Saturday, October 11, 2008

Maoist film critic digs 'The Matrix"

 
Larry and Andy Wachowski have directed a Hollywood film of tremendous value -- a great gift to the revolutionary movement on par with that of  Reds  politically and done artistically as well as can be with special effects. This is not a "B" grade indoctrination and it touches on many important areas of revolutionary thought.
[ ... ]
The moment of truth comes when Neo finally understands that he is a battery in a farm controlled by a computer program. When he learns this he moves to attack Morpheus, the messenger that told him no, Neo was never in control as an individual. Neo gets unplugged from the computer program where he learned the truth and we get the sense that he would have killed everyone in that unit of the resistance if he hadn't fallen unconscious first.

MIM recognized this moment. Unfortunately, more often than not MIM is unsuccessful at that moment. Most imperialist country people refuse to accept science, the notion of materialism and the idea that the individual is not free. They violently and irrationally attack the messenger and cling to pre-political lifestyle moralism.

Morpheus's resistance is better than MIM's, because once the recruit accepts the pursuit of truth, Morpheus can show people mechanically how their brains work. It becomes a matter more like learning to drive a car than one of years of study.

Not only is there military hierarchy in the resistance, but a traitor arises within the resistance who blames Morpheus for teaching him the truth and who says he's still not free because he only follows Morpheus's orders. The anarchist-individualist sells out to the Matrix for steak, wine and a future computer program where he is famous and wealthy. Thus after achieving a relatively high level of scientific
consciousness, the traitor says he is "tired" and actually kills his one-time compatriots before being killed before he could be re-absorbed by the Matrix.

Drawbacks

There are a few drawbacks to this film. It has the mandatory Hollywood minimum of violence. The violence is righteous, but of course even the perfect film will be misconstrued in the current capitalist context. The choreographing of violence to music makes it more akin to dance.

Morpheus is Black and the "Oracle" who predicts the future is a Black womyn, but there is a slight incongruity in speaking of an "Oracle" and "fate" when it is clear that science has advanced so far. Fate should not be used as a metaphor for forces beyond individualontrol.

Romance is kept down to a minimum, but the film ends with a classic (and borrowed) heterosexual charge. The last fight scene is as a result the most trippy of all, but we do not believe the romance or the superpowers involved in the last fight will overshadow the step-by-step progression in science that people went through in the movie up to that point. If there is a sequel, we may learn even more about what happened, so that the viewers are left with no mystical residues.

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