Thoughts
on the film "The Matrix"
by Ludwig Janus
Correspondence to: Dr. Ludwig Janus, Köpfelweg 52,
D-69118 Heidelberg, Germany.
Introduction
The
film "The Matrix" opened in the American cinemas at
Easter 1999. It was directed by Larry and Andy Wachowski and
stars Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss and
Hugo Weaving. It was one of the most successful films of the
years and was awarded four Oscars i n the categories film editing,
visual effects, sound and sound effects editing.
The film is about the inner individuation of a young man who
leads a double life: Thomas Anderson working for a large software
company by day, and a criminal hacker under the name of Neo
by night. He finds out through his computer about a mysterious
program called Matrix and a certain Morpheus, who can explain
this matrix to him. As a result of his contact with the mysterious
Morpheus, he also starts being pursued by very violent agents,
who turn out to be working for the Matrix system of rule which
governs not only the world, but also reality. These agents are
fighting against the rebel Morpheus and his group, who have
risen against this system of rule. They try to win him over,
and when this doesn’t succeed, they insert a mini-transmitter
in the form of a scorpion into his navel. This all just seems
like a bad dream. However, Morpheus and his envoy Trinity make
contact with him again, convince him to join them, take the
bug out of his navel and take him to Morpheus’ base, the
submarine Nebuchadnezzar. There, Morpheus explains to him that
the entire world as we know it is an illusion, a computer program
that merely leads people into believing that it is reality.
Humans are therefore caught in the Matrix with no will of their
own, slaves of a foreign power of intelligent machines. Neo
discovers from Morpheus that he is "the One" who can
fight against the Matrix if only he wants to. He has to make
the decision: If he takes the blue pill, it will take him back
to his previous life and everything will remain as it was before
for him; if he takes the red pill, he will learn the truth and
enter a new world. Neo takes the red pill.
After that, the first task is to locate him in the Matrix system.
The humans are fetal beings bred in huge fields in eggcup-like
containers so that the intelligent machines that rule the Matrix
and hence the world can feed on their biological energy. Morpheus
and his group locate Neo’s fetus-like body in one of these
containers and free him from the painful wiring that has been
inserted into his body. After he has been released from this
fixation symbolising the uterus, a sinister process of birth
begins: He slips through passages, is thrown back and forth
and almost drowns before he is finally grabbed and pulled into
the submarine again. He is now in the real world of the submarine
and is no longer his own dream, as he was before.
Morpheus explains to him the background to the dynamics of the
Matrix world. At the beginning of the second millennium, humans
invented hyperintelligent beings who turned against the humans
and tried to seize power, but were dependent on solar energy.
The humans fought back by altering the bioelectricity of the
atmosphere, thereby producing constant storms and clouds, blocking
out the sunlight. The machines’ response was to take control
of the humans, to keep them in the breeding grounds as sources
of energy and to keep them quiet by maintaining a computer-generated
illusion of life around the year 1999. The earth itself is a
destroyed desert without any forms of life. All that remains
are the breeding grounds and the computers that rule the Matrix
on the one hand and on the other Morpheus and his group in their
submarine, which mainly operates in the sewers of huge ghost
towns, and a mysterious human settlement called Zion, where
a group of remaining humans have survived. Their organisation
also depends on a central computer. Morpheus is the only one
who knows the core codes. One of the goals of the Matrix agents
is to catch Morpheus and to force him to tell them the core
codes, which would allow them to destroy Zion. The rule of the
Matrix would then be complete.
Morpheus is convinced that Neo is the One (an anagram of Neo)
who can overcome the rule of the Matrix. A complicated training
programme has been designed to this end, consisting mainly in
Chinese martial arts. A further step is the ability to take
giant leaps across terrifying abysses. The idea is therefore
to develop superhuman powers or to develop his potential so
that he is up to doing battle with the agents.
