the matrix explained
I found it to be a good read!
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Where did the Wachowski's get their source material?
Here are some ideas on how the storyline weaves in
mythology - it might help you understand the plot:
About the year 2199 machines gained artificial
intelligence and humans freaked out and went to war.
The machines used solar power, so humans scorched the
sky in a nuclear winter, and the machines started
enslaving humans and drawing off their heat for power.
Now they create test tube babies, grow humans in
fields and plug them into the Matrix pods when they're
children, feeding them on the liquified remains of
those who die. The Matrix was designed to provide a
mental stimulus for the human bodies. The word Matrix
is derived from the Latin word for "womb", which is
itself derived from the Latin word for "mother", which
is "mater".
The First Matrix was designed as a perfect utopia but
without choices. Humans did not accept it as real so
they just kept waking up in their pods or dying. It
was a disaster. So the Matrix was rebooted and
redesigned to reflect human civilization in 1999,
complete with freedom for people to do wrong things.
Each person lived out their life in the Matrix
program, acting and being acted upon. Free choice
meant some people were good, others were bad, and
these interactions created a perfect replica of
reality. 99% of people accepted the program because of
free agency. But 1% didn't, which is where the
Architect had a problem to solve.
The Architect program is pure mathematics - left brain
- order. The Oracle program is pure intuition - right
brain - chaos. It was the Oracle that suggested the
Architect redesign the Matrix to give humans free
agency. Since humans were to have choices, so must the
programs sent to watch over them, so they could adapt
to the variances created by choice, and keep things in
check.
To help the Oracle program understand human intuition
even better, and thus help the Architect reduce the 1%
rejection factor, the Oracle was to encourage people
who sought enlightenment. She would prompt them with
cryptic questions designed to draw out their free
thinking. When they needed a special nudge, she would
upgrade their ability to think and do with an
enhancement code they would take in through the mouth;
a cookie, some candy, etc.
In the Second Matrix a person responded to this
stimulus and became The One. They were younger than
11, and childlike in their view of love, right and
wrong. In the trilogy we learn that people older than
11 seldom adjust to the non-Matrix reality because
they are too fixed in their ways. Enhanced with
upgraded abilities The One learned of the truth about
the human condition and hacked into the program to
wake people up. These kids banded together and used
what remained of real world human technology to mount
a resistance against the machines, hence the
hovercraft, weapons, walkers, etc. This gear was found
on the surface and transported down to Zion in a time
before the machines had Sentinels patrolling. When the
machines realized the underground pipes and passages
were being used as transport conduits by their
enemies, they started sending out the Sentinels, but
by then Zion was operational as a command centre and
the kids had grown into adults.
The One of the Second Matrix eventually had enough
experiences for a download of their knowledge into the
Source to provide the Architect with new data to
reduce the dropout rate of people plugged in. They
were taken to the Architect's white room, and given
the choice: walk through the Left Door to upgrade the
Source with new data as was always intended, or walk
through the Right Door back into the Matrix. If they
chose the Right Door, the Matrix would be shut down
while The One was inside, killing them and everyone
else, and the Sentinels would wipe out the people in
Zion. If they chose the Left Door, the Matrix program
would get enhanced to better deal with human intuition
and the resulting causality, and The One would be
returned to the real world with his special program
deleted (no longer The One) to select 16 women and 7
other men to repopulate Zion while anyone not chosen
would be killed off by the Sentinels. This core group
would then be in place to receive anyone else who
dropped out of the Matrix program - which would happen
because the Oracle program would continue to seek out
and encourage kids to be The One, so the machines
could further investigate human choice, intuition and
causality.
Reboot, and in comes the Third Matrix and so on until
the Sixth, when NEO emerged as the anomaly called The
One. Neo is different to the other Ones. He was woken
up older than 11. This means instead of having a
general love for the people in the Matrix like the
younger Ones had, he was old enough to have a specific
love for Trinity, and a desire to save her inside the
Matrix. Which is why he chose the Right Door instead
of the Left Door in the Architect's room.
He was also different in that instead of running from
the Agents he decided to confront them. Being a
computer hacker might have given him a special
perspective with which to operate inside the Matrix.
When the Oracle upgraded his abilities with a cookie
Neo developed the ability to see the Matrix in code
while he was inside it. He could rewrite the code to
stop the Agent's bullets, to reboot himself after
being killed, to dive into Agent Smith's code and
insert himself in its place, and even to fly.
