Kapell, Matthew, and William
Doty, eds. New York: Continuum International Publishing, 2004.
187 + xiv + appendix pp., $19.95 (USD). ISBN: 0-8264-1588-1.
[1] If we really are in the Matrix, I have to open a target
shooting school for bad guys. I may just be a Matrix-powering battery,
but I wanna be a rich one. Of course, the presentation of reality
in The Matrix, that of a late twentieth century, urban, consumerist
society reeking of capitalist ethos, is fertile ground for such
a Horatio Alger initiative. The edited work Jacking in to The
Matrix: Cultural Reception and Interpretation is a fascinating
analysis of a hugely successful popular cultural phenomenon whose
value lies in the multidisciplinary voices presented to explain
such a phenomenon. Several times while reading it I actually caught
myself saying “Good point!” For example, in a
particularly delightful essay, John Lawrence argues the political
leadership portrayed in The Matrix films resonates with the
U.S. love affair with the European “cult of the heroic leader” and
the knowing nods of its acceptance as all that is needed to justify
getting the trains running on time in any fascist utopia.
[2] Seeing The Matrix through a gendered lens, Martina
Lipp clearly situates the films within the dominant patriarchal
ethos of gender-based expectations of behaviour. When jacked
in, gender differences seem to become obsolete, or “techno-digested.” If
Trinity wants to become superbly proficient at anything, a software
program is downloaded into her. But such a radical egalitarianism
(read: equal to males) has no place within the real world.
Here, as Lipp points out, is the message to the female audience. “You
can be powerful, but only to the extent those in power let you.” At
the end of the day, and after sex, Trinity is the support half of
the stereotyped heterosexual partnered norm presented to us.
[3] Richard King and William Leonard catalogue the racial
and ethnic stereotypes rampant within The Matrix. Like the
bending of gender, we see the bending of racial and ethnic behavioural
stereotypes. King and Leonard argue that, in The Matrix movies,
strength, fortitude, and even humanness can only be acquired within
such long standing presentations of, for example, blacks as “uncle
toms,” or of the stoic, forever trying but not quite catching
up to the white protagonist, or the more recent biracial buddy who
blindly follows the illogical and irrational white leader simply
because he has to be right. The images are only bent, not broken.
[4] Richard Jones begins the process of fleshing out ideal
types of public and private religion as a tool for analyzing profane
popular culture that infringes upon the sacred. We have been
privatizing the sacred for millennia, but it only became recognizable
to a wider audience (at least in the West) in Calvin’s teachings.
Now there is a private faith, and traditional religious rituals
actually mean dominant religious rituals. Thus we can see
Neo dodging bullets and defying gravity, becoming the One “who
will fight to save enslaved humanity,” as a secular manifestation
of a long tradition of salvationist, sectarian, charismatic appeals
to a personal saviour, speaking in tongues, and wrestling with the
devil. Jones’s arguments provide us with tools to analyze
the power of the sacred in our supposed profane world. Later
Jones rightly shows us the appeal of a shopping mall of the sacred
in our postmodern consumerist culture. We can now choose, like Neo
and the rest, our fundamental truths, with all other possible alternatives
relegated to the banalities of the Matrix. But today in our profane
postmodern milieu, as in the Matrix, truth still requires that Kierkegaardian “leap
of faith,” or at least Pascal’s wager.
[5] And yet, even with its interdisciplinary approach, there is
an omission reflected in the Horatio Alger trap into which many
popular culture studies fall. In the Matrix, in Zion, and
to the Wachowski brothers, some people are better than others. Stratification
is a given, it is normal, it is just. We see it with the warrior
elites following Morpheus, the gerontocracy of Zion, or the slavish
hero worship of Neo by the masses in Zion, the great unwashed. It
assumes a twisted Horatio Alger meritocracy where worth is based
upon cosmological capabilities. What is overlooked by most of the
contributors is that The Matrix franchise as cultural phenomenon
is a standard example of the myriad of alternative futures presented
in popular literature and film that never include a critique either
of capitalism or class-based inequality. Yet capitalism is the economic
engine, and inequality the driver that wildly steers popular culture.
[6] In our popular discourse, we ignore the profound inequalities
provided in capitalist social relations of production. We talk of
postmodern culture, of popular culture, but any discussion of capitalism
as the basis for these cultures is anathema. The authors have provided
critiques of gender and ethnic inequality, thus mirroring what we
see as a social dysfunction already. This is a weakness of Jacking
in to The Matrix Franchise; ignoring the social relations
of production and the resultant inequality is the job of the Wachowski
brothers, not of the academic interpreters. The brothers provide
popular culture for mass production and consumption, to get rich.
But it is the job of academic interpreters to identify the ideological
presentations of popular culture as a meritocratic ideal where some
deserve more than others.
[7] Considering the mass consumption of The Matrix franchise,
and the devotional appeal it brings to water cooler conversations,
this book deserves consideration as a supplemental reader in popular
culture studies. In a final irony, I note the edited work
by Matthew Kapell and John Lawrence: Finding the Force of the Star
Wars Franchise: Fans, Merchandise, and Critics. The editors
have found the successful formula; a franchise begins.
Ronald McGivern
Thompson Rivers University
rmcgivern@cariboo.bc.ca