After he has completed this training programme, Neo is taken
to a woman called Oracle, who has the power to identify the
fate of the individuals in the group. Oracle is a kind of mummy
figure in her kitchen baking biscuits, but she also radiates
a great deal of enigmatic femininity. She has prophetic powers
and primeval maternal knowledge. She tells Neo that he is not
the One, but Morpheus is so convinced he is that he sacrifices
himself for Neo. It is in Neo’s power to prevent him from
doing so or to save him. This gives Neo the motivation to develop
his powers to the full.
The opportunity to do so arises immediately, as there is a renegade
in the group called Cypher, a kind of Judas or Lucifer who betrays
the group, in particular Morpheus, to the Matrix agents. The
agents are thus able to locate Morpheus and his group in a large
building and deploy police units to capture Morpheus and the
group. It seems at first as if they can escape through gaps
between the walls for the sewage pipes, but the group is discovered
there too and Morpheus is overpowered, while the rest of the
group, in particular Neo and Trinity, are able to escape. The
traitor Cypher, who has taken over command in Nebuchadnezzar,
is finally able to be overpowered by a seriously injured member
of the crew. However, Morpheus is in the agents’ power,
is interrogated by them and is given an injection to weaken
him and make him reveal the core codes of Zion. The only option
for the group in Nebuchadnezzar is to kill Morpheus’ body,
which is in Nebuchadnezzar while his cerebral identity in the
virtual Matrix world is in the hands of the agents. If his body
in Nebuchadnezzar were to be killed, Morpheus would also cease
to exist in the virtual world and would not be able to give
away the core codes.
The alternative would be to rescue Morpheus from the skyscraper
in the virtual Matrix world, the agents’ central base.
However, this base is heavily policed. Nevertheless, Neo decides
to take on this adventurous rescue mission with the assistance
of Trinity. Heavily armed, they overpower the guards in the
entrance hall and on the roof of the building and hijack a helicopter
to get to the storey of the building where Morpheus is being
interrogated by the agents in an office. They open fire on these
agents and manage to free Morpheus. Morpheus and Trinity manage
to get back to Nebuchadnezzar, while Neo has to deal with Chief
Agent Smith, who is in pursuit. The fight against Smith in an
underground station becomes the central battle of the film.
Neo manages to centre himself in his true self as it were and
to overcome fear and terror, which puts him in a better position
than the agent. He manages to overpower the agent by using his
inner force and to make the agent explode. At one stage of the
fight, Neo appears to already be dead, but is revived by Trinity’s
love and in the end is able to overpower his opponent. The initial
split personality of Thomas Anderson and Neo is thus overcome,
and he now has the coherent personality of Neo.
"The
Matrix" as an Individuation Process
"The
Matrix" can be interpreted at various different levels:
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"The Matrix" as the myth of the feelings of reality
and identity of the Internet generation
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"The Matrix" as a film discussing the philosophical
question of what is real in the world of virtual realities
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"The Matrix" as a film portraying Christian ideas
of salvation and Buddhist/Chinese methods of self-orientation
in the cyberworld
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"The Matrix" as a mystical initiation into the scenery
of special effects
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"The Matrix" as a shaman’s journey
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"The Matrix" as a fairy-tale amid the harsh realities
of the modern finance and hi-tech world or
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"The Matrix" as a parable of modern depersonalisation
and disintegration of the ego in the face of the overwhelming
confusion of complex, mechanised social dominance
The
film can be interpreted from all these viewpoints, and that
is the strength of the film, together with the fact that, like
every authentic work of art, it provides an authentic, original
answer to the questions and emotional challenges of an age through
the power of creative fantasy. The range of possibilities offered
by film as a medium in this context is quite remarkable, which
is why it now plays such a dominant role as an artistic medium.