But when he dived into Smith some of the upgraded Neo
code wrote onto the Smith code. For the first time an
Agent program was unplugged from its normal protocols
and had freedom to reboot itself and overwrite other
entities, like Neo had done. We saw it as Smith
replicating himself.
This created a second and unanticipated anomaly inside
the Matrix which threatened to bring the system down.
So in Reloaded the Oracle told Neo he had to find the
Keymaker, and get inside the Source, which ultimately
was the objective written into his programming, but
now needed to happen sooner rather than later. The
system needed a reboot to delete Smith. She gave Neo
some candy to rewrite his compliance to this goal, and
told him he'd already made the choice and now needed
to understand it.
When Neo, Trinity and Morpheus meet the Merovingian he
talks about causality and how people can eat programs
like orgasmic cake that force a reaction that can't be
controlled, like Neo had with the candy. He tells Neo
he's come there because he was told to be there, a
puppet to the system. He denies Neo the Keymaker.
Persephone helps Neo find the Keymaker, and Neo gets
to the Source where he has the same discussion with
the Architect that other Ones had before him.
However, this time The One does not rejoin the source
code to reset the system. This time, his adult love is
stronger than the compliance and causality code he'd
been given. So instead of losing himself to save
everyone in the Matrix - as past Ones had done - he
saves Trinity from falling to her death, and restarts
the code governing her heart. His consciousness is now
more Program than human, living in a human body. Agent
Smith was also a Program that had overwritten a
human's code (Bane's) to upload into the real world
and possess Bane's human body.
Neo and Smith are the same; one positive, one
negative; one good, one evil. The Oracle says it
clearly in Revolutions: Smith is the result of the
anomaly trying to balance itself.
Neo's choice to save Trinity has changed everything.
The system is still threatened by Smith's behavior, so
the Oracle makes a new choice; one she has never done
before because no version of The One has ever chosen
the difficult path as opposed to easy one of just
resetting the system. She allows herself to become
merged with Smith in the hope that she'll be able to
help Neo when the time is right. His choices being
different to the program she fed Neo have made a
believer out of her. Neo is stronger than his
programming. He is really The One: self-aware and
self-governing - a true god in machine terms.
At the end of their final battle, Smith tells Neo what
the Oracle last told Neo: "everything that has a
beginning has an end." This was the Oracle speaking to
Neo through Smith, which Smith realizes because these
aren't his words. When Smith replicated over the
Oracle to see with her eyes, she fed him a vision of
the future that was what he wanted to see, right down
to what he would do, where he would stand and what he
would say. Neo realizes the only way to end this is to
sacrifice himself. He allows Smith to replicate onto
him, thus destroying The One's program. Since Smith
and The One are opposites, their merger cancels the
other out, which is why all the Smiths simply delete.
The Architect then reboots to start the Seventh
Matrix. This time there is an agreement for peace.
There will be no reduction of Zion down to 24 people.
Everyone will live. The Architect tells the rebooted
Oracle that the machines will keep their peace. But he
suspects the humans will not. The Oracle suggests Neo
or another One will return.
I have a suspicion that because Neo's consciousness
became more Program than human, even though his real
world body died, his essence will be loaded into the
Matrix as a Program. I think that Persephone was also
a previous One now loaded into the Matrix. As a
program not connected with a jacked-in human body, she
remembers her mortal life, but can no longer
experience the physicality, which is why she wanted to
kiss Neo to remember what love feels like. Persephone
knows Neo's fate will be the same as hers, which is
why she tells Neo and Trinity that nothing lasts
forever. When a One completes their mission and
rejoins the source code, they are a product of two
influences - the Oracle and the Architect, chaos and
order, yin and yang, mom and dad.
The post-mortal Ones are therefore the children of the
Matrix gods. In mythology, Persephone was the
beautiful daughter of Zeus (= the Architect) and
Demeter, goddess of fertility (aka creation, intuition
= the Oracle). Persephone was abducted by Hades and
taken to his underground kingdom to be his wife. In
the Matrix mythos, the Merovingian is Hades, his
underground night club is Club Hel.
The Merovingian is not a previous One, but he has
survived Neo's predecessors and will also survive Neo.
