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