With their carefree Californian attitude, the Wachowski brothers
avail themselves of the resources of mythologemes, philosophemes
and religious ideas of salvation from East and West to create
a terrific psychomix. The specific idea for the Matrix world
was derived from science fiction literature: The conceptual
world of the novels of Philipp Dick, the Hardboiled comic by
Geof Darrow and the Shadowrun role play, which features a matrix
world. In terms of style and aesthetics, the Japanese Manga
comics are no doubt significant. The basic structure of the
story follows that of the hero’s journey presented by Joseph
Campbell in Hero with a Thousand Faces and given to the Hollywood
directors by Christopher Vogler as a kind of recipe for writing
the script and directing the film. The basic outline of the
hero’s journey which all myths and fairy-tales with initiations
follow is intelligently transposed into cyberspace by the Wachowski
brothers.
I would now like to outline my understanding of the film along
the lines of the individuation process of a young man progressing
from a state of conflictual disintegration to higher degree
of personal integrity. In the course of the plot, the initial
discrepancies between his life as a software programmer and
his life as a hacker prove to be the expression of extreme disintegration
in his sense of existence, which explains the intensity and
radical nature of his individuation process. His ambivalent
apparent pseudo-conformity begins to crumble when his immediate
manager says to him that it seems as if he thinks he is someone
special and that he is not complying with the company’s
rules. If that doesn’t change, the manager says, he’ll
have to go. As a result of this social verdict, the pseudo-conformity
he has achieved as an adult begins to crumble and he has to
go through puberty again as it were, because the ambivalent
identity he has achieved proves not to be socially viable.
The subsequent events are the portrayal of a regressive individuation
trance that begins with his sense of reality beginning to crumble
and at the same time being caught up by the inner call of a
paternal imago, a father who believes in him and his future.
As Morpheus is the son of the night, he also has the dual male/female
dimension of archaic parental imagoes. This belief by the father
in his son or by parents in their child and his or her future
is the force that enables constructive individuation to take
place despite all the confusions and contradictions of the world
and of our being in the world. This force is conveyed by the
imago of Trinity, the holy trinity, whereby the Holy Ghost has
female qualities here in the sense of an anima. She brings the
call and the message from Morpheus to the prospective hero Neo.
The latter is thus at the same time confronted with his disintegrated
assertiveness or aggression, with which he is projectively faced
in the form of the agents. Neo’s disintegrated assertiveness
or aggression is the reason why he was not able to resolve the
ambivalence in his social life between his existence as a software
programmer and as a hacker in a socially mediated way. The more
dominant and threatening the invasion of the destructive tendencies
projectively externalised in the form of the agents, the more
important the contact with Morpheus and his confidence in him
as the saviour of the world becomes, whereby this is the portrayal
of the collapse of a personal/social world through failure in
his job shown against the backdrop of the collapse of the entire
world and its deliverance. Morpheus thus stands for the individual’s
primeval vitality and self-affirmation attached to the father
or the parents, portrayed projectively in the father’s
belief in his son or the parents’ belief in their child.
As a result of Morpheus’ belief in him, he finds a niche
for self-contemplation after the collapse of his ambivalent
identity. Morpheus is thus a kind of self-analytical authority
in that he makes primeval knowledge accessible again that has
been lost sight of as a result of disastrous experiences and
creates a space to enable this self-contemplation on the conditions
of the individual’s own existence. This occurs in the film
in the form of explanations given by Morpheus: The dream-like
blindness in the human condition in the form of an apparently
"normal reality" is the expression of a disastrous
primeval conflict or struggle in the past between humans and
superior intelligent machines that has led to the actual core
state of being alive/ being fixed in a kind of uterine fixation
dependent on superior intelligent machines. Here, an individual
problem is being examined at the social level. Humans find solutions
to social emergencies, e.g. socialism, or even a technical innovation
that seems to "intelligently" overcome the traumatic
situation of social or economic need, but at the price of shifting
their dependency onto the system, which is reflected in, or
amounts to, a prenatal fixation. Due to the ephemeral nature
of our age and the options open to us with regard to information,
we now have an eye for how such systems of dependency arise
and also how they collapse.
However, in the case of the hero, we are not dealing with a
social problem, but the solution of an individual problem reflected
in a social conflict or a social disaster. This disaster is
only accessible to the film implicitly in the projection onto
the social conflict, and only its consequences are described.
