a landmark film in the context of a review is, of course, to presume the film’s significance in advance of any argument (and we’re talking about a film of which superlatives have come to be de rigueur). Clover is equally conscious of the seductive power of the adjectival, suggesting that the film is a “significant event in the history of film… that alternatively whispers and bellows its possession of Big Ideas” (13). He is astute enough to know that to ignore such evaluative claims to do with the film’s cultural capital “would be as foolish as to accept them without question” (13). Clover points out early in the text how the film, in the same year of its theatrical release, had already been appropriated by what he refers to as the “cultural theoretical complex” (32); in this case the “Inside the Matrix” international symposium hosted by the Centre for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. While Clover is not entirely dismissive of the intellectual significance of the film, as a film of “ideas great and small” (14), he is not sufficiently moved by its apparent intellectual force to spend too much time engaging with the scholarly response to it. In terms of its dual themes of messianism (Neo as the One) and Gnosticism (the false consciousness of the Matrix), Clover observes that such ideas are “often tossed in with more concern for their cool-appeal than their coherence” (14). He cites such loud and declamatory theoretical motifs as the conspicuous number of Neo’s apartment (101) and his stash of contraband concealed in a gutted copy of Simulacra and Simulation as examples of a “sensation of reference, the satisfaction of catching at least some of the allusions as they pass by, like watching jeopardy or reading Foucault’s Pendulum. And the latter, similarly, provides the sensation of abstract thinking” (14).

It would be a mistake, on the basis of such acerbic critique, to conclude that Clover flippantly disregards the film’s philosophical aspirations and its substantial scholarly reception. There is no question that for Clover the religious and philosophical posturings of the film are clichéd elements of its plot. However in de-emphasising the importance of the metaphysical abstraction that the likes of Slavoj Zizek or Erik Davis have seen in the film, Clover persuasively argues for a broader, speculative analysis that asks different questions of it. Dallying for too long with The Matrix‘s sci-fi commonplaces (man versus machine, reality as hoax) distracts us from what he regards as the more important issue of regarding the film as a “total object, as a cultural product of its time and place” (14). The question that Clover asks, then, is not “what is the Matrix”, but what is The Matrix. This is a difference that makes a difference and it constitutes the great strength of this book.

Clover traces a cultural trope in certain kinds of sci-fi cinema in the latter half of the 1990s. The Matrix was one of a number of films, including The Truman Show (USA, 1998), Dark City (USA, 1998) and The Thirteenth Floor (Germany/USA, 1999) which constitutes a “microgenre” of sorts (8), which Clover calls “The Edge of the Construct”. This apt formulation refers to pivotal, revelatory moments in each of these films when the central character comes to the realisation that the seemliness of things and reality do not cohere; what was reliably thought to be reality is nothing more than simulation, the fabrication of an unseen demiurge’s will to power. For Clover the identification of the commonalities in these films with questions of technological simulation signals the first of his two main concerns with The Matrix‘s contemporaneity, its reflection of its own social, historical and economical moment in time.

Clover’s first excursion into the present involves an allegorical reading of the film. The allegorical dimension of The Matrix, as a futuristic sci-fi interpretation of the present, is hinted at in Morpheus’ admonition to Neo early in the film: “You believe it’s the year 1999 when in fact it’s closer to 2199”. For Clover, the scenes depicting Neo in his non-hacker persona as the straight-laced Mr Anderson are among the most telling in the film in this respect. Clover’s depiction of Thomas Anderson as a “man without qualities” (23), all bland surface and no depth, locates him as one of a hive of self-similar data-workers in the honeycomb-like structure of cubicles in the offices of Metacortex. Clover’s incisive account of Keanu Reeves’ performance initially appears to be yet another caricature of the actor as wicker man: wooden and ripe for burning. However it is an inspiring account of how his performance is brilliantly apt for the digital projection of a human, in which he must “appear as appearance itself” (22), as a “not-quite-human” (21). For Clover, such scenes implicate the audience of The Matrix in the Matrix itself, presenting it with its first glimpse of the true conditions of an encompassing 1999 reality that they, like Neo, have become oblivious to:

The Matrix isn’t just a totem of the era, but its ultimate object: massively capitalised, wickedly digitised convergence of industry and desire. When the go-go tech workers of 1999 drank up The Matrix in their few moments of downtime, they were consuming their own ecstatic achievements […] The rest of the time, the film’s audience, when they weren’t an audience, laboured more than ever. The new economy had shrugged off the eight-hour day like an old husk. The border between work and non-work went with it (72-73).