Merve is a Program that traffics information, a
router. He surrounds himself with bodyguards and
henchmen drawn out of the programs used to make movies
and TV shows for the people plugged into the Matrix -
he uses werewolves (the silver bullet killed him) and
ghosts (the phase-shifting Twins) - because they
cannot die inside the Matrix as easily as "normal"
characters can. He keeps the Keymaster because he
wants all the keys for all the backdoors in the
Matrix. This is power. He also wants the Oracle's eyes
to gain more power.
In an interesting esoteric versions of history the
Merovingian kings were direct descendants of Mary
Magdalene and Jesus Christ. Some say the Roman church
killed off all remnants of this dynasty (in the Cathar
Heresy of Languedoc and during the Inquisition) in
order to rule the religion through the spiritual
dynasty of Peter instead of the "holy blood" of Mary
Magdalene's descendants, who were the Roman church's
rivals in authority. In Matrix terms, the Merovingian
would therefore be the offspring of one of the earlier
incarnations of The One. We see that programs can have
children, as is the case of Kali and Rama Chandra
appealing to the Merovingian to take their daughter
Sati across to the Matrix.
Another connection here: Kali (Sati's mother in the
Matrix) is a name of the Hindu goddess who was the
destroyer of evil spirits. Her devotees believed
wisdom meant learning that no coin has only one side:
as death cannot exist without life, so life cannot
exist without death - a central tenet in Revolutions.
The Matrix movies draw from many places for the
characters and storylines.
PEOPLE
Architect = Zeus, god, father of the Matrix.
Oracle = Demeter, wife of Zeus, goddess, mother of the
Matrix.
Persephone = daughter of Zeus & Demeter.
Merovingian = Hades, the devil. Son of a previous One.
Neo / Thomas Anderson = neo is a prefix for "new", an
anagram of "one", and "anderson" literally means "son
of man", the self-title of Jesus Christ.
Trinity = unity of three distinct Persons.
Morpheus = the god of dreams in Ovid's Metamorphoses.
Niobe = a mortal turned into stone by the gods.
Kali = destroyer of evil spirits
Rama Chandra = seventh avatar of Vishnu and/or a god
of fertility
Sati = Hindu character connected to widows
SHIPS
The Logos:
A hypostasis associated with divine wisdom, or the
second person in the Trinity
The Nebuchadnezzar:
Babylonian king whose name means "the frontiers".
The story makes numerous references to historical and
literary myths, including Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland, Judeo-Christian imagery and the novels of
William Gibson, especially Neuromancer. Gibson
popularized the concept of a world wide computer
network with a virtual reality interface, which was
named "the matrix" in his Sprawl Trilogy, a concept
which was also used with the same name in the British
sci-fi series Doctor Who.
Students of Gnosticism will notice many of its themes
touched upon. Other motifs include the free will vs.
fate debate and the nature of reality, perception,
enlightenment, and existence. In many ways The Matrix
is about a kind of reality enforcement . There are
also vague references to Buddhism and Daoism , with
concepts of Enlightenment/Nirvana and rebirth.
The Matrix has many cinematic influences. Its action
scenes, with a physics-defying style drawn directly
from martial arts films, and the rooftop chase from
classic American movies, are notable.
Additionally, there are notable influences from
Japanese animation (anime). Both a scene almost at the
end of the movie, where Neo's breathing seems to
buckle the fabric of reality in a corridor he is
standing in, as well as the "psychic children" scene
in the Oracle 's waiting room are evocative of similar
scenes from the 1980s anime classic Akira . The title
sequence, the rooftop chase scene where an agent
breaks a concrete tile on the roof when landing after
a jump, the scene late in the movie where a character
hides behind a column while pieces of it are blown
away by bullets, and a chase scene in a fruit market
where shots hit watermelons, are practically identical
to shots in another anime science fiction classic,
Ghost in the Shell .
It should be noted that the reason given in the movie
for computers enslaving humans is implausible from a
thermodynamic point of view. The chemical energy
required to keep a human being alive is vastly greater
than the bio-electric energy that could be harvested.
It would be vastly more effective to burn the organic
matter and power a conventional electrical generator.
The Wachowski's original explanation was the machines
were actually using the humans' brains as components
in a massively parallel neural network computer.
Because they felt non-technical viewers would have
trouble understanding it, the writers abandoned this
concept in favor of the "human power source"
explanation.
Trivia buffs should also be interested to learn that
Carrie-Anne Moss also appeared in a short-lived
science fiction television series call Matrix in 1993.
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Long read but worth it! Who wrote that??