However, the symbolic description allows real events in the
hero’s development to be unravelled which substantiate
his central weakness in a fetal fixation, preventing him from
constructively asserting himself in the contradictions of the
social world.
I see the central weakness of his core self as being derived
from birth by caesarean section and subsequent care in an incubator,
which is experienced by the child as violent and threatening.
The predominance of a technicalised birth does not allow the
child to find its emotional home in a postnatal relationship,
but instead leads in his or her imagination to an imprisonment
in the security of prenatal containers. However, this security
is distorted by the distressing experiences in the incubator
that results from being attached to various tubes and recording
instruments, as used to be customary practice particularly in
intensive obstetric care. In order to enable them to bear the
deprivation in the incubator, the children were "mildly"
sedated. The dazed state is repeatedly interrupted by a number
of invasive measures, particularly by blood samples being taken
to be tested. The child finds itself in a distressing dazed
state confronted with an overpowering, dehumanised mechanical
reality. The positive relationship to Morpheus, the intense
belief in Neo and his potential overcome the negative binding
forces, release the uterine fixation and allow a kind of postnatal
process to take place such that he is subsequently really born
and is released in the first step from the projective imprisonment
in a matrix symbolising the uterus.
The dependency that continues to exist is symbolised by the
imprisonment of the rest of the world in the Matrix existence.
Further liberating steps require the self-constitution to be
further strengthened. This takes place through Asian martial
arts designed to strengthen the hero and for him to develop
his capacity for movement and action centred in the self. In
developmental psychology terms, the aim is to use these ritual
martial arts to subsequently develop the motility of the individual
as an infant and as a young child which has been weakened by
premature birth and hence to fully realise his physical potential.
A sense of physical force and of being centred allows a life
of potential for aggressive conflict. Here, the giant leap across
abysses symbolise the precarious leap from dependency to one’s
own identity. Only then is the individual able to contemplate
his or her own projects in life.
This occurs during the meeting with the mother figure Oracle.
In developmental psychology terms, this is about finding oneself
in the emotional force field of the relationship with the mother,
who is both a specific mother figure and a mythical figure.
Just as the maternal dimension of the Matrix (womb) became the
individual’s paralysing fate as a result of the disastrous
conditions of birth, the positive mythological mother figure
Oracle becomes a source of self-awareness. Her psychological
wisdom motivates Neo to avail himself of all his energy to "save"
the father figure Morpheus, to whom he partly owes his individuation.
When Morpheus is betrayed by Cypher and is captured by the Matrix
agents, this presents a new challenge and a test for Neo’s
motivation. In order to free Morpheus, he mobilises the resources
of his ego and achieves a capacity for action that makes him
a match for the Matrix agents, which proves the increasing coherence
of his ego. In dangerous situations, he no longer experiences
projective fear, as a result of which he can only save himself
by escaping, but instead can now take up battle with the agents.
He manages to rescue Morpheus, and all Neo now has to do is
to prove his superiority and the new identity he has taken on
in a final battle with Agent Smith. At first, it looks as if
he is going to be beaten and he already seems to be dead. This
battle takes place in virtual reality; Neo’s real body
is lying in a kind of trance in Nebuchadnezzar. There, Trinity
follows what is happening and in the moment of crisis expresses
her love for him by kissing him, thus following a prophecy made
by Oracle that the man she falls in love with will be the One
who can save the world. Her love revives Neo, and he regains
all his energy and presence to such an extent that he loses
all fear, which can be seen by the fact that he can stop the
bullets and they bounce off his hand held up in defence without
causing any harm and fall to the ground. At this moment, he
is able to find his way in his thoughts into the projection
of his aggression, the agent, and hence to cancel out its effect.
He is able to identify with his own assertiveness and his aggressive
potential without fear, and in doing so he also frees himself
from the dominance of the Matrix, which also takes effect for
the group.