In other words, the blunt quotidian bondage of the information worker is for Clover the world as it is in the New Economy of 1990s America. The film’s dystopian vision of enslaved humans blinded by the Matrix to the actual conditions of their lives is the correlative of the computer programmer’s subjugation to a dominant force, in this case the information boom with its promise of dot.com utopia: “If the iconic image of the time was the programmer coding for 26 hours and nodding under the workstation, its flip side was the itinerant data temp, hustling a week here and a project there, wherever some start-up needed an IPO crash crew” (73). Clover’s unravelling of the allegorical dimension of the film in this respect is inventive and compelling, but in the end unsatisfying. It is insular in its view of the data worker as being exclusively American, as well as the internet and the information economy as phenomena that don’t seem to have made it past the West Coast of the United States: “If I haven’t made it clear, the film isn’t just about 1999 but about America, the one we entered after leaving the cinema” (41). Clover’s elision of the world of the Matrix and The Matrix is a fascinating reading of the film, but one that stretches credibility as a culturally embedded allegory of the information age or cautionary sign of the times: “We must have suspected that there was no exit, that we might already be inside something from which we might not be able to escape” (41).

Clover is more convincing when dealing with the film as a kind of index of the 90s obsession with all things digital. A “digital entertainment about being digital” (19), The Matrix is for Clover a film about the omnipresence of digital media, from visual effects to the audiovisual language of the video game paradigm. In the context of the latter, he persuasively describes the features of game-play that the film incorporates, from its fighting sequences and shoot-em up action, to its preoccupation with loading and training programs and overall deployment of digital effects as mise en scène. As a homage to, as much as an appropriation of video game aesthetics, The Matrix dramatically evidences how cinema had effectively mastered the convergence of film and interactive media, pushing the boundaries of how far a film can resemble a videogame, and yet still be a film (26). The film’s stunning array of visual effects, including the now mythic “bullet time photography”, immerses the audience ever more deeply into its world as an “all-encompassing spectacle” (40). In his discussion of the concept of immersion, arguably the most primary colour in the digital palette, Clover offers us a way of thinking about the film not as allegory, but as a performance of culture in the age of digital simulation. It is here that his persistent elision of the Matrix and The Matrix really packs a critical punch:

… the special effects cannot be extricated from the narrative, from the movie’s worldview. Indeed, it might be argued that, taken in sum, the effects are the worldview: there is a digital confabulation. It is thrilling, and filled with visual pleasure, and designed to surround one’s consciousness utterly … It becomes difficult to discern whether this forms a description of audience and film, or of Neo and the Matrix (28).

In a film dominated by the dread of the knowledge of complete immersion, Clover identifies its opposite in the audience’s desire for “perfectable immersion” (40) – a dialectic understood only too well by the treacherous Cypher, who sells out the human rebellion for the amnesiac pleasures of immersion, such as the taste of steak without the knowledge that it is simulation: “I don’t want to remember nothing. Nothing”. This interplay between being in and outside the Matrix, forgetful of, or acutely attentive to its simulation, is for Clover one of the film’s great creative achievements:

The endless confusion of insides and outsides lets us fall quite far into the story. It also allows the story to flow in a peristaltic action out to the world beyond the theatre door. Mediating relentlessly between the present and the future, analog and digital, The Matrix could lay claim to being the most immersive movie ever made; it was without question the movie most haunted by the fear of immersion (29).

At a time when many of the themes of postmodernism had been thoroughly digested by cinema, it is perhaps fitting that a film that samples so many of its ideas should be remembered as an index of that very process of appropriation.

I have deliberately avoided Clover’s discussion of bullet time. A review shouldn’t give everything away: discovery must remain one of the great pleasures of reading. Suffice to say, when you read this fine study your understanding of the contribution of bullet time effects to the film will be heightened, as will your appreciation of the film as a whole. As Clover observes in this respect, the dodging of bullets does not require us to “suspend our disbelief so much as to understand the terms by which these episodes are believable” (18). Welcome to the real world.

Darren Tofts
Swinburne University, Australia.
Created on: Tuesday, 19 July 2005 | Last Updated: 19-Jul-05