Parallel to the virtual final battle, the Matrix attacks Nebuchadnezzar
using a kind of killer spider, which is sawed up using laser
saws. I presume that the experience of caesarean section during
which the womb is cut open is repeated here. Since the final
battle is won, this recapitulation in Nebuchadnezzar of birth
by caesarean section is no longer an unprocessed and centrally
weakening experience of being overwhelmed, as it was in the
original situation, but instead becomes an experience of liberation
and of retaining inner vital consistency in the face of the
predominance of the machines. The killer spiders lose their
effect.
The fact that technology- and computer-related elements are
dominant in the film distracts us from the fact that it is ultimately
about issues of personal individuation under the given conditions
of life and not a large-scale social fight for survival between
humans and machines. This large-scale social conflict is the
backdrop for the projective portrayal of Neo’s actual individuation
process.
The
Position of the Matrix in the Psychohistorical Individuation
Process
It
is not only individuals who go through several stages of individuation
in the course of their life, of which adolescence and mid-life
crises are particularly pertinent examples; societies as a whole
also go through a psychohistorical process of development and
individuation of the identity of their members. Here, the change
in identity that takes place in the Enlightenment is particularly
significant for our sense of identity. Whereas in the religious
world view of the Middle Ages and the early Modern Age the actual
core of personality was externalised in the experience of the
trinity of God the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost and their
representatives on earth, the Pope and the Emperor, in which
social and individual identity was anchored, the Enlightenment
marked the beginning of a shift in the way personality was organised
in the sense that, as Schiller put it, the individual sought
his reason for being in himself. This was associated with the
hope that orderly forms of life could be developed through reason.
Psychoanalysis, modern art and the disaster of the two world
wars showed that there are irrational forces at work deep within
us that are as profound as the religious forces that used to
be projected and that have to be overcome within us.
Psychoanalysis initially sought to explain this by means of
a phylogenetically determined castration complex and then in
an innate "death instinct", which was eternally struggling
with an urge for union. The recognition of the effect of prenatal
and perinatal experiences and traumas, as described by Rank
and Graber, opened up new horizons to explain the dimension
of magical and mythical feelings of the self and the world.
Findings in psychotherapeutic settings of a preverbal nature,
such as body therapy, LSD therapy, hypnotherapy, regression
therapy etc., supported this view.
Sloterdijk recently summarised the relevant findings following
the ideas of the psychohistorian Lloyd DeMause from a philosophical
point of view, compressed into Chap.8 of his work Sphären
I ("Spheres I"), which deals with the social presence
of prenatal experience. Here, he shows in particular that the
theology of the Holy Trinity is ultimately a psychology of the
prenatal mother-placenta-child relationship. This primeval relationship
constitutes the primeval three-in-one structure of the self,
which serves in a projectively externalised form as a point
of reference in the social space. The threefold structure is
repeated in the relationship between the Father, the Son and
the believer, an earlier form of which already existed in Ancient
Egypt in the relationship between Horus, the Pharaoh and the
people with its many different symbolic manifestations.
In connection with the psychohistorical position of the Matrix,
it is relevant that the decline of religious projections burdens
each individual with archaic conflicts between the ego and the
self, which were formerly dealt with projectively in the rituals
of the church. The individual thus seemed to be relieved of
a burden, but on the other hand had to endure the primeval conflicts
in archaic enactments of war. The news that God was dead only
reached the educated classes at first, but has increasingly
become social reality over the past decades. In this situation,
archaic primeval conflicts that can no longer be dealt with
in the projective space provided by the church are thus examined,
inter alia, through the medium of modern films. A striking example
of this is "The Matrix", which takes the example of
Thomas Anderson / Neo to examine the possibility of emotional
individuation in the sphere of influence of multinationals and
the Internet. It appears that the primeval force of human self-constitution,
which all rituals, fairy-tales and myths always contain in the
same form, can be realised even under the modern conditions
of a pluralistic society that put a strain on identity and of
technical possibilities that jeopardise emotional integrity.
The characteristic style of the film follows the hero’s
journey to the hereafter as elaborated by C.G. Jung and illustrated
by Campbell in his Hero with a Thousand Faces using many examples
of myths. Rank had already developed the perinatal aspects of
these heroic myths in 1909 in his Der Mythos von der Geburt
des Helden ("The Myth of the Birth of the Hero").
The fascinating, powerful potential of human identity and individuation
is no longer projected into the religious sphere and the Chosen
One is no longer sought in heavenly realms, but is instead the
individual him- or herself in the charisma of his or her own
primary potential. This potential can be referred to as primary
narcissistic potential as defined by Freud or as the possibility
of having a will of one’s own, as Rank described it in
his psychology of the will. This is particularly instructive
with respect to the Matrix insofar as, due to the overwhelming
state of dependency, the individual’s own will can initially
only manifest itself in negative forms, in this case Neo’s
activities as a hacker. In this self-will, which can initially
only be negative, lies the core of constructive creativity,
as later realised in the new Neo. Whereas Freud primarily emphasised
the aspect of "paternal protection", i.e. the significance
of Morpheus in the film for constructive individuation, Rank
focused on the self-will of the son. As the film shows, both
can only lead to constructive individuation by interacting with
one another, as the archaic knowledge contained in all myths
and religions ultimately tells us.
The message of the film about the opportunities and the happiness
derived from an integrated identity in a reality full of contradictions
is very similar to the message of the currently much cited Harry
Potter, which is also that even the most difficult early traumas
can be overcome using the individual’s very own charisma
of his or her identity if given even a minimum amount of support.
Concluding
Remarks
In
view of the perfection of its technical effects and the cultural
mixture of mythical elements from all over the world, "The
Matrix" is a typical product of Hollywood and of the Californian
culture of internationality, which uses and combines highly
specific cultural traditions in a typically American pragmatic
manner focusing on psychological special effects. However, "The
Matrix" is also an authentic work of art in that it is
a film which, in the way the script is written and in the imagination
shown in the film, it constitutes the Wachowski brothers’
genuine response to issues of identity that are typical of our
age and provides the youth of today with powerful mythologemes
on the journey of identity in the way they choose to live. I
assume they are working through their own experiences of prenatal
and perinatal trauma, which have given them a sense of insecurity
in terms of the nature of their reality. In interviews, they
have talked about their basic doubts about what is real. According
to their brief biographical notes, little is known about them
apart from that.
In the opening credits of the DVD version, they appear as elf-like
American boys whose playful nonchalance gives them an air of
extreme intelligence and alertness, constantly on the move and
fidgeting. One of them is constantly stroking his cheek with
forceful rubbing movements, while the other clasps his leg as
if rummaging for something. This gives the impression that they
are countering or compensating for a feeling of depersonalisation
by touching themselves. This would be consistent with the impression
of early experiences of depersonalisation given by the whole
film. There is no nature, nothing cosy in the film; the prevailing
atmosphere is one of intense depersonalisation and coldness.
Only a very few scenes show any intimate personal contact, and
such contact is seen more in jokes. Alienation and vulnerability
are the prevailing features, which is typical after a premature
birth. As we know from observations made by the parents of premature
babies, children who have been in an incubator find it difficult
being touched and having contact with people for a long time
afterwards. Under favourable conditions, this can be integrated,
but under unfavourable conditions, a sense of alienation or
of glass remains as a relic of the experience in the incubator.
In situations of crisis, these early experiences of deprivation
then resurface and may at the same time be a vehicle to face
up to real individuation and to accept the challenge it poses.
Experiencing invasive techniques at the beginning of life may
create a particular awareness for the emotional and mythical
dimension of technology. Perhaps it is ultimately not really
important whether one or both of the Wachowski brothers were
born prematurely or whether they only assimilated the ubiquitous
images in the media of invasive, technicalised birth in their
mythopoetic imagination. They manage at any rate to create mythologemes
for present-day individuation.
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